darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]

Except they can’t just do that. The UK because they think they’re special has legal powers to exercise against Apple GLOBALLY. They can legally under their laws force Apple to backdoor encryption for US users, for Russian users, for French users, for Chinese users, etc, etc and give the UK access to all of their data. That’s what this order is and it will allow them to share that data with the US NSA and FBI, with French police, with other eyes agreement partners effectively making such ADP useless for anyone who’s an enemy of the west located in the west or anywhere else.

And as long as Apple has a legal presence in the UK they don’t have a real way to resist this. The only sure-fire way is closing up shop, moving all engineering staff, shut down the shop or move it off-shore, never letting CEOs or top level technical people visit due to risk of being detained for non-compliance and just basically giving them the finger.

Pretty easy solution honestly. Just close all presence in the UK. Just walk out. It’s a tiny market anyways. Pathetic delusional former empire constantly imagining itself more important than it is.

Too soon to tell. Also not sure what their plan is and what success means there.

It’s quite possible they intend to do the whole small yard, high fence thing they’ve been pushing with Democrats for a long time but really kick it into gear. This has the benefit of crashing quality of life and increasing expenses for the working class which increases their desperation and the potential for exploitation of enlarged underclasses of people who’ve slipped under from all of this and are only barely not drowning.

It would also involve (attempting) reshoring from China, beating corporations until they comply like with Russia, allowing a few carve-outs (as with Russia), then stoking a war over Taiwan, using the resulting propaganda storm to force heavy sanctions and decoupling (with again some carve-outs for valuable corporations that can’t or refuse to pull out right away). That plus the rising reaction in the US and Europe bodes ill for those in the imperial core. What they do next in such a scenario is up for debate. I personally think naked resource grabs like what Trump talks about, just taking Greenland, openly invading/couping nations in Africa and Latin America, completely dropping the mask and seizing as much as they can to pull into their “small yard” behind their high fence and put up as much of a wall around China/Russia and as much of a squeeze on the two of them as they can by using what power they can to deny them as many markets as possible and to maximally disrupt their supply chains (Trump’s talk of taking the Panama canal for instance would be potentially part of the US shoring up its naval control of the world, it has only sea-power not land-power potential so must maximize control of choke-points to dominate and enforce embargoes and sanctions). They’d try to combine this with continued operations to foster terrorism and instability in key regions to block the belt and road as well as resource extraction for China’s manufacturing.

It’s also possible they do something else.

So I think it’s possible it’s an attempt to use the power of their hegemony before it slips further to shape and direct the world into a shape they believe they can exploit to maintain a dominant position.

Going to agree with others. Have something on that you can hear in the background. It can be just above a whisper, it can be just nature noises or white noise, it can be a movie or TV show as long as it doesn’t get so loud that it wakes you, it can be audiobooks or podcasts. I know someone who enjoys silent film scores as they don’t have human voices which intrude or wake one up and the colors of such playing on a TV are muted generally.

A photo of a North Korean artillery vehicle being transported in Russia- https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1gr85hd/ru_pov_another_picture_of_north_koreas_170mm/

This video a Russian shot of what they say are North Koreans, shot in Primorye on the far eastern coast of Russia- https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1g9eeix/ru_pov_handsome_allies_have_arrived_from_north/

Russia admitted they had DPRK troops in their country for joint training exercises. This is proof of nothing. I wouldn’t even be shocked if they went to the front to learn a bit about modern tactics but I can guarantee they haven’t fought outside of internationally recognized Russian territory (Kursk) IF at all. Most likely they just gave them briefings and training on modern warfare tactics which they’ll take back to the DPRK.

Yeah it can really double or triple (or more) the time you spend on a workflow because it’s not great. Not a fan of how hard it is to do something like select in motion hair (including strays) and change the color of it in gimp. PS is really in another league for intermediate or advanced image editing and manipulation.

I’m seeing so many alarming things that not a lot of other people are pointing out or honing in on yet and I hope I’m wrong but it looks more and more like all part of the same shift.

For one. Everyone seems to laugh at Europeans and assume they’re just being trod on by the US as helpless dogs regarding Ukraine and energy and Russia. But what if, alarmingly we actually read that as liberal Dem-Cent, as liberals holding the party line, as liberal die-hard ideological commitment to the project? Not so funny then huh? And even if those people get kicked out, who are they going to be replaced with? Reactionaries who idolize fascists in every case and who represent in Europe the same kind of turn we now see in the US.

For another, bourgeoisie potentially shrugging at tariffs even when it hits them hard. This has yet to unfold so I could yet be wrong but it’s potentially showing they still have very high class consciousness and very high class solidarity and are not going to do in-fighting as tons of people constantly predict here and on the grad that weakens them and allows China to continue their plan. That in fact, they might form up ranks, do the decoupling thing, do some old school naked colonialism to make up for it in profits overall for the class. And if they do that, well China is not in a good place then are they? Not if the west starts couping Africa, just seizes Greenland, wields its considerable economic might to prevent most countries from daring to join a BRICS currency or evade sanctions they impose to strangle China because no one wants to break ranks and get the empire’s fist in their face first. Neither is the proletariat if their plan is siphon white people from Europe to the US via increasingly bad economic conditions, kick out non-whites, play up the white supremacy, crank up things like greedflation, crack down further on labor, seize and tighten control on free speech to an extent they’ve not done in 50 years and turn up the reactionary culture. In fact the reactionary culture has been brewing for some time online, maybe it’s ready to serve.

Divided the liberals and capitalists are weak, united in purpose, moving together as a bloc, making big changes, u-turn like should be terrifying to anyone who is not of that group or wants a better world, a multi-polar world, workers rights, etc. Some will say too little too late but I don’t think so, they still have tons of momentum and capital, a very commanding place of power coming down from their utter unipolar hegemony.

I’m not saying we’re doomed, well we kind of are fucked because of climate change and this AI nonsense among other things erasing any meager hope, but it’s going to be a long fight. And honestly I think the empire is counting on climate change coming in on their side and fucking up China badly and the models say it is going to be least bad for the US, pretty bad in places like China among many others. That’s also why this talk of annexing Canada has me thinking. Probably just trade bluster but what if it wasn’t. What if they’re already planning out the rest of this century and adapting to climate change by moving some things more northernly?

Oh and another thought. Greenland allows policing arctic shipping. Panama Canal which Trump also wants polices shipping from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The US is at heart a naval power. It doesn’t have the land power potential that Russia, China, EU have via Europe/Asia/Africa trade and civilization. The US is trying to pull the world’s oceans into its “small yard high fence” concept of living with multipolarity to enable them to police trade, enforce sanctions, threaten anyone anywhere who defies them. The US already has many plans in place for keeping west Asia (middle east) destabilized and thus denying China an overland route to ship their goods to markets in Europe, Africa, west Asia which means they can lock them down with just island rings and sanctions on ships carrying their goods via these various ocean passageways. There is the wrinkle that they could ship through or along the coast of India but India is run by Hinduvata fascists who hate China as much as the US so they’ll gladly join the US or inflict costs for transit so high as to leave China non-competitive. China’s only remaining route is shipping north through Russia and central Asia the long, long, long way around at great expense via limited rail (or building a ton more rail) which is one more reason why the US is keeping Europe hostile to Russia and plans to erect a kind of trade barrier between the EU and Russia and certainly wouldn’t let the EU allow Chinese shipments via Russia through the EU to say Africa (as if they wouldn’t already be massively too expensive at that point).

Modern communication software and the encryption behind them has given modern socialist movements secure and anonymous communications that even the most powerful intelligence services cannot penetrate without social engineering.

Danger. They don’t need social engineering, they can hack you. They can hack your iphone, your carrier will help them. They can hack your computer, your ISP will help them. Are they doing this all the time to everyone? No, it’s not practical and more use raises more chances of your tools and methods being detected. Should organizers be wary of the limits of their abilities to secure their electronic communications on devices that are likely compromised with backdoors at the hardware level? Absolutely. Even regular cops can use zionist cyberweapons they purchase to hack racial justice organizers, what the NSA and CIA have are even nicer but totally classified.

Do use encryption, do make it so your data can’t be easily subpoenaed or siphoned up in bulk collection. Do make it harder on them. Do force them to burn expensive methods if they ever try and produce anything they have in court. But do not think it makes you totally invulnerable if you get on their radar and they want to get that info as it does not.

People in industry who propagate these types of lies, who give credence to them shouldn’t be able to show their faces in public. Like they should get bullied and cajoled out of any convention they try and step foot in. Just absurd because devices like these can be easily monitored. You can mirror their WAN traffic and just sit there and look for evil Chinese spying and not find it because it isn’t there. I hate IT/infosec fascists. I miss the halcyon days when there was at least a more prominent anarchist hacker vibe and talk like this was held up to scorn because it was seen as coming from the same place as the demand for clipper chips.

What TPlink should do is opensource their firmware. It’s a good thing to do. Though it wouldn’t save them it might buy a little time, Kaspersky opened transparency centers where governments could send someone into a secured room to see their source code and ask questions and they still got banned because muh Russia bad.

I’m going to keep screaming it. This is not a one-off. This is an enduring shift, a marked turn the bourgeoisie have taken with Trump. They have shifted from decades of doing this to abandoning it. They ignored him last time, this time they’re embracing this culture war reactionary turn. They’re taking the mask off, just like Trump. No more democracy rhetoric, we want Greenland because it’s rich in minerals and allows us to police the arctic so we’re just going to take it. That kind of naked early-mid 20th century imperialism and power-plays, no more window-dressing or convoluted excuses and ethical arguments just might makes right.

Well hiding bunkers tends to be a very basic tenant of them so I assume they’d go to great lengths to conceal where exactly such bunkers are beyond being in a vague 20 mile region.

Secondly I’d assume they be might be clever enough to think to conceal the vents. To put serious resources into hiding them a distance from the actual bunker in say fake houses or office buildings that have a concealed level in the attic or basement with an intake. All kinds of ways to hide these things that would require extensive search to locate and maybe equipment.

One should assume they’d also conceal the entrance, also a common thing for anything but military bunkers. Could do that to fake buildings, a wall in a basement of a house that opens or even something more elaborate like an elevator that pops up from a concealed space in an area people wouldn’t look which you cover with a layer of dirt to hide the signs of until it’s first used (or just put it in a fake closet or bathroom in a building).

All of which is to say the wealthy have good reason to feel this wouldn’t necessarily be an issue. People assume that the rich would run into these things to hide from a successful worker’s revolution when that’s not IMO what they’re for (that’s what the bunkers tech billionaires build in New Zealand are partially for being remote, on an island run by a pliant settler-colonist state). These are for mythical things like an asteroid impact, solar flares, or more realistically instigated nuclear war that the US government informs important people to shelter from an hour ahead of time. Maybe for things like a proletariat uprising in a given region ala BLM summer type situation where people are trying to Luigi CEO’s but don’t really have the ability to completely control an area for an extended period and without a vanguard party would at any rate mostly target visible banks, homes of the rich, police stations, etc.

If they set off nuclear war (a real fear I have that they’d rather destroy most of the world rather than give up power) and nuke China and get nuked back they also won’t have to worry about that many people being around to try and kill them and those who are around will probably be so messed up with grief, pain, hunger, and other immediate needs that they won’t dedicate the resources to finding and killing people in bunkers if that information even still exists (hall of records could be destroyed entirely or at least thrown into disarray) because they’d be too busy trying to survive. At least for the tech billionaires they do tend to surmise in their planning that they/their servants/guards/remnants of the state apparatus of violence will be able to emerge eventually and re-assert order under their control of course and that’s something that obviously could go wrong for them but it would potentially buy them the ability to survive the immediate threat and even be rescued if some elements of the state still survive (as is likely in a situation where they set off nuclear war intentionally as the government has their own bunkers as well as remote military bases not worth being hit by an enemy nuke) the bourgeois state might rescue at least some of these people to manage their rebuilt society or at least that’s what they’re banking on.

Honestly the fact they don’t specify higher upload speeds than 5mbps in this day and age is pathetic. That’s not workable if you need to do video-calling or have more than one person in a household. Regular web browsing can easily saturate that in spikes at moments. 10mbps should be the absolute minimum upload speed allowed.

They’re a mixture in my experience. You have the extreme reactionaries who are biting their tongues not to scream about their admiration of historical fascists (or sometimes not and just saying it) talking up nonsense, you have anti-imperialist leftists in some smaller quantity but more commonly found on the more intelligent opinion pieces that are anti-imperialist in nature, and you have some liberals.

America can’t be blamed for the next pandemic if we turn off all surveillance and early warning, gag scientists, stop any reporting on it, stop looking for it, etc. Then when it does break out into a pandemic there won’t be any solid proof of where it came from and we can blame China (or maybe Mexico since this is Trump) for that as well.

Trump does this for this questionable guy because someone whispered his name in his ear and yet Biden only commutes Leonard Peltier and puts him in a position where Trump can either have the FBI harass him to death in home confinement or maybe even send him right back to prison because he merely commuted the sentence rather than pardoning. Fuck Biden. Even when he does something sorta good it’s done so incompetently incompletely and badly as to be almost more a taunt than a good deed.

Good news but I get the impression the wars of the 2030s are going to heavily involve UAVs aka drones.

Why have one heavily trained pilot able to pilot exactly one plane who stands a good chance of dying if it gets shot down when you can have one heavily trained pilot sitting in a drone base safely away from the battlefield commanding 6 drones with or without the help of specialized AI? Six drones that can be replaced by just building more and launching them from a field. And the drones can be as expensive and specialized or cheap as the specific operation demands, from overwhelming an enemy with hundreds of them at once to just above a dozen of the most top of the line models.

Fighters seem like they’d have limited utility in a peer conflict. For someone like the US that likes bombing people who can’t fight back they’re quite useful. But for fighting the US and its vassals I’m not certain you need more than a kind of border force of them that can do intercepts and basic air policing around your borders. That is that in any war you’d pull them back a bit and hit the enemy with waves of drones and missiles and use them as deep defense against penetrating invaders who somehow manage to get past your ground-based anti-air (which needs to be the most effective thing as dog-fights are not an effective way of dealing with enemy air intrusion).

Their validity as a colonial project, their excuse for their colonization, apartheid, genocide in Palestine is that they are the ONLY safe place for Jews, that they HAVE to be there, that they have this special right to this particular place.

In this they have long shared the interests of the anti-semites including the original Nazis who after all it must be remembered hoped at first to simply encourage all the Jews to emigrate out of Europe which absolutely worked for the interests of the zionists. Their interests to this day are making Jews anywhere outside of their project feel unsafe. It is a boon to them, their legitimacy, their strength to have anti-semites take power, for Jews to flee to them as the more they have the more they can cry that they truly represent all Jews and any opposition to zionism or the illegal occupation state known as “israel” and its policies is in fact anti-semitism. More than that though as all ethno-nationalist movements they desire to draw all the “chosen” people to them to create what they imagine will be a “pure” utopia.

The whole zionist project has a need to seize control of the mantle of Judaism, to completely conflate the two, to absorb the diaspora religious identity into the fascistic political movement.

They’re going to let the feds harass Leonard Peltier in his house arrest and make his life as close to the misery of actual prison as they can.

This is why Biden is fucking pathetic for commuting instead of pardoning him and others.

Should have been a pardon. Could have commuted this much earlier in the presidency and at this point he has nothing to lose. No career, few years of life left, no reason for Biden not to do it.

More likely to go through right now than in a year or 6 months as they haven’t quite had time to stack the administrative agencies thoroughly though I suspect they’re going to be processing more than usual.