That’s the catch: you can’t not use Google at all if you’re online at all, because Google has managed to insert itself into every little corner of the internet.

And that’s how the surveillance trap has quietly snapped shut on all of us without most of us noticing anything.

George Orwell had it wrong: the surveillance isn’t conducted directly by a tyrannical dictatorship but subtly, indirectly by the private sector in cahoots with the government. And the date he predicted was 40 years off. Other than that, he was right: we live in a full-blown dystopia now.

Yeah he wears heavy biohazard protection, complete with the hood and the respirator and everything. He’s better isolated than a cosmonaut on the job.

Removed by mod

Not me, but one of my best friends founded a company to clean up murder scenes, houses in which someone has died and their corpse rotted away for weeks, accident scenes… that sort of thing. His stomach seems perfectly unaffected by gruesomeness of all kinds, so he figured he’d market that particular ability of his.

His lowest rate is $300 / hr for “simple” cleanups and he’s doing very, very well.

I use a calyxos device to share VPN, as of a few months ago.

Hotspot & Tethering

• Allow clients to use VPNs

Oh wow I totally missed that. It works great! Genius!

Thank you for that. Suddenly it makes repurposing one of my old cellphones a very simple and viable proposition.

(and I’m posting this from my laptop connected to the hotspot connected to the Calyx VPN 🙂)

get a older cell phone. Put lineage OS on it, or calyxos… share your VPN over hotspot, these are the only two ROMs that I’m aware of that allow you to do that

That’s what I thought too. So I tried it on my CalyxOS phone and… it doesn’t work: the hotspot doesn’t route through the VPN. And from what I read, it’s by design.

I have an old Nokia 4.2 running LineageOS. I might try that one.

end-to-end VPN

Incidentally, do you know if the GL.iNet devices can act as a VPN server too?

At this point, I think China is well known for infiltrating local businesses and forcing them to sell networking gear with trojans.

The US is better known for surveilling people indirectly by exploiting corporate surveillance data collected by big tech monopolies doing their bidding for them and by directly “tapping the line”. I don’t think US officials asking US companies to compromise their products and keep quiet about it would fly in the US. At least not yet. But I wouldn’t put it past them either.

To be honest, of all three, I’d rather purchase something made in Europe, even for a premium.

There are others that aren’t Chinese but nothing anywhere near the price bracket you’ll get from GL.Inet

Can you give me some pointers to non-Chinese equivalents of those GL.iNet routers? I’m quite ready to suck up the extra cost.

First world problem.

You’re hungry.

What software do you use to forward the texts automatically?

Actually I kind of had the same idea but for the whole phone - i.e. leave a cellphone with phone features at home (so voice and texts are received on this static phone that never gets used for anything else) and forward calls and texts on another cellphone with data only. But I don’t think there’s anything to set that up easily.

Interesting thanks. I’ll dig into the privacy issue.

Using things like Signal and WhatsApp may reduce your footprint further.

I use Signal with most of my family and friends. The phone things is for random people or companies that need to call me, and the texts are mostly to get notification when I receive a parcel, or confirmations for appointments, that kind of things.

WhatsApp, being owned by Facebook, can fuck right off.

I was planning on using a VPN.

But anyway, even if I’m connected direct from a known fixed WiFi, it’s still less precise than cell triangulation.

EDIT: actually I just did a test with the VPN, and WiFi calling totally bypasses it. Damn 🙁

Well, I know it’s all going through the internet anyway nowadays, so yeah it’s technically always voice-over-IP even if I use the cell network. The only difference between normal calls and WiFi calls is how it connects to the internet really. I just don’t want the extra baggage that comes with staying connected to the cell netowk method of getting on the internet.

And of course what I referred to when I said VoIP is pure VoIP providers that sell you a number and access to a SIP server, independent from your cellphone provider.

That’s remarkable considering Linux is only 33 years old.

thats a lot of words for contributing for a single year, only half of which was ‘volunteer’

How long have you been contributing?

Two comments about this:

• It is my firm belief that 99% of the population of any country ruled by a dictator are the primary victims of that dictator, don’t condone what their rulers do, have done nothing wrong and are just trying to be good people in unfavorable circumstances.

  The Russians are no different and it isn’t fair to impose on Russian individuals of obvious good will the treatment governments apply to the Russian government, because the Russian government and the Russian people are two very different things.

• Linus said in this interview:

  I’m Finnish. Did you think I’d be supporting Russian aggression?

  and here I’m telling you this: Linus acts like a dipshit.

  I know the Finns very, VERY well, and while they’re generally great people, when it comes to Russia and Russians, they have epidermic reactions of totally unreasonable proportions.

  I understand where they’re coming from and why they react like that, but Russia is to the Finnish people what peanuts are to someone with a peanut allergy: the reaction is totally disproportionate and with zero nuances.

  Don’t ever try to argue with a Finn that a Russian person can be good, and that Putin is also their enemy: the Finn will shut down and stop talking to you - meaning, in their culture, that you can politely go fuck yourself.

  And that’s what we’re witnessing here with Linus: however many years he’s lived in California, he still hasn’t shed that part of his upbringing, and quite frankly, shame on him.

20 sounds so old though

Treasure that moment in time my friend, because tomorrow you’ll wake up and you’ll realize you’re 60 and you haven’t see those 40 years fly by. Take it from me, now you think you have the time but you really don’t: time accelerates the older you get. And that scary shit is for real.

The popular music is garbage and Garbage is forgotten.

About that:

I realized something many years ago: people of a certain age always tend to think music from their time was better. But they all fail to see that whatever music from their generation is still around is the good shit from that time. For example, this still plays on the radio but this thankfully doesn’t.

Whatever young people listen to now is everything: the good and the bad, and mostly the bad. Their shit hasn’t had time to decant yet.

So yeah, to an older listener, today’s music is mostly shit, because it is - just like the music from their past was mostly shit when their past was today 🙂