I’m in a shower of my own tears

I love this!

Thanks for posting the contents of the image. This is especially important for folks using a screen reader and the source content is behind a paywall or login link.

I mail a lot of gmail users. Is there a plugin to filter all my outgoing email to inject 0-width Unicode or replace all chars with a visibly equivalent character to prevent LLM training on my data, as I am not a GMail user?

This just means that it’s not about protecting citizens or vulnerable individuals. The fact that the law won’t say the true reason likely means that the real reason is unpopular or at a minimum something that nobody can get behind.

I saw something in The Oatmeal line ago about pairing abstract ideas with concrete ones. IIRC, the example was to tie Bald Eagle extinction to Twinkies (in the US, presumably) such that if bald eagles go extinct, so do Twinkies. It’d be useful to pair the right to privacy with another right, such as the right to free speech (in the US, for example). That way, if these types of laws pass, so would free speech, something that most people seem to value.

Just imagine if the roles were reversed and some reporter was hanging out in a top secret war chat on Signal with high ranking US government officials!

I thought Debian didn’t include firmware and other binaries by default. I remember having a separate firmware CD for installs on weird RAID controllers. Did that change?

I can shut my nose mostly, but when diving into water from a significant height, it will always shoot up my nose, so I plug it with my fingers.

Consumer reports recently added a privacy rating to their car ratings. I glanced at it a little last year. I think it rated if you could opt out and the reach of the sharing.

I do have to say that I’m generally disappointed with the discussion on this topic every tine it comes up. The majority of responses go contrast to the question. “Don’t buy a car” or “fix up a junker” are generally not helpful if you’ve already decided that your top priority is to have a newer car. Another thread actually recommended to move to another country where you could walk everywhere. Seriously.

Most often a car purchase is a complex decision making process where you need to weigh multiple, often conflicting priorities where privacy is only one aspect. I get the impression that if people followed the advice of the majority of these comments, they’d be living in a tent off grid, hunting for food to stay alive, but living their privacy dream.

My SO calls this diarrhea of the mouth. It’s quite the affliction.

I understand your point, but there have been some successes in bringing these issues to light: City committee rejects Smart Street Lights surveillance policy in San…

There are others as well, I can’t find them now in the sea of articles. There are also large oranizations that can help to get a community organized.

I think the key is to tone down the message a bit to bring the “normies” into the conversation. Talk about a waste of tax dollars, talk about why you should care about privacy when you have nothing to hide. Talk about how these devices are misused and abused for personal gain and rarely assist in bringing criminals to accountability.

Most people don’t care about privacy but may care if their tax dollars are squandered or if their daughter had a stalker.

There are individual solutions, but of limited success. The most effective method is policy change and the most effective way to change policy is with a collection of people.

Form a concerned community member group, grow the group, approach local politicians and city council members, requesting change.

Check out the deflock and EFF web sites for inspiration.

This is the hardest but most effective method. I was able to change a speed limit in the neighborhood and close a road that was being abused as a traffic light bypass by bringing concerned community members together.

26 Down votes? Who downvotes something like this?

Point taken. It was probably a bad example. I was trying to find an example of something that would be an unpopular topic rare hat would ultimately benefit the community.

I saw somebody suggest that the voting buttons should be used to indicate whether the comment benefits the discussion or not.

I suppose the same would be true of the original post; does the post benefit the community.

For example, posting a blog of why Mitsubishi is the best car maker to a photography forum is a downvote, true or not. Posting that veganism isn’t a sustainable lifestyle to a vegan sub is an upvote, but you’d better be ready for some backlash.

Perhaps you can find inspiration from Daryl Davis, who convinced 200 Klansmen to give up their robes.

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes

I saw a documentary once that said that elephants are starting to be born without tusks. Male & female. It’s evolution in action. It’s sad to me, but life finds a way.

There was a sea turtle at an aquarium that I visited with a 3d printed shell, so why not this?

I’d prefer to use the confiscated tusks to beat the poachers with. After that, they should give them back.

I heard something on a radio show during Covid on how to talk to people who have “gone down the rabbit hole”. It was discussing MAGA as a cult. The guest on the show was a woman who was raised in a cult in the 70’s and she “got out” and spent her time talking with others in the cult to help them to break free. I can’t find a reference to the show, but I think it was Carrie Miller hosting.

My takeaway was that you can’t come at people and tell them that everything they know is wrong and you will show them the way. They’ll fight you. You need to deprogram them similarly to how they were programmed into the cult. Small bits, here and there to slowly guide them to questioning their beliefs. Once that happens, show them how to research and seek out information and let them know that they will be safe.

If someone found a link to the podcast/radio show, I’d be super happy.

I think what we’re dealing with, in part, is a collective action problem. There’s a lot of people who want to do something but either don’t know what to do or don’t agree on what to do. It’s one way that a minority population can stay in power.

What an individual can do is miniscule compared to a crowd. Also, some people are willing to break laws to make change and others are not.

I do on all my devices that can as a matter of practice, not for any real threat. I’m interested to learn about how to set it up and use it on a daily basis including how to do system recoveries. I guess it’s largely academic.

Once I switched to linux as my daily driver, I didn’t have a need to do piracy anymore since all the software I need is FOSS.