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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • I don’t game much but I’d try to stay closer to the debian ecosystem, or one of the more well-known distros. There are a lot of cases where there’s a debian and ubuntu installer for something and otherwise you gotta compile or hope for an appimage or flatpak. Ubuntu’s out because snaps are horrible, although you can get rid of those. Personally I install debian on all my boxes. It’s a really minimal distro and things tend to go pretty fast because of that. Debian or I hear Fedora’s great.






  • You wanna go for start-ups then. Most bigger and medium-sized companies have centrally-managed security where they wanna push updates and such to all computers or there’s some corporate spyware everyone’s gotta run or they’ve got everyone on M$ Office etc etc. Odds are a place that lets you use a linux laptop is going to be reluctant to buy you one and invite you to use your own. Macbooks aren’t so bad, if they let you have sudo, lots of places use those.




  • Being privacy-conscious can protect your information from being passively collected by mainly corporate entities that track your buying habits, life events, and health.

    If you think you’re being actively targeted for surveillance, then you need security that is proportional to the resources that the people who are spying on you have. In the case of say, the NSA, they could have a backdoor in a various location in your hardware or software stack. If you have privacy tools like tor, they’re liable to target you and collect your data just for that. Most android/IOS phones are thoroughly bugged and tracked, to the point where if the battery is still attached and the phone is switched off you can still be tracked. If the NSA does collect your data, there’s a 99% chance no human will look at your data unless they have a reason to search for you.

    If you are being spied on, odds are you won’t catch it. You might be able to isolate abnormal outbound network traffic if you’re really good about tracking that kind of thing on your network. Your phone could connect to a fake Stingray cell station and you wouldn’t know.

    If you’re being stalked by a person with less resources than the NSA, it becomes a lot easier and common-sense privacy protections can help you keep a low enough profile.

    It’s also worth noting that if private companies get a hold of your data, they’ll sell it to any government or private organization who’ll pay them. There’s scant regulation about what they can’t collect and what they can’t do with it.

    I think the simplest rule of thumb is if you have something sensitive, don’t say it near an android or ios phone and don’t put it on a computer that’s plugged into the internet. Criminals have their own OPSEC, as do people in the intelligence industry, and usually the answer is an “air gap”.











  • Mass shootings, although there are indeed many, are a small percentage of the gun deaths in the US. Most are suicide, next most common are arguments outside bars. Most common weapon in gun homicides is a handgun.

    Research shows that income inequality causes crime and you can see that more unequal nations (Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Israel) have more violence.

    The problem with the US is it’s a sanctuary for capitalists, capital and capitalism. Worse than anything that the US does or allows to happen to its own people, is what our government/corporations do to “developing nations”. Invasions, supporting coups, fighting to suppress labor rights and wages, extracting natural resources with little compensation, overthrowing governments that try to stop any of that, supporting genocide, committing genocide, chemical warfare, biological warfare, nuclear warfare. Any socialist country they can’t overthrow they’ll try to starve through embargoes.

    Anyway, the worst states are ones where abortion is outlawed, lawmakers fight access to public health care or any public resources that don’t go to the wealthy. Usually these states are controlled by the wealthy, like coal bosses running West Virginia into the ground. Capitalists have been using evangelical christianity in north and south America to scare voters into voting right-wing on culture war issues like abortion and transphobia. They use reactionary tendencies like hatred of foreigners, hatred of gun control, hatred of schools teaching the history of how our country treated black people, etc, to keep people voting for the right-wingers who also happen to be the friendliest to business.

    Both major political parties are right-wing pro-capitalist parties. Some states do have some social safety nets for health care and welfare but being poor is a horrible experience in every state. 50,000 people die yearly from lack of health care access, not including COVID deaths. There’s really no state you can live or party you can vote for to get away from it.

    I’ve lived in a few less right-wing states. A friend of a friend was killed by police while he was suspected of shoplifting, trying to run away. Some kid killed himself in my high school while i was there. I live in a town where there’s lots of homeless people and syringes all over the place. 3 people in my family died of COVID.

    Basically the US is a fascist country. Fascism is when the wealthy consolidate their power over government, in the face of growing violence and instability from growing inequality. The point of fascism is to protect capitalism from these growing threats by creating a police state, deflecting blame for hardship onto minorities, and handing off chunks of the government to the wealthy through privatization. The wealthy and the government essentially merge, they become the same people with the same goals.