jsdz

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Chinese programmer ordered to pay 1m yuan for using virtual private network (www.theguardian.com)

A programmer in northern China has been ordered to pay more than 1 million yuan to the authorities for using a virtual private network (VPN), in what is thought to be the most severe individual financial penalty ever issued for circumventing China’s “great firewall.” The programmer, surnamed Ma, was issued with a penalty...

jsdz,

Not spelling out the whole story to your satisfaction in the headline is no better than capricious law enforcement giving out penalties for something that shouldn’t be a crime ranging from nothing, to a $27 fine, to confiscating 3 years of income, to 13 years in prison?

jsdz, (edited )

How is it misleading? Based on the info we have it seems accurate.

jsdz,

“Halved?” No. There should not be software patents. They are good for nothing.

jsdz,

Bug fix releases are the best releases

jsdz,

They train the children to know and accept that they will be watched closely by anonymous strangers for their entire lives.

jsdz, (edited )

“KDE Plasma offers a more native development experience for the team and therefore it is easier to maintain. This is the main and only reason for this switch”

As a user I switched from KDE to XFCE, and found it to be an improvement. But I’ve never done any development involving Xfce.

jsdz, (edited )

Well, they’re both pretty good.

Xfce starts off closer to the way I like things and requires less messing around with the config to get it all the way there. It changes less frequently, which I appreciate. It uses slightly less memory, seems to go wrong less often, and has fewer things I have no interest in like ‘kwallet’ or whatever. And I appreciate what seems to me its more approachably modular nature (which I’ve used only for a couple of minor things.)

jsdz,

It took them a couple of days to come up with this statement about the horrific attacks from Hamas. Maybe they just need a little more time to come up with their statement concerning the even more destructive responses from Israel.

jsdz,

Wow, 2015. Back when they had to hire actual humans to write bullshit like that.

jsdz, (edited )

I’ve got an older Nitro 5 which has served me well the past 4 years. Build quality is great compared to most other laptops I’ve had. Mine has no problem running Linux.

jsdz,

It’s generally okay with the big games of 2020, so probably.

jsdz,

When X.com eventually gets around to making its own window system, they may be in legal trouble. Perhaps the resulting lawsuit can raise enough money to get X.org development going again.

jsdz,

People who find that “frustrating” have led too sheltered a life.

jsdz, (edited )

*with the exception of some who have specific disabilities

I had a dream about windows and have decided to setup Linux on my laptop. What distro should I use?

I used Ubuntu once a few years ago but had compatability issues so I went back to windows. Not a great programmer but I’d like to learn. I’m not looking to do much gaming beyond DOOM2 and factorio. Mostly looking for privacy and a way to get back into programming (I have this pipe dream of learning Assembly). I’m not to...

jsdz,

I get my news from the only reliable source and I recommend going with MX Linux.

jsdz,

You have been trolled by Canada’s “newspaper of record.”

jsdz, (edited )

It will have no practically significant effect. Websites do not have access to browser chrome css properties. The worst it might do is change the dimensions of the viewport in a way that makes your browser fingerprint slightly more unusual, i.e. the same thing that would happen if you set the UI to “compact” mode.

jsdz, (edited )

Is EVE Online still going? It appears to be. It’s a somewhat challenging game and very different than what you’re used to, but it really was fantastic for getting to meet good in-game friends way back when I played. Of course some of them would eventually betray you, take all your stuff, and leave your dead corpse floating in space, but even so it’s very much a team game that may be what you’re looking for if you happen to be into spaceships and/or spreadsheets.

jsdz,

Lazy loading of images through the mechanism controlled by that setting is relatively new, and many sites unfortunately still have javascript to do something similar in browsers that don’t support it.

It’d be nice if Firefox could let us turn off the new feature in a way that’s undetectable without specific measures to look for it, but it seems extremely unlikely that Mozilla will ever find that worth the effort of doing. In some cases you might be able to just block a single script with noscript or ublock, but all the implementations are different and there’s no general solution.

jsdz,

I just tested my favourite cloudflare-blocked site and it still hangs on “verifying the security of your connection” in my figerprinting-resistant browser profile.

jsdz,

I’m pretty sure the main system startup bottleneck is me typing the disk encryption passphrase.

jsdz,

In that case use some other DNS server.

jsdz,

Will win 7 be the last ever usable OS from Microsoft, or will Windows 13 turn out decent? Only time will tell.

jsdz,

I understand why they can’t have proprietary drivers

Who can’t have them? 90-some percent of Linux distributions make them available to those who are unfortunate enough to need them.

jsdz,

It appears that the other guy didn’t call you a fanboy. He implied that you might be a troll, before you’d listed that software and after you’d called him a fanboy.

But yeah, it’ll probably be a while before there’s a Linux version of Adobe Illustrator, and the alternatives are different enough that it’d be a lot of work to switch even if it’s otherwise practicable.

jsdz,

Professor Geist is basically right about such things as usual, but I hope for the sake of us all that he does save some of his strength for honest reporting on whatever happens next in this story and doesn’t burn himself out picking fights on fucking twitter.

jsdz,

Is this perhaps part of the reason for some big price increases in recent months? They were preparing to “freeze” the price there for a while so that the government can claim victory?

jsdz,

Watermarking at first sounds like a noble and promising solution

Does it? Watermarking typically aims to be difficult to detect and hard to remove. To me it sounds more like the steganographic equivalent of malware.

jsdz,

Ed Is The Standard Text Editor

I’m not saying it doesn’t get a lot of shout outs, but it could always do with one more. I think the last time I used it was to automate the editing of config files on some antiquated telephony system by piping ed commands through netcat. There remains a chance that I might live long enough to find some excuse to use it again.

Considering Quantum Fiber as an ISP, but they require the installation of a (permanent) C5500XK smart NID

Does anyone know if this enables any kind of tracking (either through WiFi device logging or network activity)? I’ve typically used my own networking modems and routers, I’m a little weary of a required smart device that I don’t have control over....

jsdz,

If you can’t avoid it and you don’t trust it, you could probably turn off its wifi and then connect to it only through your own router+VPN.

jsdz,

Oh, it’s Lunduke. Had me worried for a moment, there.

jsdz,

He has something of a tendency to sensationalize things.

jsdz,

You do have to figure though, that it’s only the most active users who will opt to pay $14/month

I’d say it’s more likely to be the most wealthy users who will pay the $14, and it seems plausible that the most devoted facebook users might care less about avoiding the ads than people who are there only reluctantly. So maybe slightly closer to the middle of that 11% to 342% range.

jsdz,

It’s the kind of game where nobody wins.

jsdz,

That classic free market system where a cartel has regular meetings to set production levels to maximise their profits.

jsdz,

Actual free markets are almost as rare as actually existing socialism.

jsdz,

Really? I thought the most infamous example of triangular trade was more of a mercantilism thing.

jsdz,

A “free market” as the term is usually understood is a well-defined thing, which of course has many problems and failure modes, but is not well-represented by a market dominated by a large cartel routinely controlling prices. It is also not the same thing as capitalism.

jsdz,

The free market is an abstract concept, one which rarely exists in anything like its ideal form due to its instability under current conditions of capitalist development. The original definition given by classical economics is still the prevalent one. Despite what slogans from some proponents of capitalism would have you believe, not only are free markets not identical with it, but capitalism tends to take markets further and further from anything resembling their theoretically ideal state of freedom.

jsdz, (edited )

If it involves “an oligopoly, a cartel, or a monopoly” then it is not a “free market” according to what they taught me in econ 101, everything convincing that I’ve heard since, and what Adam Smith explicitly wrote down when he first described the idea. Wikipedia cites Karl Popper in saying that in classical economics a free market is one that’s “free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities,” and that it’s a market in which economic rents are minimised. A monopoly is by definition antithetical to a free market. Any neoliberal suggestions that attacking the whole concept of public regulation of markets will always make them more free are simply lies, and should not be accepted.

That there is at present little or nothing preventing any imperfectly but approximately free markets that might otherwise exist devolving into less free ones dominated by monopolies, cartels, corrupt and captured regulators, out-of-control rent seeking, frauds that rely on information asymmetry, and other such perversions is (obviously, I thought) the reason why I’ve been consistently saying that “free” markets are not something we see much of in reality. Perhaps that’s not exactly congruent with Marxism, but I don’t think it’s inconsistent with it either.

jsdz, (edited )

I dunno, maybe they changed the terminology since I took it. Seems to me “free market” was not previously imbued with all that meaning you guys are reading into it. I’m not convinced it isn’t just an Americanism. To me a “free market” is simply one that’s substantially free of distortion, resembling to a notable extent a perfect market. But I’ll certainly avoid the phrase in future.

jsdz,

Indeed, I am convinced of it. Thanks to everyone who took the trouble to help fill in my ignorance there. It was a pleasure being your crazy person on the internet for the day.

jsdz,

Sort of. They can still see which IP address you’re connecting to, which by itself or in combination with some minor traffic analysis is quite often enough to identify which website you’ve visited. Perhaps it isn’t if the website puts absolutely everything through a giant CDN like Cloudflare, but in that case it’s Cloudflare which gets to see all the sites you visit which isn’t a whole lot better than the status quo.

Still, it’s a little less information given away at least some of the time. Better to do it than not do it.

jsdz, (edited )

To be more precise, my belief is that the main thing ECH does is make it more difficult some of the time (depending on the details of how the site works) for observers of network traffic to directly see which website you’ve visited if it’s one of those that have chosen to give all that data to Cloudflare or some similar system instead.

There also do still exist some simple web hosting setups that share many independent domain names on the same IP, but I think it’s not as common as it probably was when they first came up with the idea of encrypting the tls server name many years ago. Maybe it’ll make a comeback for sites whose users need to avoid censorship in this way if it’s true that domain fronting has generally become more difficult.

jsdz,

Alternative headline: Google is making it even harder for non-Google operators of mail servers to interoperate with gmail.

jsdz,

Forget your ideas of utopia for the time being. First let’s reduce the copyright term to something reasonable like 14 years or less, and abolish legal protections for DRM such as the DMCA. It’s a big enough change to start with, and might lead to more people respecting the law. The absurdity of works being locked up by the heirs and successors of authors who’ve been dead for three generations is unjustifiable.

jsdz,

Given that there’s no hope for my scenario happening, I suppose that one will do.

jsdz,

“4 censures” doesn’t seem like a large number, accusing them of paraphilia is beside the point and makes it look like the objection is simply to queer people existing, and you should really gather more evidence than that before going around accusing anyone of pedophilia in this day and age.

On the other hand I had a look at that instance, and I would not federate with it.

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