To reach the particular law office which has become a specialist in this particular case, yes you are trapped because they use MS Outlook. There is no way to exchange email with them without involving MS.

Victims can use any lawyer, but any other lawyer will need to research the case (at the victim’s cost).

Self hosting would mean I could control account creation and make many burner accounts. But there are issues with that:

• If there are several burner accounts then the admin would have to make it easy for others to create burner accounts or else it would be evident that all the burner accounts are just the admin’s, which does not solve the aggregation problem. It introduces complexities because the DNS provider and ISP would have the identity of the self-hoster. One could onion host but that greatly narrows the audience.
• It does not solve the problem for others. Everyone who has the same need would then be needlessly forced to independently solve all these same problems.
• I do not have high-speed unlimited internet, so I would have to spend more on subscription costs.

I think it complicates the problem and then each author has to deal with the same. If it’s solved at the fedi API level, then the existing infrastructure is ready to work.

(edit) I recall hearing about a fedi client application that operates in a serverless way. I don’t recall the name of it and know little about how it works, but it is claimed to not depend on account creation on a server and it somehow has some immunity to federation politics. Maybe that thing could work but I would have to find it again. It’s never talked about and I wonder why that is… maybe it does not work as advertised.

Those do not obviate the use cases I have in mind. Secure drops are useful tools for specific whistle blowing scenarios. But they are not a one-size-fits-all tool.

I routinely use framadrop and then transmit the links to regulators or whoever I am targeting to act on a report. But what if the target audience is not a specific journalist or regulator but rather the entire general public? The general public does not have access to reports submitted to the Guardian’s dropbox or NYTimes’ dropbox. Those are exclusive channels of communication just for their own journalists. The report then only gets acted on or exposed if the story can compete with the sensationalisation level of other stories they are handling. If I’m exposing privacy abuses, the general public does not give a shit about privacy for the most part. So only highly scandelous privacy offenses can meet the profitable publication standards of Guardian and nytimes. The reports also cannot be so intense as to be on par with Wikileaks. There is a limited intensity range.

The fedi offers some unique reach to special interest groups like this one without the intensity range limitation.

NYtimes is also a paywall. So even if the story gets published it still ends up a place of reduced access.

They are great tools for some specific jobs but cannot wholly replace direct anonymous publication. Though I must admit I often overlook going to journalists. I should use those drop boxes more often.

(edit) from the guardian page:

Once you launch the Tor browser, copy and paste the URL xp44cagis447k3lpb4wwhcqukix6cgqokbuys24vmxmbzmaq2gjvc2yd.onion or theguardian.securedrop.tor.onion into the Tor address bar.

That theguardian.securedrop.tor.onion URL caught my attention. I did not know about onion names until now. Shame it’s only for secure drops.

That story is focused on #CloudSTRIKE but the bigger more remarkable demon here is #CloudFLARE.

This story demonstrates Cloudflare acting as a proxy bully of their own customer, on behalf of CloudStrike by pushing a frivilous #DMCA take-down demand. CF took the spineless route as it sees CloudStrike as having more muscle than their customer. After CF joins the Goliath side of the David vs. Goliath battle, CF ignores Senk’s responses and keeps proxying threats.

Senk bounced from Cloudflare and went to a provider who has his back. #ArsTechnica publishes Cloudflare’s conduct. As embarrassment hits Cloudflare and David (Senk) starts winning against Goliath (CloudStrike), CF changes their tune. Suddenly they are on Senk’s side, saying “come back, we’ll protect you – we promise we didn’t get your messages”. LOL. Senk should do a parody site for Cloudflare too.

Senk’s mistake: leaving CF. He should have waited until CF actually booted him. Then that would have more thoroughly exposed CF’s shitty actions. Senk gave CF an easy out.

Interesting to note how a human on the side of civil rights who advocates decentralisation was treated with hostility by Cloudflare. Yet CF is fine with sheltering actual criminals.

Customers should take several proactive steps to protect their personal information and reduce potential risks: Be Wary of Phishing Attempts

Customers should rethink their stupid ass decision to use AT&T in the first place since it has been known for over a decade that AT&T is the most privacy abusive of all US telecoms, most notably their role in project Fairview (archive for clearnet users and wikipedia).

AT&T customers don’t give a shit about privacy. But I do have some sympathy for all the non-AT&T people who communicated with AT&T pawns.

BTW, the OP’s link avoids reclaimthenet’s shitty popup if proxied through 12ft.io:

https://12ft.io/https://reclaimthenet.org/nearly-all-at

Not sure it matters since the text is in the OP anyway… guess if someone wants to share it around.

Folks, FedEx has always been on the extreme right. Some basic facts:

• FedEx is an ALEC member (extreme right lobby and bill mill), largely as an anti-union measure
• FedEx founded by an ex military serviceman
• FedEx gives discounts for NRA membership (though I heard this was recently discontinued). NRA is obviously an extreme right org who also finances ALEC.
• During the NFL take-a-knee protest, FedEx is one of very few die-hard corps that refused to give in to the boycott. FedEx continued supporting the NFL against all the Black Lives Matter athletes taking knees and getting punished.
• FedEx ships shark fins, slave dolphins and hunting trophies. Does not give a shit about harm to animals (even when endangered) or environment.

I have been boycotting FedEx for over a decade. Certainly being pro-surveillance is fitting with their history and should not be a surprise to anyone who is aware of this background.

The only moral inconsistency is that FedEx has a reputation for not snooping on your packages and seems to be favored by people shipping contraband. But to find the consistency it’s just about the bottom line. They make no money by ratting out their customers who break the law. But installing a surveillance system on their trucks is probably yielding revenue for FedEx.

I’ve been out of the loop on games for a while but ReactOS may be worth a look.

The 1st ½ of your comment sounds accurate. But…

And also in Foss there are highly opinionated software where the devs completely ignore users, ban them from GitHub when they post issues,

Right, but to be clear non-free s/w is worse - you can’t even reach the devs, generally, and there is no public bug tracker. FOSS is an improvement in this regard because at least there is a reasonable nuclear option (forking). The nuclear option for non-free software is writing it yourself from scratch.

That all sounds accurate enough to me… but thought I should comment on this:

However - in larger enterprises there’s so much more, you get the whole SDL maturity thing going - money is invested into raising the quality of the whole development lifecycle and you get things like code reviews, architects, product planning, external security testing etc. Things that cost time, money and resources.

It should be mentioned that many see testing as a cost, but in fact testing is a cost savings. In most situations, you only spend some money on testing in order to dodge a bigger cost: customers getting burnt in a costly way that backfires on the supplier. Apart from safety-critical products, this is the only business justification to test. Yet when budgets get tightened, one of the first cuts many companies make is testing – which is foolish assuming they are doing testing right (in a way that saves money by catching bugs early).

Since the common/general case with FOSS projects is there is no income that’s attached to a quality expectation (thus testing generates no cost savings) - the users are part of the QA process as free labor, in effect :)

Yeah this article caught me by surprise. Natural gas is naturally odorless so that probably works against awareness.

I tend to be lazy about turning on the loud fans which downgrades the ambiance. But I need to change something because grease cakes up on everything near the oven and on the cabinets. My range hood is also the ventless style, which must be totally useless against the benzine byproduct.

I will certainly put more thought into kitchen design in the future. The gas appliances should probably be in the corner of the room so there are fewer directions to control, and the hood should probably be big, industrial, and vented outside. It’s a shame because I might prefer the gas stove to be in an island layout or at least centrally located.

It depends on what you’re baking. You wouldn’t want your cake to have a crispy hard crust on the outside, but you would want that with bread and pizza.

That’s interesting but it seems like an incomplete answer. I’ve read that it’s very common for people to install a range hood that’s too small. If it’s true that range hoods are often under-sized, then it naturally follows that they would often be ineffective. So I would like to know the answer in terms of a high-end well-designed & /big/ range hood. I would also expect a low hood to be more effective than one installed high above the stove.

Many coils pulse full heat to simulate different heat levels. Gas gives you very precise control over exact heat levels and it is instantly responsive to change.

You’ve got the precision factor backwards. Gas is a clear loser on that.

When you have knob levels 0—9, if you set the knob to 3 on electric you get exactly ½ the heat energy that you get from level 6. It’s perfectly linear. This is not true in the slightest with gas. A gas flame is non-linear as you go from 0 to 9. All you can do is eye-ball the flame and guess. Even when you have a flame size in mind, it’s not reproduceable because you’re still eye-balling it every time. You can’t trust the levels on a gas knob either because they’re so non-linear that you can get a big flame difference in certain points along the scale.

Gas also has less precision of control because of the reduced range at both ends. The lowest possible gas setting is still too hot for some tasks. So the best you can do is manually mimic the pulsing of electric by turning the burner off and reigniting periodically. The highest temp on gas is also less than the highest temp electric can achieve.

The only “precision” task that gas wins at is at the zero (off) level, and speed, AFAICT, which is related to precision. Both of those factors can be discarded for the most part when comparing induction because it adjusts temp demand fast enough.

indeed some houses have gas-fired wall heaters which have shitty ventilation, if any. In which case the air would of course be moist.

It’s also worth noting that moist air feels warmer and is not prone to any evaporative cooling effects. Some people will vent their vented dryers into the house to boost the humidity in order to save on heating costs.

Can anyone just pick up and move to the US? Or the EU?

Are you not distinguishing wealthy developed countries from developing countries? This may sound anecdotal but I believe I’ve detected a pattern of people from privileged countries having the copious red carpets you mention, such as EU administrations & border police not hassling Americans who overstay their visa. Even within Europe eastern block Europeans face more red tape than westerners. Some passports yield many red carpets & some none.

You don’t think you’d be considered a migrant if you wanted to move to Cuba, with all the restrictions that would entail?

It’s not what you think. The restrictions in that movement actually come from the US. Cuba welcomes Americans to the point that they will even hold back on stamping a US passport on request. Considering Cuba actually has an emigration crisis (with an “e”), it’d be ironic for immigration into Cuba to be difficult.

Indeed. And it’s a needlessly destructive form of sanitization. That is, sanitizing properly normally means replacing the special characters with an encoding to ensure literals render.

I think this is a regression. IIRC, there was a time when a removal only removed it from the timeline. You could still reach it via the modlog. IIRC. But those days are gone. It’s a shame because it’s important for the community to be able to evaluate the mod’s decision making.

I’ve even seen cases where an over-zealous mod gets embarrassed by the mod log and purges the mod log itself to remove traces of the censorship itself. I suppose that’s only possible if the mod is also an admin.

Great find! Glad to see there are some onion hosts as well.

Any idea how to adapt the monero.stackexchange link in the sidebar? The code.whatever.social page cannot handle that link apparently because it does not lead to a specific thread.

There are bug reports and then there is user support. There’s some confusion because I filed a bug report in a user support community (because there is no bug reporting community).

Indeed the user support solution is to either request that the admin to change the slur filter config, or change instances. But the purpose of the thread was to report a bug in an in-band way (without interacting with a Microsoft asset [#deleteGithub]).

I can see your point in many situations but when I say I am the one b*tching (myself… in the 1st person), in this context I am not saying I am acting badly myself. So the “women are bad” narrative doesn’t follow. In this case the word merely serves as a more expressive complaint.

If someone were to talk about someone else b*tching, it might well be what you’re saying, as they are complaining about someone else complaining & maybe they oppose that other person complaining or their aggressive style thereof.