The fingerprint reader on mine doesn't work either. I've read up on solutions for that regards Debian but I haven't tried any yet. I have a yubikey and that works fine as an extra layer of login security.
TerkErJerbs
joined 1 year ago
Yeah not surprised. The head of that unit was (probably still is, haven't looked him up in awhile) Jason Charney. If you search his name and CIRG you'll find lots of paydirt going back years prior to the Fairy Creek and Wet'Su actions. He's a fuckin douchebag, and his whole team follows suit.
The CIRG started as a small specialized counter-insurgency unit but when they took off, in conjunction with the Wet'Su actions ramping up, they got a lot of funding. They also got (and continue to receive) an influx of over-timers from other regions, detachments and units who can spare the personnel. To say that another way, if Brooks, AB or Brandon, MB detachments are having a slow month, their members can "volunteer" to rotate out on other assignments such as Charney's F.N./hippy headbusting crew. And if you pay attention, CIRG keeps getting more funding because douchebagettes from other regions are more than stoked to get on Jason's team for a working vacay, make some overtime, use all the fun new tech toys, and stir shit up. They actually love it, and it shows.
They're a crew, within the RCMP, who openly and gladly do damage to resistors of industry. The funny thing is they were deployed nation-wide for a bit during the omicronvoy anti-vax protests... and that probably either solidified their place on the federal level or... if they fucked that assignment up... did damage to their unit's future. I haven't dug too deep on that one.
I've also seen articles from 2 to 3 years ago about RCMP training in Israel for counter-insurgency tactics (i.e. against Gaza and Hamas) but those references I seem to remember being within easy reach appear to be scrubbed. Really makes ya think.png
Here's some fun take-home reading for anyone interested in the above... Militarization of Police - publicsafety.gc.ca and I quote:
On June 16, 2020, Mr. Paul Manly, MP for Nanaimo-Ladysmith (Green), asked the Minister why funding is being used for the militarization of civilian police forces, with mention of “weapons of war” being provided to the RCMP for the policing of civilians, in reference to Tactical Armoured Vehicles.
Incidents involving police intervention are complex, dynamic and constantly evolving, oftentimes in a highly-charged atmosphere. Police officers must make split-second decisions when it comes to using interventions. For this reason, the Incident Management Intervention Model (IMIM) is introduced in the second week at the RCMP’s Training Academy, Depot, and then integrated into all other relevant aspects of training for the remaining 24 weeks. After leaving Depot, annual IMIM re-certification is mandatory for all regular members.
The RCMP continually reviews its policies, procedures, training and safety equipment to ensure it is using the most effective practices in law enforcement. The RCMP’s approach in responding to protests has evolved significantly and it is moving away from enforcement-focussed policing toward a measured and intelligence-led approach using community conflict management principles.
The RCMP has an Operational Framework to Address Large Scale Protests. The framework encourages officers to prevent and resolve conflict, accommodate and respect differences and interests, and strategize to minimize the need for use of intervention options. In support of this framework, the RCMP has developed Community Conflict Management Group (CCMG) training that is available to RCMP employees and other law enforcement agencies. CCMG training teaches interest-based communication skills, strategic thinking, and relationship-building techniques to facilitate the timely resolution of conflicts. CCMG-trained police officers use relationship-building techniques, emphasizing proactive engagement to establish trust, respect and accommodation of the positions and interests of all parties.
Emphasis mine, and fuck you Jason Charney. ACAB
I have a lenovo thinkbook (cheapy thinkpad) for work with AMD chip and gpu. It wasn't one of their models certified for linux but everything runs flawlessly for a lean debian build for me. I've had linux on several laptops and this is my second machine with AMD chips, and I'll say that what you hear is true; There are way more, and better, drivers available for AMD if you go with linux.
My 2 cents.
Saul Goodman. Thanks for your words and solidarity. I'm glad your friend did okay. I'm now in mid-life and I'll be processing all of it for the rest of my days. Thriving in my own way, etc. I've made peace with as much as I can at this point, and will continue. I don't know what's become of my siblings to be honest, I went full no-contact with a lot of that part of the family. I hear things every few years. They're all aged out now, some are doing better than others.
You nailed it with references to the economic system, parasitic billionaires, etc. When you dig deeper into PTSD or frankly any other mental health diagnoses it starts to become clear that modern society itself (or whatever elements of modern life you care to throw your stick at) are huge components of what's happening en masse. Hate to break it to all y'all doubters but we're not meant to live like this. Modern tech is awesome... I use it. I have a stable career because of it... but yeah. Watching the natural world around us collapse while we thrive (i.e. for a few decades, until we also collapse) is fucking with our collective consciousness. Whether some of us can acknowledge that at the moment or not... it's happening.
I don't know if Gen Z will pull us out of the dive but I hope something clicks with the vast majority of people coming up. It's extremely hard for most folk to turn away from a momentary feeling of security, safety, pleasure, abundance and comfort (even the manufactured, synthetic variety). Even if we know it's toxic and self-destructive. Ask your nearest addict what that's like... you might learn something. In strictly biblical terms, we as a species have created a pretty good mindfuck for ourselves.
Good times.
Former street kid here. I didn't end up in the foster system but three of my younger siblings did... as did dozens of my friends from the street along the way. It's a fucking awful place. Lots of foster families take on several kids because they get paid from the gov't a certain amount per ward. So some of the sickos turn it into something like a puppy mill and keep rotating new kids in as the other ones age out. You don't get a lot of empathy or care in that scene. Those kids are institutionalized by the system itself from an early age, and then those "families" openly exploit them. Does anyone who understands this stuff wonder why foster kids grow up hating authority?
I will say that I have met the opposite too. Some of those foster parents are amazing people, extremely generous and huge hearts. Good minds. Good intentions. They're out there.
Here's another thing a lot of people miss. Not to take away from how much the foster system blows... but for every kid who does end up being taken away from their family-of-origin and thrown into that grinder, there are hundreds more who should be taken out of abusive situations or environments of shocking neglect (ask me how I know). To say that another way, if every kid (and questionable family of origin) were found and processed, the system we're examining here would be multiple times larger in scale.
All these "save the children" assholes can eat a dick. Start looking around your own neighbourhoods. I guarantee there are several abused and neglected kids within a block or two of you in any direction. Even the "good" hoods.
15 charges. 3 have stuck. As though his peers didn't know something was up with this dude. As though an entire publicly funded private army trained in detection of crimes of this nature didn't have a fuckin gut feeling.... and then let it all slide.
ACAB.
The other comments almost got it right. If you had your torrent client bound to Mullvad and then opened your Tor Browser.... your torrent client would be running over the VPN tunnel (Mullvad) while your Tor Browser would be sending all its traffic over your vanilla ISP and through... the Tor network (unless you also bind it to Mullvad). You'd effectively be "split tunnelling" your traffic, which is actually a good use-case for Tor anyhow.
There's a lot of debate about whether it's fine to run a VPN tunnel (OS-wide) before you fire up your Tor Browser.... effectively you'd be pushing your Tor traffic through the tunnel to the VPN's entry/exit nodes before it got to/left the Tor network. Some say it's a security risk (if you don't trust the VPN provider, for instance. Which is valid if you're using some of the scummier providers). You need to do some research and understand the implications of doing that, before just mashing buttons.
You can also fire up the Tor network system-wide if you're crafty and then create an encrypted VPN tunnel to go over that, so all of your VPN traffic would be travelling over and through Tor nodes before it reached the entry/exit nodes of your VPN. It can work both ways. There are cases for both options, if you know what you're doing... which is a huge caveat.
Overall though, no. Please don't torrent over Tor. As you say, it's not necessary and eats bandwidth from an already slow network protocol. A VPN is more than sufficient for that purpose. If you wanna get more secure than that, make sure you're running an encrypted DNS solution (or resolve your DNS locally if you know how to do that) and profit. Then your ISP can't see shit. They'll still probably traffic-shape and throttle you, simply because they can tell it's going out over an encrypted tunnel of some kind... but they'll never be able to see what specifically you're up to.
Honestly when I told people where I worked, half of them heard Spotify in their mind and rarely bothered to correct them 😂
Arrow Lakes and the Columbia downriver from the hydro dam in Castlegar are the lowest many locals have ever seen it, which is crazy. Many watersheds in the midwest and southwest US are drying up, such as the Colorado river...
Whatever's coming, it's going to be intense. We had it pretty good for awhile, we didn't have to think about where our basic needs were coming from. That's obviously about to change.
Welp... how long-winded do you want me to get on this one? You could look up literally hundreds of examples in mainstream news about how Shopify came up as a lean scrappy underdog circa 2012 alongside many of the second wave of budding platforms. In those days they were just a snowboard company who hated the pre-rolled ecomm solutions (especially Amazon) and came up with their own way.
Turns out a few other people liked their way as well... so they pivoted to SaaS and took off running. Their mantra at that time (and they still pull it out on the regular now... for laughs) was "Arming the rebels" (against Amazon...)
They built their SaaS platform on world-class customer/merchant support. Built things users asked for. Hired talented people who were inspired by the environment of doing good in the world... etc etc. They believed in what they were doing... i.e. "Make Commerce Better."
Around the time I joined (2021) they got absolutely fucking hammered by new clients/merchants over lockdown. They were primed for "easy dropshipping" this and "low-cost barrier to entry" that for tens of millions of broke people sitting at home for lockdowns across 18+ months, looking for (pre-rolled) ways to earn an income. Their own marketing to small and emergin businesses (easy money over here!) ended up fucking them in the end.
They did an over-hiring wave like any other tech compan at the time. Very shortly after their email and chat support queues were overrun (weeks-long wait times) they reduces phone support hours for normal merchants before killing them completely shortly thereafter (workers can only field one call at a time, vs 3 chats and multiple emails per hour)... Obv they kept phones open for Plus merchants (enterprise, of course). That's Enshittification - Stage 1. They built their business, name, and reputation helping the little guy (the "rebels")... and now they were pulling up the ladder behind them to help the Plus/enterprize clients get and remain profitable, instead.
I could keep going. If you look far enough into it they started aggressively courting Enterprize clients last year after their shares tanked, and after they laid off 30% of staff.... and while they do that they need to pull finances and resources further away from their "rebels" to keep the Nikes and the Chapters of the world happy. Established mega-corps don't love it if you're giving "the little guy" stellar support while you give them (Nike) the same level. They want "better", at all times.
They've been at multi-billion dollar valuation for years prior to Covid. It was the pressure through lockdowns and out the other side tha pressured them to keep growing profitability, sent them over the edge of enshittification. They've clearly taken a lot of advice from Wall Street and Silicon Valley about how to stay on the money train (from same).... during tough financial times. They're already pulling top-notch support from their enterprize clients, and third-party app devs (ask me how I know that). The next (obvious) phase is to claw back those margins that keep enterprize clients happy, once they have enough of them locked in that a few leaving won't hurt them. That's phase 3, if you haven't been keeping track.
Do you need more of a primer, or did I answer your question?
Rogers chased me for months via collections agencies back in the early oughts because after I had cancelled my cell phone (and paid everything I owed up to date)... there was a $1.80 service charge or some shit that I didn't get the bill for... so they literally sent it to receivership.
I laughed, and ignored them. It came back to bite me over a decade later when I was looking for a new cell and plan. Rogers had the one I wanted, and I applied and was rejected because of that $1.80 default I pulled in my early 20's. Good times.
Recently I was a Shaw internet customer. I wasn't keeping up with the news that they were merging with Rogers. Around the time I found out about that, I was moving anyhow and neither service is available where I am located now. The best part is, I started looking into my modem settings (provided by and managed by Shaw at the time i got it) and I realized that they had force-enabled Shaw/Rogers Public Hotspot services on my modem/router. This is notable because I had put the device in bridge mode over a year prior, and completely disabled the wifi antennas on it. The company (Rogers) had set into motion some bullshit to turn every single modem/router in every consumer's home into a public wifi hotspot, without any consent or prior knowledge. The wifi account itself being used as the hotspot is separate from your own private traffic etc... but it eats into the bandwidth you're paying for, obviously. If you're in a high-traffic part of a large community, probably a lot.
When I phoned in to cancel my plan I also made a point of asking the support person to take notes on my complaint about that non-consensual fuckery with the device sitting right beside my desk.
TL:DR fuck Rogers, and good for the Shaw techs for standing their ground.