Not true at all. Or, rather, it depends on some time scales and definitions.

The same way that there is no such thing as a "selfless" act - no one acts selflessly. They just value different goals in their assessment of selfishness. Selflessness is simply selfishness on a longer time scale or with a wider scope.

Chinese cars will be disruptive to the US auto industry, but devastating... that depends on what you mean. One could argue, and I would tend to agree, that the continuing artificial protections are doing the industry more overall and long term harm. The whole key to capitalism and the free market is that the market drives a path to highest efficiency. Artificially protecting Ford et al from those drivers to efficiency is creating waste and giving the worst of both worlds. The greed of capitalism and the self-serving of authoritarianism. Think of Soviet Russia circa 1980. Falling under its own weight and crumbling infrastucture because there were no drivers to efficiency.

Chinese cars are probably the only thing that can save the US auto industry. It badly needs a reset.

...

From the article...

... do they mean a "general" post on twitter today receives less than 3% of the views, or an EFF post on twitter receives less than 3% of the views that it did? Because I think the "general" post on twitter today receives prolly a quarter of the views. The rest is on them.

Twitter is twitter, and I'm sure there is a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B here, but come on. But let's be honest and ask when was the last time the EFF got a real headline?

In fact, I see this announcement as little more than a "hey guys, remember us... we used to be famous sorta", and taking potshots at a platform no one listens to them on to do it.

No. They are balanced in equal proportion. The fundamental property in question is that which caused the morons to clump in the Unites States. The rest of the world got a much higher proportion of anti-morons as a result.

Unfortunately you can. The fact this made it into a courtroom is the most frightening part.

The idea that one can release video coverage of what happens in one's own home and invade someone ELSE's privacy by doing that - it's frightening that survived a motion to dismiss as a matter of law.

Well...

First of all sure, the immigration issues you cite aren't actually what the real problem is, but let's look at it. You have a president who is willing to nationalize the state guard in order to put armed soldiers in the streets who are under his direct control. They are there, ostensibly, to open the way for ICE. ICE, an organization that openly advertises for recruitment in white nationalist magazines and recruits from white nationalist organizations. ICE, whose members openly flash white nationalist and KKK signs in photo ops together. Is that the organization that's no problem? They may want to do some laundry because their uniform shirts are looking a little... er.... brown.

Secondly, ICE isn't actually the real problem. The real problem is that there has already been political violence in the streets of your capitol. It is sparking all over the country. The rhetoric is off the charts, and your president invokes the most bizarre logic in every decision he makes. So when you say...

who's rules are you speaking of? Those are a moving target and change at the mercurial whim of the person who controls all the aforementioned organizations. Your country is on a collision course with violence that will make that Jan 6th look like a christmas party. My own take on the trends there, is that there WILL be more violence in the streets of your capitol before, or as, the 118th congress first sits. If it does. I for one think it will sit, but not before more blood is spilled.

You brushed off the warning contained in the story. The Ig Nobel organizers' decision to relocate wasn't frivolous. These are serious international academics and scientists making a calculated risk assessment. So if you brushed that off as a stunt, I suspect you will brush off my own comment here similarly. I hope rather than believe you will take a long hard look at the way things are going before violence hits your streets again. Also remember you are on the inside, with a breakdown like other people see coming being something that is just not possible. But people on the outside see it coming - sometimes people on the outside can see the trees better than the person inside the forest can.

Well....
Sure, immigration issues and ICE itself are an issue at play here, for sure. A federal police force that the nation's president is willing to invoke federalizing the state guard in order to compel states to allow it in where they aren't wanted is a concern. President-controlled national guardsmen in the streets is a concern. An 'immigration' police force that advertises in white nationalist magazines and recruits from white nationalist groups and who openly flash KKK signs in photo ops is a concern. They may want to look at doing some laundry, because their uniform shirts are looking a little.... er.... brown.

But the real concern is not immigration or VISAs. The real concern is that there already has been political violence in the streets of your capital city, there is political violence sparking all over, and there is a good chance there will be a lot more of it very soon. Mark my words, before the 118th congress convenes, or as it convenes, there will be more political violence in the streets of your capital, and this time it will spread.

More pointedly, if you can't see what's going on in your own back yard, if you can't see where the trends are taking you, and what damage the off-the-charts rhetoric is doing, then perhaps look at the decision to avoid the US made by the Ig-Nobels as a litmus test. Often times those who aren't in the forest and are looking at it from the outside can see the trees better than you can. So take a long, hard, sober look at what others are saying before you write it off as a political stunt.

Take a long hard look.

If this was targeted at actual legal requirements then this would be a question to ask. And if age verification measures were actually about age verification then again this would be a question. The "save the children" laws were never about age verification. They are about the lucrative sale of information between five-eyes and the wider intelligence sharing.

Five eyes et al are about getting around national laws forbidding surveillance on own citizens by getting other countries or organizations to do it for you. In Canada, if I want intel on someone here, I query five eyes and the information flows in from corporate data and/or what intel in other countries have on my citizen.

This is very very lucrative. There are huge intel budgets funding these, and getting that information into the system in a huge part of the business model for Whatsapp, Discord, et al. They sell it to government, and government sells it to other governments. In the UK, for example, they require Discord, a private US company, by law to collect massive amounts of information on UK citizens, then query it back over five eyes and circumvent national domestic spying and surveillance laws.

Them "walking back" the facial scan is nothing more than them telling you "if we already can pin exactly who you are and track everything we want to track on you, we won't care - it's only when we don't know who you are that we'll do this".

The community over at Linux Mint is showing the pressure. Under the gun, and unable to process even basic issues, they turn on users and blame them for problems and bugs they experience, telling them their use case is flawed when the reality is they just don't have the resources to deal with the issue. Now, not having the resources is one thing, and a fair response. But turning it back on the user and telling them their use case is flawed when they experience is the tail wagging the dog.

Another community I saw this in for a long time, and I really thought the project would implode, was the Palemoon browser. They got behind when webcomponents became a thing and they could keep up with changes. They too would blame the user when yet another web site that didn't work on the browser was encountered, telling them they should be using the site, should complain about the site, and why would they need a site like that anyway??

Palemoon dragged themselves out of it. They buckled down, and it's almost back to being a useful browser again. But the community at Mint concerns me. They are on the down swing. User blaming and load shedding are just symptoms of a larger issue. Too much work for too few volunteers. They also don't have a good end-to-end workflow strategy. By that I mean in many cases they don't seem to treat the OS as a coherent whole that is used for actual workflows from beginning to end. Pieces that have no replacement are deprecated while resources are spent on pieces that have many duplicates.

I'm concerned.

It's the difference between a "custodial" and "non-custodial" wallet. They didn't lie - they just have a custodial wallet system there. That means when you transfer coins there, they keep custody of them, and give you a number in an account that says how many are credited to you. Like any bank - a bank is a custodial wallet for fiat currency.

I would never leave my funds in a custodial wallet, I keep the few I ever use in non-custodial, almost entirely self-managed wallets. I don't keep much anyway, I don't speculate on coins. I use use some for the occasional e-commerce. But these exchanges try and make their custodial system appealing. They use very low fees to buy coins and charge low fees to "transfer" one coin type to another. It's the withdrawal fees where they get you. Well, it's also the transfer fees - they charge low fees to transfer, but ANY fees to transfer in a custodial system are fictitious. It costs them nothing to move your coins from one memory location to another.

The mistake many recipients made was to, on that exchange, try and sell their "coins" for cash. That's what would have dropped the BTC value there. Forget that, get the coins OFF the exchange first. Then cash them out, slowly.

I expect so few coins were actually lost because there are some limits as to how many coins you can exfiltrate at a time. Likely the exchange actually possessed far fewer real BTC in its vault than it purported to give away anyway.

Litecoin, and Monero are the ones to actually use for ecommerce. Transaction fees are low enough that this is viable. I buy my VPNs and pay for some VPSs using those coins. Generally buying LTC from a public exchange, converting to XMR on privacy-focussed no KYC hands-off exchange, and then self-mixing XMR through a couple more wallets a few times. XMR's transaction fees are exceedingly low, it's still very hard to pierce where transactions go, and is actually a great way to pay for an account I don't necessarily want the vendor to have my details on. I mean, if I have a VPN, how secure is it if my VPN provider can out me at any time? In that case, it's just one more person promising not to use my data. Or promising to keep it secure. No thanks. They can't give away what they don't have.

These are good use cases for e-coins. BTC had, long before usage fees became an issue, already become untenable as far as privacy is concerned. When it was created, and anyone could actually mine it, then sure, that's private. But it's ONLY private if you can mine it yourself. The moment you use any fiat to buy it, the resulting BTC is actually the most trackable currency on the planet. Unless you wear a mask and pay highway-robbery rates to buy it from a BTC ATM with cash. But even there, here in Canada at least, most require you to show ID.

BTC's hemorrhaging value because it's only a speculation currency and there is no good use case for it to generate users to prop it up.

This is exactly how I boot my computer.
In Windows I:
- Insert write-protected VeraCrypt recovery USB stick into USB
- Boot and hit F12
- Select the stick as the device to boot from, when VeraCrypt's recovery appears, I select to boot from the stick's copy of the EFI bootloader.
- Enter my Windows VeraCrypt partition password, and only when that processes can the bootloader even see my Windows drive, which can't really be tampered with because it's encrypted.

In Windows, the EFI bootloader doesn't change except in major build-number updates. When it does, i update the EFI on my stick from a secure machine using verified EFI Windows boot binaries for that build. The Veracrypt bootloader EFI binaries only change if I update to a new version of Veracrypt, which after installation there is very rarely a need for.

In Linux I:
- Insert other write-protected EFI + /boot USB stick
- Boot and hit F12
- Select the stick as the device to boot from, boot into Grub which then chains into the initramfs on the stick's /boot
- Enter my Linux LUKS password, and continue to boot.

In Linux, once control has passed to initramfs, /boot is no longer needed, so it doesn't matter that it's not read/write. I have a script that I can use to remount /boot and /boot/efi as required if I want to do a kernel update. In that case, I flip the write-enable on my stick, insert it, mount /boot and /boot/efi, and do the kernel update. Unmount, stick out, write-disable, and then back in to use scripts that take the bootloader and first two partitions of the stick (the EFI and /boot) and images it for a backup, and takes an sha512sum of that and signs it with my GnuPG key. I can thus verify the integrity of the stick any time, verify the backup, and ensure they both match. The backup, its sha512sum and signature are all sent off machine to online storage.

In short, unless you get my USB sticks (which are on my keychain and go with me everywhere), you're not booting my computer into anything that I don't control. Even if someone got my sticks, I can replace them in a way that I can, with very high level of assurance, know is safe.

It's cute that they are saying this is for age verification.

It's nothing more than a tracking mechanism. Discord, Telegram, Whatsapp... all the so-called independents, are governments' back doors into tracking who you are, where you are, and what you are doing at any particular moment in time. Why do you think they all require cell phone numbers? But requiring cell phone numbers has created a black market in numbers that can pass verification methods and this leaves them without any real way to track who is on the other end.

They get a LOT of money from Five-eyes for sending them tracking information on people. And the public at large has shown they will continue to use these "services" regardless of how egregious the breach in privacy is.

It's funny... I scratch my head when I see stories like this, up here in Canada we have a Do Not Call Registry and laws regarding it that actually have teeth. Get a robocall and they get a fine. Per call that's reported.

I haven't got a robocall in years. For a while I started getting spam text messages until I convinced the Do Not Call Registry folks that the law as written (specifying solicitation 'telecommunications' were what were prohibited), and even that stopped.

Bug your congressman for this. It actually works.