Readit NewsFirst, you use well-known cloud or dedicated hoster. All your traffic is now tied to the single IP address of that hoster. It may be linked to you by visiting two different sites from the same IP address. Furthermore, this hoster is legally required to do anything with your VPN machine on demand of corresponding state actors (this is not a speculative scenario; i. e. Linode literally silently MitMed one of their customers on German request). Going ever further, residential and company IPs have quite different rules when it comes to law enforcement. Seeding Linux ISOs from your residential IP will be overlooked almost everywhere (sorry, Germany again), but seeding Linux ISOs from AWS can easily be a criminal offense.
Second, you use some shady abuse-proof hosting company, which keeps no logs (or at least says that) and accepts payments in XMR. Now you're logging in to your bank account from an IP address that is used to seedbox pirate content or something even more illegal, and you still don't know if anyone meddles with your VPN instance looking for crypto wallet keys in your traffic.
VPN services have a lot of "good" customers for a small amount of IP addresses, so even if they have some "bad" actors, their IPs as a whole remain "good enough". And, as the number of customers is big, each IP cannot be reliably tied to a specific customer without access logs.
Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran. These are the cutting edge tech, they may not be so privacy-friendly as Mullvad, but they will certainly work.
1. They are in most cases run by national spy agencies.
2. They will at least appear to work, i.e., they will provide you with access to websites that are blocked by the country you are in. Depending on which country's spies run the system, they may actually work in the sense of hiding your traffic from that country's spies, or they may mark you as a specific target and save all your traffic for later analysis.
My inclination is to prefer free (open-source) software that isn't controlled by a company which can use that control against its users.
If social media sites are shut down but I am free to post my opinions on my personal blog site, how is my freedom of speech affected?
Did I not have freedom of speech before social media existed?
Is there an implication in freedom of speech that any speech facilitating service that can be offered must be allowed to operate? That's at least not obvious to me.
I echo what others said: There are good reasons to oppose all this, but blanket cries of "free speech" without any substance don't exactly help.
Each new day gets a header.
Here's Sunday, with blank lines added to get reasonable formatting on HN:
links from 02025-08-24:
https://archive.org/details/TheDesignOfSwitchingCircuits/pag... My childhood book on digital logic (including a little #electronics) as an #ebook. #hardware
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_discharge_lamp sodium-arc and mercury-arc lamps are also HID lamps. #hardware
https://archive.org/details/ge-glow-lamp-manual-1966/page/n1... scan of GE’s glow-lamp manual for neon lamps from 01966. #ebook #hardware #electronics #history
https://youtu.be/Nn5v59l2Xec?t=64 VEMAG brand double-screw extruder screw pump #mechanisms pumping M&Ms and ground meat. #video footage of the parts being washed.
https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/aleksandro_arz_51_arz51.html very pretty old radio
https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat2141 "Superlenses" to overcome the diffraction limit, #optics #paper from 02008
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_length#Electrical_l... electrically long and short #antennas and loading coils and whatnot. #electronics #communications #radio
https://www.ornl.gov/publication/evaluation-power-fluidic-pu... #fluidics for pumping in #molten-salt #nuclear-reactors (just an abstract)
https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/in-defense-of-tech-trees trying to use "tech trees" to understand the #history of technological development
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_diffraction near-field #diffraction is "Fresnel diffraction" #optics
https://psi329.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Lewis-PernFascis... Was #Perón a fascist? #fascism #history #PDF #paper #toread
https://lwn.net/Articles/1030818/ #Treacherous-Computing for “confidential VMs” #privacy despite #Linux #virtualization #toread
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44950482 discussion of alternative ways to run graphical apps inside #Docker, including maybe drawing in a web browser
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991638 my post about how #Rust’s approach to handling #Unicode introduces unnecessary bugs into command-line programs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WApL1EL2GMk #Frondizi speaks about #Perón. #history #Argentina #video
https://github.com/3b1b/manim Manim math #animation software for morphing equations and plots and stuff into each other, using FFmpeg, OpenGL, LaTeX, and Pango
https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/September-2020_NVM... in ZNS #zoned-storage a zone must be a power-of-2 number of LBAs, unlike in ZAC and ZBC #PDF #toread
https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/f2fs.html "f2fs" is the #Flash friendly #filesystem for #zoned-storage. “F2FS is a file system exploiting NAND flash memory-based storage devices, which is based on Log-structured File System (#LFS). The design has been focused on addressing the fundamental issues in LFS, which are snowball effect of wandering tree and high cleaning overhead.”
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Here's today, ten years ago, so you can see how my bookmarking style has developed:
links from 2015-08-28:
http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/article-j1a-swapforth.html A free-software #Forth operating system running on the J1a open-source CPU running on a Lattice #FPGA thanks to Project #IceStorm’s reverse engineering and the resulting free-software #synthesis and programming toolchain, running on the Lattice iCEstick evaluation board with 8K of RAM. #J1 #hardware
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRVaLUQUmA8&list=PLACB124F79... A 2009 #video lecture series on #mecheng manufacturing processes by “nptelhrd”, Prof. Inderdeep Singh at IIT Roorkee. Some problems with the audio, seems to be a bit clipped. However, the video is entirely a talking head and a bunch of PowerPoint slides, so the only way you would watch this video to learn about powder metallurgy instead of reading a book is if you are dyslexic or have a beard fetish. At least it doesn’t have shitty elevator music.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/ The USGS gives #pricing information on a variety of mineral #materials, including some historical stuff. #minerals
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/titanium/mc... #Titanium #pricing in the US has gone from US$9.62/kg in 2010 to US$11.20/kg in 2014. Nearby pages use dollars per pound, but the prices per kg show a sharp reduction from its peak of US$17.28 in 2005, but it had a low of US$6.50 in 2003, US$9.70 in 1995, and US$8.26 in 1992–3. This means that the FFC Cambridge Process is not in production yet.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5188/ A #PDF with a bunch of metal #materials #pricing for 1970–2010. Comprehensive, covers nearly all metals and some semimetals. Unfortunately at least some prices use folk units like pounds instead of SI.
http://rebeccasolnit.net/essay/a-rape-a-minute-a-thousand-co... Rebecca Solnit talks a bit about #rape and #intimate-partner-violence. #feminism
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/08/06/2015-184... The FCC is proposing to outlaw #free-software for wireless firmware.
https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/emulate-an... Programmers competing to do Intel 8086 (subset) #emulation in different languages, including a C program in 348 lines.
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Perhaps surprisingly, of those 8 links from ten years ago, only one has really linkrotted; unsurprisingly it's Solnit's essay. But it survives in the Archive. The titanum PDF redirects to the general titanium Mineral Commodities Summary page.
Emacs full-text search is surprisingly often effective at finding relevant information. Grep (or M-x occur, its moral equivalent) works even more often. F6 opens the URL in my browser. Emacs C-s can search those 12000 bookmarks faster than I can type.
At some point in the past I wrote a Chrome extension that would show me all the links for a given hashtag with their descriptions (formatted as Markdown), with the hashtags being links to other similar hashtag pages, and also let me bookmark pages from within the browser interface, but I don't know where it is now. It wouldn't work with Manifest v3 anyway.
>A blog is speech, but I wouldn't say that deciding to operate a social media site is speech.
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* See UDHR articles 12, 18, 19, and 20. This is not an issue limited to the provincial laws of one small country.
† Unless the site operators also use of the site, in which case they too do suffer it; this is in my experience virtually always the case with the noncommercial sites that it is most important to protect.