Sadly, Iran has not been “tolerable to the media” in recent times.

(Example: a few months ago, their courts were discussing whether to sentence a rapper named Tataloo to death for “corruption on earth” - singing about the wrong things.)

Since they are now in war, media freedom in Iran is probably under the table.

Opinion:

Politically, the ayatollah can’t be toppled by foreseeable events, except if an Israeli strike should kill him. His successor in that case is unlikely to be milder. Netanyahu is also firmly in power due to special circumstances, and probably pretty safe from any Iranian attempts.

Militarily, Iran has taken bigger losses, and has probably lost expensive and important parts of its nuclear programme - but not its stocks of highly enriched uranium, or its ability to launch ballistic missiles. From that perspective, if the Israeli strikes were meant to disarm Iran - they didn’t.

Prognosis: they will trade more strikes and neither will achieve breakthrough success. Iran will lose more in the process.

• Not providing a platform for activities that harm society (e.g. scams, disinformation).
• Not providing a platform for activities that will get you sued or prosecuted (e.g. piracy, child porn).
• They had to pay a considerable amount for the service.

On social media, putting the burden of blocking on a million users is naive because:

• Blocks can be worked around with bots, someone has to actively fight circumvention.
• Some users don’t have the time to block, simply conclude “this is a hostile environment” and leave.
• Some users fall for scams / believe the disinfo.

I have once helped others build an anonymous mix network (I2P). I’m also an anarchist. On Lemmy however, support decentralization, defederating from instances that have bad policies or corrupt management, and harsh moderation. Because the operator of a Lemmy instance is fully exposed.

Experience has shown that total freedom is a suitable policy for apps that support 1-to-1 conversations via short text messages. Everything else invites too much abuse. If it’s public, it will have rules. If it’s totally private, it can have total freedom.

it was also unclear he has in fact paid any taxes to the Russian government

Seems like a Captain Obvious moment. You work somewhere, your employer pays taxes to the government without even asking if you like it. I’m fully certain that even hardcore anarchist partisans who burn shit at night, pay taxes to the RF government on their day job - to look more like a normal citizen.

Perhaps more importantly, Netanyahu also exchanged the director of Shin Bet, as if anticipating that some day, that guy might get a warrant to arrest a certain person accused of war crimes.

To make it short and get to the point, Israel is also risking their constitutional order by letting Netanyahu run wild. He might decide not to leave at some point.

1.8.1 is sufficiently infectious and will attempt to self-install on you, functionality however is the same, it does the same stuff as Omicron did

In our modern times, Ea-Nasir still has some bars of aluminum to sell you. Quite several, in fact. :)

Saudi Arabia needs to run out of money and get into an “all hands needed” situation to change (at which point they will surely discover that half of hands belong to women).

The king needs to lose his ability to bribe people to shut up.

Everyone can help this a little by transitioning off oil, gas and other petrochemical products, not letting this country acquire advanced technology, and generally not cooperating with them.

How to make Saudia Arabia a normal society?

• deny it income
• deny it access to advanced technology
• deny it legitimacy and cooperation

Most importantly: stop using oil and natural gas sooner rather than later.

Reasoning: the king stays in power by paying cops, security officials and prison guards - and paying people to shut up and tolerate the regime. Once the system runs low on money, things may change.

Note: women in Europe made rapid progress at getting civil rights at a time when they were needed to run ammunition factories.

It doesn’t have to be a world war - any development that makes it economically unavoidable that women start going to work outside their home, will change the role of women in society.

But who would buy such hardware? :)

so good luck hiding a VPN client.

In my imagination, there is no VPN client. The whole network is behind a VPN router and the internet gateway is where it needs to be.

how did you do it?

In the BIOS options of that specific server (nothing fancy, a generic Dell with some Xeon processor) the option to enable/disable ME was just plainly offered.

Chipset features > Intel AMT (active management technology) > disable (or something similar, my memory is a bit fuzzy). I researched the option, got worried about the outcomes if someone learned to exploit it, and made it a policy of turning it off. It was about 2 years ago.

P.S.

I’m sure there exist tools for the really security-conscious folks to verify whether ME has become disabled, but I was installing a boring warehouse system, so I didn’t check.

please read up on intel management engine

I’m already familiar with it. On the systems I buy and intall, if they are Intel based, ME gets disabled since I haven’t found a reasonable use for it.

Oh yeah, ARM also has something similar.

Since this is more relevant to me (numerically, most of the systems that I install are Raspberry Pi based robots), I’m happy to announce that TrustZone is not supported on Pi 4 (I haven’t checked about other models). I haven’t tested, however - don’t trust my word.

Who would you buy from in this case?

From the Raspberry Pi Foundation, who are doubtless ordering silicon from TSMC for the Pico series and ready-made CPUs for their bigger products, and various other services from other companies. If they didn’t exist, I would likely fall back on RockChip based products from China.

https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/nsaant/firewalk/index.htm

Wow. :) Neat trick. (Would be revealed in competent hands, though. Snap an X-ray photo and find excess electronics in the socket.)

However, a radio transceiver is an extremely poor candidate for embedding on a chip. It’s good for bugging boards, not chips.

The first and central provision of the bill is the requirement for tracking technology to be embedded in any high-end processor module or device that falls under the U.S. export restrictions.

As a coder with some hardware awareness, I find the concept laughable.

How does he think they (read: the Taiwanese, if they are willing to) would go about doing it?

Add a GPS receiver onto every GPU? Add an inertial navigation module to every GPU? Add a radio to every GPU? :D

The poor politician needs a technically competent advisor forced on him. To make him aware (preferably in the most blunt way) of real possibilities in the real world.

In the real world, you can prevent a chip from knowing where it’s running and you can’t add random shit onto a chip, and if someone does, you can stop buying bugged hardware or prevent that random addition from getting a reading.

Let’s not pretend Israel was ever anything other than a settler colonialist project whose most ardent supporters were antisemites.

I’m a bit poorly informed about public and private discourse on the subject, in the late 1940-ties. Can you point me to any evidence which would substantiate that claim?

Don’t let the facts slow you down, eh.

Attributing the existence of a country to an agency the country built, is a bit on the fast side, I think. The agency was born 1 year after Israel and built from scratch.

Israel exists because millions of people didn’t have a place they could call their home country.

Sadly, what has become of that country is not cheerful. Its war in Gaza seems to intend making life impossible in the sector (making a population’s life impossible in their homeland has a definition: genocide) and prime minister Netanyahu is grabbing for more power, likely with thoughts about “staying a bit longer”.

Mossad (role: foreign intelligence) is an agency directly subordinated to the prime minister of Israel (unlike some others, e.g. Shin Bet (role: internal security and counterintelligence), which recently had its chief fired because he wouldn’t swear personal allegiance to Netanyahu). So, in the current political situation, there is credible suspicion that Netanyahu is creating a precedent and subordinating all intelligence agencies to his person - if not directly then indirectly.

Mossad’s cooperation with foreign agencies has been punctuated by episodes of non-cooperation.

I can point out several moments in history where the interests of Mossad contradicted, for example, the interests of the CIA. Threats were made, negotiations were held, some Mossad guys got caught and were imprisoned in the US.

However, during less tense periods, agencies have also been trading tips. Mossad has built a highly successful “business” of assassinating people. It logically follows that if agency A knows that person X is on Mossad’s “hit list”, and they find out where X lives, then A won’t need to send a killer, but tips off Mossad. Intelligence agencies may sometimes (not cheerfully) share part of their technical networks with each other, but human networks - almost never. It can get their own agents killed or imprisoned, if another agency is careless.

I think they earned their award. The original story, now 11 months old, is perhaps worth re-reading.

Summary: anticipating ICC conclusions about the war in Gaza, Netanyahu (from whom Mossad takes commands) sent the agency to collect compromising material about the ICC prosecutor. The head of the agency threatened her, but she disclosed the contacts to other ICC officials and proceeded with the investigation.

According to accounts shared with ICC officials, he is alleged to have told her: “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”

If he does that, the prices that rise most in the US will be medical products, medicines and motor vehicles.

The EU does have a trade surplus in goods with the US. The US has a nearly comparable surplus in trade of services.

If the EU were to respond by taxing US services harshly, we’d experience more expensive licenses and advertising costs. Year of the Linux desktop? Year of the dark red Google?

Harvard says the administration’s move is unlawful.

And most likely, it is.

However, for a foreign student to enter the US currently to study (presumably for several years) does kind of feel like jumping onto a hovercraft crewed by eels.

It is.

Who’s gonna stop them?

The first line (diplomacy):

Several factions in the Libyan government have warm relations with Turkey. Turkey has so far antagonized with Israel over the matter of Gaza. It’s not hard to predict that factions in the Libyan government, upon Trump’s likely blackmail (he can do little else) to accept the deportation of million ethnically cleansed Palestinians, would receive a phone call from their Turkish, Quatari, Algerian and Pakistani backers, telling them to “stop discussing that nonsense” and asking them to reject Trump. So, most likely the Libyan government will fail to reach a consensus.

The second line (politics):

The Libyan parliament will not support it. Parliament may remove the government if it’s doing something unpalatable

The third line (war):

Libyan people will not support it. Various factions may rebel again and restart the civil war if they see the government acting seriously against their wishes.