Reminds me of a certain emulation site that was hit by Nintendo’s lawyers and removed the download links for all of their games.
Except that’s all they did. The files are still there, the game pages are still up, all that’s missing is the big shiny download button. A simple userscript can add them back and let you download the “removed” games.
It’s all in how he communicates, not what. He’s an old-school con man, a confidence trickster. That whole style relies on the fact that people are really bad at judging character, and someone who lies with a straight face and never shows an iota of guilt will be believed to be innocent and truthful no matter what evidence is presented against them.
Combine that with a heavy dose of sunk cost fallacy and an increasingly uneducated and desperate electorate, and it’s easy to see why many follow him despite his near complete lack of articulateness.
He’s like if Edison and Henry Ford had a baby and it only inherited the worst parts of both.
On the other hand, wouldn’t you expect such an agent to be under heavy surveillance themselves to prevent that very thing? If he had contingencies, it’s likely they were known about and disabled when the time came. And you can bet every single friend and collaborator of his was watched like a hawk after he was imprisoned/died.
That’s if there even were contingencies - never underestimate the stupidity of someone who thinks they’re untouchable.
Just wait until you can only stream books, not download them, with random words replaced with synonyms using an algorithm that lets them track down who the originator of any scanned copies is.
That might sound ridiculous, but streaming-only to prevent perfect copies and hiding purchaser identifiers in the data are both DRM techniques that have been explored in other media already. There’s no limit to how anti-consumer publishers can get when they think there’s slightly more money to be had.
Deniable encryption like that will be a lifesaver if things get bad enough. Though I’m thinking more the kind where the encrypted content on a computer disk is indistinguishable from free space, and you have multiple passwords that decrypt different parts of the filesystem. That way you can be interrogated and/or beaten, “give up” and unlock your computer (using the decoy password), and still hide any incriminating evidence since those files remain hidden with no way for adversaries to even detect that they exist.
Nah, they clearly meant in liquid form.
Hey, don’t blame us for Murdoch. He’s Australian, he only bought US citizenship in his fifties in order to spread his hate better.
… Saying that becoming American helped with that doesn’t really strengthen my case here, does it?
“Here’s the thing you have to understand about Ted Cruz: I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.”
The problem with using salt water isn’t salt buildup, it’s that it’s corrosive and will drastically shorten the lifespan of any equipment exposed to it.
ReVanced (a patched version of the official app) is straight up better than Premium because it can get rid of all the crap corporate insists on shoving into customers’ faces. My YouTube app has a subscriptions tab (that only shows videos, not shorts or random “informative” carousels) and my profile tab with all my playlists, and nothing else.
It’s glorious in its simplicity. Why would I ever pay Google for a worse product?
Okay then, the labyrinthine structure spontaneously generates tiny minotaurs, which then consume the disease-causing miasma.
I copy+pasted my lunch without thinking and overwrote my clipboard; guess I’m sans vehicle now.
For the uninitiated, the Mormon church has more than $200 billion in a “rainy day” investment fund they created using the tithes they demand from their members, with an estimated $7 billion more being added to their reserves each year from tithes and donations alone.
I would point at Android as an example of what would happen. It’s not public domain but the end result is similar, namely that the open source originator (AOSP) suffers from a severe lack of features compared to the commercial offerings.
The default AOSP apps are incredibly barebones compared to the ones Google and the carriers put in their ROMs. You have to choose between “have nothing more than the basic features and compatibility with only well-established services” or “get the latest and greatest with all the bells and whistles (plus a huge heaping of telemetry and invasive advertising)”.
It turns out it’s really hard to compete with a major corporation who can throw entire teams at a problem and can legally copy anything you add to your own version. That’s not even getting into the things that open source projects lack due to their haphazard team structure such as unified UX designs (Blender pre-2.8 and GIMP pre-3.0/unified window mode being the most famous examples of terrible user interfaces that lingered for far too many years).
doctorpyrotechnician
And we talk to Americans on the internet, we know that Americans don’t respect their allies. The soldiers of allied countries that sacrificed everything in Afghanistan and Iraq doesn’t even register with most Americans. There is too little sense of honour in the American population. Americans only care about money now, and that’s not a motivation that can be trusted by anyone.
I agree that how the US treated its allies is abominable (our abandonment of local guides and translators, who were promised a place in America for risking the lives of themselves and their families, to be murdered by the Taliban/ISIS should be prosecuted as a crime - not to mention the minorities left to die to appease larger powers, such as the Kurds, Armenians, and now Ukrainians). However, most Americans don’t know about any of this.
Most Americans are living in a bubble that hides or vastly distorts anything outside of it. Our media is hyper-focused on a narrow band of issues that gets guaranteed views (mostly culture wars that said media invented or spread in the first place) and only pays lip service to anything outside of that. For many, “news” means pithy one-liners and relentless attacks on the other side. They’re told some minor issue is the single most important thing right now and are so whipped up they don’t look outside to see the world is burning. The right-wing media is an endless parade of hate, while the left complains about said right while offering no solutions. Neutral media is a joke, and foreign news has no foothold outside individual posts being shared if they agree with a person’s existing position. Major news gets cycled out after mere days and is quickly buried by the next meaningless story. It’s a constant cavalcade of worthless noise that obscures any actual reporting.
If America could somehow shrug off the 24-jour news hype cycle and see what’s actually happening in the world, I think you’d find there’s a great deal of empathy in the populace - it’d be hard to stir up an audience if they didn’t care about something. Sadly, I can’t see such a thing ever happening - the biggest shakeup in news this decade was Fox being called “woke” and what was once tabloid trash becoming accepted sources amongst the right, even getting dedicated reporting positions in the government while traditional media was kicked out. So if anything it’s only going to get worse, with the addiction to drama and outrage leading half the country even further into isolation and delusion.
Or decades of behavior before that. Fun fact, he was denied a permit to open a casino in Australia due to his clear ties to Russian organized crime* - in 1987.
* For those unfamiliar, Russian organized crime is deeply entrenched with the actual Russian government - hence the term “Mafia State”.
This reminds me of a post where someone hooked a dead spider up to a syringe and used it as a grabber. A spider’s musculature is hydraulic so the legs would curl and uncurl as the syringe was pressed.
Definitely one of the creepier things I’ve casually stumbled upon.
Edit: Behold, necromancy! (time-stamped video)