I also don’t think it’s ever been confirmed that it was an employee

Oh yeah that’s another thing: would you rat out the guy who killed a disgusting CEO if you flipped burgers for a living? Whatever you think of murder, you might well look the other way in this instance.

I don’t buy the conspiracy theories and “the Man sees everything and needed a plausible excuse” theories (although I’ll admit the Man does see a lot more than he should…)

But I will say this: I find it extremely odd that a random McD employee in Fucktown, Nowhere, 275 miles from NYC, recognized a hooded dude wanted for murder in NYC, for the following reasons:

• McD employees don’t look at patrons. They’re bored shitless and they’re not paid well enough to care. You could show up at any McD joint disguised as Elton John with a feather up your ass and the employee behind the counter would still tell you “Would you like fries with that” while looking right through you.

• Do you follow the local news in a city 275 miles from where you live? I don’t. And even assuming it’s NYC and it’s a big enough city that people in Altoona pay attention, there’s a murder every 12 hours in NYC. Why would that one in particular enter the consciousness of a bored employee in a burger joint in Altoona.

• Can you recognize a hooded guy you saw on a still photograph? I can’t. I might have suspicions, but I’m almost certain I wouldn’t be positive enough to call the cops. And again, I work at McD and all I really want is go home after my shift. So I might just forget I saw someone I might have vaguely recognized.

Also, it would start to look very much like a Nazi coming back to visit.

I wasn’t aware Lemmy was competing with Reddit.

But according to Democrats, the economy was doing great…

It’s going to decuple after His Orangeness puts his stupid tariffs in place. Then you’ll miss the dems.

He ain’t a terrorist, he’s a murderer. And so was his victim.

It’s well known that the Time uses the Man of the Year to designates a person of particular concern under the guise of flattery.

Is this in relation to the monetary value of cryptocurrency or the anonymity of cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrencies are just fiat currencies, like the dollar. They’re worth what people think they’re worth.

My beef with them is that they’re either pushed by scammer to empty honest but gullible people’s bank accounts, or they’re used to pay for illegal activities because they’re totally opaque and unregulated. My other beef is that they’re really securities and they’re not subject to the rules on securities for a reason that totally escapes me.

I don’t do cryptocurrencies both out of financial self-preservation, and also because I refuse to participate - and thus promote - stuff that’s generally bad for society as a whole.

And if you’re not convinced cryptocurrencies in all their forms are rotten to the core, consider this: Trump loves em. That alone is a red flag big enough to hang on a pole in North Korea.

MySudo is a proprietary aliasing software

Hard no.

Privacy.com is a proprietary financial transaction masking and aliasing tool.

Hard no.

Google Pixel phones

Hard no.

Yes, I know Pixel phones are the best option to run the best deGoogled OS out there (Graphene) but paying Google to escape the Google surveillance is just too rich for me. I’ll never get over that one. Fuck Google, even if it means running a slightly less secure OS (CalyxOS from the fine Calyx Institute, which you rightfully list).

Cryptocurrency

Hard no. I don’t partake in scams, even for the sake of privacy.

Other than that, great list. Thanks!

The stock Fairphone runs the stock full-blown Google spyware stack. Privacy isn’t Fairphone’s selling point: it’s repairability.

You can install CalyxOS very easily on it however. That’s what I’m rocking on my Fairphone 4, and it’s great. I have no issues with it.

I hate Elon Musk as much as the next guy - and all the more now that he has this massive conflict of interest working in his favor and at the American public’s expense.

But I will say this for the sake of exercizing critical thinking: everybody is happy to say AI hallucinates when what it says doesn’t suit their narrative, and call AI intelligent when it does.

That’s the catch: you can’t not use Google at all if you’re online at all, because Google has managed to insert itself into every little corner of the internet.

And that’s how the surveillance trap has quietly snapped shut on all of us without most of us noticing anything.

George Orwell had it wrong: the surveillance isn’t conducted directly by a tyrannical dictatorship but subtly, indirectly by the private sector in cahoots with the government. And the date he predicted was 40 years off. Other than that, he was right: we live in a full-blown dystopia now.

Yeah I watched some Gutfeld. He does go through the motions but his jokes never really land. It’s kind of like having a conversation with an AI chatbot: it’s convincing to a degree but something is off and it’s nowhere near as enjoyable as talking to a real person.

Finally a real list that doesn’t include Dave Chapelle - whom I already knew and whom find extremely unfunny.

I do enjoy Bill Maher very much. I don’t always agree with him but at least he makes good points and he’s funny. If nothing else, I respect his ability to address points regardless of which side of the political divide they traditionally fall on.

I’ve watched Joe Rogan too - not for comedic value but to listen to some of his guests - and he sucks ass. I didn’t think he was trying to be funny, because he really isn’t. Buf if he is, it’s not working at all. He’s just a terrible Youtuber the same way countless other Youtubers are, just with a bigger audience, as far as I can tell.

I don’t know any of the others you mention. So I will gladly check them out now. Thanks!

I use a calyxos device to share VPN, as of a few months ago.

Hotspot & Tethering

• Allow clients to use VPNs

Oh wow I totally missed that. It works great! Genius!

Thank you for that. Suddenly it makes repurposing one of my old cellphones a very simple and viable proposition.

(and I’m posting this from my laptop connected to the hotspot connected to the Calyx VPN 🙂)

get a older cell phone. Put lineage OS on it, or calyxos… share your VPN over hotspot, these are the only two ROMs that I’m aware of that allow you to do that

That’s what I thought too. So I tried it on my CalyxOS phone and… it doesn’t work: the hotspot doesn’t route through the VPN. And from what I read, it’s by design.

I have an old Nokia 4.2 running LineageOS. I might try that one.

end-to-end VPN

Incidentally, do you know if the GL.iNet devices can act as a VPN server too?

At this point, I think China is well known for infiltrating local businesses and forcing them to sell networking gear with trojans.

The US is better known for surveilling people indirectly by exploiting corporate surveillance data collected by big tech monopolies doing their bidding for them and by directly “tapping the line”. I don’t think US officials asking US companies to compromise their products and keep quiet about it would fly in the US. At least not yet. But I wouldn’t put it past them either.

To be honest, of all three, I’d rather purchase something made in Europe, even for a premium.

There are others that aren’t Chinese but nothing anywhere near the price bracket you’ll get from GL.Inet

Can you give me some pointers to non-Chinese equivalents of those GL.iNet routers? I’m quite ready to suck up the extra cost.

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Wholesome, yes. But the magic and the poetry is immediately spoiled by the poster’s username.