The Buzz bomber will never be forgotten!

Eat shit, microsoft

I lived in a tech echo chamber until I was in my 30s. This is because my dad is a baby boomer computer engineer who was working with computers since the 70s and we always had a computer at home (no consoles, just computers). First was a c64, we even briefly had a c128 (that didn’t work) and then we got a 386 followed by pentium machines and we first hooked up to the internet in the 90s… and before the internet we went on dial up BBSes run by ultra nerds.

My dad still keeps up with tech and is probably better with computers than many recent CS graduates. It wasn’t until I worked in tech support that I realized… Holy shit! There are people who have no idea their computers have directories! As in, if the shortcut isn’t on their desktop, then their program might as well not exist.

Also one thing I learned that if you tell someone to go to a site and you spell the URL to them, then 99.9% of the time they will Google it, because they don’t know what an address bar is.

I used to think those ‘how to use a computer’ courses in college were a giant waste of time (and an easy A for people like us) but I realize that these people could absolutely benefit from something like that.

And that is when I was working with people who had laptops mostly. When I worked in mobile tech support… fuck me! Do you realize that for a sizable chunk of the population the only computer they have is their smart phone? Those people are far, far worse. When I worked in mobility we were not allowed to hang up on clients for any reason (it was grounds for immediate termination) but at least a few times a week I had to deal with a client who did not know how to hang up their phone! No joke. They were accustomed to the other person hanging up and they didn’t know how to do it!

This is doubly frustrating when those people are using flip phones rhat have a clear hang up button on them.

So yeah, acknowledging we are in a bubble is a good thing. But it isn’t a bad thing to hang out with fellow tech nerds either.

People keep forgetting that.

Large cash payments may be needed in places and during times where non-cash are difficult or impossible. I have family who live in countries where having bank transfers would be cumbersome and are riddled with corruption, so I bring them cash. I once did get 9,500$ in cash (below the 10K limit) and they were paying for repairs for their home and the workers could only accept cash. Having a digital platform would have made all this impossible.

Ow and btw Mullvad can be both by sending them an envelope with cash

I am afraid I don’t understand. You can buy credit cards by mailing cash to Mullvad?

Using your bankcard with chip to pay is already obfuscated in most situations on the receiving end since a lot of cash registers will group the transactions together and way out once.

I actually rarely pay for things with my bank card. I usually buy with credit card and that will always leave a trace. But it is good to know that.

The whole no cash purchase over 3K or 10K is honestly crap. They did that in Quebec last year and are going to do that throughout Canada. I never paid for anything with that much cash, but I still find it shit.

I have been saying this for more than a decade. Shit like this is why privacy laws and stuff regarding warrants and other stuff need to be expanded to private entities as much, if not more so, than government agencies. In the past the idea of a company having that much access to people’s information was unthinkable, and in almost everyone’s mind it was governments we needed to be worried about.

But that hasn’t been true since the 90s at least with credit cards being used for most stuff and internet purchases being the norm for almost everything.

Governments in the past needed something to ask for permission to look into you… but companies never did, and since the only thing governments need to do is either buy it or ask nicely it makes many protections kinda moot. The fact that many countries want a strict surveillance state over everyone means even the classic protections we had for a brief while are disappearing, too.

If there ever is a 2nd enlightenment with protections for people it needs to make the stuff written in the 18th and 19th century look like children’s toys in comparison.

If you say ‘but what about terrorism and bad people?’ Look around you. They still exist and still rarely get caught unless they fuck up badly. Most of the time it still due to informants and people talking to authorities. In the US the murder rate resolution is only 50% (and that is just arrested and charged, not convicted) and this is because there is a massive distrust of the police. In other countries people are more likely to assist the police and/or they take their jobs far more seriously in terms of forensics… and on top of that they usually have a far lower murder rate which allows more time and resources to be funneled into solving major crimes.

Better to let 100 guilty men go than 1 innocent person convicted is the usual motto, but they don’t believe that in practice. In reality they are very much kill them all and let God sort out his own. And we can’t keep allowing that shit to happen.

I have been exploring ways to pay for things anonymously… in Canada and the US they do have prepaid credit cards (rhat are sadly visa or Mastercard based) that can be paid for in cash and activated without the need for a name or anything. Meaning unless you activated it on your phone or clearnet without a VPN it will be difficult to link it to you directly. Doubly so if you wait long enough for the store’s surveillance footage to be cycled through (few places keep security camera footage in perpetuity, many delete stuff from a few months back or a year or so back unless something suspicious happened, meaning the footage of you buying the thing will be gone.)

So that’s one trick to be able to pay for something with a credit card without it being immediately obvious who you are. Much like paying in cash, another thing i am getting back into.

I actively avoid those. I used to go on the chan forums but after seeing people just posting random attachments and someone saying ‘get that kiddie shit out of here’ before it stayed up for a while I turned tail and ran from those and never looked back.

I feel like a dipshit for not participating.

I am aware of many, I am just saying looking at the dark web is not a good idea because… well… OK we’re all adults here. That’s where all the CP is and I have no interest in seeing that shit.

Unfortunately there is truth in what you are saying.

You give them too much credit. They don’t care about porn. They want everything on you at all times.

Parental controls for internet use have been around since the 90s. There are even some vintage porn sites that have been running since then that have ads for them. I know this. I saw them back in 1999 and 2000… when I was an underage guy looking at porn online.

I really, really dont want to search for porn on the dark net…

The death grip that they have over everything is more than anything in history.

I assume GDF means Genocide Defense Force, but what do you mean by IOZ?

I am a Dell guy through and through. I flashed linux mint on a cheap ass USB I had lying around. I will start with my laptop this weekend.

I gave been wanting to go on linux mint for almost a year. Its time I fucking did it.

Edit: I have been doing a lot for privacy, but it just isn’t enough. For example I wanted to use venice.ai… but I didn’t just use a tutamail email, I even used a prepaid credit card. I live in canada where you don’t need to attach your name to a prepaid card, meaning it is as anonymous as possible if you want to buy something with a card (and yes, I paid for it in cash and it was activated by the store).

He’s the guy I will miss.