I work in security, and I’ve seen a lot more EDR killers lately. Every incident I’ve seen regarding ransomware or potential ransomware has used EDR killers while compromising DCs, backup servers, file servers, and the odd workstation used for persistence.

No. Of course not. I put it in quotes since I was being sarcastic.

but Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, can’t even get the mental health services he obviously needs

Lmfao

I’d rather get healthcare at all. I’ve been too poor to afford any medical care at points in my life, I’d settle for even some low quality care as opposed to none at all and hoping that this new weird pain either is insignificant and goes away without issue, or it gently takes me out in the night.

I’m excited to see where pirate medicine goes. I’ve met a trans woman who told me that her DIY HRT was life changing in the best possible way, and I can only dream of what would happen if people started making their own Insulin or T or whatever

To me, the only reason why you would want to mandate voting is if you want to increase civic participation (or, more cynically, you are a political party who has done some research and you have realized that such a law benefits you more than the opponent). I think a law like this would not make people engage, but make it look like they are engaged. Because of this, I think it is pointless, and if it is punitive, then it fails to accomplish what it sets out to do and just punishes people for no reason.

I don’t like superficial policy. I want policy to actually attempt to fix problems rather than try and mask them. This doesn’t fix issues like people being unable to vote due to work, or people feeling abandoned by politicians and not wanting to give them a modicum of support, or people just feeling crushed by the system itself and seeing no point in it all. This doesn’t even attempt to look at root causes.

This doesn’t address the inability for many people to run for office, be it because they can’t afford the money needed to get started, or because they can’t afford to live off the politician paycheck for one reason or another, much less afford to take time off work to campaign.

I also think that not voting is fundamentally a vote. Sometimes the two choices are just so abhorrent that you can’t bring yourself to vote, and is that not a valid political stance? Is it not an intentional political choice? Isn’t that what voting is in the first place?

Sure, you could have a system that lets you vote “nobody”, but if that’s allowed, then why are you mandating voting anyways? This subverts the point of that law, and it means the effective use of the law is to punish people who vote for no one in the wrong way. What is the benefit of a blank ballot or a “nobody” ballot over no ballot?

I fucking love pirate medicine. Fuck the US healthcare system, what good is having the “best healthcare in the world” if you can’t even afford mediocre healthcare?

I love my car for the fact it doesn’t do anything crazy. Buttons and switches for everything, bluetooth for music, and a minimalist infotainment system that may as well only be there for the phone pairing process.

I might be in the minority, but I hate Apple CarPlay/Android Auto. I don’t want anything fancy, just music. I don’t want all the bells and whistles of my phone, just music.

I’m not familiar with taoism, and I do not understand the point you are trying to make. I’ve read the chapter on this site.

I think you are talking about this paragraph:

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness. When goodness is lost, there is kindness. When kindness is lost, there is justice. When justice is lost, there is ritual. Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.

I don’t get what you are trying to say. Are you saying that Li is Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(neo-Confucianism)), or in the quote I have, ritual? Are you saying I’m an advocate for Justice in the sense of this quote? I think you are either misunderstanding me (I know I am not understanding what you are saying since it is unclear), or ascribing a set of values to anarchism that doesn’t line up with what I’m arguing in order to dismiss my argument.

To be fully clear, I’m going to elaborate on what I’m saying. I’m giving a simple cause and effect statement here, not some moral justification. When there is a liberatory movement that threatens the power structure that enforces hierarchy that oppresses people, those in power will use their position to make the movement, threatening tactics/techniques of, or other things done by the people of the movement illegal, necessitating breaking the law to continue. Working within the shifting bounds of law is insufficient.

Yes, but since most people for whatever reason believe that you can fight the state only by the rules the state makes, you won’t be able to do anything about it.

I agree. As an anarchist, I do not think following whatever rules the state makes will ever be sufficient for achieving any liberatory goals.

They are doing this pretty intentionally. Tomorrow is always different from today. People have been complacent, while some other people perceptive of the future in a bad way have made plans for taking unprecedented power over societies.

This is why I advocate for decentralizing power (and the dissolution of all hierarchies and hierarchic power structures). The last thing I want is a despot using the current mechanisms of power and centralize everything, and have such an absurd amount of power.

You are saying this [cut quote about my advocacy of decentralization] as part of a discussion, but they are not discussing this with us. Public opinion won’t stop them. Only force will.

I agree. Every single movement that has gone against a component of the government required either violence, or backed, credible threats of it. The government will never reduce its power to the benefit of the people, even if that policy is popular.

You are absolutely correct, I’m just worried about one less barrier.

FOIA is great and all, and so are public records laws and disclosure laws.

But the state is gonna state, and when push comes to shove, social media will be another tool to manufacture consent, break up movements, and preserve itself over the interest of the governed.

I’m not concerned about the ability to FOIA shit about Twitter or Facebook’s algorithm, as much as I’d like to know about how it targets the content slop to its users. I’m concerned about how it will consolidate power into fewer hands, and how state sponsored social media will be abused. And I don’t think FOIA would ever reveal that if it happened.

Fuck nationalization of social media. Honestly, this is one of the worst ideas I’ve heard.

The idea that giving the government a monopoly on the biggest data hoarders is somehow better than having the capitalists own it is mind-boggling.

The government doesn’t need a warrant to search through its own data.

The last thing we need is to give the state more power over our lives, more insight into our lives, and more control over the narratives we learn.

Every time humans have centralized more power into fewer and fewer hands, nothing good comes from it. We need more decentralized forms of media, not more centralized forms.

Absolutely.

I don’t have a CS degree, I have a Cybersecurity and Forensics one. But, I love programming, and between the overlap of the two degrees and and my advanced designation I ended up taking about 3/4ths of the classes needed to get a CS degree.

Diversifying helped so much with me becoming a well rounded developer. My assembly programming class, while optional for CS, was mandatory for me, made me a significantly better dev. That assembly knowledge got me to become a skilled debugger, which made my C++ classes 10x easier, and it helped me understand memory at a lower level, making the memory problems easier to diagnose and fix.

I convinced a CS friend to take one of my cyber classes, Reverse Engineering, and he found te components of the class where we analyzed a vulnerable program to find and exploit the vuln, or the bit where we tried and determined the bug based on malware that exploited it is insightful to learning to program securely.

Learning about the infrastructure used in enterprise during a Windows admin or Linux admin class will make it easier to write code for those systems.

From the cybersecurity perspective, many of my CS classes carry me hard. Knowing how programs are written, how APIs are developed, and how to design complex software lets me make more educated recommendations based on what little information I’m given by the limited logs I am given to investigate. Writing code that interfaces with linux primitives makes it easier to conceptualize what’s going on when I am debugging a broken linux system.

I have tons of experience with enterprise linux, so I tend to use Rocky linux. It’s similar to my Fedora daily driver, which is nice, and very close to the RHEL and Centos systems I used to own.

You are slightly mistaken with your assumption that debian is insecure because of the old packages. Old packages are fine, and not inherently insecure because of its age. I only become concerned about the security implications of a package if it is dual use/LOLBin, known to be vulnerable, or has been out of support for some time. The older packages Debian uses, at least things related to infrastructure and hosting, are the patched LTS release of a project.

My big concerns for picking a distro for hosting services would be reliability, level of support, and familiarity.

A more reliable distro is less likely to crash or break itself. Enterprise linux and Debian come to mind with this regard.

A distro that is well supported will mean quick access to security patches, updates, and more stable updates. It will have good, accurate documentation, and hopefully some good guides. Enterprise linux, Debian and Ubuntu have excellent support. Enterprise linux distros have incredible documentation, and often are similar enough that documentation for a different branch will work fine. Heck, I usually use rhel docs when troubleshooting my fedora install since it is close enough to get me to a point where the application docs will guide me through.

Familiarity is self explanatory. But it is important because you are more likely to accidentally compromise security in an unfamiliar environment, and it’s the driving force behind me sticking with enterprise linux over Nixos or a hardened OpenBSD.

As a fair word of warning, enterprise linux will be pretty different compared to any desktop distro, even fedora. It takes quite a bit of learning, to get comfortable (especially with SELinux), but once you do, things will go smoothly. you can also use a pirated rhel certification guide to learn enterprise linux

If anything, you can simply mess around in a local VM and try installing the tools and services needed before taking it to the cloud.

I love mutual aid. I’ve started organizations, and participated in others, including orgs that have faced extreme repression in the past, and/or have other chapters currently experiencing repression.

But one of the orgs, which has faced significant repression in the past (before my time), is still going strong. Not at the level it would have been if there had been no repression, but still strong.

However, these mutual aid organizations do accomplish what they set out to do, whether it is feeding their communities, keeping them warm or cool, providing hygenic supplies, harm reduction, and so on. Sure, if they had more resources, they’d accomplish more, but it’s surprising what can be done with what can be taken solely from donation, or surplus produce that will go bad if not used immediately.

I think saying “look what happened last time” in the sense that you should not do something because reactionaries reacted in a specific way is stupid, since you can learn from what went wrong, and build more resilient movements.

Mutual aid probably won’t overthrow capitalism (alone), but it is critical for providing the ability to build a better world under capitalism, and after it. And the solidarity fostered by participating in these movements? Priceless.

A few times, only when dealing with student loan servicers, banks, and my credit card company

Marriage is a social construct not built upon love or companionship. It is just a social relation that is related to the two, with religious and legal backing to fortify it.

If you see marriage as a means to love and companionship, you are not gonna have a loving relationship. Love and companionship are completely viable (and I’d argue stronger) outside the strange little box that society tries to place it in

Fuck marriage.

I don’t think there is anything that a person of any gender can’t provide in a relationship. I do see that society shuns certain people from performing certain roles, but anyone can do any one of them.

If he is only ranting politics, he might not have anyone to talk politics with. Maybe he is the lone conservative, lapping up every scrap of talking points from Fox (or maybe Newsmax), but can’t spew them out around family who sees him as being crazy for watching Fox. If you aren’t pushing back, he probably sees you as safe, and if he is finding it hard for him to deal with political stressors, that’s probably why he is ranting and getting so emotional.

This is why I did a “walkthrough test” when I had to write documentation on this sort of thing. I’m a terrible technical writer, so this shit is necessary for me.

I grabbed my friend who knows enough about computers to attempt this, but not enough about infrastructure to automatically know what I meant when I was too vague.

Took two revisions, but the final document was way easier to follow at the end

Well, microsoft chooses bing for you sometimes

I met a southerner who speaks in a more northern accent, but sometimes slips into their original southern accent on certain words or when yelling, which happens in the busy kitchen I was working with them in.

It’s pretty funny to have someone behind you shouting about their hot trays of potatoes or about them carrying knives or whatever.

Congrats!