Edit: To be clear, I agree with you in general. I just got bugged a bit by those three things 😅

You do not. You are misinformed and propagandized. Your choice of examples revealed that clearly and nothing you say can refute that fact. Read Marx, read Lenin, your understanding of the state is lacking.

For one, anyone educated would understand that Americans are the best example of sheep in the world and that many Europeans are good second examples. The British for example with their high tolerance for a surveillance, laws that criminalize all manners of small trivialities, etc, etc. Educate yourself.

“We have to comply with the law”. This has become Russia or China where the sheep people do whatever an oligarchy dictate.

“What are we a bunch of Asians?”

Also China isn’t run by an “oligarchy” but by a dictatorship of the communist party via a mandate of the masses (they execute CEOs and rich people there, we let them rape kids and commit horrific crimes of greed and fine them less than they made off that crime). Russia is but so is the west and I prefer the term capitalists or if you prefer the original French “bourgeoisie”.

There was a study from one of the big ivy league universities that showed that in the US the people don’t get what they want, popular policy is consistently not passed nor popular will acted on. Princeton I think.

So it’s not what people per se want, it’s what the ruling class (capitalists in the west) wants. And they’ve decided that because the rate of profit falls and their demand for profit grows that they need to put the population under lock and key because they’ve made economic conditions worse and they’re going to get worse yet. They need a police state to control the workers who might want better conditions or gasp to take some or all of their wealth. This is part of that.

This is also because China is rising and they are terrified of people seeing a more equal, just society that can be created through socialism. They are terrified of dissenting voices so they want to remove anonymity so they can terrorize dissidents and opponents into silence. They saw what happened with their attempts at narrative shaping in Gaza, they are deeply alarmed that tik tok won’t be the last thing, a new one could pop up anywhere, right now they play whack a mole, they want to control the whole thing top to bottom.

As to people being sheep. It’s more like they’re beaten down. You defeat this today they come back in a year and then again and again. They have all the money, all the time and are willing to wear people down, use their capitalist owned media to propagandize and sensationalize for this until the people are exhausted and stop fighting it so hard. People work long hours, they take home less money than ever, the government openly abuses people, the police don’t act fairly and persecute black people, there’s a sense of there being no fairness and not enough time. The people are also mis-educated. They’re led to believe there’s this big problem, they don’t understand technology and passively accept their leadership has some amount of good will in how they pass laws and govern to address real problems the bourgeois press has done its job of propagandizing them for. They can’t see the whole picture because of these facts.

DSA fails again. But not a surprise considering they exist to tail the Democrats.

No wonder Trump loved him after meeting with him. They probably both talked up how they fooled the workers with populist rhetoric and how much smarter they were than common people.

1. Don’t sync anything to icloud you wouldn’t want the government being able to get it or generally want to keep private.
2. Go through privacy settings, especially location settings and check what you’re allowing including system services, adjust as you feel comfortable while still meeting your needs.
3. Pay attention to what apps you’re installing. Most profiling data is not sold by say Google directly off your phone but based off ad-networks incorporated in third party apps you install. The app store has a scorecard on all apps showing you how much if at all they profile and spy on you, make use of it, make wise choices, don’t install bad apps.
4. Install a privacy respecting adblocker to help limit tracking while using the web browser
5. Limit permissions for apps. If you must use an app that has location tracking consider only allowing it while you’re using the app, this may have implications for some extended functionality like updating while in the background or via Apple’s little info tiles.
6. Disable siri or limit it, turn off “hey siri” mode in settings.
7. Enable lock-down mode (this is an extreme step and will result in some loss of functionality, Apple details the implications themselves so take a look at their page on it before doing so)
8. Disable radios such as bluetooth and wifi while outside your house to prevent any possibility of their use in tracking you. You can actually make a “Shortcut” using app of the same name from Apple to automate this anytime you leave home and I believe there are existing ones you can find if you search around.

Apple phones are fairly private as long as you don’t use icloud for anything sensitive, apply common sense privacy settings, and pay attention to what apps you install and what permissions you give. Also don’t send them crash or debugging data as that can contain personal info potentially so uncheck that option.

CMR performs better under all workload types.

Shingled Magnetic Recording overlays the tracks on top of each other like roof shingles. This means you can fit more tracks on the same platter which means you can fit more data. Unfortunately this also means whenever writing data you have to rewrite tracks adjacent to the track you’re rewriting which leads to a lot of reshuffling of data which leads to very slow writes when this is taking place (say you edit a file or replace it, delete some and copy over others).

SMR allows more storage for less money but it takes a serious performance hit (right now about the largest CMR disks you can get as an example are about 28TB in size, by contrast you can get 40TB SMR disks so it can significantly amplify storage). It shouldn’t be used for many scenarios. For archival backup it’s fine. For disks that are having data changed on them anywhere near regularly it’s not great.

I want to underline that for USB powered portable 5200RPM disks they’re already slower disks when CMR, so as SMR they get a lot slower in write performance (one I had would drop down to sustained low 20MB/s write speeds when over 60% full). A 7200RPM SMR disk with proper 12V power from a PSU rail or an AC adapter would likely be double that at worst by contrast.

So SMR has its uses, it has its place. It’s just a lot of people who don’t know might use it in places where CMR is more appropriate and would give them a better experience. So by all means if you’re using SMR in back-up disks to your primary ones to create back-up snapshots that are updated infrequently continue to do so, they’re fine for that especially if the tasks are done on machines that can be left running for days while the data is slowly written.

Yeah if anyone is hoping for cheaper RAM from China flooding western markets. It may happen but it’s not happening this decade. Hope you’re ready to wait until 2030s because that’s how long it’s going to be short of the whole AI thing violently imploding.

Maybe, but they’re also aware of that now.

It would cost the CIA couch change to bet 300-400k every weekend that Trump is going to attack just to get the Iranians in a panicked frenzy only for it to not happen. If it prevents even a single US fighter from being shot down by wearing them down with false alarms it would be worth it to place and lose bets like that every weekend for a year on end.

So maybe, but also the US could rig that for nothing, they wouldn’t notice it or need to pass a bill to afford it.

That would mean likely the US nuking Iran in a fit of rage while the TV propaganda plays images of the sinking ship and wails and gnashes its teeth and demands action then applauds or falls solemnly silent when it happens. The media will simply say “well maybe it wasn’t right BUT they did sink our carrier, they shouldn’t have done that and we wouldn’t have done this, you know how we are”. And that will be that.

Russia is as someone else noted tied up in Ukraine and doesn’t want to escalate with the guy (Trump) who can force Ukraine to sign a treaty or agreement with them. Getting into a hot war with the US would be a nightmarish strain on their military and bring them and US very close to nuclear war. Russia will resent losing its Iranian partners to the US but it won’t end the world or Russia in order to attempt to stop it. China is uninterested in getting drawn into a war at all, much less that far from its shores where they don’t have the advantage in logistics compared to the US and would be at an awful disadvantage. China’s navy is not a deep blue water fleet like the US, their navy is structured around coastal defense in the South China Sea and it and their air force lack the range to engage in anything protracted with the US.

This is a problematic framing. While Trump personally may want to distract from the Epstein files, the media itself is doing a great job burying them without him by frothing at the mouth about that news anchor lady’s mother getting kidnapped and doing wall to wall breathless coverage on that while talking zero about the Epstein files.

Also Lindsey Graham and other neo-cons including John Bolton have wanted to regime change Iran since at least the beginning of the George W. Bush administration and constantly inveighed for it. Rubio is very much of that faction and the US interests are broadly served by seizing control of global oil supply. They already took out the head of Venezuela and subordinated control of their oil to the US. They need only take out Iran and having already gotten Europe to not use Russian oil they’ll control oil flows globally in a way that lets them inflict pain on China (even with Russia stepping in to supply China some oil it’s not enough for its needs).

This is part of a grand geo-political strategy of maintaining hegemony that has little to do with Trump. Nancy Pelosi, has applauded applying pain to the Iranian people to try and get them to overthrow their government. It is in the interests of the US and the zionist entity known as “israel” to destroy Iran’s current government even without the oil due to their presence as a regional power not on the US/“israel” side (the oil just makes it more appealing and serves even more objectives).

Without owning these apps, or creating an alternative that people use, it is very hard to change anything, because they can manipulate people easily, and actually people became zombies with this much screen usage.

Some would have said the same about capitalist ownership of TV stations late last century and of newspapers and radio before that.

It’s definitely a challenge but ultimately what will likely drive socialism in the west is the collapse of material conditions. You believe the propaganda because you’re comfortable enough to not care to question it. But when things get bad, when quality of life is in the shitter these methods will not be that effective.

Socialist software development like all aspects of the superstructure and base will be driven by who runs things. If the workers run things then we’ll have socialist software development, if the bourgeoisie do then we won’t have it in measurable quantities. Don’t put the cart before the horse.

As to using some of these companies in the event of a socialist government I feel the abusive algorithms would need to be removed first. Some would be shut down because they’re not necessary or just abusive, those that need replacements would be replaced. Google for instance in its search capacity could be replaced.

Use the IMDB ID for search in that instance.

The ID is the part of the URL that starts with “tt”. Lots of sites support that and for instances like that it’s the best bet. Do include the double t when searching.

Note: this works via API with jackett. It will probably work otherwise but worth trying the searcher plugins in qBittorrent using this method even without jackett.

Some WD red drives (particularly under 16TB) are SMR. There was a whole scandal with this and you can look up a list. WD Red Pro are always CMR and I think the plus typically are too but you can easily search up a list of SMR models.

SMR in those. Also typically 5200RPM vs 7200RPM speed.

From experience I can say you can’t reliably play back high bitrate content from those. Read and write speeds get bad after you’ve used 1/3-1/2 the drive. Oh 8-14MB/s should be fine. But forget playing a 4K encode at 20MB/s with a 2MB/s audio track.

As backup drives they’re acceptable as long as you can accept much longer write times to refresh data.

Bigger drives with power supplies generally are 7200RPM. Many of the lower capacity ones (under 14TB) are still SMR but you should be able to play back higher bitrate content and get a bit better read/write performance.

As to Russia, Azerbaijan is firmly in zionist pockets and helped them stage an attack on Iran last time, Armenia has fallen out of favor with Russia as well thanks to US efforts.

The bigger problem with Russia is they’re at capacity dealing with Ukraine. If they had more weapons to spare they would have been using them to pound Ukrainian forces and advance their own lines and positions for negotiations. They can’t spare much without dipping into stockpiles they’re likely keeping in reserve in case of the emergency of the EU maniacs going to war with them. They can maybe give Iran raw materials but can’t help if the US were to bomb those locations.

Putin is also being played by Trump to not react to these things beyond words because Putin wants Trump to help with a ceasefire, a negotiated exit, otherwise Ukraine can keep building drones and doing terror attacks into Russia for the next 10 years no problem and Russia has no appetite to entirely occupy Ukraine so they must have a negotiated end. That and perhaps he thinks he can get sanctions relief. For all the talk of a turn towards the east being permanent, Russia’s bourgeoisie still keep glancing at the west and you know they hunger for the EU markets and to be a Eur-Asian power.

As to China, the B&R is a single rail link though several countries that are in bed with the US and the US could kill that by leaning on them. Even just slowing up shipments with bureaucratic paperwork would buy the US weeks to work. Nor has China shown a great appetite for crossing the US on matters such as these when it’s going in for the kill. They’ll sell to Iran but they won’t solve the Iranian logistical problems for them if the US leans on countries in-between to stop the shipments and likely won’t put their air force planes in danger to fly in deliveries under a US air campaign.

But the more important thing here is Iran has no resolve or desire to fight the US. Their liberal leadership, their domestic bourgeoisie desperately want reintegration with the west. If the US punches them they’ll look to land a symbolic blow back that might not even be on the US itself and then to go to the negotiating table and take some sort of deal. After China refuses to directly intervene on their behalf they’ll probably think it acceptable to agree to screw them at the US behest if the US offers even minor sanctions relief.

They have no appetite for a long confrontation with the US and no ability without suffering the crushing the living conditions of their people. Decapitate and remove some of the religious hardliners and more liberal types who favor reintegration with the west could very well take their places and choose an off-ramp as they have the past few confrontations with the US and “israel”. They’ve swallowed poison pills before in their own words. But as religious conservatives and liberals there is nothing they can do to fix their country’s economy and the increasing anger and misery of their people under western sanctions. So they either take a deal now and maybe the power structures and people in place survive and thrive under a loosening of the noose or they stand proud and collapse under sanctions in 5 years. Democrats have signaled they’re behind it, Nancy Pelosi called for pain for the Iranian people so they know a Dem president that follows Trump won’t save them. So why not make a deal?

Well there is the scenario where they decapitate the government and sue for peace with whoever replaces it and that person gives it to them. A Venezuela type scenario where they agree to decouple from China, give US a veto of where Iranian oil is shipped and give US some tribute money and US in turn removes sanctions, doesn’t bomb them any more and so on. Of course Iran is significantly more a power than Venezuela so it seems less likely this happens but Iran also doesn’t really win from a prolonged fight with the US so it still seems a strong possibility. Trump would have to give them economic relief in the form of removing some sanctions but I think they might go for it unfortunately.

There are various bluetooth remotes that can be paired with computers, as well as air mice with remote-like features. There are also IR receiver USB dongles you can buy which allow you to use an IR remote with them with some 3rd party software installation and configuring. (FLIRC for one makes one of those).

If most of your content is self-provided (through whatever means) then a mini-PC may offer a decent experience (subject to certain limitations even there compared to hosting on one PC and streaming to a dedicated streaming device of decent quality which together cost significantly more).

Most commercial streaming services due to DRM will not work with a min-PC, at least not above 720p resolution and only through a browser interface which is not the greatest to try and navigate with a remote control. So if a significant amount of content is watched via streaming services I could not recommend a mini-PC by itself as a solution.

IMO with the info you’ve given I say get a decent streaming box. Some you can replace the Android default launcher on to remove ads or otherwise root (though beware these methods have been patched more and more so someone saying they did so successfully in 2024 does not mean you’ll succeed with the 2025/26 model). There’s also options like Apple TV, not $60 (twice that) but it comes with no ads by default and is pretty overpowered with a smooth experience if you already have an iPhone (you can use the phone as a remote). If you don’t have an iPhone or other apple devices it’s a toss up, ATV 4K is still a very nice device but you might want to go with the Android side of things.

You have to give them your phone number to sign up.

That phone number is tied to a real person by government records. Sure if you’re in say Russia it makes it a lot harder for the FBI to identify you because Russian phone companies won’t necessarily respect a US legal request. But if you’re anywhere within the west (US, Canada, EU, Australia, NZ) they can ID you unless you go to the trouble of getting an anonymous phone number that works with the SMS verification services they use and maintaining that number for when they lock your account and demand to verify you again all while accessing it over a VPN. That plus no encryption by default makes it not very secure at all.

But fundamentally you could do the same thing securely with any service, you could do that with Facebook, with Twitter, and the list goes on if you can get good reliable anonymous phone numbers. Telegram isn’t special in that way.

@davel@lemmy.ml

I was willing to give this user I’m replying to a crumb of benefit of the doubt but given they’re using Nazi dog whistles and don’t seem repentant about spreading Nazi conspiracy theories after being made aware of it (see their reply to me and their other posts) and instead seem to double down. I think action may be warranted under global rule 1 given it’s unacceptable to be a Nazi or talking like one here.

Given they were also banned from the CTH sub on hexbear for the same behavior I think it’s clear they’re beyond saving in their desire to spread Nazism.

All that would happen absolute worst case scenario if MS breaks this is your users would get a whining complaint about not being activated. Get a small “Activate Windows” logo stuck in the lower right hand of their screen and would lose the ability to change wallpapers, customize windows colors, etc.

To be clear it wouldn’t break the install and it would leave it in a state in which you could use an updated version of MAS (reminder MAS supports multiple activation options) to fix it remotely.