Hey, at least we got the Antiviral Wipe during the pandemic!

I actually really miss his police procedural sendup series A Touch of Cloth starring John Hannah.

Despite being the stuff of nightmares, Santa continues to be the world’s most popular home intruder.

Charlie Brooker and Diane Morgan fucking kill me whenever they work together. His writing and her delivery as Cunk just kill me.

Yes, folks, all the Cunk specials are written by Black Mirror head writer and creator, Charlie Brooker.

Looking forward to Cunk’s Quest for Meaning (which looks like it got renamed Cunk on Life in the last 10 months), looks like it’s hitting BBC’s iPlayer on December 31st and Netflix on January 2nd. Ringing in the new year with Cunk sounds grand to me.

Edward Snowden is a prime example of how to handle it.

Only communicated via encrypted channels.

When revealing himself and his leak, he had already left his home country. He was trying to make it to South America when the US canceled his passport. US went so far as to bring down a sovereign nations Presidential plane to search it for Snowden.

I’m sure he has still had to worry about his personal safety after getting stuck in a country he wasn’t planning on getting stuck in.

But the reality is you have to meticulously plan and basically abandon your entire life and move somewhere they cannot touch you. When it comes to US companies, you generally will have to do like Snowden and avoid US-allied nations.

See also: Steven Donziger and Chevron

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger

Donziger was placed under house arrest in August 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of criminal contempt of court, which arose during his appeal against Kaplan’s RICO decision, when he refused to turn over electronic devices he owned to Chevron’s forensics experts. In July 2021, US District Judge Loretta Preska found him guilty, and Donziger was sentenced to 6 months in jail in October 2021. While Donziger was under house arrest in 2020, twenty-nine Nobel laureates described the actions taken by Chevron against him as “judicial harassment.” Human rights campaigners called Chevron’s actions an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP). In April 2021, six members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded that the Department of Justice review Donziger’s case. In September 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that the pre-trial detention imposed on Donziger was illegal and called for his release. Having spent 45 days in prison and a combined total of 993 days under house arrest, Donziger was released on April 25, 2022.

US corporations can and will bring the weight of the US “justice” system on whistleblowers. The US is not unique in this regard. Whatever giant company you’re whistleblowing against, you better GTFO of the country they are based in.

I always somehow miss when it stops working and by the time I go to YouTube again it’s already working again.

Blessings to Gorhill

The internet is fragmenting and healing. It was never supposed to be so centralized.

It’s like the AI was trained on Neil Hamburger. I can hear it in his voice.

Batman to Alfred every day:

Looks like there’s a handful, with the most active being on lemmy.world

https://lemmy.world/c/amitheasshole

This is the most “active” one and its pretty dead.

FBI is actually promoting Signal and WhatsApp as well. Which should make people raise eyebrows and question if they don’t already have access to both of those.

often relying on getting a warrant post hoc or lying to establish probable cause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Here’s a whole ass Wikipedia article on the very subject, because it’s been so widespread for so long it has a fucking name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemisphere_Project

Here’s a Wikipedia article on the mass surveillance by the DEA, which is where the data used for parallel construction was sourced.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805/

Here’s a good example from the first Wikipedia article about how the Feds pass signals intelligence to local law enforcement so they can start cases and claim they found the initial evidence some other way than illegal mass surveillance.

For more history about attempts to install backdoors, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

The lady Batman doth protest too much, methinks.

The Neverhood is deeply underrated. It got a spiritual sequel a few years back.

The fact that existing backdoors have been completely taken over by Salt Typhoon hackers means fuck all to them, I guess.

Elsewhere the FBI suggests using encrypted texts because of Salt Typhoon. Talking out of both sides of their mouth.

Shows where the real priorities lie. Our governments view their own citizens as the enemy.

You got the touch! You got the power! Yeah!

Fucking magnets? How do they work?

Yeah, COVID was an excuse for a lot of companies to kill their customer service departments and make their automated systems even worse.

I hate to say it but god damn if this is what you have to get a union to fight for in tech jobs, tech jobs need unions more than manual labor jobs, actually.

I mean, no shit? Like do you think this is a gotcha?

But according to Democrats, the economy was doing great… and it is… for the already wealthy. For everyone else it’s gotten kinda dicey.

I think voters staying home probably had more to do with the party talking down to them about their own lived experience with the economy. People are hurting and sick of being told by the “good” party that they have to wait longer for their lives and problems to be taken seriously.

It’s not a healthy response to it, but lots of response to mental abuse aren’t healthy, whaddayaknow. Because that’s what gaslighting people about the economy is, mental abuse.

I know we make fun of Trump voters for giving a shit about the cost of eggs, but when it comes down to it, a lot of us are struggling in near abject poverty here and are busting our asses to make ends meet. That includes a lot of smart people who see that the solutions aren’t in Donald Trump’s unhinged rhetoric. However, they also see that the Democrats aren’t offering solutions as much as bandaids and aren’t going all out for us but starting from positions of compromise like writing a damn immigration bill giving the Republicans everything they’ve ever asked for in regards to the border. And then this useless shit about bald eagles. Are we really surprised that shit’s not inspiring people to vote for them?