This has placed the prime minister in a political vise. If he commits to postwar Palestinian rule in Gaza and begins acting seriously to establish it, he loses the far right. But if he commits to resettling Gaza, he loses the Israeli majority and the international community. And so, as he has often done in the past, Netanyahu has chosen not to choose

Oh, he’s chosen.

But also see:

https://piped.video/watch?v=EAogtqyN22M

My guess is that it’s related to the Weber-Fechner laws of perception. This is the same principle that explains why turning a second light on doesn’t make a room seem twice as bright. Fechner’s formulation is “the intensity of our sensation increases as the logarithm of an increase in energy rather than as rapidly as the increase.”

Reminder: Hamas does not have a presence in the West Bank. Mass killings of Palestinians have never been about containing or defeating Hamas. The killing, destruction of property/seizure of land, and creation of fear are the point.

Is there a reason this requirement doesn’t apply to iMessage as well?

Obviously taken to an extreme it’s bad, but I think it’s fine to have a function that can do one thing two or more different ways and ignore a certain parameter if one of the ways doesn’t need it. I’ve done some programming against the Win32 API and this is what jumped to mind for me, and I think it’s the typical case here. If I were designing from scratch I might split it into n functions that do it one way, but it’s such a small difference I wouldn’t fret over it. And of course making a change to the Windows API is an undertaking, probably not worth it in most cases.

They are owned by governments in the sense that they exist at the pleasure of the governments they depend wholly upon. Corporations are legal entities; who administers the law? To use a tech analogy, I’m pointing out that though a file has an “owner”, which is a user account, the true owner is the operating system itself.

I have to admit I’m surprised this is as controversial a take as it is.

All corporations are owned and funded by governments. A corporation must be incorporated somewhere by some government. These corporations benefit from services, grants, and special benefits (e.g. limited liability) provided by that government.

However, I don’t think governments are using this to do mass surveillance on people with VPNs, if only for the reason that there’s not much to be gained by such an action. Most privacy invasion is of the kind people freely allow. Using a VPN doesn’t make logging into Google meaningfully more private. The only groups I can think of that would really want to be able to spy on VPN users would be the MPAA, RIAA, etc, and I don’t think they have the kind of sway to get governments to do that.

But yeah, if you are doing something a three letter government agency will target you over, a VPN ain’t going to cut it.

I agree that dropping dumb bombs on populated areas is wrong

Comparing Netanyahu to Assad is very apt, I agree

Ok, but we all should admit: .net is a terrible name.

IMO the best way to ensure that traffic always goes through a VPN is to use network namespaces. The wireguard website has an article describing the process. In a nutshell, you create a dedicated namespace to put the physical interface in, create the wireguard interface in that namespace, then move the wireguard interface to the root (“normal”) namespace. That way the only way to get traffic out without the VPN is to run a program in that dedicated namespace.

Ah yes, threats of abuse, famous for always having the outcome they intend

[edit: especially when dealing with children who are still developing their ability to speak and comprehend speech]

Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software

I had really hoped that by time we would finally have got beyond good & evil.

Basically do what Europe does. Government regulators actively monitor companies and stop them from misbehaving, rather than waiting for them to misbehave and then sue them. If they don’t follow regulations they get disbanded. It’s not perfect but it’s better than what we have here.

Are people more greedy, more stupid, and more religious than they used to be? Why?

The US has this bizarre setup where we “regulate” companies through the courts rather than directly through government agencies (this is not always the case, but it often is). The problem is that even when this “works”, i.e., the court punishes the company, they get a fine. So it becomes a financial decision: if we can get away with this, does that outweigh the risk that we might not? Sometimes it ends up profiting the company regardless.

Related to this is that prosecutors have total discretion in the realm of plea deals. If you do a crime here, it becomes a negotiation with the prosecutor. What can you offer them to get off the hook? Sometimes it makes sense to do a crime, because the advantages you gain become leverage to negotiate your way out of punishment.

The US is often used as a synecdoche for the five eyes, the “western world”, nato, etc. Stop being so obtuse.

Because asking whether a chinese phone is spying on you is a loaded question.