darkcalling

@ darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml

Posts

62
Comments

173
Joined

6 yr. ago

1y ago

Locked

WTF is happening on Hexbear?
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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 1y ago
The mass line has relevance especially in a situation like this.

1y ago

Could I get an engineering degree in the US and use it in China?

I don’t know enough to say. Do what you’re passionate about and find a niche that works for your wants to emigrate.

Reddit is not great but /r/sino actually has a lot of Chinese people and expats who may be able to answer questions that are this major better than us.

Good luck.

1y ago

Why did MLGJoe get banned?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 1y ago

Oh wow they were a prolific poster. Can't say I liked all they posted but this is going to be felt in terms of content. Hopefully other people step up to increase our posting. News communities would be a great start. I do what I can personally.

2y ago

Could I get an engineering degree in the US and use it in China?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

There is also the possibility of working in an international company that might transfer you there, especially if you have language skills already.

There is risk with this move though in the years that follow.

Why? The US is seeking a decoupling and sanctions war on China that will likely mirror their moves against Russia which could easily prompt many western companies to pull out of China or reduce presence dramatically at which point OP you'd be scrambling against all your co-workers including native Chinese to get a job to be able to stay in China.

Of course China might mirror Russia's moves to absorb some of these companies in counter-sanctions but there's no guarantee that they'll go out of their way to protect and keep western workers who after all are largely white/western chauvinists who aren't particularly pro-China in most cases. Having permanent residency by this point means you'd be more likely be kept on, lacking it means it's easier for them to dismiss you and focus on their own people and problems.

Think that US corporate interests will stop such a plan? Maybe. Maybe not. The biggest companies in the US were trying to do business and expand into the USSR and had money to gain but the US government blocked them and threatened them. It denied them the right to make profit from an enemy to hurt that enemy. Just as it has done successfully with Russia. They'll put up so many measures that inflict compliance requirements and costs and roadblocks and just plain distractions and tariffs that most western companies will choose to voluntarily exit or draw-down presence greatly I believe.

I believe this will be over an instigated, US-led Taiwan declaration of independence that they will prompt their obedient puppets there in the DPP to make which will lead to either a mainland invasion or severe coercive measures that are adequate for the US to portray China as a bad guy threatening a good guy democracy and rally the "garden' of Europe on the side of liberalism with them to do to China what they now do to Russia. As we've seen with Russia it won't be complete or sudden but gradual turning of screws which prompts companies for ideological and financial reasons to leave. One must also remember things like Epstein, the point of which is to have compromising material on business leaders that government can leverage in instances like this to force them to act in the way they desire. And of course open government blackmail that companies can either do business with the US or China which prompts them to leave to save their larger western government contracts.

It's possible this won't actually happen but there are a lot of planners and people trying to make it happen and making the moves setting the stage for it happening so if that's your way to China I'd say don't slack on getting permanent residency as soon as possible.

2y ago

Could I get an engineering degree in the US and use it in China?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

Cuba is under embargo. They're not able to just welcome and take tons of random people who want to live there so I really, really would not count on that happening. They're a country that has been struggling in the face of US imperialism and embargo for half a century, they've recently had wide-spread power outages again, moving there will not help their situation.

China on the other hand is not in the same boat. Learning Chinese is indeed a bare minimum I'd think. As to citizenship, it's near impossible to get for the average person. The best you can realistically hope for is permanent residency status which gives you most of the rights of a citizen without any political rights and certain others. You can get that after living there for a certain amount of time and applying for it or by marrying a national.

Of the two China is the more realistic plan but understand that China has tons and tons of engineering graduates, it's a very popular discipline so competition will be very steep and getting a job there on that basis could be tough. I'd recommend having some other angle, a very specialized discipline, perhaps something the west is slightly ahead of China on or something that's just come into vogue and will have increasing demand but hasn't hit it quite yet.

And as others mentioned your pay will be much lower than in the US (lower cost of living makes up for it), if you have student loans you need to consider you may never be able to pay them off even with decades of work in China, though as others mentioned if you can move to China, get permanent residence status, renounce your US citizenship and/or simply never return to the US it may not matter if you never pay them off but realize if something goes wrong, if your plans don't work out and you end up back in the US things could be very rough for you if you have loans you haven't paid anything into and they go after you.

2y ago

Do you think the WebP "BlastPass" vulnerability was intentional?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say WebP was created purely so zionist and US intelligence could have an exploit to use against people. It was created because Google serves a lot of images and had an inherent interest in lowering the costs of doing so via compression.

The more reasonable explanation is this was discovered and not patched because it was being used by "friendly" intelligence, not patched until independent actors discovered it at which point the jig was up. Same thing with how Russia accused the US of exploiting an Apple iPhone vulnerability to hack Kaspersky employees, it's not likely they had Apple build it so much as they forced them not to patch it after they built it or asked them to and they agreed.

Hardware backdoors in intel processors? Sure, I'll buy that, it makes sense and the tools to poke about at it are very expensive and specialized. Designing and deploying and bullying the web onto a new image standard just so you can exploit one vulnerability in it that could be discovered and patched at any time? Ehh.

Why else would Google so relentlessly push an image format of all things unless there was some covert benefit to themselves?

Reduced bandwidth and control of the standard. Meaning they themselves don't have to pay licensing royalties to someone else which is also a consideration and benefit. See for example Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish philosophy, tech companies have reasons to want to control the software and standards that are most commonly used for reasons like that.

2y ago

L fucking MAO. How does it feel?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

Well given it's the reigning hegemon I'd say they are and need to be. That's the unfortunate fact. If the US wants other countries less interested in it maybe they could try not trying to dominate the world and do constant regime change, destabilization, sanctions, etc and let other countries develop in peace but they can't and there are apparent differences in who the main enemy is and how to approach that between the parties.

I doubt the Chinese or Russians are interfering but the Iranians are genuinely still furious at Trump for the killing of Soleimani and I actually do believe they'd probably like to kill him if it wouldn't cause a war and certainly to prevent his return as they think that Biden/Democrats who gave them the nuclear agreement are more reasonable and that they could still reintegrate with the west.

BUT I doubt their "interference" admits to anything. It's nothing, a couple of small, easily detected bot operations, maybe a hack of the campaign, a drop in the pond compared to the average US NGO "civil society fostering" in a given former soviet state and their level of societal interference even in hardened countries like China that take serious steps to curtail it.

2y ago

Good antivirus recommendation?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

I would recommend trying to get service from one of those providers on sale then in the future if you think it's wise to hide your communist activities. Only you can decide how dangerous records of access to given websites are for you now and in the near future given the legal and political situation in your country.

Access to lemmygrad is encrypted by HTTPS so they shouldn't be able to see what your username is or what you're posting but they would see you accessing it. VPN providers may have sales for whatever holidays are regional to your area otherwise many have sales around Black Friday for the US and/or Christmas/New Years.

I don't think you necessarily need an AV, that said Kaspersky does have a VPN built into their premium tier offering which I believe admits in its privacy policy that it scrapes your activities to sell to advertisers. I also wouldn't trust them not to hand over your data to the Polish authorities on request as they are very much cop-lovers there. They make a good AV product, consistently ranked top 1-3 but they're not comrades.

BUT for most people I would just recommend free options like Windows defender, a second opinion scanner for eye-patch stuff like I recommended (or uploading it to virustotal), and back-ups. Have an external hard drive or flash drive that you don't leave connected to your computer that you backup everything important to every 3-6 months so on the off-chance something happens you're covered and this unlike an AV covers your hard drive failing.

2y ago

Good antivirus recommendation?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

They just said they're a communist in Poland. That's a pretty decent reason.

And a VPN will indeed mitigate that risk. They're not trying to set off a nuke in NYC after announcing their intent a week ago, they don't need to immediately worry about VPN providers being honeypots for NSA/CIA/eyes agreements as Poland is frankly not a central member of NATO, it's an attack dog, it's fodder on the eastern flank, it's not white enough to get the good stuff.

VPNs have been proven to be private in court in the past. ISPs log and will hand over all your data and info to authorities and that's not even a secret, no operation will be blown by their ISP handing over years of records on them on request. That's a fact. VPNs will not necessarily do that and most of them make it a business model not to have that data available to hand over and were they to be proven to be doing that would instantly collapse as a business and their utility as a honeypot for intelligence would also vanish. If one were a central figure in a communist uprising I indeed wouldn't count on it keeping you safe from that info being passed from one intelligence agency to another but for an online poster and maybe minor activist? The risk is much lower.

Are there VPNs that are scum? Is there a lot of spamming and dishonesty in the business? Yes. Does that mean there is no utility, it's all futile, it won't help you at all? Fuck out of here with that. Millions of pirates who can't be identified every month say otherwise. As does the fact Proton closed down port forwarding because someone used it for a malware campaign.

Indeed does the poster need a VPN or are they over-worrying? Maybe but the fact is they need to make that call. I can't say "oh don't buy into the fear-mongering of VPN providers" because the world can change and ISPs can keep logs for years. I think given they use a US-centric website the risks are lower than if they happened to use an equivalent to lemmygrad for organizing Polish communists but still not zero.

Tor can be de-anonymized by regular police as it was in Germany only recently using a timing attack but that's not the best for retrospect attacks on a mass scale for unmasking various people like say warrants to all the ISPs to deliver data on anyone who visited

would be. Safest option right now would probably be stacking a VPN and Tor as it's even more correlation to perform and makes timing attacks much harder but I wouldn't bother at this point for just posting communist takes. Deranged option would be stacking two separate VPNs paid in cash mailed in envelopes sent using gloves and under that Tor or another onion routing proxy and while doing that running a random traffic generator through the two VPNs. But that's obviously massive overkill for the amount of effort anyone here is likely to be worth.

A bit ignorant your post tbh.

2y ago

Good antivirus recommendation?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

Just buy a VPN subscription if you need one. Proton, Mullvad, Air vpn all look about as good to me unless you do a lot of 🏴‍☠️ and need port forwarding in which case only the last I think has that.

As to AV, do you have some specific threat or need for one? Do you run a lot of 🏴‍☠️ software or visit very sketchy places? Or do you just assume you need one because that’s the common attitude?

Windows defender with smart screen on is pretty effective for most people’s threats. That and keeping software up to date to avoid leaving vulnerabilities. Update immediately for things like OS and anything internet facing like web browsers, chat clients, etc. Run an ad blocker as well, that stops a lot of malware. Ublock origin works best on Firefox but it’s better than nothing on Chrome.

If you’re saving a lot of money with arrr type software it’s not the worst thing in the world to have a second opinion scanner to scan downloads before running but if you don’t it’s not necessary for most people. Malwarebytes offers a free on-demand scanner. Kaspersky is also pretty decent if you can get a good deal on it but it’s overkill for most people.

2y ago

Cope

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

There is a very alarming claim that they're pursuing and potentially weeks away from a nuclear weapon. The west is just deranged enough and Zelensky as well to use such a weapon, however crude on Moscow. For the west it presents an opportunity to hobble and weaken an enemy while keeping their own hands clean enough that they think perhaps they will escape retaliation, that Ukraine will get nuked into nothing but that doesn't matter because it will have served its purpose.

Recently Zelensky zig-zagged back and forth on this, saying that they either needed to join NATO imminently or get nukes, one or the other, seeing as NATO is off the table this is perhaps a way to attempt to threaten his western backers but he may underestimate how much they'd in fact enjoy that.

2y ago

Reminder to backup

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

I recommend for writing that people make frequent versioned copies as well. For example after some amount of pages or time spent I'll copy the file itself and rename it

_backup

<date>

to try and protect against corruption that happens to part of the file without being noticed and just to have the option of rolling back to a previous iteration or at least looking at it. It can clutter things up a little but if you like you can put the backups in their own folder somewhere. Though this is obviously no substitute for backing up to another device as this method doesn't protect you against your storage device failing, suffering corruption, malware, etc so it's more important to do that.

Sorry this happened to you OP.

2y ago

Barriers to entry; or, There's Too Many Damn Questions

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

I rise in support of the vetting.

It works. It works so well there are sore anarchists and left-libs on hex bear who will let people know they were rejected from here.

Sure it won’t stop a CIA officer who’s familiar with Marxism and determined to get an account (though even they will probably have to take their time). But it stops fascists who aren’t going to spend hours researching Marxism to give convincing sounding and organic arguments and it stops liberals who likewise aren’t going to put in the effort.

I do think perhaps the admins could offer an abbreviated vetting for those with an account here to get on prole wiki and perhaps vice versa.

2y ago

Should loli posting be allowed?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

Loli refers specifically to a genre of images of sexualized pre-pubescent and tween aged drawn characters in the Japanese style. Asuka as drawn doesn’t really fit the trope and is honestly too old to fit the bill that way either.

I have seen the deranged like channers and other pedophile or creep adjacent types refer to underage girls in general that way but it’s a term of objectification like “ho” or “thot” when used that way (yes even when directed at fictional characters). So I’m assuming through osmosis you were exposed to that. But best not to use it that way as it comes off wrong and icky. (And let’s be honest it’s already an awful term)

2y ago

Should loli posting be allowed?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 2y ago

She's 14. All the Eva pilots are 14.

Probably a bit beyond whatever the definition means perhaps given in the Russian novel it sources the term from she was I think 12 or something? I’m doubtful the referenced picture was "loli" as the OP asked in an incendiary manner though I do think it's not the most appropriate and best not to be posted here if it even should be posted anywhere with some of the comments.