Well, there’s also that bit where we funded fundamentalists during the cold war to try and fuck with the soviets, and the imperialism we and the soviets did that led to radicalization. A problem that we exacerbated which bit us back in the ass a few decades later.

In most cases there isn’t much you can do to fool the government without a lot of prep time such as scouting routes to find cameras, destroying them, or being really good at changing into bloc in the middle of a crowd and not getting caught.

But the important thing is threat modeling. The past dozen or so protests I’ve been at haven’t had the government as a big threat, it has had fascists as the primary threat. While a fascist cop would be a problem, it is much less likely than fascists combing through protest footage to try and doxx people, or a fascist at said action trying to get good photographs. That’s why I masked up.

The last real dicey action that I went to I still masked up, even knowing that the government could still try to track me if needed because I knew it would be time consuming to do so, and that they would only go through the process of doing that if I make it worth their while. Bloc is still effective, but quite hard under this heavily surveillanced police state.

I think it would be funny to normalize wearing bloc in order to retain privacy. It’s why some people might wear accessories they normally don’t wear, such as beanies and sunglasses at protests, even if they aren’t in full bloc, covering hair and eyes (in addition to a surgical mask) can make it really hard to doxx someone.

That’s a fun mistake to make. I had a similar thing happen with Kubuntu uninstalling my GPU drivers. I could never figure out what caused it.

The world is full of creatives who make things without any expectation of income, but people create anyways. Look at open source software, or the many youtubers who don’t get enough views to get paid yet they post anyways. There’s quite a few journalists who operate solely on optional donations.

Fuck IP. Copyright is theft. IP kills.

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

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’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.

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

I’ve heard wazuh can do authenticated vuln scanning, but since I’ve scaled down my homelab and hardened it to a point that vuln scanning is not currently needed I’ve had no need to do so. I have a friend deploying wazuh at his job so I’m gonna have to reach out to him some time to learn how he is doing it once I start growing my lab again.

I use nuclei for networked vuln scanning, which is all I really need right now. Works well with community rules, but it is a cli application. I really like how I don’t need to deploy it on a dedicated device, I just run it using all rules on the subnets that I want to scan from my laptop, which I have plugged into a vuln-scanning network with open fw rules, and check back in half an hour. Once I get a few more raspberry pis, I’ll have one on such a network that I can just run a scan from.

Well, microsoft chooses bing for you sometimes

I run two APs, and a Unifi server running on a thin client linux server.

I have the U7, and the U6 extender that goes in a wall outlet

I have a few of their small poe powered ethernet switches, they’re great since I have a poe switch as a backbone I can put it near a group of devices in a room, like consoles, raspberry PIs, etc, and just not have to worry about much setup or powering yet another tiny device.

Highly recommend unifi devices

Capitalistic motives is incompatible with any art form. Executives are the harbingers of the mindless greed of it.

The good art we see under capitalism is in spite of it, not because of it.