I've been using a VPN on and off for years when there was a privacy concern.

Now there is a privacy concern 24x7, and so I use a VPN 24x7. A bad law and risk-averse sites have made the web a complete PITA without one.

The number of e.g. news sites and other vanilla content that requires intrusive checks, photo-ID etc. is astonishing.

I wonder how many parents have had to ask their kids for help setting a VPN up? <sigh>

I just couldn't live without this thing. Well, I could but I would be less productive and more grumpy.

Back in the mists of time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I developed DataEase applications under MS-DOS there was a thing called "Pathminder" [1] which was a very useful tool. Moving to Linux and finding Midnight Commander felt like coming home...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PathMinder

In my case being a generalist is less about knowing a lot about everything, and more about knowing how to work things out, and how to bridge the gap between specialised fields.

I do end up knowing a little bit about lots of things, but in terms of "knowing enough", I only need to go into a scenario with enough knowledge to get some traction on the issue I'm working on. Once I've established a bridgehead, the rest follows naturally.

Nope, the author's point is about what happens after fascists are elected, and he proposed no exceptions to that.

Finland was not cited as an exception. His point about Finland was that the fascists messed up - they tried to use violence before that point.

This is hilarious - I have yet to get to the article, because (on a fresh Ubuntu Mate LTS install with the stock Firefox) I am redirected to: -

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/cspace-generic-ua.html

...which complains about an "HTTP User-Agent header value that is too generic or otherwise excessively suspicious. Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that behave like this.", and I'm left thinking that the person behind this site does not care about client-side problems...

Username checks out!

We also outsourced our social media. That has to change - it's literally not safe.

There is a lot of witless verbiage about the "town square", but precious little acknowledgement of the obvious fact that every town has its OWN square, and that's the point.

For the last decade my feeds have been polluted by "content" about Brexit and Trump, almost all of which has been noise/distraction/propaganda. I'm sick to the back teeth of it, and it's time to make it stop.

I truly believe the Fediverse is a viable solution. I've found Lemmy to be an extremely viable alternative to Reddit. The fediverse, more than any other centralized solution, seems equipped to avoid the hellish pitfalls that profit-motive behemoths seemingly must sink into.

There is no monetization, corporate decisions, manipulative algorithms; just self-hosted open source instances as far as the eye can see. Certainly there are rough edges and a perceptible decrease in dopamine from using them, but surely that's worth toughing out as they shape up if it means stopping the unfathomable destruction of society that we're experiencing in real time from big tech?

In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky makes a powerful argument that independent, citizen owned media is of critical importance if we're to pull society to a better, more collaborative place. It doesn't get more 'citizen owned' than a web of interconnected self-hosted servers.

I agree. As well as the technical merits, it seems to me to be a better match for natural human interaction. Your point about citizen-owned media is well made - in the US we seem to be seeing the near-total collapse of integrity in commercial media - on the one hand it is dismaying to watch, on the other it is as clear a call to arms as we could wish for.

It's been good to see Bluesky up its video game in response to the TikTok nonsense. I'd like to think that the Fediverse could evolve to meet the expectations of people fleeing Facebook, Twitter & co, but it's not there yet. Those of us who are highly motivated (and I am, after recent events!) will make do, but I think it needs to be easier in order to get the critical mass required.

No, they don't just work at these places, they run these places.

There may be some problems in UK society caused by upper class Harrow school boys (!), but the batch of those very same upper class Harrow school boys currently running the security services are obviously smart enough to recognise that getting the job done requires more diversity.

I don't think he _made_ anyone do anything, unless that's somehow a term of art?

Fair point, no coercion. Encouraged.

Thanks for explaining where that apparently random ordering comes from - drives me nuts too!