I’m a professional. I expect to be treated like one. If there are companies who are serious about hiring a professional, I’m all in. Please engage me.

That’s really well said.

I remember being in the same situation a couple years ago in which I was accepted to an interview through a video chat web application hosted by the company.

To my horror, when I joined the meeting, it was not a video chat interview. It was a series of recorded clips of their HR person reading off questions, the clips pausing, and then a timer showing up on the screen noting “You have 15 seconds to answer”.

I was so put off by this that after the first question, I decided to spend the rest of the time I was being recorded explaining to them under no uncertainties that this was one of the most unprofessional interview processes I had ever engaged in, and that they had made it clear that they did not value my time whatsoever, so I had no reason to reciprocate.

Or worse is probably right:

I remember working IT, and every other week there was some announcement that looked like this:

Microsoft Pro Plus for Office is now Office 365 plus for Business

Office 365 Office Pro is now Microsoft Office Pro Plus

Office Dynamics 365 for Business is now Office for Business Pro

Microsoft Windows Home Office 365 is now Windows 365 Home Plus

How anyone still manages that fucking licensing is beyond me.

For sure, I have no illusions about that. I still think if this went through and fucked the world economy they would pretty quickly find they would have to repeal the repealment though. It would create way too many problems to try to weasel out of.

Sure, but my point is that it does not mean they want to. They will take the cheapest option possible - if there isn’t one, they usually try to invent a new cheaper option for themselves. In the realm of bribery, if you are going to bribe people anyway, why wouldn’t you pay a couple bribes to avoid paying indefinite bribes?

Haha, I had the same thought - it would be better if it didn’t have the potential to completely collapse society though. I could certainly stand to lose more than a few of the things I listed though.

If the news were that it was being amended to make carve outs for businesses who pay an amount of money, then I would be more inclined to agree.

But the news is that it would be repealed entirely.

This means you could not bribe the government once to protect you from all lawsuits - you would have to bribe each and every judge involved in each and every lawsuit, and/or each and every juror.

1 Billion people sue your company. I don’t think any megacorp would be happy about suddenly having to pay out 1 billion bribes and to do so as a regular ongoing expense.

The least expensive option for the corporations is to not have this repealed. As a result, that is what they would prefer to put that money into instead. Way cheaper to bribe this into not passing than it is to have to do it continuously or multiple times and/or losing those income streams.

I don’t think this would pass, the megacorps stand wayyy too much to lose here and would fight tooth and nail to prevent anything like this. Same goes for a lot of the US government. This would kill any website with user generated content because no company would risk the lawsuits and basically boils down to two options for them - get collapsed due to the cost of legal fees resulting from millions of lawsuits, or get collapsed because the major sources of income streams of your business no longer exist.

Facebook/meta - gone, youtube - gone, reddit - gone, lemmy - gone, twitter/x - gone, bluesky - gone, every chat application - gone, every email provider with a web application - gone, every search engine - gone because they wouldn’t be caught dead potentially displaying anything made by a user, etc.

This would instantly kill the thousands of data mining/brokering businesses that exist because they collect and sell this data.

Sections of government that collect the same data to spy on what people are up to would also not be happy about this. Making it so that people can’t openly discuss anything actually damages their ability to control narrative because no one would be able to speak openly anymore, including bot accounts.

Ad companies would die because users would no longer have any reason to visit half the websites where the ads are and therefore advertising on them would be useless.

IT infrastructure would collapse because there would no longer be any place to discuss fixes or workarounds to problems and every open source project would cease development - which a tonne of proprietary technology uses in their stack. Every business that uses a LAMP stack would almost immediately be fucked.

Billing systems would collapse, large numbers of people wouldn’t be receiving paychecks anymore, supply chains would crumble, etc.

Tonnes of companies would get hacked because there wouldn’t be a reasonable way for people to distribute information/stay in the know on new vulnerabilities for the masses of IT/security workers.

No one could leave reviews of any kind on any service or product which has a litany of resulting problems itself.

This would also result in an ungodly amount of lawsuits filed for any and all reasons which would basically collapse the court system under its weight.

Even if this went through, I’m sure it would immediately collapse the economy like has never been seen before and they would scramble to revert it.

I won’t buy a phone with any fewer than 16 folds.

Affinity is one of the things i lost in moving from windows to Linux, but I’ve been getting by.

I bought a license before canva acquired it and quite enjoyed the software.

Really sad to see canva doing what everyone knew they would do to it.

This is kind of how VeraCrypts hidden partition feature works.

You start the process of the volume’s encryption and set a “false” password for it. It creates a partition that is encrypted with that password. When it finishes, you mount it and store “fake” files, the files you would reveal under duress. Veracrypt then takes in a second password and creates a “hidden partition” in the remaining free space of the disk - to be clear, that memory space still reports as unused/free if investigated, but the partition is there.

You can then mount that with your second password and store your actual files. You can work with files and folders in the hidden partition as needed, however if anything is added or changed etc in that first fake partition, the data in the hidden partition will be corrupted by those actions.

This means that so long as you plan ahead, someone can literally put a gun to your head and demand the password to the encrypted disk, and you can give them one that works without revealing the data to them.

In theory, since the data in the hidden partition is encrypted and unreadable, it is impossible to detect that it exists in the “unused” space of the disk, even by a forensic analyst. To them it would just look like old, randomly flipped bits that came from previous usage followed by a quick format.

Now, what’s really cool about this is that if you use the veracrypt bootloader, you can store and boot from an undetectable OS you store in that hidden partition, while having a decoy operating system on the visible partition:

https://veracrypt.io/en/VeraCrypt Hidden Operating System.html

With this question asked, I’d like to build on it and ask what options exists outside the realm of google given their recent bullshit.

For those who know, tell me about the pine phone, fair phone, anything else like this.

When google fucks shit up in the near future, I would very much like to hold on to the ability to side-load apps using obtainium and f-droid indefinitely. Are the pine phone/ fair phone reasonable for this? What pros and cons am I looking at?

I’d love some example questions for this.

I can’t share it all here for reasons I can’t detail.

I may do a second write up at some point for public distribution and if so, I will share it with you here.

I am trying to get people I know personally to stop posting and reading and instead begin to focus on the very basics of actual organization, in the form of simply being able to communicate effectively and securely.

I have collected and written up information for them with the consideration that they are non-technical, pertaining to secure and private communications primarily, but also many more potentially useful emergency-scenario information and data which I will not speak about here.

The package I have started giving to my friends contains information such as:

• How to communicate securely using something like Simplex or I2P
• How to correctly configure and use a VPN
• How to flash a security distribution of Linux such as TailsOS to a flash drive and how to boot to it from a computer
• How to securely encrypt data to a device using an encryption software with hidden volume features such as VeraCrypt
• A litany of manuals for all kinds of useful information you can use in emergencies, which I will not detail here
• Files containing the data required to build potentially useful items in emergencies given access to the correct hardware which I will not detail here

I firmly believe that the majority of Americans will not do anything until someone is actually showing up at their door, coming after them in the street, or destroying the regularities of their personal day to day life, so my intention is to distribute materials which they can turn to when the fear sets into them well enough that they are scared to talk about such things openly.

It is clear to me that most of my American friends at least, at this point, still only feel superficial fear and outrage. The other day I asked them “If you had to vandalize a public space with a piece of art, what would you draw or paint? Let’s say it is the side of a bank”.

One said “tits”, one said “flowers”, one said “a fox”.

Even in a fantasy, they would not express fear or outrage in a public setting.

I have had pretty good luck with airvpn, but the ultimate is mullvad as I understand it, though relatively speaking it is much more expensive than airvpn.

I haven’t had a lot of time recently to look, but I know FL studio can mostly be set up to work through wine. The problems exist in the plugins/VST’s/ the VST management softwares/ the Audio interface drivers and latency.

If you do so, I would be interested in hearing about the experience and any troubleshooting you had to perform to fix problems.

My workflow is in FL studio, however the bigger problem is my VST libraries. I have the entire Arturia V collection as well as many, many more plugins and I am unsure if they would run on Linux, or if they do, how well. This is unfortunately a big problem as my collection of VST’s total into the thousands of dollars. I suppose I could run a windows VM to make everything function, but then I would probably have problems with latency/connectivity on my audio interface when I want to patch any of my hardware in, if drivers are even available for the interface in on Linux (It’s just a scarlett 2i2 I believe).

The moment I can verify a solution for my music production workflow on Linux, I know that I’m out as well.