cecilkorik

I know people who have had to give them the phone. It doesn’t happen every time, it doesn’t happen to everyone, it doesn’t happen often, but it definitely does happen, and from what I understand, they can refuse you entry if you do not. I’m not in a position to say how common or widespread it is, but there are enough anecdotal stories to convince me it’s probably decently widespread, albeit occasional and possibly targeted. Like you said though, no one knows what they’ll do anymore, maybe just shoot you in the face. And that’s kind of the point. They want that environment of uncertainty and not knowing when the bullet is going to come for you.

Sent back if they’re lucky. Otherwise sent to concentration camps, El Salvador, or just never seen again at all.

Yes, they already do that. That said, if you have good op-sec, you’re not going to have your social media on your phone. At least, not your real social media, or if you do, you’ll have it behind a password they can’t break and that you’re not going to give them, so this is not really about getting into everyone’s social media per se, it’s more about providing them more excuses to detain people they don’t like, increasing surveillance of people who they know are probably not really doing anything wrong to begin with, and the chilling effect that surveillance provides in controlling those people who are not really doing anything wrong.

Mmhmm. The more things change, the more things stay the same. “Gulf War 3: Gulf of America edition” Now with extra-bigass Freedom Fries!

Millenium can combine Proton folders into one (not an endorsement, I don’t use it personally, just an option, you should perform your own due diligence)

Getting some serious “are we the baddies?” vibes from the US lately.

They aren’t as distracted by their phones yet. Once they get Tiktok, all bets are off.

Sounded like a Ukrainian drone attack to me.

“A few turns away” until suddenly the meme of the kid riding a bike shoving a stick in his own spokes.

Well I guess this game is going to be keeping me up all night after all.

It’s never wrong to punch a Nazi, even if the Nazi is Jewish.

It’s a form of gaslighting. They are minimizing our very legitimate concerns for our continued existence and right to self-determination and pretending we are only mad because of tariffs. They know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. The battle for Canada’s independence is already in progress. And right now it’s being conducted by information warfare. The risk is that it may not stay there, depending on how much progress they make in the information space.

No, Casinos are owned by rich people, they follow a completely different set of rules. When a poor person dishonestly takes a rich person’s money, that’s fraud. When a rich person dishonestly takes a poor person’s money, that’s business.

And the red-white-and-blue walkers.

In a better timeline, the US would be invading El Salvador to free these people.

Correct. Does it have an extra large battery pack for endurance and loitering while it’s identifying a target, or is there a chunk of high explosive surrounded by shrapnel? There’s no way to tell which is which without taking it apart, and if it’s the latter and whatever is controlling it makes the choice that it wants you dead, it’s not going to wait around for you to inspect it, it’ll instantly zip towards you at 200 mph. Bang. The end.

I’ve watched enough Ukraine War footage to have a good idea how utterly surreal the future is going to be. Humanity has always been incredibly talented at finding new and more efficient ways to kill. It’s kind of our specialty. The wonderweapons we’ve gotten used to being developed by the military industrial complex tend to be expensive and impractical, because that provides a nice mix of profit and geopolitical control, but these small, cheap, efficient and incredibly versatile killing machines are going to reshape the world the same way the development of firearms did. I really have no idea what the future will look like anymore, I don’t think even any of the science fiction has really grasped all the consequences this will have.

Scientists have been telling anyone who would listen, for decades, in the most dire terms, of what was going to happen and how badly it’s going to happen and everyone was like “nah they don’t know for sure and they’re exaggerating and being ridiculous” and yet the same people are still going to have the utter gall to act completely surprised pikachu face when it starts actually happening and try to convince us that no one could’ve possibly predicted this.

except the scientists. who predicted this.

Here’s the quick checklist of reasons the US needs to invade a country:

• Does it have oil?
• Does it have terrorists?

If you answered “Yes” to any of the above questions, your country can be invaded.

The thing I hate most about Ford is that he can be genuinely likable and relatable at times. Sort of like George Bush Jr, he’s got a non-threatening “I’d sit down and have a beer and chat with him” charisma. It makes it really hard to imagine that he’ll ever lose an election or face any resistance to his policies, even though he is one of the most corrupt and directly threatening premiers in living memory. He is quietly dismantling and privatizing everything about Canada’s largest province and mortgaging its future to cash out for his cronies while keeping the masses distracted and on his side by relaxing regulations and alcohol policies and performative trade rhetoric.

And it makes me angry how amazingly well it works. We get so excited about the unimportant stuff he does because it’s simple and fits in a tweet, and we don’t have the time or energy or context to try to understand the important stuff where he’s intentionally breaking things and stealing from us because it’s complex and convoluted.

Just because the visible footer gets removed doesn’t mean there isn’t other unique tracking information hidden deep in the PDF that could still get the lawyers sicced on you. Depending on how valuable this information is to the company, and how litigious they are, you have to judge how far they might’ve gone and might yet go to protect it.

Unfortunately, that’s why this kind of copy protection can an actually be an effective tactic to prevent individuals from sharing their copies. While there might be ways to strip this kind of hidden data on simpler PDFs… even resorting to methods like screenshotting or printing and scanning, still cannot give you absolute confidence that there isn’t some subtle unique identifier invisibly hidden in the layout or through subtle inconspicuous variations, especially if you’re doing this regularly and they start targeting you and your account for identification. And on complex PDFs there are so many more ways they could hide this information digitally if they know where to look for it and you don’t. 99% of the time it’s going to be pretty obvious to strip out, but are you willing to take that risk even if you do find a technical method of removing the visible footers? If it’s a one-off, maybe you can get away with it, but in the long term this strategy is not viable and is a trap for rookies.

The only truly safe way to share digitally watermarked content like this is to buy it with a burner account and full opsec in the first place. Nobody to sic lawyers on if it’s a hacked paypal or a stolen/prepaid credit card or an untraceable email and IP, or in a jurisdiction with no enforcement. Smash and grab, get the data anonymously and get out. Don’t share stuff from your personal account that’s literally got your name and banking information attached to it unless you can confirm it’s bit-for-bit indistinguishable from other innocent copies with something like a checksum.

The culture wars and gender wars are intentional distractions. The class war is the one that matters. The billionaires figure they can solve the housing crisis, solve economics, end war, and save the environment by simply making the rest of us extinct. And in the most cruelly utilitarian way possible, there is even some truth to that. They do not value human creativity, human rights, or human life at all. They are extracting every last scrap of value we have, then they will end us. They consider themselves above the rest of humanity, transhumans, superhumans, better than obsolete humans, and they think the world will be an objectively better place with much fewer of us on it. When you start to see everything that’s going on in the world it all starts to make sense when you understand that is actually their goal. Their goal is to not need us any longer, and then to remove us. I am certain it will not be as easy as they think, but expect them to try.