Its just as risky for a non-American buying from a US company. And despite what others have said, customs can be a point of interception. But it’s not customs you need to worry about, they hand-off to the spy agencies to do their thing when they get a valid order to do so. Example program:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/

Like others have said though, your threat model is what’s important. And if you are a person of interest to security agencies eg a whistleblower or journalist then you’d be wise to have someone you know make the purchase instead of you.

I’d be more concerned about Chinese products in general, as they have been caught again and again with pre-embedded untargeted malware. Meaning, everyone who ordered that model got a helping of malware, not just those under active surveillance by three letter agencies.

A few examples in this blog entry: https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2018/05/23/flawed-by-design-electronics-with-pre-installed-malware/

If you’re not a person of interest though then you are 99.99% safe. You could always reinstall the OS when you get it and ensure the bootloader is locked. Again that would keep everyone except state security agencies out.

I’m not saying the election wasn’t stolen, but there are a lot of data points tying individuals and businesses together (which is not hard when they’re all billionaires and massive multinational companies), and not really any hard data proving the crime occurred. No evidence that UPS software updates have been used to install malware (malware would be needed to gain ‘root access’), no evidence that StarLink devices can interact with cellular devices in ballot machines. No evidence of anything really, not even enough evidence to get a warrant to subpoena communications or look through firmware/software code.

I could probably piece together a story with just as many convincing links with any arbitrarily-chosen Billionaire, given enough time.

If they had hard evidence of any of what they’re accusing, it would be world headline news. I hope they find it - but until then this is about as convincing as the ‘very big evidence’ of election tampering in 2016 by Dominion that Mike Lindell claimed he was about to drop on the public for several years.

This is important because unthinking tribalism pushes anyone on the fence away from wanting to hear your position, and we don’t need any more people pushed to the right.

Like when Trump torpedoed the Trans-Pacific Partnership - which would have meant all involved countries would have fallen under (globally draconian) US intellectual propery law and other controversial changes. In short, it was a huge win for corporations an a huge loss for consumer rights. Trump torpedoed it because it wasn’t “putting America first” enough. So, although he stopped it for a stupid reason - it was great that he stopped it anyway.

It was of course renegotiated a few years later as the ‘Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership’, but notably with almost all of the intellectual property crap removed or vastly de-fanged, and various other controversial provisions removed - and that agreement passed. So it was a lasting win.

But if you ever say 'i hate Trump, but not everything Trump has done is bad because… ', you are still likely to get a hundred Lemmy downvotes even if you explain why. Hopefully people can learn that you don’t have to disagree and disavow someone/some entity all of the time just because you disagree with them in general. A win is a win and it’s ok to say ‘hey actually that’s good’, it doesn’t mean you support or like them - it just means you think they made one good decision.

Ah, all good. I didn’t downvote either way, just commented to try to make sense of the discussion. Sarcasm or facetious language is easily lost over text - thanks for clarifying

Saying “I can’t live without Harry Potter”, that’s hyperbole. Or if you’re serious, it’s just funny.

The argument is that funding Harry Potter directly funds JJ Rowling - whom then proudly and openly uses her wealth to pay for campaigns to enact anti-trans legislation and pays suppot to regressive anti-LGBTQ groups. Its a boycott.

People are justified in judging those who know this yet continue to support Rowling’s products monetarily or act in them as LGBT hostile.

From all the online back and forth I’ve seen though, few care if you pirate them therefore denying monetary support <- that’s nuance.

Cool, and anyone can just access Wolfram Alpha directly - as they’ve been able to for like 15 years - and make fewer mistakes than they would by using it via an LLM.

The LLM (Copilot) is being advertised as a maths tutor. It’s not good at maths. It doesnt understand anything about maths. All it can do is send your query through to Wolfram Alpha and then spit it back to you.

Hype.

Here’s Microsoft advertising Copilot “makes solving maths problems a breeze” with an entire how-to article.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/for-individuals/do-more-with-ai/learning-and-education/how-to-use-ai-for-math-calculations

MAGA are patient, playing the long game, they’ll wait? These are the guys that wear diapers to virtue signal they’re Trumpers, and charge into the Capitol building when they lose an election.

They’re neither intelligent nor patient - they just have NEAR ZERO pushback from all the people in institutions around them, everyone turning to the person next to them going, “gosh that’s … can you believe they’re doing that - that’s unconstitutional and definitely illegal”.

I read the article, and even the outgoing Fulbright board just handball the problem to the next people.

[With] the board calling on Congress, the courts and future Fulbright Boards to “prevent the administration’s efforts to degrade, dismantle, or even eliminate one of our nation’s most respected and valuable programs.”

Why the hell are they not doing that? It’s cowardly and its essentially a strongly worded letter.

Sends a message for one news article, an action like this does. Then they all get replaced by lackeys and the new Fulbright Scholarship board does whatever Trump wants.

I’d think it’s better to advocate change from within and use your power to shed light on the bullshit through years of leaks to media, while doing your best to shield the organisation from the worst decisions, than to just quit in a huff of solidarity.

This is really concerning for the Android ecosystem.

It will make development much harder and slower for CalyxOS and Graphene - which is very bad news as they are tiny teams.

As I understand it this affects all models to a degree, even Fairphone, as source code for Pixels made it easier to see how code could be adapted to support new Android features/APIs/etc for third party phones.

Whelp guess I’ll be hoping Linux phones rapidly improve in quality and availability.

TL;DR: what you’d expect. Boring gangster disputes. A gangster laid the blame on him partially for killing an associate of the gangster, with little to no evidence. So they killed him publically to maintain street cred.

Heh. No a younger guy with the same name, totally unrelated who coined it in 2018 on a political science blog. I knew my wording was clumsy but was too tired to think of something better.

Here’s an interview with him by Slate if anyone’s curious.

https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservatives-frank-wilhoit.html

Refuting irrefutable evidence is their bread and butter.

Jan 6th?? Livestreamed attempted coup, recorded at a hundred different angles. With a thousand different people saying “I’m doing a coup”. Mock gallows. Mobs of terrorist traitors shouting “hang Mike Pence!”,“hang Nancy Pelosi!”. Carrying guns, knives, handcuffs and cablecuffs. Multiple bombs placed (still unsolved). Smashing into government offices, beating and killing cops.

“It’s overblown. It’s deepfakes. They’re crisis actors. It’s a false flag by Antifa… Ok so they’re MAGA but it was just a peaceful protest… OK so it happened and was violent but so what, it was justified. They’re being prosecuted for being pro-Trump, not for breaking the law. This is all the deep state! … Trump should pardon them… Trump pardoned them. Nothing was done wrong and there’s proof”

I think I’ll just keep using tailscale until they start enshittifying, and then set up a Headscale instance on a VPS - no need to take this step ahead of time, right?

I mean, all the people saying they can avoid any issues by doing the above - what’s to stop Tailscale dropping support for Headscale in future if they’re serious about enshitification? Their Linux & Android clients are open source, but not IOS or Windows so they could easily block access for them.

My point being - I’ll worry when there is something substantial to worry about, til then they can know I’m using like 3 devices and a github account to authenticate. MagicDNS and the reliability of the clients is just too good for me to switch over mild funding concerns.

It’s not really, because the “AI” people have gievances with in context is the LLMs that are being shoved down everyone’s throats by every silicon valley giant, with literal trillions of dollars invested in them. Very, very not left wing. I’m left wing - that money can be MUCH better spent elsewhere.

When people complain about AI evangelists they’re complaining about the people who fawn over the aforementioned tech giants, wholesale theft of training data, and enshittification of all platforms by AI slop - not ‘AI as a concept’, so in other words, you’re very much crafting a straw man of your own there.

Except Ken M is funny

Channel 9 are not quite Fox News level but definitely Fox Lite. They’re careful in their written news articles to only be centre-right, but their video and TV news broadcasts are heavily favoured to right-wing bias and favourable story selection, and always very critical of any left wing interests.

I’m not sure of their YouTube channel is available worldwide, but if you check that out if you can and you’ll quickly see it’s got all the same talking points as Sky News Australia (News Corp - Murdoch, Sky News is the Aussie version of Fox News).

Yeah it is. The whole film is worth watching for about 4 key scenes, and the last 15 minutes are very satisfying.

Considering all the crap that his Barons old nanny accused Baron of on a big Twitter thread last year - which is still all online and has never been challenged as untrue or sued or taken down by the very litigious Trumps, I’d say Elon’s daughter (who hates Elon) should stay the hell away from Baron.

https://www.politicalflare.com/2024/08/nyc-nanny-just-revealed-some-very-shocking-and-disturbing-information-about-barron-trump/

I’m onto you’re plan