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shirro

@ shirro @aussie.zone

Posts
1
Comments
231
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Department of Defense to be renamed 'Department of War' within week, Trump says

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  • Has there ever been a more timid, passive, weak, complacent, idiotic population than the current USA?

    From afar I watched them passively accept people dying or losing their homes because they couldn't afford health care. I saw them go off to fight stupid unjustifiable wars overseas with little protest. But it is when I saw them accept their kids dying in mass slaughters in schools with barely any outrage for decades that I realized they had lost their humanity. If you can accept such outrageous things without acting you can and will accept anything.

    A large number of them actively cheer their own downfall as a nation, their own impoverishment, their slavery and their stupidity. I wouldn't underestimate the tasking of rebuilding a civilized society there. They might kick the Trumpists out with some effort but the rot goes very, very deep.

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    What is Kick, the platform on which a French streamer died live?

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  • Nobody ask Albo why an Australian gambling industry billionaire operates a youth streaming platform while his government is going through the pretense of acting to protect vulnerable youth from online harm. Kick is for handwave over 18s only so nothing to see.

    Can't get away with accusing politicians of being corrupt here but they never seem to act effectively against the interests of wealthy people do they?

  • Road safety data shows pedestrian deaths have increased by almost 50 per cent since 2021

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  • As usual follow the money. The automotive lobby keeps killing people to make profits. They control the flow of information and public policy. People die for profits. That is all there is to it. If we wanted to cut pedestrian deaths all it takes is for people to shake off the influence and care about their families and community instead of swallow the mindless shit fed to them by paid influencers and media and then hold politicians accountable.

    Too many huge trucks on the road and I don't just mean the taxpayer subsidized yank tanks. Hugely profitable private logistics companies got public rail defunded over decades to the point it is unusable. Can't walk to schools or shops now without having to cross unsignalled intersections crossed by huge road trains all day and night. Successive governments have pushed heavy vehicle traffic onto B roads through small town centers and roads never designed for it and off the major highways with their bypasses and safety upgrades. All because they are too cheap to fund the necessary infrastructure upgrades at a small number of choke points. One day a double tanker of dangerous chemicals isn't going to make a turn with the shops on one side and kindy and childcare on the other. It will make the headlines for a couple of days and then it will be back to heads in the sand.

    This country has some excellent institutions and people but fundamentally the media and politics is controlled by a small corrupt elite regardless of which party governs.

  • Age verification fun

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  • Jellyfin doesn't know shit about my kids' age, gender or political beliefs and that is the way we like it.

  • Age verification fun

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  • What pissed me off with the Disney one was them putting it on my kid's profiles instead of sending me an email. From memory they did give a non-binary/intersex/prefer not to say sort of option but there is no winning choice because no matter what you supply it has the potential to be used as an algorithmic input in future and deliver overly narrow content. I don't think they should requesting that information. When the yearly subscription runs out they are gone along with the rest.

  • Age verification fun

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  • Perhaps some companies are trying to get ahead of the game. It they can demonstrate they are ahead of things it might be a bargaining point.

    The google one was kind of weird because I wouldn't consider the app in question an adult only app, the account had aged to 18 from probably 5 or so years ago. And it is my first time seeing the option to verify age with a picture or government id like they have in the UK now.

    Disney wasn't an age verification in the sense of the Australia/UK laws and I am fairly sure it was a demographics update to gather more marketing information for the option of a future advertising rollout. Just general enshitification.

  • Age verification fun

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  • I gave a fake age years ago, only by a year to get around some bullshit. Had to correct that when I verified :-(

    He is a good kid. He doesn't give a shit about crap like social media. I just wanted to install an open source email client for our self hosted family email and I had to get it via f-droid because its apparently for 18+ on google play. Like he is old enough to download and compile it from source. What is this bullshit? It let him have Signal though that was a while back. The younger kids are all on family link - but 17?

  • Age verification fun

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  • So first one was having to tell some yank company all my kids ages and gender (wtf?) to access their Disney+ profiles despite me being the adult who runs the account and having set appropriate limits like G and PG for them. Why the fuck does disney have to know a kid or a dog or a cat is watching if I pay the money. (However this started we all know Disney wants it for future targeted advertising and everyone in on this bandwagon for ulterior motives now)

    Now my 17 year old (practically 18) needed to install an app in google play on his phone. Google play insisted on age verification. It wouldn't accept his visa card. It wouldn't accept his drivers license and then it shat itself but looks like he is verified now but now now it won't let him install apps. It's still happy to advertise to him though.

  • Going to waste: two years after REDcycle’s collapse, Australia’s soft plastics are hitting the environment hard

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  • Saw a bit behind the scenes of another plastic recycling company once a long time ago. It looked very dodgy to me. I probably can't say much more since the fraud case ended with a not guilty verdict and I don't want to risk defaming anyone but the actual processing part looked like a pilot plant to me and couldn't have been doing much volume while the offices were in a high rent location. It didn't add up. I think it is in the interests of a lot of companies to green wash plastic packaging and some government funding of recycling operations has possibly been fraudulent.

    Plastic packaging needs to be viewed as harmful waste again and not as a recyclable product and consumers need to change their purchasing habits to avoid it.

    I am just old enough to remember there was barely any plastic packaging as a kid and we coped fine without it.

  • Signal boss warns app will exit Australia if forced to hand over users’ encrypted messages

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  • Opening up private company communications to the government makes that data a huge target for foreign intelligence and criminal organisations. Even our allies will happily pass on valuable company secrets to their own companies. Everyone is out for themselves. The software our government uses to analyse data will generally be closed source and supplied by a foreign power and not sufficiently audited.

    Unfortunately our politicians are dangerously ignorant about the techological risks to national sovereignty and our economy. So they rely on often dubious advice from parties with a vested interest that is opposed to the public interest.

  • Signal boss warns app will exit Australia if forced to hand over users’ encrypted messages

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  • There are a number of good alternatives. Signal wins because it's well known, easy to use and install. Governments are targetting private communications, not a specific app so their entire class is under threat and alternatives that can be backdoored will be.

    It's all very short sighted. If you really want to stop private communications you have to outlaw all people with technical knowledge and access to general purpose computers. I can cobble something together that is secure enough for a criminal or terrorist to communicate with freely available software but it won't be full featured or nice to use.

    Taken to the extreme this thinking ends with sending all the people with glasses to "work" some fields in the country because intellectuals challenge the security of the regime. That makes no fucking sense in a liberal democracy. So why even start down this path. Get a warrant and surveill people at the end points. It's the only acceptable solution.

  • YouTube makes last-ditch attempt to lobby government against inclusion in under-16s social media ban

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  • I think YT Kids is shit as a babysitter for little kids particularly when we have the ABC. But my kids are older and have individual accounts with age based limits and it is working really well along with parental guidance ofcourse.

    I do not give a fuck about foreign multinationals in general, particularly not tech ones, and I'll back a democratically elected Aussie government and our sovereignty against them on principle. But Youtube's account system is working out well for our family and I don't want to lose it otherwise I am going to have to spend effort on circumvention which is just a waste of everyone's time.

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    Permanently Deleted

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  • It's just an extension of extremist Christian white nationalism/neonazi shit. They realized terminally online young men were very vulnerable to this sort of grooming way back before gamergate even. It was definately weaponized in the US against Clinton and Harris. It's 90% political in origin.

    It is arguably true that many young men are shat on by the world we have created for them compared with the past. Stupid fucking gig economy, home ownership, cost of living, transition from manufacturing to service economy. But the people enslaving their brains are the same people with a foot on their necks keeping them down economically and socially. Pull back the curtains and its a handful of mega rich cunts protecting their fortunes by raising a compliant army of cucks to distort the democratic process.

    Young men need to open their eyes and tell the sketchy old pedo dudes trying to manipulate them to fuckoff, NYPA!

  • Human Rights Cannot Be Sidelined in Australia-China Meetings: "Xi Jinping’s Repression Renders Him an Unreliable Counterpart", Group Says

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  • There is that other country as well. The one you can get in serious shit for questioning or mentioning genocide.

  • US lobby groups urge tariff retaliation against Australia’s ‘socialised medicine’

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  • Being a sovereign nation should mean we can tell the yanks they can fuck off.

    Unfortunately they have their corporate and defence hooks into us really badly.

    If the current US administration has any global impact it is this: We all need to wake the fuck up, diversify our strategic relationships, and reduce our dependence on the US.

  • Why does Arch seem to have a cult like following?

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  • I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.

    When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, "humanity towards others" etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.

    The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn't really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don't get why people would use it.

    Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don't do this bullshit.

    Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn't have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.

  • Seems like the perfect day to ask: Muricans, what's your dream country to expatriate to? Non-Muricans, what's the thought on accepting US refugees?

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  • Non-murican - strongly feel preference should be given to genuine refugees fleeing war, famine etc where they have absolutely no ability to influence their fate other than escape. The US is a failed democracy but the people there have barely begun to challenge their government compared to what we have seen elsewhere in the world. And there is still refuge available in blue states. US citizens need to stand up and fight. Then if they fail, only then do they get to go in the queue with the genuine humanitarian refugees. I don't like queue jumpers. Sorry but impingement on your civil liberties doesn't compare with families in war torn parts of the world living in fear fear of having their limbs blown off every night.

    Ofcourse business around the world would like to cherry pick talent for in demand jobs. They prefer not to invest in developing local people when they can import experienced talent for less. So people with in demand skills will get in that way, not as refugees.

  • Australians will soon need their age checked to log into online search tools – here’s why

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  • Do you mean to say what is wrong with US multinational tech companies forcing Australians to log into their services so they can extract more value from them under the cover of a voluntary industry code of conduct they wrote and submitted to their US born ex-employee that isn't mandated by any Australian legislation and isn't part of any Australian party policy to my knowledge?

  • Why AOC should run for president in 2028

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  • Ranked choice is bare minimum for a democracy these days. Whatever ancient shit the US has doesn't count anymore. Also get rid of the elected tyrant bullshit and upgrade to parliamentary democracy. Then go for mixed-member proportional for extra credit. Also get rid of voting machines and do it all on paper.