Moscow says it won’t be pressured over Ukraine 30-day truce --RT

This is foolish. As foolish as Trump’s tariffs war. It’s trying to bully someone with a strong hand into a deal when they already offered you one. Trying to bluff them in a situation where if they call your position collapses entirely is foolish.

Trump is showing he truly is someone swayed by whoever talks to him last. Zelensky was instructed by psychological experts from western intelligence I’m sure just how to appeal to him at their last meeting.

Russia’s bottom lines have been the same since the start and the only change has been the addition of recognition of the eastern oblasts (which Russia within its own legal system incorporated as de jure parts of Russia (under Russian law)) as part of Russia.

I can only assume that this ceasefire is another Minsk agreement deception. They intend to attempt to force it, to re-arm and re-train and re-group Ukraine’s military so they can put more of their men into the meat grinder and stall a collapse of the front another 10 months. And quite frankly given all the talk from France and other members of sending in troops once a ceasefire is achieved of trying to push the envelope of the acceptable slowly until Ukraine is de-facto but not de jure part of NATO.

Trump is going to ensure the US gets very little or no minerals to plunder from Ukraine if Russia has to push through to the finish.

I also wouldn’t be shocked if Trump is testing the waters with this, says nothing and then when Russia pushes back hard he’ll claim he never agreed to that and attempts to leave Europe on the hook for it all.

There are different definitions of win. I certainly fear nuclear war. But I think the west believes their island chains will strangle China, prevent a break-out beyond the SCS or retaliation against US interests and notch them a win. China will repel them from the SCS, reclaim Taiwan and unless subjected to continued attacks I think it’s possible they won’t pursue the US much further though who knows. The US will use the fall of Taiwan and the inevitable missile attacks on island chains around China such as Philippines which were used in attacking China/PLA, etc to further justify their presence and cast China as an aggressor and “threat to democracy” and as justification for Russia level sanctions and attempts to economically strangle or at least isolate China and push it into its own bloc which can gradually be attacked and undermined.

China itself doesn’t want to put the US in a spot where there is zero relations and incentive for the US to just go sicko-mode so they’re likely to go along with the decoupling and ship products for finishing to third countries while counting on US decline. This would allow the US to prevent China from claiming the commanding heights, the name brands, the finished products, and totally removing the US ability to sanction countries by denying them product (China could still sanction but so could US, both would have a veto) and allow the US a very ugly kind of managed decline in an attempt to reclaim greatness.

West still thinks it has tricks up its sleeve. Their special forces people talk vaguely of swarms of AI sea-faring drone-mines they’d plan to deploy in the SCS to totally deny China its use for their navy but I also believe for the purposes of stopping Chinese shipping and forcibly decoupling them from the world.

They’re better products when made in China no doubt.

Fuck. Goodbye anti-imperialist speech. Goodbye health resources for LGBTQ people. Goodbye old internet.

Once that happens I expect the west to go nuclear on this.

They’ve already said it’s national security concerns to sell latest AI chips to China and to buy Huawei, they will slap a total import embargo on these chips and I feel most likely ban western companies from developing software for them to attempt to choke their utility. Could lead to a hard forking of Linux at that point among other more interesting things. I also would expect the west to start enforcing their “clean network” initiative on allies a bit out of the anglo-verse, say leaning on counties in Latin America, Africa, Asia, etc as well as individual companies within them to not use Chinese chips, maybe even slapping on sanctions that western software cannot be used in the same institution or in contact with systems using these “dangerous CCP spy chips” to again attempt to lock in markets for themselves, crush Chinese exports, etc.

We’ll have to see how the current trade war pans out, it could leave the US in a position where it can’t do this, it could leave the US in a position where it can, it could leave it in a position where it’s very easy.

It will be an uphill battle, the west has the high-ground in terms of controlling all the major software, the operating systems, gaming, entertainment, productivity, specialized applications, etc and will likely try and leverage that to lock people into a western hardware/chips+software ecosystem. But it’s good because it will mean a reckoning and a real fight and real independence for China from the west though it will come at the price of some pain obviously.

Needless to say I don’t think westerners will be able to get anything nearing cutting edge or 10-years-recent in terms of these chips due to restrictions.

It’s not just about maintaining the edge on high technology, backdoors in chips like these and sitting atop the vulnerability disclosure process allows the west unprecedented hacking abilities and Chinese chips threaten their global hacking and intercept spying network and thus blinding them (as Huawei did by displacing Cisco/Juniper).

They’re a cabal of pedophiles. And also what you said and they took Anakin because of that but usually take all kinds of kids under the guise of training them. CTH talked about this on and off throughout their 3 riff tracks for the movies.

Well retro RTS I like. I haven’t had much experience with retro RPGs, I admit my tastes have been more modern with that genre (though what does that mean anymore? 2000s? 2010s?)

I play very few games these days.

Favorite genre is hands down RPG though I also have a soft spot for retro RTS games because the first video games I played were RTS (C&C).

I don’t know anything about the situation (and haven’t played the game) but I also must chime in and say I think Black Myth Wukong possibly got shafted at the recent awards on geopolitical basis. I think the west is at that phase where they are going to actively suppress Chinese culture and media in ways that involve pressure and behind the scenes stuff to prevent them from gaining official recognition and a platform.

I hope Moscow arrests someone and swaps them for him, a hero like him deserves more than this.

They were a key witness in multiple trials as I understand it. I suspect killed.

That’s not how it works. If they come to you with a warrant you can’t just say you’d rather not. You have to turn it over or else your people will be arrested and your company if located in a state amenable to such orders raided. It all sounds good and fine until one of these people empty-mindedly takes a vacation to the US and an under seal warrant is opened and they are arrested and jailed until the company complies at which point they’ll buckle.

The only solution as with VPN providers and copyright infringement is for them to have no data to turn over so when asked they can tell the truth and say there’s nothing they can do to help because they have no relevant information.

Otherwise you’re just one very long arm of US law or a hack by activist reactionaries away from all this data being available to anti-choice authorities. The only solution is keeping it all local and this company should be tarred and feathered for this pathetic pinkwashing of unnecessary and invasive data practices.

I think Inquisition is pretty good. People have criticized it over the years for various things but as someone who’s played RPGs and MMORPGs in the past it scratched a lot of things for me. It’s the type of game that is really worth the money. You can easily lose a hundred to two hundred hours in a complete play-through if you take your time and do all the expansion and side content and with multiple romance options and certain branching parts of the story it takes multiple play-throughs to see absolutely everything.

I do recommend trying to take your time if you can or go back later. The story and scenery are pretty interesting both.

Apple podcasts on iPhones, iPads and Mac computers has transcripts that are shockingly good even for highly technical jargon and unusual names. Unfortunately no way to access it outside of Apple devices and no way to copy it as they’re concerned about copyright.

Otherwise I’d try whisper.

This is because of western sanctions. Chinese contributors are much more numerous and more important than any Russians ever were; and they’re also not a sanctioned country, so I highly doubt it

Uh they are sanctioned with more being added literally every year and once the US kicks off the planned war and decoupling against them in the next 4-5 years they’re going to throw down a wall of sanctions just like the one they threw on Russia and I bet you that Linus will cite legal once again in an opaque decision to remove them while crying about how evil the Chinese government is for oppression of Uyghurs, for reclaiming Taiwan after it declared independence at American urging and offered to host American nukes, etc, etc.

Oh they’ll let some back in, after they’ve signed a pledge that they are not associated with the Chinese military in any way (working for a company that supplies systems that are used by another company in a product that sells to the military counts), that they denounce their government and the communist party, that they are not Uyghurs or in Xin’jiang or associated with companies in Xin’jiang (as all enlightened westerners know all Uyghurs that were not killed in the totally real genocide are slaves so it’s not acceptable to use their work) and so on and so forth. Which will mean a shocking amount of their devs will be out and Linus will shrug and claim they made a choice to not take the simple step of siding with the west against their own people and therefore got what they got.

They of course hope to use such sanctions to force companies to gut-punch and weaken the Chinese military and state but having them choose to decouple from the west instead is also perfectly acceptable.

The west is pulling all its might to it, while it still has strength to do so. It will cut out Chinese developers but that doesn’t matter. If Linux desktop crashes and burns no matter because they only really need it for servers and Red Hat and other alphabet agency adjacent companies will keep those distros humming along on approved Intel/AMD/western hardware configurations.

They aim to then cut out China from Linux and hope the whole thing collapses and cannot be used for their own hardware meaning they’ll have to support a hard-forked kernel which many western planners doubtless think they won’t be able to do or it will at least hinder them badly for some time and more important draw a strong digital divide, a digital iron curtain between western Linux and users thereof and Chinese/Russian Linux and users thereof.

The planners of these things don’t care about some minor consequences, they’re in a life or death struggle, winner takes all, west comes out on top for another century+ of dominance and exploitation with western capital at the helm and white supremacy triumphing OR the multi-polar world emerges victorious and western hegemony and power collapses and with it their DoTB and their entire way of life and privilege.

Reshoring includes reshoring software jobs and if it’s important their thinking is someone will get paid to do it by some company, if it’s not paid for it clearly wasn’t important. This could cause problems for western corporations but it would likely be a down the road thing and most likely Valve or others would desperately try and keep Linux afloat just to have an alternative to Microsoft so they’re not destroyed by Windows locking down sales and apps via Windows store sales.

Viewed in light of this it seems likely they wanted to cement control of Telegram and the founder refused their advances.

It’s not enough for the US to be able to utilize a thing for their ends, they desire the ability to deny their enemies the same (which flies in the face of the liberal notion of freedom of speech not just for who you like but those you dislike). As well as probably wanting technical data and backdoors to identify both puppets and pawns as well as enemy groups they can target for surveillance, harassment, arrest, deplatforming, etc.

In light of these kinds of tactics one has to look at something like Tor with a skeptical eye. Maybe it was just made before all this was common practice. But I personally find those whisperings about the idea that 90% of exit nodes and other parts of the network are run by isnt’reali, US, and eyes intelligence agencies to allow de-anonymization on anyone but their people using it.

Anyway you look at it, this, the raid of Scott Ritter as well as the home of another RT host whose last hat was writing for a Nixonian realist conservative policy magazine, among many other actions and it seems the boot is coming down hard and fast. That is that the US firewall is being erected but unlike China’s which seeks merely to control their own information space, the US is clamping down hard on anyone but them speaking or coordinating, organizing, putting forth opinions. They’re no doubt incensed by the amount of conservatives in the US who view Russia sympathetically. The deranged agents of the FBI and so on who fully bought into the de-bunked Russia-gate hoax clearly see any sympathy as evidence of Russian meddling and the larger strategy moving above and beyond them of the state is to crush movements against its interests now.

From crushing Palestinian genocide protestors (and going so far as to punish the proles by banning medical face masks) to this they’re reaching out to crush and achieve total dominance on all fronts for all their narratives from their settler-colonial genocide-state isn’treal to the Russian antagonism, to China and beyond. That’s why we see a resurgence in pushing the Xinjiang genocide lie again as well I think.

And it’s why Tiktok was banned, why Kaspersky was banned (not sharing data with the NSA like US AV firms do), and why they’re now harassing this Telegram guy.

If it is true that Russia’s military is using it, they are very foolish to do so.

It’s doubtful it’s an official practice for field communications so much as soldiers using it on their own in ways that severely compromise operational security. It’s incredibly popular in Russia, much of the news we get on the Ukraine conflict is via official releases done on Telegram or Twitter by Russian state agencies.

That said maybe they’re using it in some semi-official capacity which is bad but at the same time this war kind of came out of nowhere. Russia doesn’t really have a lot of homegrown messaging apps. They can’t trust western stuff like Zuckerbook or Signal for obvious reasons and that leaves out most of the encrypted messaging clients. They could have rolled their own but that’s a vulnerability as any brand new and rushed software you create is more likely to have bugs that intelligence agencies from the west can exploit to take over devices, spy, break encryption, etc than something that’s at least been on the market a while. It does underline they /should/ develop something that can be used for these purposes that they control.

Well yes and no. SMS messages are readable by the carrier (both receiving and sending) and absolutely accessible to the FBI and NSA often without a warrant and they’re stored for 6-18 months or so by the carriers.

Telegram on the other hand to my knowledge still practices encryption in transit. Your connection and data you send to Telegram is over an encrypted connection like HTTPS. That means your carrier/ISP cannot see what you’re saying on Telegram just that you’re using it.

Is it completely secure against third parties, against Telegram itself being compromised? As in end to end encryption. No. And that’s why an arrest like this is particularly problematic as anyone who can coerce the company or someone with sufficient access can just get all this data from them as well as doing other things. But it does reduce the number of parties with easy access and raises the bar to gaining access somewhat. As evidenced by the Snowden leaks we can’t be sure any service that isn’t based entirely in an anti-imperialist core nation like China doesn’t have the NSA in the back siphoning up all the data or even just metadata.

As with many things there are degrees of security and privacy with encryption. SMS I’d consider as safe as shouting something in a public space. This I’d consider as safe as sending a UPS envelope with a message inside to someone. Properly implemented E2E I’d consider sending a UPS envelope but the contents inside are scrambled and unreadable except to your recipient who has a special decoder that UPS isn’t in possession of.

I know there’s a Plex program that does this, creates simulated channels filled with randomized (or via pre-defined criteria like action movies) channels that you can tune to. Might be something for Jellyfin that’s similar. Maybe not exactly what you’re after and if you don’t have a very large collection it won’t work that well but if you have hundreds of movies or shows it could look pretty random.

Exactly, once you’ve experienced it I just don’t get how anyone could go back except kicking and screaming but people want their slop I guess?

Cable is garbage. Just straight ad-infested low quality slop that has its production values slashed year over year. Goodness I sound old now but I do think back in the early 2000s when I was growing up that there was better quality and shorter commercials too.

Compare to ad-free service from two streaming services at $20/month each and you’re only paying $40 and getting no commercials, no interruptions, no wastes of your time and tons of content on demand on your schedule.

Add to that some sailing knowledge and you don’t have to worry about rotating services either.

The only thing I miss as a film nerd is TCM (also commercial free). Oh and PBS sometimes had good stuff though that’s not technically a cable channel.

Not prioritizing moderation and not locking down chat for anyone under a certain age is inexcusable. But when I see articles like this and see the law enforcement interviews I can’t help but smell a planted article to push for pulling back section 230 protections.

What that won’t do is hold big companies truly accountable. What it will do is push piracy, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, anti-zionism, anything that goes against the mainstream narrative and could get companies even conceivably in trouble for hosting it (and I’m not talking just about reddit type hosting in that they provide the code, front-end, etc but any type of hosting including companies that host this lemmy instance) will lead to massive crack-downs on anything outside the mainstream. Which means us. Which means anti-imperialist speech, which means speech against the genocide of Palestinians, etc. Meanwhile take-downs for violent rhetoric from the reactionaries will as usually be untouched or left up a suspiciously long time before being pulled down.

Companies will pre-censor because right now they only get in trouble for not acting in a reasonable timeframe upon notice, if you lose that there is a strong incentive to vet and hit anything that anyone, even a bunch of online Nazi goons crying about commies who are terrorists without further evidence as reason to just stop doing business with that person or group and deplatform them immediately. The powerful will get a second chance and appeal, the powerless will be given the finger.

The problem as usual is capitalism and capitalists and their corporations. The solution as usual under capital we’re told we should believe and accept is strip everyone of their rights, further entrench the security state, pass enabling laws to allow better suppression of content that the state finds harmful and after a short period of success basically ignore the original stated reason for passing such things.

Capitalism cannot handle keeping kids safe. Capitalism is a pedophilia loving, pedophile enabling system.