Surely nobody who is not doing anything online which is or will ever be until the day they die deemed morally objectionable by those with access to those databases or those with power over anything on their lives who can be provided directly or indirectly with data from those databases, have nothing to fear from this.
I’m in Europe and following the news of the MasterCard and Visa censorship I activelly went looking for how else could I pay for things online without using their networks, and as it turns out there are plenty of solutions supported by both Steam and GOG which I was just ignoring before because they just looked as lots of “weirdly named” unrecognized payment options.
I’m now using those in my purchases and so far they actually look more convenient than the Visa/MasterCard (for example, with iDEA which is Dutch, I can literally pay from my mobile phone banking app by just taking a picture of a QR-Code on my screen). The problem in Europe is just there being lots of local solutions and no EU-wide one yet, though I’m lucky because I have bank accounts in different countries (having lived in several countries in Europe) so I have access to many options.
Keep in mind that outside Britain, the rest of Europe have long had their own debit card withdrawal and payment networks and not relied on Visa/MasterCard (to me Britain was, frankly, weird in that it relies on mainly VISA Debit and had no local payment solution, probably explained by lack of political will in the UK for that: most such payment networks in Europe were born out of political pressure on banks to come up with a standard and sometimes were even started as state-owned companies) so a lot of these local online payment options are extensions of those existing networks, which is probably why trying come up with an single integrated cross-border payment processor has been slow going.
That said, thanks to it having been mandated at the EU level, bank transfers are nowadays fully cross-border integrated and you can transfer money between accounts anywhere in EU with the same ease and for the same cost you can for local accounts (the banks really resisted that, by the way, as it took away most of their “international transfers” profits) so we’re probably not far from a single EU-wide payment processor (or at least EU-wide account support on existing solutions).
Giving him a literal gold bar (though disguised as a stand) is stereotypical buying El Presidente in a Banana Republic bullshit.
I get the impression that Amazon has become the same ever since it openned the store to the same kind of salesmen, at that’s for likelly the same reason.
Then again I’ve been boycotting Amazon for a decade so I wouldn’t know for sure.
The device is probably just using a USB-C format connector to get power, without using the data connection at all, and a strict implementation of the USB protocol on the other side (the so called Host) would mean the device gets from the host only the minimal power levels (100mA @ 5V, if I remember it correctly) meant to merelly power enough a connected device which has no batteries (say, a mouse) for it to actually do the initial USB connection negotiation, and that current will only get increased by the host it if during that negotiation the device tells the host it requires high-current (which in different USB versions has a different value - in USB 1.0 it was 500mA but latter versions increase it), a negotiation which that device can’t do because it doesn’t actually do USB data at all and just treats the whole thing as a dumb power cable.
Dumb charger bricks don’t care at all because they themselves only do power and not the USB protocols, so really just treat the USB cable as a power cable into which they always make available whatever current the other side pulls up to the brick’s max supply capacity (usually 1A or 2A) with no “USB negotiation”.
This is why even in the times of USB-A some devices would charge fine from a dumb USB power brick but charge really slow if connected to a host which is a data device that can also do charging (like, for example, a notebook).
This is even without getting USB PD into the mix.
Because USB PD is a comms and power protocol, were the device tells the host the characteristics of the power it expects to get (not only current but even voltage) the USB PD brick has a proper USB implementation were it acts as a USB host.
I expect the USB PD brick has a strict implementation of the USB protocol which, in the absence of USB negotiation, just provides that minimum current that per the protocol a USB host is expected to provide pre-negotiation, which is too low for properly charging most things.
It’s more that AliExpress is all over the place, which is probably because manufacturing in China is itself all over the place (small and pretty much amateur-hour cottage factories doing plastic molded stuff or pretty simple electronics right next to much bigger professional companies designing their own smartphones and computers) plus there is very little in the way of established brands and without a brand to defend, manufacturers don’t really care if customers get a bad impression of whatever product name they’re using today for their, at best, badly made stuff.
It also doesn’t help that in a lot of domains competition in China is mainly on price: the manufacturers might even know how to do a good product, but they have to use inferior parts and cut corners on their designs to stay competitive on price.
(At some point I looked into importing LED light bulbs into Europe from China and got and evaluated several samples and then went back to the manufacturers and at least one e-mail exchange was very enlightening on this and on just how little extra money it actually costs to provide a much better product, but to compete they have to advertise - this was in Alibaba, the B2B site that gave birth to Aliexpress - the cheapest product they have which is kinda crap but only a domain expert doing a teardown of their product will spot it).
Also the fraud prevention in AliExpress is pretty much non-existent and anti-fraud there is entirelly reactive, so product listings with fradulent claims which are hard for customers to validate just stay there forever (for example, almost all powerbank storage claims or solar power bank supply claims are complete total bollocks, insanelly so at times - I’ve seen listings for small powerbanks claiming more power storage than actual EV cars have).
So for some things you can get really decent stuff at a good price - best place to buy switches or push-buttons for Electronics and as the above poster mentioned mini-PCs, to which I will also add Single Board Computers - whilst in other areas it’s a bit of a crap shoot if you’ll get something decently made or not - for example clothing - and in yet others the scams are more than the honest listings - such as external digital storage, solar power or power storage.
The fallout of the consequences of all this use of AI is going to be massive.
The distribution of mistakes that humans make is not probabilistically uniform but rather weighed towards smaller mistakes, because people are rational so they pay more attention to possible errors with big consequences than they do to those with smaller consequences and generally put much more effort into avoiding the former.
Things like LLMs pretty much have a uniform distribution of errors, with just as much big ones with big consequences as small ones since they’re text predictors which don’t actually reason their responses hence don’t consider anything which includes not checking for errors, which is why some LLM hallucinations are so obviously stupid for thinking beings (and others are obviously very dangerous, such as the “glue on pizza” one).
I suspect the accumulation of the consequences of LLMs making all sorts of “this can/will have big nasty consequences” mistakes in all manner of areas over a couple of years is going to be tons of AI adopting companies collapsing left and right due to problems with customers, products, services, employees and even legal problems (I mean, there are people using AIs in Accounting, which is just asking for bit fat fines from the IRS when the AI makes one of those “big mistake that would be obvious for a human”) and this is before we even go into how much the AI bubble is propping the stockmarket in the US.
It’s incompetent assholes all the way down…
Wow, your entire “argument” is literally nothing more than a collection of Strawmen, False Dichotomy Falacies and McCarthist-style slogans (yeah, sure mate, any critique of anything at all in modern Capitalism must be “Socialism”).
Five paragraphs of tribalist muppet kneejerk slogans deployed in defense of the notion that Ideas should be Property, no less.
Only Socialists would want to have published Scientific Papers freely available to all and for there to be archives of published digital works in the day and age of zero cost publishing and distribution on the Internet: the evils of Socialism can only be avoid if for absolutelly everything, somebody somewhere is getting paid.
You can see how trully Freedom-loving mainstream Liberal parties are, even in Europe, by looking at the domains were Freedom Of Ideas clashes with Ideas As Property such as science publishing: almost all of those “Liberal” mainstream parties side with the Owner Class in expanding and increasing enforcement of the “though shall not share without paying” Intellectual Property laws that let some make money of something they are only able to own due to such laws (those laws are literally anti-natura in that ideas are naturally shared), rather than with the natural freedom of sharing.
The way States support and impose Intellectual Property is really just a facet of the broader societal problem of politics in Capitalist nations (even those disguised as “Democracy”) not really working for the many.
Unless things have changed massively in the UK in the last 5 years or so, in my actual experience you don’t unless you make a profit.
The yearly baseline costs of opening and operating a Limited company in the UK are pretty low (less than £100 if I remember it correctly).
It also protects your machine from any spyware in the original game, as it’s very easy to have the sandboxing deny network access beyond localhost.
Personally I run everything inside the sandbox with networking disabled.
“You plebs should know your place”
In Linux, if you run games with Lutris, you can have them sandboxed with your sandboxing app of choice (personally I use firejail) by changing the “command prefix” option in the configuration for the game (or setting it as the default in the global Lutris configuration).
Also Lutris defaults to a different Wine instance per game, so Windows-specific malware would only ever affect the wine instance of that game.
So if you’re worried about pirated Windows games might contain Linux specific malware meant for when the game is running under Wine (as Wine is just an adaptor, not an emulator or sandboxing layer) you can go as crazy as you want in blocking what that executable can access, all fully under your control.
For starters, the whole “Progressive” thing is an American concept born out of the American environment (with its very deep religious moralistic strain amongst a large fraction of the population) and does not really applicable to Britain because, at least until recently, they didn’t really have regressive tendencies.
Beyond that Labour hasn’t been Leftwing since Tony Blair took over in the 80s and started talking about it being New Labour - they’re Neoliberals and quite strongly so, so pretty rightwing.
What they did was performative Identity Politics like in the US: theatrics in the Moral space to make them seem different from the other mainstream party, rather than actually having genuine Liberal Principles.
Of late they even ditched that and seem to be trying to outfascist the Fascists.
Big Brother states (which the UK is certainly headed towards)
When the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK had even more civil society surveillance than the US.
As a consequence of those revelations, in the US some of the surveillance was walked back, whilst in the UK the Government just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, issued a bunch of D-Notices (the UK system of Press Censorship) to shut up the Press, got the Editor of the newspaper that brought it out in the UK (The Guardian) kicked out, and the Press there never talked about it again.
Also, let’s not forget the UK has the biggest number of surveillance cameras per-capita in the World.
Oh, and they have a special and separate Surveillance Tribunal (the Investigatory Powers Tribunal) were the lawyers for the side other than the State are not allowed to be present in certain sessions, see certain evidence or even get informed of the final judgement unless their side wins.
They easily have the most extreme regime of Civil Society Surveillance in Europe, and in the World are probably second only to the likes of North Korea and China.
Britain is well beyond merely “headed towards” Big Brother and has been for at least a decade.
No Windows, no such Windows “features”.
Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC
As does Linux.
Just keep any torrent you download seeding after you finished the download and you will easilly get a seed/download ratio of 2 or more.
Even without static port-forwarding, the NAT translation done by the Mullvad router will automatically keep track of external machines to which your own machine has connected to recently, in order to forward to it any connections back, and since the torrent protocol pretty much connects to the whole swarm during the download stage (even if it doesn’t download from most of them, it still connects to each swarm participant to check which parts they have), which means that after your download stage for a torrent is over, for a while (hours, in my experience) if any of those machines tries to connect back the connection gets properly forwarded by the Mullvad router to your machine because it still recognizes them as associated with your host and forwards the connection correctly.
What won’t work without static port-forwarding is starting seeding from scratch, resuming seeding after you stopped it for a while (a day or more) and very small size torrents (because the swarm changes very fast when the download size is very small and is quickly done, and the new machines in the swarm which your own machine did not connect to during your own download stage, won’t be associated in the Mullvad router with your machine so it can’t do automatic routing of their connection attempts).
The point being that it’s perfectly fine to torrent with a VPN without port-forwarding and you can do it without being a leecher as long as you’re not just downloading tiny torrents and you make sure to leave the torrents to seed for a while after the download stage is over. What you can forget about is seeding from scratch or to remote machines you did not download any data from, which is a problem if you’re trying to get a good ratio for private trackers since you can’t just fire up a torrent for seeding alone and all uploading can only happen following your downloading of that same torrent.
Also in this day and age getting a VPN and having it always on for general privacy enhancement, especially against snoopy governments (something which just keeps on getting worse), is also a good idea, plus it also lets you work around geographically restricted sites, so it ends up useful in multiple ways.