I could write a long tirade on the terrifying flaws of this logic, but instead I’ll just share a reminder that barely anyone is the villain of their own story.

I'm not sure if you're calling Putin a stupid man that is easily manipulated or incompetent.

They are parroting Russian propaganda. The one where “the west” is stipid, cunning, strong, and rotting all at the same time.

Control of the DHCP server in the victim’s network is required for the attack to work.

This is not a VPN vulnerability, but a lower level networking setup manipulation that negates naive VPN setups by instructing your OS to send traffic outside of VPN tunnel.

In conclusion, if your VPN setup doesn’t include routing guards or an indirection layer, ISP controlled routers and public WiFis will make you drop out of the tunnel now that there’s a simple video instruction out there.

• USA is not the most diverse country (its ethnic fractionalization index is below that of Moldova - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-racially-diverse-countries or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level)
• Out of listed countries, the only one that exhibits clear signs of ethnonationalism is Russia (although I have to admit to be fairly ignorant on state of things in Argentina)
• Lumping Russia with its former colonies screams “ignorance”
• Grabbing a bunch of countries from the oldest trade route and thinking they are gonna be ethnically homogenous echoes the previous scream
• Me spending time on this post is a clear evidence of procrastination
• Poland has universal healthcare, walkable cities, affordable intra- and intercity public transportation, and provides free higher education to its citizens
• Moldova provides free education to its citizens and has universal healthcare
• Even Russia has a still working universal healthcare (terrible by many standards, but still beats US) and provides higher education to its citizens
• Argentina has universal healthcare and offers free higher education to it’s citizens
• Why am I still procrastinating? Send help!

USA is a dominant superpower though.

The original book finds itself in a science fiction genre only because anything with spaceships and technology is placed there. For all practical purposes though, it’s a space fantasy.

In other words, complaining about science of Dune is like complaining about poetic meter of a tax report - something you do only with the closest of friends.

Welcome to the world of SPAs. Where every little thing needs its own application.

Damn it, we even have HTML tags that are impossible to employ in their entirety without use of JavaScript. <dialog> is infuriating and is literally two attributes away from not needing JavaScript.

Except on Chrome. Dialog is broken on Chrome and you will have to clean up with JavaScript after chrome’s own half assed implementation.

When people say “pointers are hard”, they mean “I have no idea where the star goes and now an ampersand is also implicated”.

And if there’s a bug in that code, you’re fucked.

Safety features should work if everything else fails. Their failure mode can’t be “fuck it, it didn’t work”. Which is directly opposite to the failure mode of a subscription based service.

Don’t discriminate. Many men want a guy that can provide too.

I’m not afraid of retirement, I’m afraid of needing to work on the day of my funeral.

By not using internet. No, seriously, if you access something over the internet, you will leave tracks. This here post is nothing new or inherently scary on its own. I used to have forum signatures that would tell people what browser they were using or from what IP they were coming.

What you really want to do is disable third party cookies on everything you own. That (and things like hsts super cookies) is what tracks you.

If you’re using an app to browse Lemmy, you might ask for their implementation to reject cookies and fingerprinting attempts when displaying images and other embeddables.

a minute later edit: And yeah, if you don’t like web services to know the IP address given to you by your ISP, VPN is a decent option.

I’m weirded out by their “why need an account” explanation when Mullvad has a perfectly viable solution that doesn’t require one. “We don’t link your queries to you” is a vastly different claim from a “we can’t link your queries to you” one. Still, considering who we compare them to…

On a personal note, Google search is so infuriatingly shitty lately that I’d been thinking about switching to another service. This does look to be worth a try.