Terrarium

He is just extremely into Juche? A self-sufficient country with multiple supply chains feeding into each other? WRONG! Every cooperative will manufacture every product from bottom to top with nothing shared between products.

Save money, learn to live cheaply, and become a socialist organizing your community.

That's correct. SEIU is wed to the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party supports most of what Trump does but knows it would be bad optics to outright say so. And they have no functional means of resistance - their constant goal is to get elected by simply not being Republicans so that they don't have to actually implement publicly beneficial policy. And because of this, they guarantee a Republican victory the next time around. So SEIU has a worse than useless political arm, it actually works against itself due to myopia, liberal cooption, and corruption.

But the nice thing about organized labor is that you can struggle within it. You can help make your local better, help tie it to practical action, help get socialists into positions of power within it. It will sometimes be a fight but this is also infinitely more impact than you would ever have via electoral politics.

It is self-hosting. But use your own servers for anything critical for privacy. Any VPS provider could snoop if they wanted to.

Republicans already set this precedent decades ago. Democrats retconned the power of the parliamentarian.

"Next time around, there's no going back now"

Republicans have repeatedly overruled or fired the parliamentarian for years and years. Democrats later tried to pretend they were an absolute roadblock for campaign promises.

They will "go back" immediately.

Security and privacy benefits from building threat models. It is good to understand how trackable you are on the internet and walking around with your phone.

Do you need to think about how trackable your phone is if you are driving to and from the grocery store? At most you are providing information that the interested parties already have (where you live, where you shop, and when you shop). If you ran into some trouble it could be useful to have not had a tracking device in your pocket, but otherwise little to worry about.

On the other hand if you are taking part in a sensitive action, then yes you need to leave your phone at home or turned off and in a Faraday bag. If it is particularly sensitive then you need to make sure everyone involved does that. Having a tracking device that shows you were at the location at that time is very bad for you and your compatriots. If you need to communicate on-site, use walkie talkies and speak in code. And plan your action around not having comms. This will make your action better planned out in the first place, which is also important for security.

A threat model makes all the difference.

You need to buy more storage to archive Blu-Rays

RETVRN to alphaproteobacteria

Get involved in organizing. Even just little bits. Even just a reading group.

Qihoo is just a typical tech company with a "security" focus. It having a VPN is like Norton having a VPN - like Norton VPN.

Using a shell company is likely just a way to avoid sanctions.

A Chinese app talking to Chinese servers is no more alarming than a Swedish app talking to Swedish servers or an American app talking to American servers. Imagine writing a breathless "report" about how searching the App Store phones home to the United States. You know, to search for and download apps.

So basically the Tech Transparency Project is just doing some nationalist orientalism.

From their website: "TTP is a research initiative of Campaign for Accountability (CfA), a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog organization that uses research, litigation, and aggressive communications to expose misconduct and malfeasance in public life."

Their director: "Katie Paul, TTP’s Director, specializes in tracking criminal activity on online platforms such as Facebook. She also serves as co-director of the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research (ATHAR) Project and a founding member of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online (ACCO)."

They are somewhat opaque about their funding. They claim to not accept corporate funding but every funder they list is just a middleman NGO for corporate/billionaire funding.

So, a typical NGO run by a cop.

Tech companies are generally terrible and tied to financialized nonsense, but there is nothing out of the ordinary here. The outrage is premised entirely on xenophobia.

I wonder if Americans will learn that they actually need to do something, something disruptive, with actual leverage, to actually threaten power. Writing letters does nothing but make the signers-on erroneously believe they've accomplished something. Maybe they'd be more likely to take action if they didn't sign the letter.