flip phone

Almost all such phones are actually smart phones in a flip phone Edgar Suit. Especially if it has maps or YouTube or any kind of an App Store. I see a crapton of flip phones that run Android, which has all sorts of Google spyware piggybacking along.

I think there may be only two or three dumb flip phones or feature flip phones left on the market, and IIRC two are locked to specific networks.

If you want a bona-fide dumb phone, you might be limited to something like the rotary un-smartphone.

or toaster can’t do its basic job offline

pats my 1962 Sunbeam Radiant Toaster

Obligatory Red Dwarf toaster scene

Go for older laser printers. They’re bulletproof, cheap on toner, free of DRM, and even if they only come with an LPT port you can always build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.

About 3-4 years ago I took a bit of a dive into the firmware of IoT devices. The utter lack of security and the amount of information being hoovered up to the mothership made me swear to never build anything “smart” into the renovations of my current home. Sure, there will be automation. There will be CCTV. There will be solar with battery backup for essentials. There will be conveniences of all kinds. But virtually all will be air gapped, incapable of remote rooting, and under my full control.

Hell, even my laser printers are HP models over two decades old - an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN - that are totally devoid of any DRM or “smart features” and can trivially take generic overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.

Sometimes criminals also shoot back at the police that come after them with guns.

In the heat of the moment, the only difference between a vigilante and a cop is the level of training, the assigned equipment, and the choice for the cop to follow well-established procedural rules. It’s only when you zoom out do you see the legal system supporting the cop. But when zoomed in and examining the individual incidents, nothing says the cop can’t come away with added lead, either.

Vigelanty justice only works when target deserved like the dead CEO, otherwise it just crime.

You clearly see the world in black-and-white, when it really is made up of shades of grey.

Which means that since you haven’t already gotten the point, all the crayons and construction paper in the world isn’t going to help.

The point I was making… Is that the article brought a red herring fact that has nothing to do with anything

Why did they bring it up?

It was not a red herring in the least, and it struck to the very core of my own criticisms: while some vigilantes may be very stringent about their own investigations and targets, others may not.

In this example, these vigilantes artificially engineered a target where none was likely to ever exist. They drew the target in using the profile of a perfectly legal 18yo woman, but then turned around and claimed that the target was actually chasing the profile of an 17yo - and illegally young - girl, when he was in fact not doing so.

This was a very clear situation of entrapment by false pretenses.

Who said there is anything wrong with this?

How is tbsi even example of pedophile rape? It is two adults.

that’s a weird thing to bring NYT tbh

Tell me you completely failed to grok my criticisms without saying that they flew clear over your head at 10,000m

I don’t have a problem with actual pedophiles that are caught in these dragnets.

My problem arises from the lack of rigorous and well-documented investigation into the target before shite starts popping off. As the article pointed out, there is nothing wrong with a 22yo dating an 18yo. And the problem here is a sense of vindictiveness trying to manufacture targets where not all targets are guilty of pedophilia.

So: you want to take a pipe wrench to warm over a pedophile? Make sure there is oodles of evidence that clearly and unambiguously makes the person a pedophile, and sure as shite I will look the other way. But the problem is that there is no self-reinforcing framework in place within the vigilante system to ensure and enforce this threshold of evidence. And without this system, innocent people are going to get hurt or killed.

Looks like I’ll finally be migrating my final workstation off of Windows 11.

I mean, I still have a while. The Dell T7910 still meets all of the Windows 11 Workstation 24H2 requirements, so Rufus only needs to modify that one part of the installer. And once I have Windows installed, I can do upgrades over Windows Update.

But once the machine gets too old for that…

At least OpenSUSE meets most of my needs.

Canada might need these sooner rather than later.

With the breakdown of democracy and the rule of law in America, the Constitution just became wholly unenforceable and therefore irrelevant. That means that Trump could make good on his fever dream of invading Canada.

And there are many Americans who would jump at the chance to obey his command to slaughter Canadians. With only 40M against America’s 334M - and 0.097M military personnel against America’s 2.1M - it would be absolutely no contest.

Our only way of making such a fascist act of aggression as painful as possible would be with asymmetrical warfare using tiny, hard-to-defeat drones that could act independently and strike without warning. Deploy 10k of these suckers onto a battlefield, and the only survivors would be those within sealed armour or flying at high altitude. Because even an A10 Warthog loitering low over the field can be taken out if it unexpectedly ingests a half-dozen of the explosive buggers.