It's the same kind of people who think Socialism means Communism, without realizing that anything funded by taxpayers is already, technically, a socialized knowledge/service/product. That includes the roads their vehicles drive on and the military if you want to put it that far.

One might incorporate principles of the other, but that doesn't make it the other product automatically.

In the meantime, the Poopaganda machine will continue running with the kind of ignorance being shown.

I do agree with you. I know a fair number of HAMs who continue to network with other radio operators. They are always on standby in the event of a major communications breakdown for public service reasons, and have warehouses of parts and tools in their sheds/homes to repair their radio hardware, as well as hand-powered generation equipment. Mad respect to those people. I've sat down with them for a few hours and have enjoyed listening to their projects.

I also used to work for a Data Center. I hear you there with limited Transit providers. There used to be many more in the past, although consolidation has occurred, and continues to occur. I know SprintLink is under T-Mobile, Level3 is now under CenturyLink/Lumen/whatever you want to call them. Smaller, regional providers I used to use like FiberTech Networks are now under Crown Castle, and Crown Castle is now in the process of merging with Zayo. Providers like XO Communications and UUNet are all under Verizon now. Charter/Spectrum is in the middle of merging with Cox. Frontier is merging with Verizon. Windstream is Windstream... The list goes on, and on, and on. Even though the Data Center I worked at bought as much bandwidth as we could from every major transit provider that is in our local POP, the POP/IX sites, as you mention, are the biggest risk, and that is where targeting will occur.

The Military already has their own private communication network. They don't have to do anything. But if they want to seize Starlink, then yeah, that's the absolute worst case and countries are already exploring ways to avoid that doomsday situation for them. SpaceX already needs to deal with the government for their launches and Orbit coordination.

As for Cryptocurrency, that brings us back to the general issue at hand with Crypto (and subsequent memecoins). If MAGACrypto were to become the de-facto currency for US, will anyone else accept it for trade? USD is only as powerful as it is because it is the global trade standard. Cutting off the US from trade by severing communications networks will completely devalue the USD. Crypto isn't going to function without a communications network. If you have to convert from MAGACrypto to USD just to do trade, then MAGACrypto is worthless. I hope no administration in the US, is dumb enough to actually do that. Even if the current Admin and a few past admins have put in the work to make something like that possible. The US, after all, created the technology to do that to begin with.

The overly restrictive DRM preventing you from getting above 720p video on a streaming service that you pay for is generally reason enough alone to pirate.

The US hosts a lot of critical infrastructure for the rest of the Internet, still. There have been a lot of projects to decouple from the US for this exact reason. If you also look at Cable maps, the connectivity between Europe and Asia relies on those high capacity links going through the US. There have been more connections constructed between Europe and Asia to eliminate the US as the only path over the years, but some of those cable routes also tend to venture through contested / not-so-friendly territories. Thus, transit over those paths is also more expensive!

We also have to consider that Starlink can only do so much. I believe they have trialed or have even activated Inter-satellite connectivity. But that is still a US-based company, and other countries like China are working to launch their own constellations out of fear that US and Europe-based Satellite companies can just come in someday and turn off service.

Also, cutting that Fiber will break the Public Telephone Network, which is essential for any business. I don't know how many Telcos maintain Satellite uplinks between continents these days for the PSTN, but the end result won't be pretty for anyone. Total economic collapse, especially for the US!

I know the IA has mentioned in the past they have projects in place to try to back up their archive. I hope their backup plans are true, and if they are attacked by the US, they can relocate to a new safe haven and come back online quickly. The IA has been such a wonderful resource for research and accountability.

I suppose the major bit of hope I have about the IA is with their partnership with the Library of Congress.

As for ISPs shutting down Torrent users, I suspect they would do that strictly based on bandwidth usage alone. I know my local Cable company will send nastygrams if they see you using a disproportionate amount of bandwidth compared to other customers. I've seen them also shut down Business Internet accounts for doing the exact same thing!

Every time a service rolls out one of these verification mechanisms, I really, REALLY hope they remain true to their word that age verification is only being done locally, and nothing is being sent out to a remote server... and they never change those rules in some privacy policy update.

k-ID is a company I haven't personally heard of, but I know other companies like LinkedIn use companies such as Persona for Identity verification. Several months ago, I had a spat with LinkedIn as part of making an account where they tried to force me to scan my Government ID as well as a copy of my face to a third party company called Persona. The only difference is, while they claim the scans were only going to be stored temporarily for verification purposes and then deleted, the simple fact that they are storing anything is about as far from "On Device" as you can get. Needless to say, I did not scan my ID to LinkedIn, and I had to force them to delete the newly created account.

What I'm most particularly bothered by is how many of these verification services require a mobile phone and a mobile app to do.

It will actually be for both! Emphasis on the part of the article where it says China will still have a stake of 20% in the company, AND they get to keep the algorithm.

All the US is doing is buying up physical assets and infrastructure, and the user base. The juicy bits they wanted, they didn't get. Everyone is likely going to jump off of TikTok the moment it comes time to segment the US market from the Rest of the World. China doesn't have to do a thing because Douyin is already maintained separately for the Chinese market.

No.

It's the gun analogy. Guns don't kill people. People with guns kill people. People with guns kill people over disagreements they can't properly resolve, or lunacy. Guns are a tool for hunting for food, but caveman brain leads to them being used as both deterrents, and as misused weapons.

If Fox News promotes lunacy and caters to lunacy, then they should probably be dealt with and taken off the air. My biggest problem with Fox is just how awful their opinion segments (most of their runtime) are and sound. My goodness, I lose IQ just listening to it for more than two seconds. When Fox News reports on news, and only news, without an opinion, they are fine.

Companies are locked to Microsoft Office whether we like it or not. Many don't seem willing to contribute to LibreOffice to make it beat out Excel in terms of performance, or to replace PowerBI, or any of the many Add-ins that are specifically written for Excel by Governments, etc.

We also both know, the moment any country or significantly large business starts talking about replacing Microsoft products, Microsoft is going to take notice and do the absolute bare minimum to save themselves. That's what makes all of this so difficult. At least as a consumer, I'm happy to run Linux and LibreOffice on my hardware, and I'll promote the usage of both to anyone who asks.

I say the same thing about Cisco Meraki (not Meraki Go). Who likes paying yearly for Cisco network hardware that bricks itself and takes down your network if you forget to pay the licensing? At that point it's not even about having the support contract to get firmware updates and support. It's just a company dragging you by the balls for recurring revenue, after you already paid for the hardware. But companies keep buying that crap because the product makes management of the hardware easy enough to make it seem valuable. I'd much rather buy Ubiquiti UniFi gear.

Microsoft does on Home Edition without even asking, and it doesn't provide the users with a choice to store the key locally OR put it on the Cloud account, like Windows Pro does. I'm sure Microsoft has a master key to an account as well. But one can hope they do not, and they are also storing those BitLocker keys in an encrypted fashion in whatever database runs the backend.

Also agree with you on TPMs. They are useful when invoked by the user, like for passkey or secrets storage. DRM on content and software is, and always will be, anti-consumer. As for now secure TPMs are, I know Infineon did have that Random Number Generator bug which basically broke the TPMs. So there's that.

Yep, exactly this. You can bypass the TPM and Processor requirements, but at some point it will come back to bite someone in the butt.

Microsoft with the 24H2 update broke Windows 11 for older systems (like Core2Duo, which are already ancient) due to a lack of required processor instructions. I've seen systems running under QEMU, and also on newer systems like the AMD Ryzen Zen1 platform experience "Unsupported Processor" BSODs preventing the system from booting.

Even outside of that, Microsoft doesn't deploy the yearly feature roll-ups to systems with unsupported hardware, even if Windows 11 is already installed. I've seen many unsupported systems end up stuck 1-2 builds behind, and they never see the update. They have to be manually updated using the same mechanisms that got Windows 11 installed in the first place.

Microsoft I believe, expects Windows 11 to be running on a minimum set of hardware, and that's all they are qualifying it for. So older systems are going to eat it at some point if they are used in production.

The TPM checks are for security but, certainly not required if someone is willing to drop system security for some reason.