Not enabling it may prevent you from accessing the user-facing features but may not actually prevent it from recording your conversation and training on it.

Not privatize, atomize. Centralized control is ripe for abuse, no matter whose control it is.

Oh yes, let’s nationalize the communications platforms and give the government direct control over how people express themselves. Surely the government is 100% trustworthy and will not use that power to suppress criticism or political opponents, or track people who are ‘unpatriotic’, or redefine ‘hate speech’ in a way that benefits the current regime. No such thing has ever happened in the history of ever. What could possibly go wrong.

AI is a surveillance technology.

VPNs as a technology might not be illegal but circumventing the firewall certainly is.

Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.

This is a bit of a misunderstanding about how things work in an authoritarian system. Sure, you might fly under the radar for awhile, but if you call attention to yourself (say, by getting caught trying to bypass the government firewall) and you are not high-profile, then it is very low-effort to make you disappear. Few will notice, and those that do will stay silent out of fear.

If you are more high-profile you still get black-bagged, you just get released after, with your behavior suitably modified.

Naomi Wu no longer uploads to YouTube.

Depends - how many family members do you have that the PRC might use against you? or who would miss you if the PRC black bagged you?

And there are hundreds if not thousands of them, plus a lot of automated tooling.

In which case anyone who wants to can read the message traffic and make changes to it before passing it on to the receiver.

No, you can’t conduct business this way.

No one can bank online without reliable encryption. No one can transact business online without reliable encryption.

Amazon is a terribly exploitative company, but… they might actually be better than Oracle, and AFAIK Bezos isn’t in bed with Trump like Ellison is.

The secret ingredient is poverty wages.

My point of view is that a human rights violation is a human rights violation regardless of the context in which it happens, and is therefore an important thing to discuss and give visibility to.

Labeling it as “political” and using that as an excuse to hide discussion of it feels like bootlicker behavior to me.

Yep, it’s very much “rules for thee but not for me” at .ml

ICE’s actions are political.

Discussing ICE’s actions is not necessarily political, unless you consider human rights violations to be necessarily political as a topic.

Silencing discussion of human rights violations implies tacit support for the action, so I guess we know now where .ml stands. Any claim of leftist ideology on their part is a sham, they just have a hard-on for authoritarians.

Beyond your eventual technical solution, keep this in mind: untested backups don’t exist.

I recommend reading some documentation about industry-leading solutions like Veeam… you won’t be able to reproduce all of the enterprise-level functionality, at least not without spending a lot of money, but you can try to reproduce the basic practices of good backup systems.

Whatever system you implement, draft a testing plan. A simpler backup solution that you can test and validate will be worth more than something complex and highly detailed.

I mean… exposed to each other, sure, but they’re all exposed to Syncthing and the public relays.

It is a fantastic idea to start your home server project on some e-waste hardware, and use it until you know specifically what features you’re lacking that you would need better hardware for.

Why are we taking this so seriously?

Because it’s funnier that way.

I don’t want to actually be the Borg.

I totally did say “I’d be a Borg”

You seem very confused. Join the link, the Collective will bring you clarity!

I meant a socialist cyborg.

Don’t let your dreams stay dreams!

Er, wait, are you using Syncthing for its intended purpose of syncing files across devices on your local network? And then exposing that infrastructure to the internet? Or are you isolating Syncthing instances?

And this is why anyone who suggests that machine learning systems can be used to make social decisions of any kind should be laughed out of the room. Even when the system programs itself, its goals are set by people and it is trained on data generated and selected by people.