The given reason is that people are innocent until proven guilty, and the DOJ doesn’t want to create witch-hunts just because someone was mentioned in passing. For instance, Robin Williams is mentioned in an email chain, but only because he refused to visit the island.

But the most straightforward reason is a coverup. That’s pretty much the only way to actually justify the massive amounts of redactions. As time has gone on and more evidence has mounted, it has become increasingly clear that the given reason is bogus.

If something smells like a duck, it could be a duck, but it could also be a goose, or a chicken, or a swan, or any other number of things that smell like ducks… But if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, has feathers like a duck, has flippers like a duck, has a flat bill like a duck, and quacks like a duck? We can only reasonably conclude that it’s a duck.

Obfuscation is part of the motorcade, but not to the extent you would think. The motorcade has two presidential limos, and the POTUS is typically put in one while the VP is put in the other. Or in this case, the second limo would simply be empty. The order of the limos is random. The idea being that if you manage to bomb one limo, you’d only get either the VP or POTUS, and you’d have no way of knowing which one you got until after the fact. And that’s assuming the bomb is even effective, because the presidential limos have RPG-proof windows and heavy armored plating underneath the body panels.

Most of the motorcade is focused on things like landmine detection, biological weapon detection, chemical weapon detection, standby security forces in case they need to fan out/circle the wagons and create a secure perimeter, on-site medical staff, monitoring local radio chatter, jamming equipment to activate in case of an attack, etc…

That’s probably some Secret Service thing, because the threat of poisoning is actually real. In America, the Secret Service goes to great lengths to vet potential restaurant stops wherever the POTUS/VP is going to be. But they don’t exactly have jurisdiction to do that when they’re in another country.

Notably, Trump’s love of fast food has made the Secret Service’s job extremely frustrating… He apparently has a tendency to just spontaneously demand a drive-thru stop, giving the Secret Service no time to actually run security checks on the staff ahead of time.

Honestly, we should start doing hardware-based age verification instead. Have the government run a simple yes/no service for individuals to be able to verify their age. The service simply asks if you’re over 18, and the government responds with a simple yes/no.

You verify your identity on the device once when setting it up, it asks the government if you’re over 18, and then your user account is verified as an adult when the “yes” response is returned. The only time it would need to be repeated is when someone turns 18, which would be something the user would need to manually prompt their device to retry. And notably, the government isn’t being pinged for every site you visit, they only got pinged for the initial device setup. So they don’t get access to any of your browsing data.

Now your phone can automatically send a “yes, I’m over 18” signal to any site or service that asks. And kids won’t be verified, meaning they won’t even be able to see the “are you over 18” prompts; they’ll simply be booted off the site (or in Discord’s case, restricted) as soon as it automatically asks their device for an age verification. No action is required on the user’s part, and the site/service didn’t need any invasive info about who you are. As far as an adult is concerned, they got direct access to the site without any kind of annoying “are you over 18” prompt. And as far as a child is concerned, they got automatically redirected right back to Google’s home page as soon as they clicked the porn link.

For shared devices (like computers) it could be handled on a per user basis. You verify your age on Windows/Linux/MacOS when creating the account, and then whenever you’re logged in, any site can simply ask if you’re over 18. Don’t want your kid to stumble across porn? Don’t verify their account. Now safeguarding kids on the internet is as simple as parents safeguarding their computer password and refusing to verify their child accounts.

It’s basically the best of all worlds:

• The government/private data brokers don’t get free access to your browsing data, like what would happen if every individual site asked the government for verification. This is our current reality, with data brokers hoovering up photos of IDs to feed to their data scientists.
• The adult user only needs to take action once to verify their age, and then after that the age gates are automatically opened. You don’t need to verify independently with each site, because your device handles that automatically during the initial handshake.
• Sites don’t get any additional personal info about you, except for the automatic pass/fail hardware response saying that you’re over 18. They don’t need to collect your info to pass to a third party verification system. They don’t need to ask the government, because that has already been done. And they don’t need to worry about things like GDPR compliance for collected info, because there is no additional collected info.
• Your browsing info isn’t shared with third parties, because the sites/services you use have no need to ask third parties for verification.

Of course it’ll never happen though, because it would restrict what kinds of info data brokers could collect and sell.

I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.

I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.

Here’s a reminder that packing the 5th circuit court of appeals with batshit conservative judges was a key step in the Southern Strategy. There’s also a county in Texas that only has enough of a population for two judges, and they made sure both of those are also batshit conservative. So any time they want to get a batshit conservative ruling, they just file it in that one specific county in Texas. And then Texas appeals go to the 5th circuit. And any circuit rulings are applied nationally (due to lower courts using precedent to set cases) unless it goes all the way to the SCOTUS. And with the current SCOTUS, they can simply refuse to see the case, and the 5th circuit ruling will stand.

Lots of times, the court cases are obviously staged. There have been cases where a plaintiff didn’t even realize they were named in a case that ruled for/against them, because the PAC that actually filed the case simply used their name to be able to file it in that county.

Yeah, self-hosting it can be a bear, especially since you need to deal with the whole “bots trying to kill it will regularly post CSAM in random channels, and if any of your users are in that channel it will federate to your own server and now you have CSAM saved on your server’s cache” stuff. It’s the same problem that Lemmy was dealing with during Reddit’s APIcolypse. You can always choose not to federate, but that largely defeats the point of the protocol existing in the first place.

You also need to set up TURN servers to get functional voice/video calls. That’s something the average Joe won’t know how to do, and is typically going to require a paid tier from some external host like Cloudflare.

Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.

It heavily depends on your instance, fwiw. .world tends to lean closer to Reddit in terms of moderation. And then .ml leans the other direction, and heavily moderates in favor of communism.

Yeah, the old “strict parents make sneaky kids” thing is unfortunately very true. You won’t stop the kids from doing it. You’ll just lose the ability to monitor them when they inevitably do it behind your back anyways.

Audiobooks mostly, and I know it’s not the same

FWIW, studies have found that reading and speech activate different language regions of the brain… But oddly enough, audiobooks activate the reading parts of the brain, not just the speech parts. So it may be more similar than you’d initially think.

I finally got my AudioBookShelf instance up and running last year, around March. In those remaining 7 months, I “read” (listened to) over 50 books. I used to be a voracious reader as a child. But at some point I lost the spark, as finding time to read got harder and harder. Audiobooks have reignited that love for reading, in a way I can’t even put into words.

I find myself looking forward to my daily commute, because it means I can listen to another two or three chapters in the car. I’ve even started taking the longer route home (which is technically more fuel efficient, but adds like 10 minutes to my commute) because I don’t mind the extra time in the car. I find myself wanting to wash the dishes or fold the laundry, because I can have my earbuds in while I work.

I still doomscroll on YouTube shorts or Instagram reels occasionally, but that doesn’t mean I have to give up long form content like reading. They fill two entirely separate niches.

It’s both, but the honey trap provides both motivation for the traffickers and it means everyone involved should be considered compromised by foreign states. If it were only a pedo ring, it would be bad but that’s pretty much where the conspiracy would stop.

But with a verified honey trap, it needs to be assumed that the named people are now (and have been) acting on behalf of a hostile foreign nation who has mountains of blackmail on them. And reframing those implicated peoples’ motivations from “they’re just seeking power for themselves” to “they’re aiding a hostile foreign nation” shifts things from “selfish and power-hungry” to outright “high treason”.

That’s a whole lotta words to say “I have no fucking idea what Home Assistant is, but have strong preconceived feelings about it.”

Never bought a Windows license… But happily paid the Apple Tax.

They’re the same picture.

Yeah, my linked comment was actually in response to an earlier comment I made, basically saying “this app’s explosive rise in popularity feels astroturfed.” I caught a couple of downvotes for that original comment. But the more I tried using it, the worse it got. It will 100% contribute to the normalization of Nazi viewpoints.

It only applies to steam keys though. Like if you want to sell on other storefronts for cheaper, it’s perfectly fine. You simply can’t sell steam keys on other storefronts for cheaper. It’s not really “price fixing” as much as it is “Steam ensuring their servers aren’t used unless they get their cut”…

Like imagine a company wants to sell more copies of their game. So they set up their own site to sell directly to consumers, and it’s cheaper than buying on Steam. This is totally fine. Consumers can still choose to add the standalone version as a non-Steam game to be able to launch it via Steam.

It’s only a breach of contract if they start offering steam keys for that same (cheaper) price, which allows the game to be downloaded via Steam, includes achievement integrations, includes Steam’s friend list “join game” multiplayer, includes Steam Deck/Steam Machine optimizations, etc… If they want all of those nice Steam integrations, they need an official Steam key. And that Steam key can’t be sold cheaper than on Steam’s official store.

Yeah, I bought my own domain specifically so I could set up a catch-all email service. Everything sent to my domain hits the same inbox, but I can easily see who has sold my info. If I start getting spam addressed to “walmart@example.com” then I know Walmart sold my info. And I can easily set a rule to automatically mark anything addressed to that burned account as spam.

Lots of websites quickly caught onto the “just add a + after your regular email” trick, and set up an internal rule to remove any of the + tags. So that old trick is largely useless.

Yup. Privatize profits, socialize losses. It’s the way the capitalist machine is able to keep grinding up orphans for the 1%.

Yeah, I tried to give it an honest shot. Made an account and opened the Discover page. The very first post was an antisemitic “the Jews are secretly running the world” conspiracy theory post. Whatever, it’s inevitable on an anti-censorship app. Not a great first impression, but I’m willing to shrug it off as a fluke.

Then three or four posts later, there was a blatant “Hitler was right about the Jews and the holocaust wasn’t enough” post, made by an account that was dedicated to glorifying Hitler. Again, this is on the Discover page for a brand new account. Meaning it’s what the algorithm is serving to users by default.

I made another comment about it (with screenshots) a day or two ago. Here is the link.

America bombed its own city 40’ish years ago, and the entire country just moved on without a care. And about 60 years before that, almost forty city blocks were razed to the ground because the inhabitants were black.

Yes, they 100% could risk it. America is an extremely propagandized country, with patriotism on the right reaching jingoistic levels.