A couple of months ago I set up DNS filtering for our home network using

GitHub

GitHub - hagezi/dns-blocklists: DNS-Blocklists: For a better internet - keep the internet clean!

DNS-Blocklists: For a better internet - keep the internet clean! - hagezi/dns-blocklists

and the pro.txt list specifically. Did it with the full expectation that it will cause issues and I will have to dedicate some time to fixing those for the family as everyone is online a lot. In fact it has not caused a single thing we use to stop working, except regularly causing various things to log failures to track. Some site tries to redirect me to ads, they fail to load. VSCode tries to send stats (?) to Microsoft and logs error in reaching it (but keeps working). All sorts of Windows and Apple tracking gets nuked too, about 1 in 5 dns requests gets killed in a sample of about 8 million requests. Loving it!

There is an AI cult in Silicone Valley these days apparently, which says AI will be superior to us and we are just it's temporary birth vessel. I like Joe Rogan, but he keeps spreading that nonsense too. The fact that some AI researchers think it will be good for humanity to be overtaken and destroyed by AI reminds me of my years in vet school. I had two friends who said, in moments of sincerity, they wanted to invent a virus which kills humanity (neither of them is Fauci lol). I for one believe in humanity. For all our shortcomings, we keep moving forward and getting better. 200 years ago slavery was the established norm. 100 years ago women could not vote. We may be a part of a fiat slavery system now, but we have found a way out and are more free than and live better lives than ever before. The levels of awareness and intelligence are rising. If, fingers crossed, some warmongering lunatic doesn't end us all in a mushroom cloud, we'll be just fine.

On AI And Consciousness – Caitlin Johnstone

Stunned by how many great suggestions this triggered. View quoted note →

In the UK, some people have found a way to stop paying tax too. Basically, they asked the govt to prove that none of their tax money will be used to fund terrorism - and the govt failed. So they place the taxes in a trust with the govt as the beneficiary, give them some time to react, then take their money back from the trust.

No Tax For War

No Tax For War | Lawful, Peaceful Tax Resistance Movement

Join the movement to stop taxpayer money funding war. Learn how to withhold taxes lawfully through trusts and take peaceful action for justice and ...

View quoted note →

Another super-user-friendly privacy howto from Naomi Brockwell - on Signal usernames:

Odysee

Enable THIS Setting If You Use Signal!

Did you know you can use Signal without sharing your phone number with other users? Signal introduced usernames last year, but many people still do...

Had to replace a specific hard disk today in a PC which has 8 of them. At first a somewhat puzzling task as I didn't want to unplug all of them one by one and test boot. Then I noticed they all have serial numbers on them and you can print them with `lsblk -o NAME,SERIAL`. Phew.

Bitcoin may be dipping, but the plebs are buying. Bisq has a good few buy offers at 1-2% above market value. If you need to sell I doubt you will find a better price anywhere else.

LLMs strenghts and weaknesses - by Courtland of Indie Hackers: https://storage.googleapis.com/indie-hackers.appspot.com/info-products/LLMs%20Good%20vs%20Bad.pdf

"The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles" This one sentence describes a false premise and shows why it is false. The financial incentives will not disappear, they will just get limited to people willing to pay for the creation of 'personal, reality-distorting bubbles'. There is plenty of people with money who will pay to manipulate the plebs. If we take this further and say that PR is advertising, then effectively we will be banning the publishing of information which can alter people's opinions in a positive or negative way on any topic. So... banning advertising is banning speech 🤯 I must be wrong, show me how 😅 View quoted note →

Apparently over 1500 database servers were exposing the postgresql port to the internet protected only with a bruteforceable username and password 🤯 The people who hacked this to do crypto mining did those admins a fucking favour.

The Hacker News

Over 1,500 PostgreSQL Servers Compromised in Fileless Cryptocurrency Mining Campaign

Over 1,500 PostgreSQL servers compromised via weak credentials and SQL abuse, enabling fileless crypto mining.

Prince Andrew accuser, and the most well-known of the victims in the Epstein case, Virginia Giuffre has said on her personal Instagram page that she has four days to live after apparently being involved in a road traffic collision.

Prince Andrew Accuser Virginia Guiffre in "Fatal Accident" Prior to Epstein Files Release

Dateline NBC's Chris Hanson Vows to "Catch the Predators" Among Epstein's Client List - Plus the WARRIOR CREED Podcast

I wish I was able to rate limit some accounts. Cool people, I want to follow, but not at the cost of everyone else cause they post 60 times an hour 😅