Did you ever find an answer on this?
Lately I’ve seen lots of external PCI-E slots that attach to a USB 3 cable, and they’re quite cheap. Theoretically you could add an external graphics card that way, but I have not tried it. Someone told me the heat that would bring to my USB 3 expresscard would risk damage. I think these external PCI-E slots are intended to be attached to a desktop so a cryptocurrency miner can use the GPU.
Worth noting that some countries adjust to the reduced demand for postal service by reducing the number of delivery days. Belgium did this, where they only deliver standard class letters a couple times per week. Priority class gets better treatment.
In the US, Trump is trying to fuck with USPS. He wants to privatize it. Funny thing is, it’s the (Trump supporting) rural areas that would be fucked over the most by privatization. Since he prioritizes his voters above ethical people, he’s struggling with cognitive dissonance.
We need a reform and a robust way to interact digitally with the government, pay taxes and also send messages etc.
I think that’s nearly impossible. Some people use the Tor network and govs tend to block it. For me, “robust” means being strong enough to handle Tor traffic, but I don’t think anti-Tor ignorance could ever be flushed out.
Some people also use very OLD devices, like myself, and refuse to contribute e-waste to landfills. That crowd is also hard to cater for. For me, “robust” also means working with lynx browser, but I don’t think the chase-the-shiny incompetence of only supporting new devices could ever be flushed out.
So I must ultimately disagree because if the gov were to achieve what they believe is robust, it would be a recipe for ending analog transactions that everyone excluded from their digital systems rely on. They should strive for robustness, but never call it robust. They should recognise that digital tech always excludes some people and so analog systems are still needed.
By the way: If your emails frequently lands in spam folders you should check your mail servers IP if it’s on some spam filter list.
That is exactly the problem. My mail server runs on a residential IP – deliberately so. My comment stands: it’s naive to make a sender responsible for email landing in a spam folder when the sender has no control or even transparency over the operation of the recipient’s mail server.
Nevermind. Later terminated the process and restarted and it worked. So it’s not likely a blockade of any kind.
(edit) I tried to change the title to: ~~Library blocks Tor Browser but not Tor (wtf?)~~ nevermind but sdf blocks me with a popup saying “language”.
I avoid the grocery stores that have ‘loyalty programs’
I have that option but it leads to other problems. The grocers who are so small that they have no loyalty program have a different problem: they have limited choice of brands for their small spaces and they tend to choose poorly. E.g. a small store close to me only has Kellogg’s-branded cereal, which I boycott. Their soaps are all Unilever or Proctor & Gamble. They choose the most popular brands for a lot of stuff. So to practice my boycotts against (probably hundreds of) brands requires a store big enough to carry generic nonames.
In some regions creditors and merchants have an obligation to accept cash and they are simply ignoring the law. But the gov does not enforce the cash acceptance law. It’s bizarre. Even more bizarre that people just go along with it. There was a case where a group went to an illegally cashless cafe. They ordered food and drinks and when the bill came they said “we only have cash”. The shop threatened to call the police. The customers said: please, we will wait. Police came. Customers explained that thier cash was refused. Police said: well, nothing for us to do here… you’re free to go.
We need more people to exploit unlawfully cashless situations. People should be happy to benefit while also doing a community service. Of course it’s not for folks who are afraid of cops and courts.
Denmark has this problem too. There are some university resources that are unreachable to students who cannot do an SMS 2FA verification.
Indeed it needs to be fought.
I’m with @DougHolland@lemmy.world in that I oppose surviellance advertising anyway, so if the loyalty tracking were taking place without a special app (e.g. scanning a bar code from plastic/paper), I would still not register.
In some cases we can do better than Doug. E.g. grab a paper loyalty application form (if they are available), scan the barcode or QR code, return the blank form to the top of the pile. Someone else will activate that bar code with their personal details later. You can regenerate the barcode, store it on your phone (which need not be subscribed to GSM service), or print it on paper, and use the barcode for discounts (& pay cash of course). You obviously corrupt their surveillance advertising DB and also get the discounts.
Win-win for me. But I guess it’s questionable to what extent the DB is being corrupted. My own purchases are still aggregated together which supports advertising. OTOH, it’s all aggregated to a different person, which to some extent corrupts the info. It’s unclear if this is overall more or less harmful to advertising.
Ideas? Perhaps we could create a barcode-sharing platform whereby some people take a hit for the team and register, then share their barcode for others. The volunteer would at least gain the benefit of their data being littered with data of other people.
That looks like a separate program, which Debian does not have. Apparently something added to Ubuntu that was not inherited from Debian.
Is that a separate installation? Imagemagick was my first attempt. It did not recognize XCF.
“Renamed” seems like an understatement. I heard Digital Services was completely hallowed out. If you dump the people and change the name, what’s left? The chairs and keyboards?
Musk is not personally present in the infiltration. He sent DOGE staff.
Knee-jerk fix: we make a FOIA request for the data that was removed.
But the shame of it is that FOIA reqs are not gratis, which means we have to pay again for the data. Elon’s DOGE office would just see it as a success that they are getting extra compensation for the data.
If anyone is writing or maintaining a playbook/handbook for how to run an authoritarian regime, removing open data would be a play to add.
Blocking Tor is useless for DDoS protection because there are not enough exit nodes to impact a US federal website more than a fly on the windscreen of a 16 wheel tracktor-trailor. Such an attempt will bring down Tor itself before the DOGE admins even notice.
Does your block screen look different than the attached snapshot?
The article is jailed in Cloudflare’s walled garden, so for the excluded, this is the full text:
The store is trialing a feature to let customers unlock cabinets with their phone. By AJ Dellinger Published January 28, 2025 | Comments (29)
CVS is finally willing to unlock the treasures that they have placed behind lock and key—so long as you’re willing to give the company an additional peak into your personal information. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the pharmacy giant is trying out a pilot program that will allow customers to unlock cabinets and shelves via the CVS app.
The program is currently being piloted in three stores as an attempt to ease some of the pain points that customers continue to experience in convenience stores that have grown increasingly inconvenient, requiring people to stand around waiting for an overworked staff member can come open up the deodorant lock box for them. If the trial proves successful, the company is planning on rolling the program out to 10-15 stores, with the ultimate goal of full-scale deployment across the country.
CVS’s new system for allowing customers to unlock common goods that have been put behind plexiglass will operate primarily through the company’s app. People hoping to actually be able to take things off the shelves like they would do in a normal store will have to download the CVS app and sign up for the company’s loyalty program. You’ll have to be logged into the app and connect to the store’s Wi-Fi, then enable Bluetooth connectivity on your device in order to activate the feature that allows you to unlock the cabinets. Shockingly, this is an improvement in convenience.
The introduction of the ability to unlock products in stores, in addition to being the solution to a problem that CVS caused all on its own, is part of a broader effort to shift more people into the CVS app ecosystem, where the company can farm data. The company has been trying to position itself at the center of peoples’ health, and last year it tapped Deloitte Digital to reimagine its mobile app in a way that more efficiently leverages user health information to serve them ads, offers, and just generally keep them locked into CVS.
Per The Journal, the company soon plans to load up the app with AI features, including “a search feature powered by generative AI.” Which is great, surely nothing bad will happen by allowing people to have their health questions answered by a machine known for hallucinating information.
That’s fair. I don’t really think it’s cloudflares fault though.
First of all you have to separate Cloudflare’s pre-emptive attack on Tor from that of other targets (VPN, CGNAT). The difference is that the Cloudflare patron is given control over whether to block Tor but not the others.
Cloudflare is of course at fault. CF made the decision to recklessly block whole groups of people based on the crude criteria of IP reputation associated to a member of the whole group. It would be like if someone was spotted shoplifting as they were running out the door, and security only got a glimpse of red hair. And then the store would refuse service to all people with red hair to make sure the one baddy gets blocked. It’s discriminatory collective punishment as a consequence of sloppy analysis.
Since it’s a feature that websites use to protect against bad actors and robots.
It’s an anti-feature because it’s blunt tool cheaply created by a clumbsy tech giant who has the power to bully and write-off the disempowered who they marginalize as acceptible collateral damage.
Cloudflare defaults to harrassing Tor visitors with CAPTCHAs which are usually broken (because the CAPTCHA service CF hires is itself tor-hostile, but CF is happy because CF profits from the uncompensated labor from the captcha solutions). The CF patron can whitelist Tor or blacklist Tor (in addition to default shit show). DOGE proactively chose to blacklist the Tor community.
Defaults are important. Read about “the power of defaults” and how Google paid billions to Mozilla just to be a default search engine in the browser. The money speaks to that importance. CF is 100% responsible for the default state of their sites. Cloudflare (and CF alone) decide what the default setting is.
No one forces anyone to use cloudflare.
Exactly why someone using Cloudflare rightfully gets the blame for their shitty choice to use CF. Most particularly when it is a tax-funded service. At least in the private sector we have the option of walking. I will not use a CF website (even if Tor is whitelisted) - so they lose my business. But when public money is spent on CF who denies demographics of people who are entitled to the gov service, it’s an injustice because you cannot boycott gov services (you cannot get a tax refund if you are excluded).
I wonder how that can best be expressed without overly cluttering the forum. The purpose of the forum is to track that, so it would be useful if someone would post lists of signficant or essential public resources that are in walled gardens. Maybe one thread for all of North Korea and a thread for Russia, … Venezuala, etc. But note as well if Tor is blocked but not in a fiefdom (walled garden), then !exclusive_public_resources@lemmy.sdf.org is the best place to post them.
That page is dead for me.
But I just wanted to add that Chevron is an ALEC member in the US. Thus they feed the GOP and many extreme right policy. Should be boycotting them already anyway. They also got caught financing the Cloakroom project.