MFA is the biggest hurdle. I literally could not do my job without it.

I want Roku to fuck all the way off with that plan.

Those aren’t tanks and Police Departments get them for little or no money as the US Military declares them surplus. It’s a federal program called LESO / 1033 and it’s been around since the '90s.

A civilian armored car would do the job too but I suspect there’s lobbying/insider trading involved.

Police departments used to do that but someone noticed that while Police Departments were spending money on armored vehicles the military was throwing them away. It was a waste of money all around and so the LESO / 1033 Program was born out of the National Defense Authorization Act of 90/91 and then expanded and made permanent in 1997. (Remember that year, it’s important).

The program actually makes good fiscal sense. Why waste equipment when one branch of Government no longer needs something while another one does.

A big impetus for police departments participating in the program that many people online today weren’t alive for was the North Hollywood Shootout in 1997. A couple of Bank Robbers carrying full auto weapons and wearing body armor tore the shit out of the Hollywood PD because the Police Department didn’t have the equipment or guns to deal with the problem.

In the end they had to use hunting rifles taken from a nearby civilian gunstore and a commandeered armored car. Every Cop in the country was scared shitless that it would happen to them because almost no departments were equipped for that level of violence. So they started grabbing surplus IFVs (MRAPs now) and other gear from the 1033 program.

As time went on and the “Warrior Cop” mentality took hold, primarily from Police Departments hiring untold numbers of returning Gulf War & GWOT Veterans, those Vets pushed to expand their departments use of the 1033 program so they could have access to most of the same gear they were already used to using.

That’s how we got to where we are in 2025. Each individual step makes sense but the outcome of those cumulative decisions is increasingly problematic.

Why does it have to be one or the other? I both read books and watch YT videos nearly every day.

Yep, and every one of them already complies with age verification laws so as new laws are added they’re going to comply with those as well. There are very few web admins / sysops / site operators out there who are willing, or even able, to buck these kinds of national laws.

Many fediverse hosts will make an effort to stay open by shifting their servers to countries that are out of reach of verification and law enforcement but that will only last so long.

Why do you assume that the old school forums are going to get exempted? They are going to get on the bus or get run over by it just like everywhere else. Government has already proven that they can, and will, regulate those forums.

Unless you are one of the extreme privacy people, like deep into freakaziod territory, the folks who build tracking / id systems would maybe need an afternoon to go from your Lemmy username to your home address and underwear size.

decentralized apps, fediverse

Those apps and / or the fediverse itself would get sued into the ground and shut down one app or server at a time. There’s nothing stopping any Governments authorities from going after servers inside their borders and there’s nothing stopping them from “harmonizing” identity verification restrictions among other countries. They’ve already done it once with Intellectual Property law.

This push to de-anonymize the Internet isn’t new either. Microsoft started this back in the oughts with their Passport / Digital-ID program. Google and Meta, along with others, long ago launched their own versions and it’s why you can sign into so many websites with a Google or Facebook account.

It’s generally referred to as IdP and now that the Internet has been fully corporatized, with minor holdouts, you can bet your bippy that the days of anonymous access are ending.

You made me do this, capitalism.

This is a problem with Government not an economic system. It’s about control, not dollars, pounds, or yuan.

You don’t need A/C.

Eh, it’s REALLY nice to have right now with daytime highs in the upper 90s. It’s even nicer when it’s both hot and humid.

Source: I live in Wyoming.

So do I.

Blocking vpns is tricky in a western society because so many companies cannot function without them.

Helion is saying 2028 for their first 50MW plant.

https://www.helionenergy.com/

Meh, unlikely. Gen X doesn’t have the sheer numbers to drive and sustain culture. The Boomers number something like 74,000,000 and Millennials are around 83,500,000. Meanwhile Gen X only has about 49,000,000 so we’re sandwiched between two Generations that are nearly double our size.

For example, I’ve noticed that some websites start throwing captchas at me or even just straight-up refuse to load with 403: unauthorized errors because I have my router set up to load-balance across two Internet connections. (At least, that’s my guess as to why it’s happening.)

I maintain several multi-wan commercial setups and they don’t have this problem. I obviously don’t know what your setup is but I’d guess something is wrong with how its handling flows / connections. Once a connection is established between your edge and an internet resource that flow should remain “stuck” to whatever wan port it started with and it sounds like that isn’t happening.

Australia got the criminals while America got the prudes.

Eh, you’re assigning an awful lot of malice with no real reason. A smartphone manufacturer already has access to the kind of data exposed in this attack, regardless of whether the headphones were hooked up with wires or bluetooth.

Samsung, Apple, Xaomi, Huwaei or whoever else doesn’t need some stupid BT vulnerability to know what attached devices like headphone are up too. They already have root level access to the phones hardware.

Fascists can create

We really need to get over this idea that it’s only “fascists” using AI to push their ideology. In 2025 you’d be hard pressed to find any National Government, Political Party, or Ideologically based group who is not using a metric fuckton of AI bots to distribute AIGen content in an attempt to sway elections and opinions. The IPIE report on this makes it quite plain that at least 80% of elections worldwide had problems with this in 2024.

At this point blaming this solely on “Fascists” is wilful blindness and a clear indicator that someone is either living in a bubble of single-sided information or is an ideologue themselves.

Unfortunately it’s not a country with very safe windows.

Even the TCP sliding windows aren’t safe!