Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

@n0btc@mastodon.radio @blacklight447 It's been a decade since I last checked, maybe the price has gone down, but this included installation and my house is not big.

@n0btc@mastodon.radio @blacklight447 Last time I quoted it here in California, panels alone were about $30-40k, I'm assuming another 10 for a proper lithium battery bank.

@n0btc@mastodon.radio @blacklight447 Yes but $40k-$50k is a pretty big investment.

I just heard from my school district that because our local utility hasn't maintained their lines for years and have a policy now of cutting power if winds are high enough, that the school (and we by extension) have to prepare for county-wide outages lasting upwards of 3-5 days at a time!

My copy of the Snowden memoir, Permanent Record arrived! Can't wait to dig into this tonight!

@blacklight447 Thanks for the offer. If I write new pieces for a publication down the road, it will need to be one that compensates their writers. I believe strongly in that.

@kylejj I have another writing project that's taking my attention right now. Maybe once I finish that and take a break...

I'm really missing Linux Journal today. This RMS/FSF news would have had us editors working together to publish a well-thought-out story...

@n0btc@mastodon.radio Sounds like it would be possible if you set up a DNS server in the pihole server and pointed it to localhost.

@fribbledom I'll give you a (hopefully) safe example: the Oxford comma debate. As a pro writer of both books and mag articles I can tell you that there is no one "style" but instead a few high-level ones (AP/Chicago/MLA) + a "house" style a pub bases on one of those. I know each major + house style for my pubs and apply Oxford comma when it's house style and I don't when it's not. It's like MMA for grammar.

@abbluiz Funny you should say that... :)

@fribbledom Simplifying a dispute into only two sides allows those in power on each side to silence any critique and shut down attempts to bridge differences: "You are with us or else you are with our enemy."

I'm reading through many of my old (some a decade old) Linux Journal articles right now and I'm uncovering all of these really interesting and still-useful articles I had forgotten about.

Someone just referred to warrant canaries as a dead man's switch, so my brain went immediately to this. Apologies to Oingo Boingo:

I was struck by lightnin'
Walkin' down the street
I was served with warrants that I had to meet
It's a dead man's switch
Who could ask for more
Government is coming, leave canary at the door
Leave warrant canary at the door

Don't run away, it's canary
Don't be afraid of what you can't see
Don't run away, it's canary
Don't be afraid of what you can't see

@thibaultamartin @infosechandbook@mastodon.at Some of the experts on our team are investigating that. Hope to report our findings soon.

@tga yup there's certainly plenty of dehumanizing and extreme rhetoric there too. It all leads to justifying more extreme behavior in the minds of those who buy in.

@tga @jlcrawf Straw man. One diff between a govt. and a private group targeting minorities is that the govt. has more power and resources to bear. Of course companies are starting to wield quasi-govt power so if a private group can get help from them then they also start to have a similar level of power.

But the original point was to highlight the ethical risks involved in dehumanizing and extreme rhetoric, regardless of the target. If one has greater power, it just increases scope of abuse.

@irl The goal is to have control over the DNS logs instead of giving them to Google or other big data firms. If you do not trust your ISP and think they sniff and capture all DNS traffic that goes over their wires, then the solution is to use a trusted VPN as they would probably also sniff all initial SNI requests too.

@jlcrawf I'm not espousing any personal views about the far right, the far left, or Islam. I was only pointing out the similarities in some of the sentiments and rhetoric I see in social media today to those I saw in the aughts for the War on Terror and those I wasn't alive for but read about in the 1950s for the Cold War. All in the context of how similar thinking was used to justify the abuses documented in that book.

Look what arrived! Excited to read this book. While today fascism and the far right is the existential threat that justifies any means to eradicate, it wasn't always this way. 18 yrs ago today it was radical (and non-radical) Islam and in the 1950s it was communism and the far left. This book documents CIA studies into mind control to counter the communist threat that resulted in torture of US citizens, death, and countless other atrocities.