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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 12th, 2023

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  • Well, I’m with you on Putin can go get fucked. But I think you’re misinformed on the “petrodollar empowering Putin”.

    The dominance of the US dollar as the currency for settlement of international crude oil contracts advantages predominantly the US and secondarily countries with strong currencies in open exchange with the USD. It disadvantages weaker currencies and those with poorer trade terms with the US such as Venezuela and Russia now the latter has been cut off from the western banking system.

    Putin being forced to trade his crude in non dollar denominated contracts is one of the (several) reasons the sale price of muscovy crude is now significantly lower than the equivalent from other countries. (TL;DR the sanctions are working).

    China has long been lobbying unsuccessfully to break the petrodollar/USD as world reserve currency and failed so far.

    The major US banks are just agents of a (very successful) US foreign policy post WW2. They are indeed evil, but not for this reason








  • Yes. Separate or single disks makes no difference, it writes changes to the efi partition that bios references to boot.

    I don’t know whether fedora is impacted, the article specifies the following as documented impacts

    " The reports indicate that multiple distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS, and Puppy Linux, are all affected."

    And I also note that at least 2 arch implementations are impacted in addition to that list (i first saw it on arch forums).

    I would suggest you definitely DON’T assume fedora is unaffected until you check your install, fedora participates in safeboot so given all the article listed distros also do (and arch has a method for it)

    Odds are they’re impacted, M$ has done a scattergun on this, the only ones you can be sure are unaffected are those still bios booting rather than uefi




  • To suspend Hungary (your first point) legally requires unanimity of all EU countries aside from the one to be censured. (Article7)

    Unfortunately Slovakia has recently elected a pro putin govt who will now block any attempt to deal with Orban.

    There was a short window between the end of the Polish far right PiS being in power and Slovakia changing leadership when it could have been done. Unsurprisingly Orban was very compliant during that period and as soon as he regained an ally is back to his old tricks.

    There is no legal way to do what you suggest

    Edit, missed a word



  • I can’t work out if this is well intentioned ignorance or trolling, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and a serious answer.

    The first point is there are a huge number of threats to privacy and your online and data security from connecting to the internet even in western countries.

    VPNs are not just for protection from govt abuse, in fact their efficacy there is far lower than for several other use cases.

    If you’re in the US (for example) and with one of the biggest ISPs then every DNS request being made is (was anyway, I assume still is) logged and your internet usage is then sold off to data brokers to profile you.

    So yeah, dont trust your ISP, and if you’re dealing with a VPN that wants all that info then find a better one (proton or mullvad for exampke, you can pay with monero or bitcoin or even cash by snail mail)