Are those nine year olds also allowed to vote?

Exactly; email is digital post cards and always has been.

Of course, that means I can encrypt a message and use someone else’s email account to send it :)

I have a LinkedIn account. It has the list of recent jobs I’ve held and my education.

That’s my social media presence.

Things like Lemmy are my secondary presence that I keep anonymous.

It’s never been an issue during my background checks. But then, if anyone ever dared to ask me about my lack of presence, I’d give them a level stare and tell them that I practice what I preach.

They just can’t get a break, can they?

So… it actually happened?

Oh, I thought I’d already made it clear that the west has totally failed to do the right thing here.

One of the best historical examples may be the Persian empire.

It’s definitely natural; it may be in humanity’s best interest to direct and curb it though. Unfortunately, that always seems to lead to corruption and inequality.

While true to a point, don’t paint Russia as being any better. They chose the war of aggression against Ukraine and are choosing not to stop it.

They were also in Afghanistan before the US, and destroyed it even more than the US has, between the two of them leaving the Taliban as the best local option remaining.

I sure don’t know what the solution is, as everything the world has tried so far has eventually failed, concentrating power in the hands of a few to abuse it.

BRICS could have a potential to control Russia while redistributing power, except that it includes Russia and China and India, all of which have a strong track record of concentrating power into the hands of the few, rejecting the voice of the people while putting on a western facade of being for the people.

Throw into this mix the upcoming results of global warming and neither bloc is going to make things better for the majority of humanity.

“I’m the target of an organized witch hunt!” says leader of the witches union.

Generally, it’s best to go by capability, not by policy.

Any company has to do what the government of its country says. This goes both for the VPN company, AND any exit node country. So you have to always assume that whatever country your exit node is in has full access to the data exiting the VPN there.

Then there’s the technology being used, the expertise with which it is configured, and finally the policies in place for handling and storing your PII.

Mullvad has a strong record on all accounts, even as far as just giving a year’s notice that it will stop supporting OpenVPN.

AirVPN has virtually no track record, fewer details on hardware, configuration, expertise and PII handling, and it’s in the EU, so has to comply with EU laws as well as Italian laws.

Being in the EU means it has to comply with the GDPR, which does have its benefits. But it also means an EU member state could put a gag order on your account and be monitoring all your data without you ever knowing.

So it all comes down to who you want your data to be private from and why.

Personally, I avoid all public VPN services as much as possible, and assume that the only thing they’re really doing is tricking the next service in the hop as to what country I’m connecting from.

That means the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist, along with the .io domain and countless websites.

What will happen is that the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove the country code “IO.” IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) which creates and assigns top-level domains, uses this code to determine which top-level country domains should exist. Once ‘IO’ is removed, IANA will start the process of retiring .io, which involves stopping new registrations and the expiration of existing ‘.io domains.‘

I don’t get this: shouldn’t Mauritius gain ownership of .io? Russia has .su, and it’s been over 30 years since the Soviets existed.

[edit] also, since there’s .whateveryouwant these days, why not just make .io a non-country TLD? That’s how it’s used anyway.

While I doubt that the opposition nor the powers that want them in charge are above reproach here, the arguments as to why what they’re saying is false and based on a western agenda don’t stand up to the most basic logic seive either.

It is fully possible for the incumbent to have run a fully corrupt campaign complete with ballot stuffing and intimidation/misinformation AND for the observers to not be objective either. One doesn’t cancel out the other.

The big question is: were the elections provably legitimate and above reproach, and will the majority of Georgians respect the results?

I feel your pain. I have maintainer roles for a few projects where things could be slowed down by a week or more if I didn’t have direct commit access. And I do use that access to make things run faster and smoother, and am able to step in and just get something fixed up and committed while everyone else is asleep. But. For security critical code paths, I’ve come to realize that much like Debian, sometimes slow and secure IS better, even if it doesn’t feel like it in the moment (like when you’re trying to commit and deploy a critical security patch already being exploited in the wild, and NOBODY is around to do the review, or there’s something upstream that needs to be fixed before your job can go out).

They haven’t been removed from the community though — just the maintainers list. Now they need someone else’s review to commit code to the kernel.

Personally, I think even maintainers should be required to have that — you can be the committer for pre-reviewed code from others, but not just be able to check anything you want in, no matter your reputation (even if you’re Linus). That way a security breach is less likely to cause havoc.

I doubt it’ll happen… but just imagine if once Biden hits Lame Duck in a couple of weeks, he actually does something about all this, once it won’t affect elections.

Georgia is populated by western liberals?

TL;DR: the incumbent pro-Russia billionaire is asserting he won the election.

You know what? The atrocities in Ethiopia don’t get coverage either, nor the ones in Myanmar, and nobody’s talking about the Uyghurs anymore, and even discussion on Ukraine is muted. Same goes for Burkina Faso, the Mexican cartel crisis, continuing fighting in Syria, Mali, DR Congo, Yemen, Haiti, Pakistan, and Colombia.

Each one of those has claimed more casualties than Palestine, although only a few of them are as focused on genocide.

Well… it requires not being in a border dispute for x amount of time to join. That’s going to be an issue for Ukraine for a good while to come.

So… is that enough votes by their constitution to move ahead with the constitutional rewrite?