John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series was a long and pretty interesting read.

Premise starts out as a “humanity vs the stars” kind of story, but instead of sending young people to their deaths, the futuristic human society instead recruits old people who have already lived full lives. You can enlist towards the end of your natural life to transfer your mind to a (photo)synthetic purpose-built humanoid super soldier body. If you survive a period of time (5 years?), you earn another shot at life and can elect to become a colonist for far away worlds. Most don’t get that far.

Your usual “long-term relationship tensions,” “humans are always bad guys,” “what will technology think of next?” tropes apply.

Think of it another way:

The CIA and NSA will do their things collecting foreign intelligence on largely non-US persons. They store that information in a database somewhere with a big old “foreign” sticker.

The FBI will do their things collecting domestic intelligence on largely US-persons, storing their information in a database with a “domestic” sticker.

Intelligence agencies will share information between each other at times when their jurisdictions cross and for certain interesting mission sets, but it needs to be a deliberate and measured act. The FBI shouldn’t be able to just sift through the “foreign” database without any supervision for things that look interesting to them - they need to be granted access to a certain tailored box within the “foreign” database with extraneous information (to them) redacted or removed.

Additionally, there’s a whole 'other can of worms on how much information they were able to access. It’s one thing to catch an American committing tax fraud from their emails between a foreign bank lets say. What if an FBI agent knows their (ex) spouse has some overseas dealings and they want to snoop or find some dirt? They can’t legally use their organic tools to find this information on someone they are connected to without probable cause, but who’s to say their “foreign” database accesses account for the US person who isn’t the focus of surveillance? They aren’t looking for “Spouse, bank fraud,” which would probably raise suspicion with supervisors, but rather “foreign banker, any conversations with spouse@hotmail.com,” which the other 3 letter agencies probably don’t care about.

Our issue here is that the FBI is using information that they shouldn’t have access to. You can argue legitimacy one way or another, but the way these agencies are funded and authorized to operate necessitates this separation. The FBI may have had a valid case for querying and using this information, but only under through the proper channels, which it seems were not used.

I much prefer the linguistic version of this meme for reasons I don’t understand

Yeah, it doesn’t read very clear. I’m assuming they meant that the destination IP was for the VPN server and that some deep packet analysis determined that the encapsulated traffic was TOR-bound. Or it was a wild assumption that they were using TOR and they use it synonymously with VPN.

Either one of these events (unauthorized VPN or TOR connections) would be reason enough to look more into the employee’s IT resource usage.

Cool stuff.

As far as I know, the full self driving codebase doesn’t get delivered to an end-user unless they’ve paid for the feature and have been “approved” through some safe driving algorithm. This means we’re unlikely to see free FSD for all unless somebody manages to capture the firmware package and upload it.

Don’t discount yourself or your coworkers - shifting the votes of 3% of Americans could have changed the election results of almost every presidential election since 1992 if they went from the winning candidate to the losing candidate.

The top dogs being crooks sucks, but shouldn’t mean that the only acceptable response is political apathy - not doing anything is functionally equivalent to acceptance of the status quo.

Eh kills aleins and doesnt afraid of anything

I’ve tried editing a few articles years ago, only to have everything undone hours later with no explanation why and nothing in the way of constructive criticism for whatever invisible criteria the power users were looking for. I don’t even bother anymore and avoid using the entire site if I can find what I need elsewhere.

Push away eager contributors and you’re stuck with the old guard before you realize it.

Inside you there are two wolves

This is a good way to acquire “legit” power mod status.

Step 1: make an alt account which squats on community names

Step 2: have the alt account post open moderator requests on the communities

Step 3: have your alt appoint your normal account as a moderator. Since your normal account doesn’t have a direct connection to the community creation, it’s just seen as a helpful custodian of the fediverse

Step 4: ???

Step 5: profit