I’m not sure what the Tor Project advice is these days, but my phone is setup to have Netguard hijack the VPN option of AOS and force select apps over tor (to Orbot). It’s annoying because in fact it is impossible for me to run Netguard and Tor over a VPN. Because Netguard hijacks the VPN, I cannot use a real VPN. I can run a VPN (generally openVPN), but then I must give up Tor if I do that. Orbot can only run in parallel, but because Netguard loses the VPN slot I can only use Tor-aware apps in that situation. So ultimately what you’re thinking is not possible with my tool chain (of old versions).

My version of Orbot apparently pre-dates that. At the bottom of the orbot screen it says “trouble connecting? Use bridges [boolean slider]”, and the switch is toggled off. I don’t see mention of “Smart Connect” in the settings.

I am not going to keep track of your esoteric personal preferences. If you non-transparently keep this rule concealed, the consequences are on you.

Please put your bizarre new rule in the sidebar so people who accurately discuss past events do not get broad-sided by unexpected interventionalism. The norm is that people use the present gender for present tense chatter, which needs no explicit rule. But this zealous idea of inserting someone’s new identity into their past (prior to the current identity) at the risk of disrepecting their privacy really calls for some explicit wording. Feel free to name the rule of this niche scenario after me, if you want.

UPDATE

I see the new rule in the sidebar. I agree with it. It does not cover this corner case of the context of historic accounts.

I appreciate the tip but this does not explain the Debian-Orbot difference I experienced. I have not configured either to use bridges, yet I saw Orbot connect and Debian not.

A bridge would likely be a solution for Debian. My work around has been to use Tor over a VPN in situations where Debian’s Tor fails, but that results in a very unstable connection where the VPN falls over every 5-10 min and must be re-established. So I am tempted to try a Tor bridge to see if that’s more stable.

It turns out I was in fact getting 10 days ahead with the default weather source. I just did not realise it because I didn’t know the daily forecast scrolls further to the right.

Anyway, I’m sorted… thanks!

Thanks for the tip. Someone suggested the Breezy Weather app but it seems to only cover the current day. I need several days… ideally a week ahead.

(edit) Sorry, I was wrong… The daily forecast goes 4 days out. That’s good enough.

Thanks! But I should have mentioned that I need the forecast for the week ahead. It seems to only cover the current day.

(edit) Sorry, I was wrong… The daily forecast goes 4 ~10 days out. That’s good enough.

removing something doesnt mean disinterest in nuance. it means something seemed off and worth removing.

It’s not the removal that shows disinterest in discussing the removal. It’s the fact that they were surreptitious about it. Then when tagged in a conversation and consciously chose not to react. It’s their choice. They had the option to be foreward about their action and chose the path of a shitweasel. Then I also gave them the option by tagging them in this thread and they did not take it.

degendering someone’s past entirely isn’t really a solution

I’m not convinced.

trans folk generally (excluding genderfluidity and other things like that) do not change their gender but change their gender presentation

Consider this fictitious scenario:

Bob is born male and identifies as such until reaching 25, at which point they realize/determine that they are female and change their name to Alice. Bob tried to enter a club at age 20 but the door security refused entry because of sausage control. Clubs don’t want to be sausage parties, so they allow women to enter without constraint but only select males (e.g. males accompanied with women). Yes, this really happens. Now let’s say Alice is 40 and we are telling the story of the past. Consider 2 ways to tell the story:

1. “She was denied entry to the club because the gate keepers were only allowing women to enter.”
2. “He was denied entry to the club because the gate keepers were only allowing women to enter.”

Paragraph 1 of this story is confusing and inaccurate. Par 2 is accurate and comprehensible.

Trans people themselves don’t necessarily know at every given moment with confidence what gender to claim. Bob may have very well been confident of his male gender at 20 and only started questioning it at 24. It’s not our job as outsiders to take liberties in that guesswork. We aren’t going to rewrite history without evidence. Historians use the best information they have to determine history. But as well I would not say there is a duty to investigate thoroughly on the part of non-historians recounting events in some social setting. I’m not going to track down Alice today and ask what her confidence level was in her male presentation 20 years ago before continuing to tell the club-bouncing story in a conversation, assuming it’s even possible to make contact with Alice.

But I would say historians and journalists have a higher standard and duty to get these details right. It’s unreasonable to expect the general public to inherently distrust journalists on political correctness. If a layperson refers to a news article and works with the info as presented, fault the journalist if it is wrong, not the reader who used the best info they had (the article).

Trans folks should be prepared for being addressed in the wrong gender if their presentation is mismatched at the time of presentation. I face this all the time because the pitch of my phone voice differs from my gender which causes people to misgender me. I don’t fault them. I don’t complain. I don’t even correct them. They are addressing me with the best information they have (my voice). If I get bent out of shape, annoyed, or feel a loss of dignity when they get it wrong, that’s my problem for having an unhealthily fragile ego. Rather than demanding that everyone adapt to me, I adapt and just roll with it. It gives me a slight bit of pleasure in having privacy of the other person not even knowing my gender. Privacy and dignity go hand in hand. If I attached more importance to the dignity of gender perception than the dignity of privacy, I would use a voice changing app to ensure I don’t get misgendered.

Did you message the mod to discuss?

The mod did a surreptitious censor without inquiry. This implies they aren’t interested. But they were tagged in the thread (b/c unlike them, I try to be transparent) so the opportunity is there.

Transphobia is a field where a lot of people use technicalities to normalize poor practices

The arbitrary hunt for suspect transphobes cannot serve as an excuse to disrespect people’s privacy and cause confusion about history. I find it very annoying to encounter incorrect attempts to push political correctness. If someone wants to go around finger-wagging people, they damn well better get it right themselves because they are threadcrapping to interrupt people to make an off-topic point. It’s like someone interrupting an interesting conversation to correct your English or grammar when in fact you had it right to begin with and the person doing the interruption got it wrong.

also, would that mean that you would use male pronouns for Ms. Manning when talking about her actions at the time?

I would favor singular they in the context of the past. Who’s to say (as a general case) when someone changed their gender identity w.r.t. their name? As a general principle, without knowing exactly when someone re-gendered, it’s fair enough to use the pronoun of the time along with the name of the time. It’s confusing and inaccurate to refer to Manning as a /her/ before she was a “her” (or widely known as such), as if to suggest that Manning has some kind of retroactive shame in their previous gender identity. You risk abusing their privacy at the same time as getting the gender (of the time) wrong. Manning was a man at one point in time. But again, singular they is likely safest when referencing a time before their current identity.

What if they switch their gender a 2nd time, and you are talking about a time between the first and second change?

You should think about what is the whole fucking point anyway? If you get someone’s gender wrong today, in the present, it can be offensive. But when talking about the past, the risk of offending someone gets out in the weeds with an off chance of some kind of hyper sensitivity, when there is a possible greater injustice of undermining their privacy. Privacy should be respected first and foremost. Someone who changes their identity has no reasonable expectation that everyone will know whether a fragile-dignity-ego is in play in a historic context, particularly when journalists are trusted sources of who they write about and political correctness. The article that was cited is relevant here.

Ms. Manning did request during her trial that her new name be used so i think probably she’s fine with her deadname not being used for her actions in that period.

We can guess. And because Manning is a high-profile figure we could do plenty of research before uttering a word about Manning, like reading court documents. I see negative value in using such research to finger-wag others though – people who are prima facie superficially aware of the timeline should not have to see threadcrap because a particular trans individual happened to indicate that they were not interested in the privacy benefit of a name and/or gender change and someone else kept sharp track of both that preference and exactly when changes occurred.

Wow, maybe. How did you find that? The name “Fujitsu Qfinder” seems weird and unfitting. But the comment¹ seems to reflect exactly what I’m after. Fujitsu staff themselves could not find it (after I failed to find it myself). I will have to test and see. Thanks!

1.“Tool for finding and configuring your CELVIN NAS. Now with scalable UI and added features.”

Update

It turns out Qfinder is a child app, of sorts, for the full blown CD that’s packaged with the NAS. The manual shows this:

So apparently the whole suite of CD software is being denied to customers in a forced obsolescence move. It’s not a disaster though because the NAS has a built-in web server that has all the critical pieces.

Going by mentions of Windows Live in the list of DRM-free games from Steam over at Fandom/Wikia (link), you should be able to do a partial installation of the dependencies.

That link is a shit show… tor hostility, then if I visit the archive.org version the page is too fancy for my browser… all the useful info hidden. Thanks for the idea though. Perhaps I will do the dancing to get the info later.

(update) after going back to the archive.org tab, the lists are loaded… it was just very slow to load b/c the list is LOOONNG. I would like to get that dataset in JSON.

And regarding using the disc drive, you can dump the discs as ISOs or BIN/CUE files, and mount them with WinCDEmu.

That only works on unprotected discs. Warcraft 3, for example, uses SecuROM or something to deliberately put defects on the disc that do not get copied with normal tools like dd or whatever. Then the game specifically looks for the defects to verify authenticity. Hence why I mentioned Alcohol 120, which understands securom but strangely did not work in my recent attempt.

“Load” is vague. To be clear, the CD player is artificially needed to execute games that are already installed. Of course a CD player is needed for the initial installation step but that’s not what I was bitching about.

Notable as well: there is sometimes a space saving argument to be made here (from the era of these games creations), and sometimes not. Often all the contents of the CD are copied to the hard drive anyway, for performance. The forced presence of a CD in those cases is just an anti-piracy tactic. In cases where the CD spins during game play, it could be either way… a redundant check to bake-in the anti-piracy throughout the code, or to genuinely load more game content.

What browser is that? I tested Ungoogled Chromium and stock Firefox. Hovering over “direct download” shows nothing.

The only Google anything I use is my email for ‘official’

Why is that? Most public services use Microsoft for email, I find.

FWIW, I boycott both; which means I am mostly using postal mail.

Indeed. And as well, even if growth were needed, Google is advocating for US growth at Europe’s expense.

Do you mean that a browser cannot fool a web server without using AI? Can you explain in more detail how the web service detects a client’s use of AI?

I think a surveillance advertiser known as “Microsoft Corporation” acquired OpenAI. If chatgpt works for an advertiser, then it’s working to manipulate people into buying shit they don’t need, which is obviously not good for the environment.

Not quite sure what you mean. What are numbers stations? Do you mean FM where the frequency is a memorable number?

I get the impression they would rather you listened via them then broadcast.

Yeah it’s a bit annoying how BBC keeps mentioning their digital services. They want you to have their content and they want to track you. But I think their top priority is just that you tune in one way or another. Offgriders give them the advantage of undivided attention. They don’t have to compete very hard for the attention of those without Internet.

OTOH, BBC is a special case because they get nothing from broadcast ads. I don’t even know how they are funded. Sure they get tax funded in the UK, but what’s their incentive to broadcast in continental Europe which apparently does not fund them?

(edit) a lot of FM and DAB stations have no digital resources that would track you (extremely basic websites without even a schedule). Some stations seem to have no web presence at all. So in those cases it would be interesting for them to emphasise their privacy alignment.

I’m familiar with the surveillance capitalist streaming svcs (amazon, netflix, etc) but I did not know about Hoopla and Kanopy. They are described as ad-free, so worth a look. But my quick take is that the websites are a bit dodgy/enshitified. Hoopla needs lots of Google JavaScript and after I enable it the page remains blank. Kanopy blocks Tor while playing dumb (“Sorry. An unexpected error occurred.”) I wonder are those US-only services or can a library member outside the US get access?

My local library indeed has DVDs, blu-ray discs, and PCs. I use the DVDs but that’s not really what I mean by broadcast TV. My local libraries seem to have no way to access local broadcast TV. Maybe it’s possible to go on a hunt to work out which networks have local broadcast, then track down their websites to see if they have liberated the content online, which could be enshitified in many ways with ads injected or be a conduit to a shitty place like Youtube. It’s probably not the best experience.

Broadcast TV “just works”. Broadcast TV does not push CAPTCHAs, try to collect data on you, or reject you for not using some proprietary app. It gives a technological guarantee of avoiding most enshitification that offline people expect to avoid.

I was an early adopter of e-mail and was on the web before it was graphical. But commercialisation has ruined them. I have mostly switched back to postal mail and fax. I have unplugged from home Internet service. For me this was an upgrade. In the same way, I think broadcast TV is a better UX than the enshitified net.