And that’s not the case with Ukraine because…?

As far as I know we have no data to that end, and I consider it unlikely because it’s not strategically opportune for the Chinese: The Russians are perfectly capable of bending the algorithm to their favour without being given a leg up so why risk burning the asset that is TikTok to support a war that the Chinese aren’t fans of, anyway, for an “ally” that’s already busy vassalising themselves to them.

I don’t think that the Chinese are actively using TikTok for anything at the moment, on the side of ByteDance they’re using it as a money maker, research platform to figure out things they can’t figure out with their highly restricted domestic version, and on part of the CCP it’s something they may care to use actively in the future, but there’s no need or use now, but they sure as fuck slurp up all intelligence they can get from there. Long story short don’t dunk on China if you want to visit it, especially not on TikTok. Personally I recommend dunking on China and visiting Taiwan, instead. Better tea, anyway.

You see, for cellular, a tower is truly limited on the bandwidth because it must be shared among all cellular devices connected to it

That’s still a limitation on bandwidth, not data volume. It’s still the bandwidth that costs money, not the volume.

The difference between cable and cellular is that in the cellular case it’s much more forgivable to have bandwidth collapse when lots of people want to transfer things at the same time, but not because it’s a single tower, but because it’s a shared EM field. To duplicate bandwidth with cables you can use a second cable, to duplicate bandwidth with cellular a second tower doesn’t suffice, you need a new generation of transmission technology.

A fair pricing scheme would operate on a flat fee for your home connection (at a particular speed), plus flat fee for guaranteed speed to the internet, and allow for faster speed if someone else currently isn’t using their allotment.

That’s it. That’s what ISPs are, themselves, paying, and thus what the customer should pay. All this volume nonsense is suited-up business fucks grifting people.

(For completeness’ sake: Those guarentees are bound to be asymmetric because downstream the ISP only pays port costs, while upstream the ISP pays port costs plus max bandwidth used in a particular time-frame. Not volume, bandwidth. “What was the fastest speed, in this particular month, the data move through the tubes”)

In Germany, it was found that it’s very very very easy to fall down an AfD propaganda hole when browsing TikTok – and the way that was fixed was by other parties, non-party actors etc. starting to give a fuck about the platform.

I’m not saying there’s no Chinese shennanigans going on on TikTok, there probably are at least low-key and they’re keeping it around as an asset they can use more intensively, push come to shove. But that doesn’t mean that everything bad on TikTok is a Chinese plot, it could be, you know, just our own societies dropping the ball. Shocking, I know, how would that ever happen. Algorithm-wise TikTok didn’t prefer AfD content the AfD just figured out how to use it effectively.

I’m not too familiar with the specific legal status of the OSCE in American law, I bet there’s a treaty or the other, but generally speaking a) you’re a member and b) you regularly send out your own people as OSCE mission members into other countries to observe elections and c) Every member state gets observed (alongside non-member countries inviting the OSCE because it’s a stamp of approval and can help stabilise democracies, establish trust in the procedures). Cursory observations are done for basically all elections that aren’t strictly regional, more in-depth ones every couple of elections. It’s democracies holding each other accountable.

If Bumfuck, TX, wants to make a statement against Canadians observing their elections that’s their god-damned right but it’s also the duty of Washington to shut them the fuck up. Not too filled-in on the details either but when you start arresting people with diplomatic passports accredited by the federal level I think you should maybe take a step back and make a phone call before deploying handcuffs.

Relevant Zizek

You don’t need an ID in Germany to vote just, push comes to shove, a way to make your identity believable. Expired ID, student ID, personalised public transport ticket, perfectly sufficient. Generally you just vote with your election notification, a sheet of paper with your address, ballot location, and number in the voter registry on it. If you try to vote with an ID but without notification workers are going to roll their eyes because they’ll have to manually search for you in their lists, heck, you might’ve turned up at the wrong location.

I don’t need my ID to vote, also it’s valid for 10 years. Municipalities fill the voting registry from their citizens’ registry, then send out notifications to everyone. You literally cannot miss an election. You generally go voting with that notification, it’s sufficient, or use it to request a mail-in ballot.

I’m sure administration is sufficiently different in the US than it is in Germany for the thing to not be able to work like that, but, big picture: The IRS can find everyone. Have them fill the registry, then.

The OSCE reports are usually just shy of scathing. The US reaction to those missions ranges, as far as I’m aware, from being completely oblivious to it or its results to Sheriffs trying to arrest observers.

Dunno how the situation is in Ukraine but in Germany it’s actually stricter for women: Men can refuse service at arms, while women can’t refuse medical service.

In any case not getting drafted usually is as simple as finding something else to do that’s helping the war effort. Hold the home front.

Why would I die for a piece of land,

Ukraine doesn’t fight for land, they fight to not get genocided. It’s the Russian side which has the politician on an ego trip.

And you, out of your comfortable armchair, cannot predict how you’d react in the same situation. There’s instinctive forces at play in such situations.

there is a well organized black market that will use European identities and bank accounts before selling the service to Russians.

I don’t think people would particularly mind if their Portuguese account didn’t work, specifically, on the Ukrainian front line. Unless they’re Russian soldiers in which case boo-hoo. The only accounts who should work anywhere close to the Ukrainian-Russian border should be Ukrainian army ones.

It was still punishable as coercion. Corporal punishment (i.e. what you’d do to coerce) of wives was outlawed in the early 1800s (and somehow only on the books since the late 1700s), it stuck around quite a bit longer for serfs, for underage apprentices and I think at schools it stuck around until 1956, your own children until 2000.

There’s much more to it than misogyny it was a culture of coercion in general.

Relevant Indian Metal (there’s subtitles).

Then it’s going to be an autonomous territory (like e.g. the Faroer) called the Mauritian Indian Ocean Territory. Countries don’t need to be sovereign to exist and have ISO codes. If Mauritius wants to they can do it even if the IANA insists on the letter of their rules.

Every sys/devops and programmer will know what a hash is, salt at least the sys/devops.

The general population though will be thinking of hash browns when hearing those terms and “encrypted” is absolutely close enough. So close that insisting on the difference in a non-technical context is definitely pedantic.

They aren’t, newsweek is calling it encryption because they’re writing for normies. The leaked data includes bcrypt’ed passwords, so hash and per-password salt. Their choice of hashing function is not what you want to criticise the IA for.

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Looks like a skill issue on your part.

A CD doesn’t really mean anything, the license and the physical medium generally aren’t tied. If you break the medium but have a backup you’re not pirating anything. I’d say the primary difference to a CD isn’t more or less secure but physical or not.

Downloading the game also requires an online connection. You’d only need one when you’re buying or selling the license NFT or moving it from one download platform to another, and of course to download the game. Whether you need an online connection to play depends on the game, not the NFT.

Oh, speaking of: Are you an EU citizen? Have you already signed this?

NFTs would make sense for things like tradable software licenses. E.g steam is going to be forced to allow users to sell their games soonish (they’re appealing the ruling and it’s only a matter of time until they lose) and you wouldn’t want such a license to be tied to a particular marketplace, so NFTs make sense: The game publisher mints it, it’s tradable freely, sites like steam and gog can look at them and say “yep this hasn’t been tampered with and was minted by the publisher”, and serve you the game files. Presumably they’d want you to occasionally buy something on their platform to let you use their servers to download games they didn’t sell you, or you could pay a small sum for the service.

The NFT itself, of course, doesn’t enforce anything. It’s just a non-fungible token representing usage rights in the game. Like a cd key but more secure, for the publisher (key can’t be duplicated / used multiple times, I mean a platform that would allow that could just as well go all the way and be a torrent release group) and the buyer (can check validity of key before spending money) and seller (buyer can’t claim bullshit like “key didn’t work”).

What you probably would not do is put that stuff on already-existing blockchains because why should the industry pay ludicrous transaction fees when you can roll your own.