Kaspersky should just ignore it.

They should 1) Continue to provide updates, 2) do their utmost to prevent blocking of updates, provide updates through tor or some other service that makes it very, very hard to block for the US. 3) Do what US VPN providers did when they couldn’t do business in Russia anymore which is give all existing customers free usage of the product until such time the market is available again.

Further they should start openly attributing to the US spyware they uncover instead of doing their usual diplomatic analysis of “looks similar to many western government associated actors”.

What annoys the shit out of me about this conversation that’s going to be had is if they had fears about them taking data and files well they could pass a law that applies to all AV companies and applies strict privacy policies to them but they’d never do that because all western backed AV and info-sec companies are infested up to the gills if not literally founded by funded by national security state ghouls (former of course they’d claim but no such creature).

Sadly Kaspersky are kind of like many Russians, too diplomatic, eager to bend the knee. They should absolutely do what western companies into the anti-Russian propaganda did but in reverse, claim it’s their duty to continue protecting their customers especially in repressive western states.

They will absolutely sue of course. They regularly sue copyright trolls and all kinds of others but as I understand it this kind of listing is basically entirely at the pleasure of the US government and they can just sit in court and keep repeating nothing but the words “national security, sources classified, trust us” and win the case because commerce dept I believe has authority to sanction whoever they please.

Another win for the policy of unity among Marxists, not among liberals, opportunists, and distorters of Marxism (yes that includes especially ultras).

I just don’t get people who tolerate them. As someone who’s spent years blocking and avoiding them (arrrr) they just seem unnatural and infuriating but to so many people used to them they’re just an accepted part of life.

Please empire die already. Let me see free computing within my lifetime.

Probably fine but not the most ideal.

Right now the market for SSDs sucks. Before the latest price-gouging via chopping supply in half (Crucial happily going along with Samsung’s openly announced plans to do just that to get prices up) I got a 1TB TLC drive for $60, now they’re all $110+ without exception.

For a main OS drive where you’re getting lots of random reads on start-up and during normal operation, DRAM helps a decent amount to prevent waiting (with things like big games loading lots of files this is obvious as is on an OS disk where lots of random reads occur as part of normal operations). It’s definitely something I think most people would notice between an NVMe drive with DRAM vs one without. Maybe not as much vs a SATA SSD under most work-loads.

Also OP you should realize most SATA SSD’s (even cheap ones that were name-brand), except ones in the last few years typically had a DRAM cache, it used to be standard, it’s only with NVMe that they’ve started dropping it to save money because the write/read speeds on NVMe drives sorta mask the lack of it under many but not all workloads (particularly for extra drives people were buying for non-OS installs like drives just to put games or large files on that are in addition to their main drive it matters less).

With that TBW I’d suspect it’s a QLC drive (and confirmed by searching). I always used to avoid them myself but these days with these prices if you’re looking for a deal it may be hard not to though the combination of QLC and no DRAM makes me think it’s less than ideal for an OS drive. Just make sure you have a decent back-up plan for important documents and files to another drive or the cloud as when SSD’s fail (and even good MLC/TLC drives can) they do so catastrophically and you won’t be able to recover a thing.

For reference QLC/TLC/MLC stands for quad-level, triple-level, multi-level(2). There’s also SLC or single-level. SLC is the oldest and most reliable, charges stay stable longer, the whole platter is more stable. Each increase decreases the cost per GB but hits reliability. The less bits per cell the more stable it tends to be, less prone to charge flips, better write speed potentials, it degrades more slowly and has more re-write cycles. But it costs more of course.

MLC is very pricey, easily twice the price per terabyte, but TLC is usually only a bit of a premium, maybe another $20-$30 (the T500 from Crucial for instance has DRAM and it’s TLC for $35 more which isn’t cheap admittedly but I guess it depends on where you are financially and if you plan to use this for a while. There’s also the SK hynix Gold P31 which is TLC, DRAM, and $5 cheaper than the T500 at least where I looked).

Verdict: If you’re looking for something in this price range (<$80) then definitely go with what you’ve chosen. However if you game or want something a bit more reliable with higher TBW, a bit faster, and with DRAM so you don’t have to worry about that bottleneck on an OS drive AND you can afford the extra money I’d consider strongly something TLC, with DRAM, or both, like the drives I mentioned.

Neither Washington nor Moscow was and is a well-honed propaganda strategy employed by the CIA, US State Dept, western media, etc. It doesn’t matter to them if you’re willing to criticize them, they don’t care as long as in the same breath you criticize their enemies, implicitly acknowledge their propaganda, validate their contention that yes, things have been done badly here BUUUT the numbers of death and human rights violations (according to western propaganda) are much higher over there, thus naturally it’s better over here than there. After which comes the next step of dismissal which is “stop whining, things could be worse, be grateful, you have no idea how privileged you are, how dare you attack this great country why do you know in blah blah blah you can’t even blah blah blah?”.

People who say this are not engaging in critical thinking. You criticize the west but do you believe the Chinese media? Do you read their perspectives? If their media is invalid because they abuse human rights, so should the media you read from the west be invalid. Yet this is never the case. It is never the case that such propaganda is examined, subjected to ruthless criticism and introspection with outside the empire perspectives and discarded. Even when there is a history of people calling out problems time and again and being ignored in the moment, do you listen to them in future or breathlessly await the latest piece of China bad news to make you feel slightly better about your problems?

Self-effacing and dishonest acknowledgement with a framing that it’s still the best you’re going to get is not helpful. Acknowledging too little too late and offering worthless words of salve to the victims.

Education and awareness are worthless. The past is the past. It only matters if you learn to prevent it in the present and future. Do you think the dead care about you saying what was done to them is wrong? Do those suffering today from the western military/intelligence actions who you will say you feel sorry about in 10 years care that in 10 years you will be sad and acknowledge the wrong or do they care about you understanding the wrong, spotting it now and speaking up to stop it NOW. Not to deflect, not to “but China worse” their suffering.

Look no further than many of those mindlessly defending “isreal” and their genocide. There are many among them who understand the holocaust, who know the history all too well. Yet they didn’t take away the right lessons, they took away that it was bad it happened to Jews but it’s good when it happens to Palestinians who are deserving. They take away something that’s frozen, disconnected, it gives them no analytical power to prevent the next atrocity unless it’s exactly like the last.

This kind of thinking is never accompanied by an honest assessment that one can’t really impact the process in China, the problems in China. All one can do is assist aggression by powers that have historically, time and again done bad things (often to the very same countries these accusations are against).

Is it not proper to clean one’s own yard first before screaming at your neighbor and going to knock down their fence to try and force them to fix their yard? Yet the priority is always on their yard, on the soothing balm, the salve that at least you live in a less bad place than those savages in China, Russia, wherever. A complacency, a smugness, a racially tinged feeling that for all the problems in your land, it has many upsides while their land has few. A feeling that their problems would justify violence, revolution, uprising, but your problems should be solved by working within a system that has never done anything but appropriate the memories of its victims while continuing the victimization and has been happy to brutally crush any real dissent and threats to it time and again.

Minimization of real western atrocities in favor of playing up, laser-focusing on accusations against others.

Meh. I would have respected them more for at least trying to finish the trilogy of Prometheus and Covenant. Problematic as they were they were at least more interesting from a lore perspective than inserting other random Alien encounters magically retconned into existence between the existing films which is kind of a low effort, low risk, low pay-out thing to do. And one that I might add seriously risks adding retcons or changes to the magic and feeling of the original trilogy.

They’ll never come close to touching the quality of the first two films (3 if you count the Assembly cut which really made 3 a much better film) and if you just want jump-scares and gore and horror certainly continuing the Prometheus storyline could give you some of that.

No.

The grievances and gripes people have which are highlighted as the likely cause of division and a speculative civil war are mostly smokescreen culture war bullshit that exist for media spectacle and politicking. Beating up on minorities isn’t something that’s going to drive a big chunk of liberals to fight. Material issues are not seen in class terms. It’s seen in matters of bickering about policy like tax policy or war spending which is true to a degree but it’s a lost in the illusion thing. Conditions worsen but the illusion remains.

The media and parties and grifters stir up mild tension for profit and distraction but have little real interest in it coming to an actual protracted fight. Sure reactionaries wouldn’t and don’t mind killing some progressives or leftists now and again but the left isn’t large enough, organized enough, etc to actually fight back nor the citizenry informed enough outside the bourgeois press propaganda bubble to get involved after an outrage.

The mythos of the holy American institutions, the holy government, the holy constitution and system still holds strong. As long as that is the alter at which all Americans worship at I don’t think a civil war can happen.

Only when a significant part of the population make a sustained break from that might something happen. And for that to really occur you need much worse material conditions. There are cracks, the Republican resistance to Ukraine and increasing skepticism of neo-cons (which probably won’t last beyond the day Trump is elected), the crushing of Palestinian student protests and the disenchantment that has. But neither I see as things that can grow in the short term.

If there is a civil war it will be decades from now when the contradictions have heightened, the empire has visibly fallen and Americans can only bicker among themselves and fight over increasingly limited spoils and take from each other. But it will take a severe split in the bourgeoisie or genuine anti-capitalist sentiment that rocks the youth of that time. Frankly with how atomized the population is, with technology, with the surveillance state, it’s going to get really, really, really bad before it gets even a little bit better in terms of people pushing back.

If anything I think all the mainstream talk of civil war is yet another sign we’re not headed there soon. It’s a kind of outlet, to let the public collectively explore the idea, enjoy it, hate it, fear it, whatever rather than actually experiencing it. It’s part of the broader attempts at controlling the narrative too. There is this idea being pushed that the reason we’re at risk for civil war is not any of the real problems like fascists, bigotry, support of genocide, living in a genocidal violent empire, BUT that people are seeing outside agitator “propaganda” from Russia, China, etc. It’s part and parcel of the push to ban Tiktok, to crack down on anyone spreading views counter to the state department line, to label them a real enemy. Because by tying it to that they’re no longer just a “kook” with a weird conspiracy opinion but a danger to the precious and holy American institutions and a threat of causing civil war if we don’t crack down on them and crack down on those giving them those ideas. So it’s really part of a push to control information, to control it online in social media, to block foreign media and perspectives. And to censor and deplatform anyone deviating from the “bipartisan” imperialist consensus as a foreign agent, as a chaos actor, as someone trying to destroy the US. It really all started with Trump and the liberal derangement and Russiagate hoax around him.

Related digression: I really don’t understand why so many people here and on hexbear have this idea that it’s impossible for him to go to prison, when no it’s impossible for him to face consequences for doing things presidents are supposed to do like imperialism, it’s very possible for them to destroy him and ruin his life to permanently remove him from the picture because he’s an annoyance to the deep institutions of state and imperial power.

They simply pretend the issue is he acted in some way differently than other presidents, pearl-clutch about institutions and rules of how you’re supposed to do corruption with all your I’s dotted and T’s crossed. It doesn’t matter if Biden and his son are corrupt as fuck, it doesn’t matter if the next person is as well. Consistency has never been a necessity so long as they can pretend there is some difference. And at the end of the day as much as reactionaries will hoot and holler, all the actually violent fascist militias are on a short FBI leash and none of them are going to do any meaningful violence against institutional liberals or the state in response if he’s sent up the river for the rest of his natural life.

It’ll just become another gripe, another issue in their culture war ranting and it’ll become a plank of the party and candidates to try and secure his release. Fact is Democrats are competent administrators of empire and I think honestly there’s a decent chance CIA, the deep parts of the state and intelligence apparatus have decided to go with them for a while and make an example out of Trump for trying to do petty gangsterism with their sophisticated empire and generally making them look as bad as they are with silly things like saluting generals in the DPRK which really rubs these kind of institutional American greatness mytho weirdos the wrong way. It’ll in a way get the reactionaries plenty worked up and perfect for unleashing on the growing left as a result of the Palestinian genocide and other situations unfold. They’ll be let to vent their anger beating up and killing anti-genocide protestors, antifa, communist meetings, and anyone left of the State Dept on China.

I don’t think Trump is smart enough to have some reasonable memory of classified secrets or some way to leak them to punish the US state and threaten it if it tries to send him to prison.

Best case he gets out after spending a little time in prison, wins the election and begins brutal recriminations against the Democratic party and Biden’s administration. Real let them fight hours. Worst case he goes to prison, stays there, rots there, liberals clink their champagne glasses, declare the institutions have won, America is back, brunch is on and continue with the whole charade of calling all dissent against the DNC and US foreign policy “Russian propaganda”. I just find smug liberals so annoying so naturally I want them to suffer and honestly the more they do the more the illusion crumbles I think.

Literally the text right here on this site without even needing to click the link:

Mexico’s move places it on a growing list of countries accusing Israel of violating the UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention.

Since January, Columbia and Libya have also declared their intention to join the case.

When done in the ICJ as I understand it (badly) it’s not like just a press conference where a Foreign Minister throws accusations or insults. This is going to the court as one of the parties who may bring action against other parties and saying to the court “we bring action, here’s the basis, here are our charges”. As I understand it (again could be wrong, correct me if so) ICJ as a venue for country level disputes doesn’t have like a prosecutor like the ICC, instead a country comes up, prosecutes their own case (with or without support from others) against another country who defends their case in front of a panel of judges.

Ireland’s Foreign Minister Micheal Martin, meanwhile, said the European Union has for the first time engaged in a “significant” discussion on sanctioning Israel over its Gaza onslaught.

Discussions that will drag on and on and on through the end of this year when they’ll issue the zionists an ultimatum after pretending they were negotiating with them in good faith after which 6 months later maybe they’ll slap some token sanctions on or more likely back down from back-room US pressure campaigns and their renewed focus on Trump being in the white house again.

It’s just PR and even they should know by now that “isn’t real” is a rogue state under the complete protection of the US so threats without action are meaningless to dissuade them. This is the regime that strafed and bombed a US navy ship and got an apology from the US for having their ship too close after all. They could vote to stop weapons delivers to the zionist entity for the foreseeable future right now, not even taking their stuff or refusing to sell them consumer goods or trying to arrest their officials, just blocking arms shipments and they won’t do it.

Also notice how nowhere in any of these demands and harsher language have they admitted suppression of pro-Palestinian protestors was at any point wrong or that those people were not in fact anti-semites and were in fact upset about real crimes. The suppression of genuine movements against the zionist entity will continue no doubt.

It says there that they filed a declaration with the court. They’ve joined the accusers. It’s maybe like filing an amicus brief basically adding weight by saying they agree with South Africa and giving reasons why. Not sure how much more they can do. They’d need to investigate and compile evidence to really help but I’m not sure if South Africa needs help with that or not.

I’m just writing this here because I have no where else good to put it at the moment but I’ve had another thought in light of the attack on Russia’s early warning radar.

But with the recent drone attacks on Russian early warning radar for nuclear defense I think we see what their plan may look like if they go the nuclear route. They’ve been caught shipping to Chinese hobbyists in various fields equipment which is capable of and primed for connection to western controlled command and control servers to do things like disrupt communications, launch hacking, attacks, etc. It’s reasonable to think that the Chinese haven’t found all of it and probably won’t in the near term. Perhaps some joint kind of radio jamming plus hacking plus drones attack on Chinese early warning radars in coordination with launching submarine based nuclear weapons to try and destroy China, take out their C&C and counter-strike capabilities and mortally wound them while taking minimal and acceptable (in the words of general Buck Turgidson of Dr. Strangelove) losses themselves.

I really worry about shit like this because the US only has to have a slight and temporary advantage and catch China off guard once for this to work and the US has the advantage of being deranged enough to do this while knowing for a fact that China & Russia, their enemies would never stoop so low and so has no need of defense on this matter or signing treaties against it. To say nothing of the fact that the US had early warning radars thousands of miles from its borders via NATO installations in Canada and installations in the Pacific and Alaska as well as of course those in Europe meaning even successfully neutralizing the entire massive front-line of US early warning radars would still leave the radars at the actual border giving them as much time as China and Russia have in their own best case scenarios.

Just a warning, this page tries to load resources from a url (africa [dot] thesmalladventureguide [dot] com) which is identified as being malicious and involved in malware payload delivery. This may be a false positive (though multiple products are concurring via virustotal) but exercise caution. Consider viewing article via an archive link.

Probably SocGholish campaign. Looks like they tend to rely on directing victims to fake update sites to execute malware downloads so not high risk. Most likely original site is legitimate but compromised.

It is alarming. I really hope China has put all effort into acquiring more nuclear weapons as fast as possible and putting them on their most advanced hypersonic missiles.

Because a credible threat of not just 300 but 600 or 1000 such weapons is the only thing that can dissuade the west from pulling the nuclear trigger themselves. The Chinese need to have enough deterrence to leave no chance in the minds of western bourgeoisie and planners that if they hit China, even if they take out 25% of their retaliatory capability, that China will have enough to destroy every major US city, ever major US military base, bunkers, industry, ports, infrastructure, staging locations in vassal states like Japan, occupied Korea, Australia, Philippines. They need to have such a deterrent that the western planners can’t argue themselves into thinking that they can hide in a hole and come out on top after. To know for a fact their means of production, their entire military apparatus, the overwhelming majority of their labor force will be thrown into the fire and they’ll win nothing.

The opinion is less interesting than the facts, the increasing rhetoric from the new leader of the rebellious province taken with US angling, taken with the fact that RAND study said the US had until 2026 before China overtook them militarily and it certainly seems like the stage is being set for a near term independence declaration and conflict in the SCS over Taiwan.

Given that there are elements of the bourgeoisie and state desperate to take down China and force the reluctant elements of the bourgeoisie/corporations to join in decoupling, the most realistic plan for that is instigating a conflict over Taiwan, declaring that the US and EU must “stand with democracy” as they did with Ukraine and forcing companies and countries in the case of the EU to decouple suddenly and harshly from China over it while blasting propaganda at the citizenry to get them riled up in an anti-China fervor so they don’t even notice or get angry at anyone but China for the first couple years as prices skyrocket, as supply shortages cripple the economy and so on.

Unfortunately such conditions will not likely lead to enough class consciousness for a progressive revolution of any kind but rather lead to isolationism, reaction, the working class in the imperial core being chained even further, forced into lower living conditions, forced into a kind of rentier-serfdom as the powers that be try and reshore and friendshore. The real problem with this plan occurring in time for the US to think it can win is that US foundries for chips and such won’t be anywhere near operational by 2026.

But ultimately winning a military conflict against China is not necessary for defeating it according to the plans they have. Those plans call for economic isolation of it, embargo, sanction, strangle. And for that they need outrage, they need a cause celebre, they need war propaganda. Though another problem with Taiwan is that unlike with Ukraine it won’t hold out for months. If the PLA decides to swoop in they can crush it with incredible violence and secure it within a week. If they decide to embargo and turn the screws to save lives versus an invasion while bombing military targets and formations it still likely won’t hold out for more than a few months and communications will likely be cut very shortly into things meaning they won’t have as much video propaganda to go on. At least I hope the Chinese are wise enough to cut submarine cables to Taiwan to isolate it from the western internet and propaganda as part of such a strategy. Though I suppose the western media can simply rely on making up Ghost of Kiev type stories about the break-away rebels fighting back, perhaps use video AI to “illustrate” such ideas and not disclose that it is the case right away along with lots of scary shots of Chinese military ships in formation and any initial videos that get out.

No matter how you dice it, it seems likely if not certain that Americans and probably Europeans are within the next 5 years going to find themselves without access to many Chinese goods, certainly the electronics market everything from hard drives to motherboards to graphics cards and smartphones will see spiking prices and probably severe shortages depending on how bad it gets. Just look at an artificial, engineered shortage in the prices of SSD’s because Samsung cut production to drive prices up and Micron of course did nothing to increase production because they like higher prices too. Check the price of a 1tb ssd 18-24 months ago compared to now, dramatic increases, from $60 to $100 often.

Even if the US doesn’t pull off a dramatic decoupling by war, they’ve shown with the solar panel tariffs that they’re willing to destroy the planet in some vain, idealistic hopes that they can forcibly revive domestic manufacturing and consumption by keeping out Chinese goods which only shrinks the market, hits the proletariat, etc so there’s no reason to expect that cheaply priced quality Chinese goods and components in goods from other countries will continue to flow.

The date may be much later but the US is definitely pulling out all the stops to try and make it happen eventually and slap up a hard wall for high technology. The recent comments by the occupied Korean government about their need to invest in chip-making shows the US doesn’t want to put all its chips so to speak in making chips in the US and realizes they may need help with that. Sacrificing Taiwan still means they have the puppets of occupied Korea and Japan to put such production into. Both of which they can manipulate to have lower prices than US production. I could see such a plan in Korea bearing fruit in 5-6 years easily.

China sees at least most of these moves hence their movements to move to Linux and risc architectures before the US can pull the ripcord and leave them stranded within 5-8 years at most.

May their plans fail spectacularly, may the people turn on them sooner than later. However we should all be realistically prepared for a crucible ahead of us that will mean much worse than the loss of cheap electronics treats.

rutracker has a lot of good album rips and some artist discography torrents. It’s actually only semi-private. Anyone can register for an account and you need one to use the API to search though you can use yandex with site:rutracker[dot]org set and search for what you want that way without one.

You could always interview for RED as well. You need to do prep and there’s a site for that, educate yourself extensively but it’s not at all impossible to get into if you want.

That’s just music though. While rutracker has some games they don’t focus on retro games, you’d need a more specialized site I think for that. Same with comics/manga.

Here are some links, sorry that they’re from reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/wiki/getting_into_private_trackers https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/6c5dn6/rtrackers_faq_v3/

And of course see the megathread which might help you find what you need in public spaces: https://rentry.co/megathread

Well in theory the EU states would be obliged to arrest him if he travels to them as would over a hundred others worldwide. As to punishment it would depend on the judgement of the court, the charges convicted on, etc. In a world where everyone including the EU, US, and the entire zionist military-intelligence apparatus intentionally tried to let it happen and throw him to the lions he could go to prison. Obviously that is not our world.

It would certainly make traveling internationally more dangerous for him.

In practice most likely the US and zionist lobby would quickly push Europe to denounce the ICC as anti-semitic and to pull out of the treaty or just not enforce it in this case while the CIA and Mossad jointly blow up the cars of the involved judges, prosecutors, etc and the Belgian government sweeps that under the rug.

Vile and dangerous cults.

And they tried to kill him for it. Wonder if this was some sort of deranged liberal too hopped up on anti-Russian propaganda.

Strange how none of the pro-NATO puppets who’ve gutted the quality of life for their people, destroyed industry, ruined jobs, plunged thousands into poverty and strained finances with more expensive heating and food bills, and openly let the Americans destroy their energy infrastructure and force them under the yolk have not suffered any assassination attempts.