I’ve been banned from reddit for pointing out that you do actually have recourse to change things, but that answer isn’t safe and comfortable. Ukraine didn’t shake off a dictator without paying a price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity
Or if you prefer your own history, you didn’t get rid of the Brits by just asking nicely and hoping.
For the moment I agree that most Western citizens will still prefer the US society over a Chinese one.
We’re at the tipping point right now in Europe - I am regularly having the “lesser of two evils” discussion of China vs US (and China gets the win by a hair btw in my circles). Both are clearly a threat to me and my family, the only real difference is I speak the language of one of them.
If we “prefer” the US over China it is purely inertia and avoidance of change.
I actively boycott all the US products I can, I’ll only buy US if there is no viable alternative. On the other hand I preference European over Chinese but I don’t actively boycott.
The reason is quite simple, one has actively threatened war, has corporations that are actively making my life worse and is actively meddling in the region’s politics.
China will probably do the same once the US has been destroyed by the Pumpkin Pinochet and turned into the dystopia he’s working towards. But for now one is an active threat and one is a distant threat.
I genuinely doubt most Americans realise just how much you’ve lost in terms of goodwill.
Your closest allies are aghast and trying to work out how to divorce themselves from what they thought was a great relationship.
It’s hardly surprising that those who were at best ambivalent are now actively hostile.
What exactly did you expect.
Enjoy your new best buddy Russia.
Nah we don’t know that either way on the available facts.
I had one outage which started on a Sunday and ran about 10-12hrs, 3 commercial VPNs were throttled down to 250Kb, but if you turned off the VPN or split tunneled full expected speed was reached (100Mb +). It wasn’t the VPN servers as disconnecting from wifi and going over 4G/5G worked normally.
The “outage” ended and hasn’t happened again. On the monday at least 2 of the commerical VPNs plus my work VPN were all working fine at the expected speeds and have been since. So we don’t know either way whether my work VPN was or was not affected as I didn’t think to test it.
Hypothesis 1 - I was sinbinned for too much torrent d/loading on sat night with a lock down against the VPN addresses that would have come up as the top couple of sources of large data requests (because obviously the tunnel IP address is what the ISP sees)
Hypothesis 2 - they trialled blocking popular 3rd party VPN services as you suggest (but 1 of the 3 is very obscure and def not main stream) and I was just one of those caught in it
Hypothesis 3 - Packet inspection captured torrenting activity and throttling was done because of that.
Clearly 3 is the worst scenario, 1 & 2 are quite probable - the govt is currently trying to create legislation to control VPN usage and as the largest(?) ISP Virgin would be an obvious candidate to do some tests on, and their service is so shite their customers are used to it getting shitty for random reasons.
It seems to be endemic in certain US circles to confuse Communism with Authoritarianism (which is what that link does). Yes. Stalin was an (evil) authoritarian, and his massacres were done under the banner of communism, but so was Hitler (and so is Drumpf) neither of whom were (are) Communists.
Why are the two things so regularly conflated by Americans ?
That is a little unfair the final paragraph sums up the argument it made throughout the article which is:
“Our research shows that while governments across the UK have introduced a range of measures, too many local authorities lack the dedicated resources, funding and strategic framework needed to deliver meaningful change. Financial penalties alone will not solve the problem. What works is sustained local engagement, professional advice, and properly funded empty homes teams that can support owners through the process of bringing properties back into use.”
In other words, there are powers that exist that could partially address it, more funding and focus on it would have an impact, they also highlighted areas where more / new measures could be added.
Thanks for the input. I do a lot of remote work over a VPN for work (Azure one I assume as they’re an MS house, I’ve not checked), which they don’t block, but they also only blocked the always on VPNs myself and the rest of the household had in place for that 12 hour window on a Sunday. It is currently working fine for the personal VPNs. I didn’t think to test the work laptop given I’d tested 3 VPNs by that time, but I’ll try next time
Ahh. That’s bad. What exactly did they do that made it feel like a data collection scheme ?
Yeah, I hope it’s not deep packet inspection, Mullvad has dropped support for OpenVPN (wireguard only), the other two still support it, I’ll have a bit more of a dig, my network skills beyond the basics are getting rusty. Disguising it as https should just be putting it on port 443 and making sure it’s TCP only I would have thought ?
Great questions.
I’m reasonably confident the DNS requests are not going to the ISP but I wouldn’t bet parts of my anatomy on it. The router is set to call Mullvad’s DNS with quad 9 as the fallback (which is obv for unencrypted traffic and the initial call to start a VPN session), the Mullvad client definitely calls to their dns and they have tests on their website for dns and rtc leaks which they pass.
The other two have similar setups, although the minor one I might just carefully check.
There is unfortunately only 1 ISP in my area (Virgin), and I would really love to not be using them - they have an awful reputation for a very good reason. Their support team is truly atrocious, and from previous experience I’ll get an answer like
“I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?” “Yes I appreciate that, but are you throttling my VPN ?” “I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?”
Continue loop until you hang up.
Hostinger were very dear (double) compared to most of the other options at the lower/middle end (2cpu/4gb-ram/50+gb), but thanks very much for the suggestion, appreciated.
Thank you
Thank you
Thanks very much
Thanks very much, I’m going with OVH and really appreciate so many options.
Focussing on the important things I see. Jesus.
Am I the only one who read that headline and thought “an art teacher told a student to dial down the feminism ? An art teacher ? Bullshit they did”
Nice art but the backstory is utterly fake
So it’s really Mango Mussolini behind the curtain - there is no Google AI ?
Insert Scooby Doo unveiling pic here
Press X to doubt on that headline.
The article doesn’t support it. My teen son’s response (we’re in the UK): “bullshit”
Clickbait imnsho.
Well deserved