reisse

> Actually, my main original purpose was to call (more) attention to the fact that looking for somebody specifically advertising a VPN to your particular country, for a censorship-resistance purpose

Please re-read my post then. I do not call to look for VPN for your or anyone's particular country, I call to look for VPNs for these specific countries because they have the current bleeding edge blocking tech, and if VPN works there now, it will 100% work in every other country. If you're in China, you don't have to look for Chinese VPNs, some of Russian ones will work there too.

None of the things I listed are "widely used approaches, and well-known, well-established providers" in the parts of the world where it does matter.

Yeah, maybe V* and derivatives are random ad-hoc hackery, but they also are the well-known standard now.

Well, you have to host your free open-source VPN software somewhere. And then, (N. B.: technical and usability stuff aside, I'm talking only about privacy bits here) everything boils down to two equally nightmarish options.

First, you use well-known cloud or dedicated hoster. All your traffic is now tied to the single IP address of that hoster. It may be linked to you by visiting two different sites from the same IP address. Furthermore, this hoster is legally required to do anything with your VPN machine on demand of corresponding state actors (this is not a speculative scenario; i. e. Linode literally silently MitMed one of their customers on German request). Going ever further, residential and company IPs have quite different rules when it comes to law enforcement. Seeding Linux ISOs from your residential IP will be overlooked almost everywhere (sorry, Germany again), but seeding Linux ISOs from AWS can easily be a criminal offense.

Second, you use some shady abuse-proof hosting company, which keeps no logs (or at least says that) and accepts payments in XMR. Now you're logging in to your bank account from an IP address that is used to seedbox pirate content or something even more illegal, and you still don't know if anyone meddles with your VPN instance looking for crypto wallet keys in your traffic.

VPN services have a lot of "good" customers for a small amount of IP addresses, so even if they have some "bad" actors, their IPs as a whole remain "good enough". And, as the number of customers is big, each IP cannot be reliably tied to a specific customer without access logs.

You've come to a wrong place to ask. Most people here (judging by recommendations of own VPN instances, Tor, Tailscale/other Wireguard-based VPNs, and Mullvad) don't have any experience with censorship circumvention.

Just look for any VPNs that are advertised specifically for China, Russia, or Iran. These are the cutting edge tech, they may not be so privacy-friendly as Mullvad, but they will certainly work.

Mullvad doesn't really have any modern censorship circumvention options.

> I'm still waiting for the apple laptop killer (a 12h+ laptop with plain Ubuntu) but it's still brittle as fuck.

Try Intel's Lunar Lake. My Zenbook 14S (S is important here!) does 12h+ on VS Code, browser & meetings (but compilation is remote). The screen is better than on Macbooks (it's high-res OLED), overall build is good. You probably won't be able to run Ubuntu LTS without installing latest kernel, but regular version should do just fine.

If you don't like ASUS, you can also try Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13. It's a bit on the smaller side and costs twice as much, but it's a pretty neat device.

> We have to remember nothing was "modern" at that time (around 2008)

Sorry, your memory is wrong. I've owned Nokia 5800 back then (2009 or 2010, don't remember exactly), and had a chance to compare it side to side with HTC G1 and iPhone 3G. It felt dated. Many apps were not designed with touchscreen in mind, the standard UI was "list with two buttons on the bottom", grandfathered from phones with keyboards. Resistive touchscreen didn't help either.

Then, the mobile hardware was making quantum leaps each year. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it felt every next iPhone or Android phone was twice as fast as the previous generation. And Symbian was stuck on a basically single hardware platform, with a single supported chip and a single weird display resolution (640x360).

Symbian^3 was a step in the right direction (at least they managed to rebuild the kernel for the different chip!), but the legacy was too heavy, and the competitors were moving much faster than Nokia. Like, the last Symbian flagship (Nokia 808) still had that 640x360 resolution on 4 inches. At that time, iPhone had HiDPI displays for two years!

> Symbian was as far as I know the last mass market open phone platform for developers.

Have you actually used it or developed anything for Symbian?

It was neither "open" nor "for developers". Some of the sources were available, but unlike Android, you couldn't rebuild the OS from scratch and load onto your device.

You couldn't just build and run your own apps. You had to obtain certificates from phone manufacturer (Nokia) and sign them. Thankfully the security system had so many holes it wasn't a big obstacle.

J2ME was a second-class citizen, only to support a lot of existing J2ME apps from feature phones.

Qt was way too heavy for the devices of that time. Qt apps easily consumed 40-50 MB of 128 MB RAM, while C++ ones that used native APIs could fit in 5-10 MB. But the native API sucked. It was in a bespoke dialect of C++, riddled with a lot of generational legacy. "A lot of other frameworks" you mention were mostly stuff used by some single developer for their own apps, to workaround all the Symbian quirks.

Idk, I don't understand people trying to whitewash Symbian. It didn't die because of someone turning evil, Microsoft acquisitions, whatever. Ultimately it died because it was unacceptably bad for a modern phone OS. Been there, used it, don't want to, good riddance.

MeeGo, though, is an entirely different beast...

I'd wish there were movement for the privacy-conscious services to escape any regulation, not just choose the currently-politically-correct one. Like piracy sites did in 00-10s (abuse-proof hosting in Ecuador, shady domain registrar from SEA, zero search indexing) or crypto companies now (net of shell companies where not a single one is responsible for anything).

My point is, if you trust the company you're using, also trust it to use any means necessary to protect you from bad actors, don't rely on the laws here. Both the corporate and the state ones. If you don't trust it, don't give it anything you cannot afford to leak or lose.

Specifically, EU data protection laws are good to protect regular customers from the big corporations, but they offer little protection against the EU (and the member states) themselves. And if the risk you're hedging against is "yourself turning to big corp and abusing customers" moving to EU is okay, but not in any other case.

The OP was specifically talking about hue. Hue does not change due to PWM.

This is due to different CRI (basically, how even light output is distributed across wavelengths), not due to PWM.

> Modern users have high DPI displays, variable refresh rates, multiple monitors, and panels with HDR color space support. X11 was just never going to work well for this. KDE Plasma 6.3, on the other hand, handles any of these situations quite well and I've been using it on a daily basis.

Everything from your list except HDR worked in X11 years before it started to work in Wayland compositors. Maybe not perfect, but better than any Wayland compositor could do the same until only a year or two ago.

The amount of time it took to get at least feature parity with X11 in Wayland stack is ridiculous. I'm not really sure it wouldn't be better if all that time went into X11.

Even if they did (which is questionable for me, because although a lot of embedded did jump to Wayland pretty fast, the maintaners never stated their goal is any less than replacing the whole X), they had a lot of time to pivot and rethink the design. I believe the general consensus that Wayland is the future of Linux on desktop was formed in 2013-2014, yet the feature gaps are still being patched.

I have a harsh opinion - the real problem with Wayland is that its authors and/or maintainers are *nix geeks, who never used anything more complex than X11 on an IBM Thinkpad with a maybe second 4:3 monitor attached. And they daily drive a few dozen terminal windows, Firefox and maybe Thunderbird.

I really have no other plausible explanation how they could miss so many potential usecases while rebuilding the display management ground-up: screen sharing, fractional scaling, different scaling factor for different screens, color profiles, HDR, toolbars and docking, window positions, and whatever else.

In the Wayland GitLab, there are comments in the spirit of "who would ever want to use this?" for a feature requests of something present in literally any sane WM...

If we had control of library code, we'd just get rid of select()...

Though we did use the dup trick in another case!

Oh the real fun thing is when the select() is not even in your code! I remember having to integrate a closed-source third-party library vendored by an Australian fin(tech?) company which used select() internally, into a bigger application which really liked to open a lot of file descriptors. Their devs refused to rewrite it to use something more contemporary (it was 2019 iirc!), so we had to improvise.

In the end we came up with a hack to open 4k file descriptors into /dev/null on start, then open the real files and sockets necessary for our app, then close that /dev/null descriptors and initialize the library.

You've had a good chance to really see 4096 descriptions in select() somewhere. The man is misleading because it refers to the stubbornly POSIX compliant glibc wrapper around actual syscall. Any sane modern kernel (Linux; FreeBSD; NT (although select() on NT is a very different beast); well, maybe except macOS, never had a chance to write network code there) supports passing the descriptor sets of arbitrary size to select(). It's mentioned further down in the man, in the BUGS section:

> POSIX allows an implementation to define an upper limit, advertised via the constant FD_SETSIZE, on the range of file descriptors that can be specified in a file descriptor set. The Linux kernel imposes no fixed limit, but the glibc implementation makes fd_set a fixed-size type, with FD_SETSIZE defined as 1024, and the FD_*() macros operating according to that limit.

The code I've had a chance to work with (it had its roots in the 90s-00s, therefore the select()) mostly used 2048 and 4096.

> Anyways, seriously just use poll().

Oh please don't. poll() should be in the same grave as select() really. Either use libev/libuv or go down the rabbit hole of what is the bleeding edge IO multiplexer for your platform (kqueue/epoll/IOCP/io_uring...).

Checksumming if not run on a spinning rust should've been default for years now.

Thank you!

Sorry for hijacking the thread, but I'm too curious not to ask: is having censorship circumvention out of the box a non-goal for Mullvad?

Because there are VPNs with good censorship circumvention tech, and there are VPNs with good privacy guarantees, but I know none which can provide both. What Mullvad offers now is either a decade old stuff which is blocked even by subpar DPI solutions, or a set of (more modern) protocol bridges which are painful to setup and sometimes IP-banned.

You miss a big difference between cryptocurrency and PoW captchas: it's very hard to change hashing/PoW method in a blockchain (you need ack from 50% + 1 validators, and all the validators are by definition heavily invested into the current proofing method - they have natural reason to object), but it's very easy to change hashing in a PoW captcha. So here any cheating will start a whack-a-mole game, where the defenders have the upper hand (changing PoW method is cheap, using multiple PoW methods is cheap, investing into ASICs isn't).

Why not just use Linux then?

The whole point of Windows right now is having a kernel that a) does not shove GPL down the device manufacturer's throat and b) care about driver API stability so that drivers actually work without manufacturer or maintaner intervention every kernel upgrade.

Eh, million dollars would not raise a single eyebrow from an exchange side. Your bank, maybe, will have some questions about the transaction, but the things they can do to prevent you spending your money are thankfully fairly limited.

This seems like a fairly bad example to compare with?

These runners do not even look like amateurs. Look how the best of the bunch still does the novice mistake of decelerating _before_ the finish line. They're just regular people asked for "let's try to run a 100m sprint". It doesn't take an Olympic champion to get a 3+ seconds lead in such competition.

The above-average track runner would look the same in this video. And the Olympic champion might have an 1s+ lead on them, which is still a lot, but not as lot as in this video (at least they will both fit in the camera).

Of course it's highly unlikely they'll go in court for a single user, but if everyone starts doing this, they'll sue. It doesn't matter the payment failed, you still legally owe Adobe (or any other service) money.

> The license is actually pretty restrictive: you can only use this if you own a small company or work for government / non-profit.

I wonder if this can be worked around by setting up an OpenAI-style non-profit arm to use Gumroad.

> In theory some random rogue state (Hello North Korea!), can just grant all of the Australian parliament citizenship. Suddenly they're all ineligible under the constitution.

It's funny how Russia, of all the countries, had this problem - there are a lot of immigrants from ex-USSR countries, and some of these countries make it very hard to relinquish citizenship. For example in Ukraine this is done only by a presidential order, after a long bureaucratic procedure, and the last such order was signed in 2021. So Russia had to invent a mechanism which allows to write an affidavit certifying you would not exercise any rights given to you by foreign citizenship, and with such an affidavit your citizenship is considered "effectively relinquished" by Russian authorities.

I know! As I stated,

> Even considering a huge part of that volume is coming from institutional players who enjoy significantly reduced commission rates...

But the volume is huge. Even if we take the best publicly shared MM rates from Bybit (which is 1.5bp taker commission, 0.5bp maker rebate), and assume the whole volume is traded with these rates, it is still 1bp from 40B dollars, which is 4M dollars daily.

Bybit trading volume is in tens billions of dollars daily. Their comission rate for the retail traders is up to 10bp (0.1%). Even considering a huge part of that volume is coming from institutional players who enjoy significantly reduced commission rates, I think they're surely making few million dollars daily on comissions alone, maybe tens of millions in a good day. And besides comissions, they also have other sources of profit, like staking, crediting customers, and forced liquidations.

Being a crypto exchange in current market is very profitable. If the crypto itself does not collapse, I think it's totally possible for them to repay that sum in a year or less.

I understand this is not an "official" Wikipedia list, but article in a community newspaper about Wikipedia. Yet, the notes about the list items are much more opinionated than I'd like or expect to see from Wikipedia authors.