Joe

Judges usually don’t know this stuff, but they primarily work with systems and software supplied by the state…whose experts should know what they are doing.

My bet is that this guy decided to work on personal equipment, probably in violation of the rules. Being a judge, he’s unlikely to be sanctioned for it, and will certainly learn from the experience. If anything, there may be some internal discussions which we’ll never hear about.

Law is an area where AI can add value, though… searching through past rulings and legal opinions is tedious, and anything that can assist to find needles in haystacks would be welcome. It shouldn’t be used to write legal judgements or arguments though…

They have a fetishist concept that anyone with a business empire is someone to be admired. They probably think they have a chance, the fools.

I don’t think you need separate laptops, but a separate router may be useful.

If you use Linux, you can have apps isolated to their own lightweight network namespaces (like containers), using different VPNs. Otherwise VMs can serve a similar purpose on Windows and Macs.

Iptables can also be used to block traffic, and force it through proxies (which can be whitelisted by uid/gid) or VPNs.

If you want a more secure VPN setup, I’d even recommend having the VPN(s) running on the router (eg. portable OpenWRT setup) so your laptop never gets offered a public IP / connects directly to network. Put a proxy on it for special (eg. DNS based) routing exceptions, like banking from real IP, reddit via the US, etc.

Disable IPv6 on your router or primary interface, and enable it on your VPN. If anything can discover an Internet IP on your PC, the link can be formed. Worst case, you are not using the VPN for IPv6 at all.

In the EU, there are typically three levels of VAT, with members having some leeway to choose which applies to what.

Health services, public transport, rentals/housing and education are often exempt, while most groceries and medications are at a reduced rate. eg. Germany has 7% and 19% as the reduced and normal rates.

Income taxes are additional and (in most EU countries progressive). Social insurances are often separate, and similarly progressive.

This works alongside the basic welfare nets, which ensures that people have just enough to survive if they fell through the cracks. Without this net, even the reduced rates on groceries would seem punitive.

Not every EU country is equal, but there is a goal to provide these societal safety nets alongside fair taxation, which is invested back in society.

What do you have against the project and the people behind it? It sounds personal.

There are plenty of non-commercial Linux distributions. Some managed better than others. Some generic, some with niches. OpenWRT is a favourite of mine.

They could. The protocol also supports IP spoofing, so doxing could also be a thing.

For individuals, it is a time consuming and costly legal process, whether justified or not. For the law firm, it costs a few cents per letter, but they get a few hundred (or more) euros when some sucker pays.

In Germany and no doubt some other countries, private law firms can (on behalf of the copyright holders) request people’s identity based on residential IP addresses and then send extortionist legal threats. Apparently an IP appearing on a public tracker can be enough to trigger it, without any confirmed data transfer.

VPNs are common and usually sufficient.

She is just on someone else’s payroll.

With apparmor, you could enable and disable profiles that could restrict access to files and paths by name.

For network traffic, it’s possible to use dnsmasq to blacklist or whitelist some domains.

It’s a trait of sociopathy (psychopathy?), I think. One tends to align oneself with the views of the other person (aka lying). And to survive a demanding role that requires one to form and hold and justify one’s own opinions, he probably takes the lazy route and keeps the last persona until his next mental reset.

He is an imposter in his own mind, and we know it.

Fake it 'til you make it… or not, whatever.

Heh. Tax returns and music should have been the giveaways, although I know someone who takes great satisfaction in taking every tax deduction they legally can, down to the last cent. :-P

TV and games sure, but embrace music - (try to) learn to play an instrument, and you will appreciate listening so much more!

“Cringe!” seems appropriate.

I use labwc … it’s basically OpenBox as a Wayland Compositor. Some things/programs work better than Hyprland, other things worse. No animations - just get out of your way functionality.

I found a patch that allows manual tiling and focus (eg. alt-tabbing just for windows in the left half of the screen), which is cool.

Scriptability isn’t there, but the code looks pretty clean.

The config file is similar to OpenBox. I miss multi-layer keybindings though.

Another technique that helps is to limit the amount of information shared with clients to need to know info. This can be computationally intensive server-side and hard to get right … but it can help in many cases. There are evolving techniques to do this.

In FPS games, there can also be streaming input validation. eg. Accurate fire requires the right sequence of events and/or is used for cheat detection. At the point where cheats have to emulate human behaviour, with human-like reaction times, the value of cheating drops.

That’s the advanced stuff. Many games don’t even check whether people are running around out of bounds, flying through the air etc. Known bugs and map exploits don’t get fixed for years.

Not everything will be open source. For whatever reason, they decided to make this obfuscator open source. It might also just be an interesting side project that someone got permission to release.

Obfuscation can make it harder to reverse engineer code, even if the method is known. It might also be designed to be pluggable, allowing custom obfuscation. I haven’t checked.

We also know that obfuscation isn’t real security … but it’s sometimes it is also good enough for a particular use case…

ALSA is lowest level, and is the kernel interface to audio hardware. Pipewire provides a userspace service to share limited hardware.

Try setting “export PIPEWIRE_LATENCY=2048/48000” before running an audio producing application (from the same shell).

Distortion can sometimes be related to the audio buffers not getting filled in time, so increasing the buffering as above gives it more time to even out. You can try 1024 instead of 2048 too.

There is no doubt a way to set it globally, if it helps.

Good luck!

Except my crazy relative (just 1, thank dog) also has telegram and feels the urge to forward every damn whackjob conspiracy theory reinterpretation of truth that they find to me and my wife, despite us never replying except to ask them to stop. eg. Cloud seeding, windmills and electric cars are responsible for destroying the atmosphere (not co2 and other greenhouse gases); Bill Gates etc. are spreading microchips through vaccinations; judges ruling that measles doesn’t exist; Ukraine is full of nazis; and yes, even regurgitated feelgood fairy tales and random cat pictures from Facebook. So glad they are in a country far far away from me. They “do their own research”, of course.

So bloody sad that so many people are in a similar situation of avoiding friends and family for their own sanity (and sometimes safety).