Someone pays for every camera that goes down. It just is not Flock.
The bolt cutters do not send Flock an invoice. They send one to the city.
That's the point. People know their city has to pay for these things, and the patriotic act of cutting down these cameras means that each camera down makes the Flock contract just that much more expensive to maintain. Cities aren't going to cut budget items just to keep the ever-increasing costs of maintaining a Flock contract. They'll drop the contract.
I do agree that people should be publicly commenting and contacting their city council members as well. Demoralizing the politicians who vote for this is important as well.
This article is about Proton VPN, not Proton Mail. Proton is the parent company, but because of the way the technologies work, there's different considerations you would need to make, especially if you're an activist on a government's shitlist.
Mail has to store data like where a message came from and who is the recipient. Doesn't matter if the rest of the message is encrypted, and a government might find that to be enough to abuse someone.
A VPN, however, can drop a given connection's endpoint data the millisecond it's not needed. This is basically how no-log VPNs work.
I don't use Proton, but given that Chat Control is now the law of the land in the EU, the options for a "safe" VPN are getting ever smaller as authoritarianism threatens to break cryptography and privacy in a vain effort to "protect the children."
It's important to note that they specified Proton VPN, in which case, the claim is correct. This is due in part to how no-log VPNs work.
Proton Mail, however (from your example), is harder to anonymize, as is any encrypted email service, because they necessarily have to store data for the user; even if they can't see the contents of an email, they inevitably store data like where a message came from. Additionally, every service is subject to the laws of the country in which they operate. In the case of the activists, Proton Mail was legally compelled to reveal what data they had stored, and it was enough for the investigating government to put the jackboot upon those activists.
I'm certainly not saying Proton is the best company, and I don't personally use their services on purpose, but the claim being made here about their VPN is nonetheless correct.
I personally know indie musicians who are popular enough to have had their music scraped and used as training data, in part because they are forced to use platforms like Spotify, YouTube, etc. to eke out a living. And then people have had the audacity to present AI slop versions of music using their vocals to them, expecting them to be happy about it.
Were they paid for their decades of work? No. Were they given the opportunity to opt out? No. This isn't The Man trying to capitalize upon an open and equitable system. This is The Man stealing from the poors and each other, and pretending they didn't (or worse, acting like their victimhood is somehow equal to everyone else's).
And to add even further insult to injury, these companies have tricked many of those same poors that these plagiarism engines are tools to "level the playing field" against people who have spent years honing their craft. Why, the very nerve of those people using their time to become experts! /s
Death to training without paying the stockholders, death to open-source...
Even better: how about death to training until you pay the original artists fairly and equitably, or allow them to opt out? AI should not be treated as some inevitable thief that we must all work around.
Sure, but "works with nVidia" isn't the same as "works with everything," since there's a lot of other hardware to consider, though I'd imagine the latter case would be mostly easy for an end user to work around.
That's all I'm really pointing out with that part, and if I'm wrong, then it's only good news for the rest of us.
But the benefit of SteamOS is going to be marginal at best since lots of distros are already highly capable for gaming. Waiting isn't going to bring with it some magical improvements that makes it the default choice over CachyOS, Bazzite, PikaOS, etc.
I suspect you'll be disappointed or frustrated by SteamOS, since Valve isn't really all-in on maintaining a universal distro like other projects (and that's okay); more likely, it will always be Valve-hardware-first that just happens to work on some other hardware configurations.
IMO, you're better off jumping into whatever distro interests you rather than expecting SteamOS to fit your use case. My personal choice was CachyOS for daily use and gaming, and it's been great, but PikaOS would be one I'd consider for another build. I also run Bazzite on an older laptop for some light gaming and HTPC stuff, and that's been rock solid.
Yep, I installed Aurora on an aging parent's laptop, because I was worried they'd be the target of some well-crafted malware campaign (hence why I went atomic). Plus the parent doesn't have good privacy practice, and I know Microsoft was datamining everything they were doing.
I think it's more akin to indoctrination. "You, too, can be independently wealthy if you work hard enough. Just look at these very abnormal billionaires!"
Been playing everyday for about two years with my 3060ti without much issue. There's still the odd hiccup on occasion, but it's usually solved by picking a different Proton version. Most games "just work," generally without any changes.
The nVidia drivers haven't been "a mess" for quite a long time, so if that's what is holding you back, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. ProtonDB has a massive and growing list of games that run on Linux, and you can see what people did (if anything) to get those games working.
I will caution you, however, that if any amount of tinkering makes you inwardly cringe, you might want to think twice. Linux is generally easy to use, and it's only getting easier, but there will be times you'll have to add Launch Options to a Steam game, install a mod differently, or use the command line to do something.
I wouldn't say "never," but it's very likely that RAM prices will not return to pre-AI (read: bullshit) levels. Many markets do this; hike up to crazy levels during a boom, come back down 80%, rinse and repeat.
The only thing that might put a stop to it is competition or the unicorn business that focuses upon everyday consumers and not purely profit (lol). I'm hopeful China is able to be a spoiler to this current tech hegemony, given general US hegemony is basically over, but the home computing market is probably fucked in the meantime.
It's where he lives. He's a citizen and was returning home from DR.