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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: December 6th, 2024
  • Two points:

    • Danegeld refers to paying the Vikings not to raid your lands, something that has nothing to do with Colonization
    • Groups of have been invading other groups of people’s land and taking their shit long before Europe had enough technological dominance for it’s nations to do it to other people outside Europe.

    Tribalism and all the shit that comes with it (including the whole “steal from and kill the other tribe for the good of your own tribe”) is way older than “Europe” as a collection of nations and seems to be and inherent human trait.

  • You clearly have never owned a business if you think the very legal system which makes that company a legal entity with all the rights it entails (i.e. they’re registered there) can’t force them to do whatever the local laws say they have to do.

    They can literally strike that company down of the Company Register and seize its assets because a company did not obey a lawful court order there (such as one from an Information Court).

    The rest of your post is just ignorant bollocks. This is not Privacy Legislation, this is Surveillance Legislation: the stuff that enables and backs the giant civil society surveillance systems revealed by Snowden, not the stuff that makes it a bit harder for Google to know what kinds of Porn you watch.

  • I’m seriously worried about what’s going on around this.

    There is quite the push here for people to move to VPNs under the legals jurisdiction of surveillance heavy states, not just the US and UK but also places like Gibraltar and the British Virgin Islands which are British Overseas Territories with the same laws as Britain except were they passed specific local legislation that overrides British Law.

    We’re talking about places with Information Courts which issue secret mass surveillance orders to companies based in or operating there and it doesn’t mater if that VPN is no logs because for all you know they’ve been forced to install realtime surveillance equipment/software and they can’t even tell you because BY THE LAW OF WERE THEY OPERATE if they did so they would end up in jail.

    I would expect that the kind of people who would leave Mullvad because one of it’s owners is a far-right nutter are also the kind of people who don’t want everything they do and say tracked by the likes of the US or UK.

    Further, the push is pervasive. For example https://vpn.techlore.tech/ is supposed to help you choose a good VPN, only if you look at those VPNs based in British Overseas Territories (Gibraltar, BVI) they’re listed as “Not 14-eyes” which that’s bullshit - I was actually curious and went and look at how Legislation works in Gibraltar and, as I wrote above, they have the same as in Britain except were they wrote their own legislation that overrides British legislation, which means that (unless somebody can point me out the legislation in Gibraltar that overrides it), the very same legislation that support the mass surveillance activities in Britain as a member of not only the “14-eyes” international surveillance agreements but the actual “5-eyes” one, applies to Gibraltar and hence to the likes of IVPN.

    Frankly, looking for a replacement for Mullvad whilst having some awareness of the mass surveillance shit in supposedly democratic nations is scary as fuck, since most VPNs, for all their (possibly theatrical) “No logs” and whatnot, are actually in places with Information Courts which can issue secret court orders forcing them to install mass surveillance equipment.

    Absolutely, if all you care about is avoiding lawyer letters because of pirating stuff, any “No Logs” VPN will probably do, but if you’re worried about the rise of the Far-Right then it makes sense that you’re not into there being a real risk that all you’re doing over your supposedly “No logs” VPN is in fact being logged directly into NSA or GCHQ systems (in the kind of country whose governments think being a leftwinger is “extremism” or even “terrorism”),

  • Lets not deflect the blame away from the political forces which have been subverting Democracy for decades.

    Go look at the Chat Control vote in the EU Parliament: it wasn’t the Far-Right that voted for that shit (well, at least not in my country), it was the big “moderate” “center” parties that voted for it whilst the rest voted against it.

    The push for authoritarianism is coming from the well-entrenched, big, mainstream, neoliberal parties, the very people who believed the Power of Money should not have to obey the Power of the Democratically Elected State (using slogans like “Do not interfere in the Free Market” to justify having Money as as the top Power).

    (Notice how in the US the Democrats are and have been for decades just as much into widespread civil society surveillance and zero privacy as the Republicans)

    Mainstream, Neoliberal parties are the people who have shifted Democracy in most of the West towards Oligarchy, with billionaires and even trillionaires holding immense real power.

    In most of the West the return of Fascists to politics is still pretty recent and as they’re not the ones entrenched in power, it’s not actually in their interests for widespread civil society surveillance to be in place since such mechanisms are meant to detect and stop challenges to those in power, not to put fringe movements in power.

  • They still get to eavesdrop on your e-mails.

    You know, the digital version of mail.

    Guess who used to open and read people’s mail … oh, yeah, the political police of every fucking dictatorship in Europe (both Fascist and Communist) during the XX century.

    This is the shit these people in supposedly Democratic nations have enacted.

    If you’re a citizen in an EU member state, I suggest you have a look at who are the MEPs in you country who voted for this shit. In mine - Portugal - which had a Fascist dictatorship complete with mail opening secret police, this was passed entirely with the votes of the mainstream parties and even the far-right voted against it.