darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]

Failing something like diffing which is the best way you might consider a tool that enables you to print the document contents to another document, either another type of document (epub to pdf for example) or the same type and doing that should result in no metadata at all carrying over. Of course you need the right tool for it and it may result in all kinds of mishaps with shifted text and pages and other nonsense so diffing would be better while this printing to another file solution would be nuclear but likely to foil everything but very advanced methods not likely to be employed to prevent piracy and basically impossible to automate.

I’d open the files up in Calibre or another viewer and see what kind of info it shows. Try to strip that, then open the result in a hex editor and try searching for your registered email address or phone number within the file which is the low hanging fruit obviously as if I were Amazon I’d use an internally known account number in either plaintext or even better encoded in unprintable bytes. All in all I’d try the printing to/converting to another format trick or consulting people more knowledgeable about this about methods and what to do.

Imagine getting arrested in a non-eyes, non-NATO country by the US. And right on the doorstep of Vietnam and China. How does that even work? Did the Cambodian authorities for some reason agree to arrest a dude who was in all likelihood an undeclared spy in their country for the benefit of the US and just hand him over without any further questions? Did the CIA kidnap him onto a plane and drag him away? Did he agree to be arrested and cooperate? I mean it’s right next door, a bus ride to Vietnam and a short plane jaunt to China and absolutely beyond the hand of the US.

Also kind of funny, I thought at the time that the leak was almost certainly done by the administration itself to try and tamp down the back and forth between Iran and the zionist colony and prevent a war they didn’t want to be in.

Marco Rubio Bot eh?

They may see with the US risking getting into a war with Russia and wanting a war with China that their own time to pull the US into a conflict to settle the region’s problems in their favor using the might of the US is quickly drawing to a close and will likely not exist in a few years so why let a crisis go to waste when they can try and get the US to take out Iran and Hezbollah for them which would allow greater “isreal” to become a reality. It’s an expansionist mindset too. Also fascists gonna fascist.

Here we go. Now did they have an ounce of sense and just pound the desert and a few unimportant places and claim otherwise in their propaganda so Iran has an out not to retaliate in kind? Or more likely did these deranged zionists hit important things and Iran has to hit back even harder and kill US troop scum manning their air defenses as well? At which point the US can either leave with its tail between its legs like Reagan did Lebanon in the 80s or escalate in some way including potentially war.

I hope the people of Iran remain safe regardless of outcome. I hope the colonizers of the zionist occupation continue to feel and be very unsafe as they should be until they stop their genocide and dismantle their apartheid regime.

Wow great read and some nice hopium!

I like this:

And America itself can’t even show up, they’re actually in the middle of a long retreat from the world, furiously throwing proxies in front of themselves and resorting to open terrorism.

It conjures up images of an old American style cartoon character whipping out things to put in front of them as they hastily backpedal.

To be honest Russia isn’t as strongly denying it anymore. I’ve long thought that the DPRK should send troops both to crush fascism and the US/NATO empire and because sad as it is that war costs lives, the DPRK has no warfare experience within the last 60 years and things have changed a lot. A few brigades getting experience on modern combat with Russia could take those lessons back and save many lives if/when the occupied south attacks with the Americans.

Also AFAIK didn’t occupied Korea already send a bunch of shells to Ukraine? They may not have been operating at full steam in support of them but I’m pretty sure they already chose to get involved.

Though I am still dubious that this has happened it wouldn’t be that strange and wouldn’t change my position that Russia has the right to do this.

Though I do find it a bit unlikely Russia would actually allow it as it would give the west a pretext to pour their own troops over the border by saying Russia did it first with an ally and all is fair. Most likely the DPRK troops that are in Russia reported by the west are just there for training and learning the latest combat lessons from Russian troops in modern warfare.

Hopefully the Russian Duma ratifies the treaty on mutual defense and cooperation soon as that would certainly deter the US somewhat from attacking Korea.

Oh fuck the lemmy.ml thread is full of scratched liberals screaming about Russia bad and Russians bad and this is good actually. .world and .shitworks continue to be a mistake.

Unfortunately for those military types they’re not in charge. The CIA has the ability with State Dept to just start a war. Instruct their pawn in Taiwan to declare independence, ensure the US president who is commander of the military knows they must intervene to defend them or else be seen as weak. President orders it, generals object and facepalm but China is already on the move and there’s nothing that can stop it at that point.

So it’s not what the generals want. Yes they can probably stop or dissuade the president from launching pre-emptive attacks for no particular reason but it won’t go down that way. Instead it will go down as a crisis (an engineered one obviously) that will occur, demand action and the US will feel based on everything that it is that it has no choice but to act and so it will be.

I suppose China could just let them have Taiwan but if they do the US will station tens of thousands of troops and missile systems and probably nukes on Taiwan before long and China won’t get it back this century in this case which is a real deal-breaker.

I think that military conflict doesn’t need to grow intense.

Like Ukraine it just needs to happen enough that the US government can pull a big lever called “fast decoupling” and force companies out of China quickly by slamming down a wall of sanctions. And like with Ukraine they can drag the EU into this via “defending democracy” and get them to pull their companies out and to do sanctions, divestment, decoupling.

This may be more about re-orienting the world for campism and a new cold war with the west withdrawing and putting up economic walls against China/Russia/BRICS and then trying to draw as much of the world as possible into their sphere while keeping out as much of the world from the BRICS sphere as possible with a strong possibility they can get India to pick up the slack from China and turn their position in BRICS into the kind of Turkish/Hungarian position inside NATO which is a spoiler who restrains the rest of it and takes contrary actions for its own self against the group interests and agenda. It’s a modified form of the cold war playbook the US used to success in the first cold war in the 50s through 70s. Strategic coups, destabilization operations (terrorism, separatism in key regions) to disrupt China’s supply routes and access to key resources and the belt and road.

This would be a time buying exercise. It would lock down NATO/EU markets for only western companies and non-Chinese/Russian firms and aim to out-compete using cheap labor while betting on crushing China/Russia on high technology leading to growing discontent and shortages as well as them falling behind. What if one of the points of the Ukraine war is to kill enough young men that they can justify importing a ton of desperate migrants to create a cheap factory (deeply destabilized due to the tensions of this situation) on the periphery of the EU to replace Russia/China along with their utilization of India? I wonder sometimes.

There’s a real chance the US will just do something like deploy mines or AI-drones and dump them in the straits to try and cut off China’s navy and land a bunch of weapons systems and special forces to fight China. The idea of a full confrontation between the US navy and the PLAN may never materialize so the intensity of the conflict will be lower. The US will use their vast air power to airlift in supplies and troops to the island. China can still win if they want to but it increases the costs and draw it out to be enough of a media spectacle that the people in the west are turned against China and the pressure for decoupling succeeds.

For profit company in capitalist country tries to sell products to different markets including the lavishly funded police state. It does this obviously by highlighting how such products can be used by that particular segment and wining and dining them at conferences with free swag to influence those who hold the purse-strings.

People here for some reason:

This is almost certainly no different than Apple hosting a little thing at a store showing people “hacks” like replacing an alarm clock with the clock app. It’s just marketing and with how well the police are funded it makes sense. I mean they’re foolish enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Musk’s Bazinga-mobile for “outreach” so obviously Apple wants some cash from selling cops half-baked solutions using their products that may not even be as good as purpose-built solutions currently on the market and theoretically might take away business from cop-specific businesses.

I can’t say critical support or anything but it’s nothing to get worked up about.

I mean I’m not sure what people expect? For Tim Apple to say fuck the police? Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Not to excuse many awful things they do but from a privacy perspective, Google is in much, much, much deeper with the intelligence, police, surveillance state. They own at least one company in “isreal” founded and run by zionist intelligence officers. They regularly collaborate with the zionists and the US military on multiple projects including building purpose-made equipment specifically for them and hold conferences so regular it’s not even of note. And Microsoft… they’ve been in bed with the feds for decades and do great things like automatically back up Windows encryption key to the Microsoft cloud where it can be subject to warrants by default. Apple at least on a surface level seems to do more, even if it’s just for its image and marketing.

I don’t think they were. They wanted an attack. They may not have expected the scope of it, hoped for something less humiliating and problematic that gave them justification to speed up the genocide without angering the domestic population of settlers so much and scaring some off.

Beyond that though there’s that IRA quip about those on the defensive needing to get lucky every single day whereas those on the offense need only get lucky once. It’s the same thing here. Maybe Hamas got “lucky” just as after many attempts to kill Nasrallah they got lucky and got him (I still think they followed the Iranian he was meeting with or some amount of commanders and concluded he was there). The pager thing is just unfortunately something that Hezbollah didn’t account for being a possibility in their operational security. Also it’s quite possible it was impossible to spot the small amounts of explosive without opening the batteries which few are going to do. They’re going to at most check for bugs or unauthorized hardware.

Now that further attacks succeeding serve no purpose militarily or politically they’re going to use their intelligence effectively. Though if they start losing the western crowd I wouldn’t put it beyond them to stage an atrocity of some sort happening to get the narrative of victimhood back. So far there’s no sign of a need for that.

Well obviously. But I didn’t feel like writing for hours. Any geopolitical analysis of this scale that is only two paragraphs is going to be simplified.

Whether it’s overly simple, I don’t think so. I think I captured the gist of how things seem to be going. Of course I can’t know the future, there are twists and turns and happenings no one expects.

But I do know this. Europe is bound to the US by the bonds of white supremacy and settler-colonialist legacy and the threads of neo-colonialist interest they still have. Their interests are one in certain ways and that makes it exceptionally hard for them to truly gain independence from the force that’s been occupying them (literally) and bailed out their capitalists at the end of WW2. Like a bunch of evil Captain Planet planeteers through their powers and colonial legacy, tricks, and support combined the US became capitalism’s consolidated champion as well as the global defender of the white supremacist world order.

Let’s not forget the NSA was spying on Germany’s prime minister among many others. It’s not just that they have troops in these countries, it’s that hey have dirt, leverage, ways of pushing people into or out of power when it comes down to it if they really need to make a change. They haven’t used these for decades because they’re unseemly and don’t fit with their new image so it’s a problem if they’re caught and because the EU is close enough in interests to them that it’s never been a problem. Gladio is a reminder of the tip of the iceberg of how far they’d go. Much as Google keeps Mozilla funded and alive to stave off challenges of monopoly the US allowed Europe some independence to lend legitimacy to their claims of different opinions and the idea that the EU and western Europe and most of NATO aren’t just a bunch of vassals for the US.

As Parenti once quipped, if you never go beyond where you’re supposed to go you never notice the tug of the leash, it’s only when you stray that you feel that and realize the limits imposed on you.

The Nordstream bombings was the tugging of the leash and we saw Europe very obediently heel and they’ve with a whimper accepted the US narrative lie about it being Ukraine that did it.

That’s not happening. This is meaningless talk.

They’re still withholding the machines and maintenance to the top end processes from China on national security grounds. They’ve already committed economic suicide. Germany is blaming Ukraine for the Nordstream attacks.

They lost their chance for independence this decade with the blowing up of Nordstream and when they all jumped onboard with anti-Russia sanctions and supplying weapons. The US has an interest in keeping the war in Ukraine burning or ending in a Korea type situation without a clear winner to keep Europe off Russian gas and reliant on US gas. Meanwhile the US poaches their talent, empties their industry into its pockets (some goes to China but that’s the way the cookie crumbles), and so on.

The idea of an independent Europe is laughable, it was happening but in too weak a way to ever succeed and the us sabotaged it easily and will again. After Ukraine the US is going to use Taiwan as an issue, there will be a big thing about it declaring independence, Europe will of course have to “stand with European values and democracy” and antagonize China and commit more economic suicide in decoupling from China to abide by US suggested sanctions, and so on. Europe is cooked. They’re going to go to the hard right parties after that happens since the left is not allowed at which point they’ll either start doing imperialism with the US while brutalizing migrants or they might actually take a more skeptical stance against the US and adopt a more mercenary position under the banner of white supremacy and reaction. Either way I’m sorry to say I don’t see socialism in Europe this decade or probably even the 2030s.

Also, the better example is the SuperMicro accusations.

I dunno why the feds targeted a Taiwanese company. Maybe they didn’t play ball and they got the stick.

Possible but the US is a gangster state. They’ve done shake-downs and disruption of French companies, Japanese companies, etc. It may be they were just trying to injure it to benefit US based competitors who would for example allow them to put their own spy-chips in server hardware bound for China or Japan or France or Germany. But as you say they may have been trying to get something and they wouldn’t cooperate, perhaps the US tried to bully them into moving some production to India or the US or some place further afield from China’s grasp and they refused and that would be enough. Heck the US has targeted and ruined US companies for not playing ball. There was a telecom called Qwest or something with a Q, they wouldn’t cooperate with the NSA bulk gathering illegal wiretap program and the government pulled all contracts from them and ruined them. So simply refusing a request with these gangsters is enough for them to at the least fire a shot across your bow as a threat if not try to take you out entirely.

the KMT doesn’t represent Taiwan so calling Taiwan fake-China is absurd.

I was doing a thing since, you know the territorial claims and anti-China liberals like to talk nonsense. Fact is they were to much of the world “real China” for years at the UN and elsewhere until getting unrecognized so they kind of are now the fake one, the pretender in every way. I think I see what you mean though.

Governments in practice enjoy immunity from private lawsuits.

The only way for this to have any meaning would be if his government sued them on their behalf, won, then seized some of those government assets from the zionist state under their jurisdiction or moved to have them frozen by friendly nations who complied and handed them over or to arrest relevant officials and extradite them. Needless to say the west will NEVER do this to isn’treal or its intelligence agents, certainly not for fake-China which is only kept around for use as fodder and unsinkable aircraft carrier against real China.

This company is fucked (well maybe, they’ll probably just rebrand) but this won’t be the end of western fuckery. Let’s not forget the hardware spy implants the NSA put in Cisco gear shipped to China in the early 2000s to mid 2010s (and potentially elsewhere as they were spying on Germany and other “allies”), Cisco protested, might have even launched a lawsuit but there was nothing they could do to stop it or to get compensation from it.

In their opinion it doesn’t matter.

Firstly because either the US is going to war with China within the next 8 years or it’s not happening because the US would be at such a disadvantage and like all bullies they won’t pick a fight with an evenly matched opponent. Secondly because military drone systems used by the US are not really like those used by other countries. For example, Russia and Ukraine are using near off the shelf kit and standing in a field while US drones are controlled from a bunker or command shack or place on a US navy ship from a system that looks like it’s from a Dave and Busters racing game with the whole big seat, multiple monitors, joy-stick and additional controls. US is just not interested in that kind of drone warfare. They’ve gone all in on the idea of semi-autonomous “AI” systems and swarms controlled by 1-2 trained people per swarm from a great distance. Thirdly the US has long had this image of it’s military as this highly trained, highly disciplined, elite force while simultaneously seeing Russians/Chinese as “hordes” of under-trained, under-motivated, under-equipped canon fodder so they turn up their nose to certain types of tactics as being for those others.

Fourth, the US is worried about domestic insurrection and discontent over worsening economic conditions. The worse thing you want to do in that situation is empower the ordinary people to wage insurrection using the type of tactics and methods (drones) field-proven by unconventional militias and militant groups across the middle east. These types of drones and easy cheap access to them is also a nightmare for operational security of military bases and internal security forces operations.

Unironically the US wants and is working hard on killbots they can fire and forget for attacks and area denial. They know among other things they can’t fight China navy to navy over Taiwan so instead the plan shifts to this idea of naval and aerial drones, semi-autonomous that are basically killbots or self-propelled targeting mines that they’d unleash in the hundreds and thousands in the straits to deny China the ability to send landing craft or support ships near Taiwan and buy them time to hold the island and strike at and destroy China’s navy from beyond the horizon. This is actually not a bad answer to the problem of traditional mining that mine-sweeper ships can just clear an area, mine-sweepers don’t work if the mines actively hone in on and swarm your clearing ship when you get anywhere near any of them.

The US military is not agile in the way the Russian military or the Ukrainian bandits are. It’s a big, expensive, lumbering machine and that’s the way they like it and that’s the way it’s going to be because it produces more profit for Raytheon and because it suits their self-image.

The real losers are local EMS, fire, cops, even the FBI who get hit in the budget much harder acquiring drones now.