Got it. Nobody should consider the need for a license because, in an emergency, you don’t need one. But also get a license so that you can use it in non-emergencies otherwise you’ll get a fine.

Good talk.

If you are in a situation where you need help, the odds of someone (even the person you have been talking to for weeks on the radio) doing a day or two journey to MAYBE be able to reach you is pretty slim. And such long distance communication has other implications for bad actors.

And in the event of “rebuilding” some kind of community, you aren’t going to be using a handheld device at all. You’ll raid… I don’t even know what at this point (I miss Radio Shack) to install a radio on the tallest building you can find. Oh, a HAM Radio Nerd’s house. That’ll work.

Whereas if you are trying to communicat4e with others and signal for rescue? Whatever you can get from walking up a hill/mountain or climbing the stairs to said tall building with your handheld is probably about what you can expect.

Same with in stuff like hurricanes and the like. If you are in a region that is at all hospitable then the relief teams know to send helicopters/people to that area. And if you are in the kind of situation where even a few hours might mean the difference between life and death… odds are nobody is coming.

Maybe you’d understand more things if you continued to read after the first opportunity you see to spew whatever you want to?

But in a “the internet is out” situation? Or even a “please evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion” for a wildfire or a bad hurricane? That is where meshtastic (et al) shine and it is well worth convincing friends to pick up a t-deck or whatever. Excellent for the “is it out for everyone or just me?” checks. Also useful for letting people know which field can see a cell tower a county or two over for emergency communication or to even coordinate whether you are all gonna head North or South to hang out for (hopefully just) a few days.

I’ll also add on that it is useful to be able to practice and get familiar with a tool without risking a fine.

I wish this energy was just put towards promoting ham, tbh.

I wish you put more energy towards reading the comments you are replying to

Yeah… if I am trying to reach people tens of miles away during The Apocalypse, I am already dead.

Anyone who is within range to be helpful (or… not) would generally be within signal range of a handheld.

In a true emergency? Yes, HAM is the way to go and I need to get around to buying one of those super sketchy Baofengs. In theory you can configure them to use without a license (which is also on the todo list) but it is super easy to tick into the licensed use. How much people will care will mostly depend on whether your local HAM folk are narcs. But, regardless, all bets are off in a true emergency and Baofengs are dirt cheap.

But in a “the internet is out” situation? Or even a “please evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion” for a wildfire or a bad hurricane? That is where meshtastic (et al) shine and it is well worth convincing friends to pick up a t-deck or whatever. Excellent for the “is it out for everyone or just me?” checks. Also useful for letting people know which field can see a cell tower a county or two over for emergency communication or to even coordinate whether you are all gonna head North or South to hang out for (hopefully just) a few days.

And anyone thinking of using any of that for stuff the government don’t want you to: You are an idiot and you need to learn about how insecure all of those are.

I mean… it is a “both sides” thing in the sense that there is a heavily armed paramilitary group with no oversight abducting and gunning down anyone they want. Doesn’t matter how you voted or how many maga hats you buy, if they decide you are “an illegal” they’ll toss your wallet away and load you into the back of a van.

And, when discussing stuff like this, it is important to understand that “all VPNs” actually means corporate and public VPNs.

If you want to have an actual conversation then context matters. Rather than just fixating on nonsensical overly literal interpretations because you only want to be “technically correct” by attacking a strawman.

If your corporate VPN is routing ALL traffic then your IT department are idiots. And I am pretty sure said company would thank google for blocking youtube from their employees.

It very much is possible to ban “all” public and even commercial VPNs. VPN traffic tends to have very distinct characteristics in logs and it is not overly difficult for orgs to get the IP ranges allocated to each company.

What is not possible is banning all vpn traffic in the sense that a friend or family member sets up wireguard for you. But that is a drop in the bucket to the point of being functionally nonexistent.

The middle ground, of course, are pseudo-botnets of compromised computers. But those also tend to be a fairly small percentage (outside of DDOSing) and are likely getting blocked for other reasons.

Wasn’t a fan of the video as a whole (much more focused on lecturing folk about anarchism than actual projects) but the idea of setting up a lawn light node actually seems really nice… in part because I wouldn’t mind a solar powered light for my yard. But Benn’s videos tend to always be either REALLY interesting or REALLY obnoxious so… yeah.

Looked at the original https://meshtastic.org/docs/community/enclosures/rak/harbor-breeze-solar-hack/ and that light seems out of stock. I’ll swing by Harbor Freight next time I am near one to see if that one is available, but is there a good list of lights that are known to have enough space to shove a kit in there?

And many claim palin lost the election for mccain.

And we all saw how Kamala did in the general. Chuds have no interest in pushing for progress.

She will run in 28… If there are elections.

She will bomb out of the primary in record time. Only the hardcore magats like her and they will never vote for a woman

If Big Zaddy’s crew could hit putins house, the fucker would already be dead.

Simple as that

Why wouldn’t it be?

Presumably they are better at investigative work and shooting people. Unless they are specifically involved in “cyber crime” or “digital forensics” there is no reason to expect high levels of computer skills.

In an even competent world? The people who ARE experts at that would have been consulted to define the protocol everyone else follows. Yeah…

Doubtful.

This happens ALL the time. Countless publicly released police reports, legal documents, and even (allegedly) classified documents all just use the black highlighter in Acrobat because “that is what I would do if this were a physical copy”.

One of the first things you do when anyone gives you a “redacted” PDF is to just highlight the text. The next step up is to then check the layers of the PDF in case they added black rectangles to a scanned document (and a lot of OCR tools actually do that by default).

Same with seeing if you have the document history in a word file.

Never underestimate how computer illiterate the average person is. We shit on genz for not knowing what a directory structure is but… they ain’t that far behind the curve. It is mostly just that VERY narrow subset of genx/millennial who grew up with “family computers” that picked up most of these skills.

I mean… probably (ass pulling) 80% of actual computer hacking is that level of exploit. People be REAL stupid

Check wirecutter or even amazon. Tempered glass is actually ridiculously easy to break even with just a spark plug in your hand, so anything with a hammer shape and the right tip is gonna do it. Just make sure there is also a seatbelt cutter on the tool.

That said, it is probably worth spending some more money to get the spring loaded type. It doesn’t take THAT much effort to smash a tempered glass window, but it is a lot easier to just push a device against it instead.

People vastly underestimate the importance of having a window breaking tool. Many people who die when they go into a lake could very much be alive if they had just unbuckled, smashed, and swam/floated away. One of the best Mythbusters episodes was about specifically this. Opening a door when you are underwater but there is still air in the cabin is REALLY REALLY hard and the vast majority of people do not have the training/calm to take a last gasp of air, wait for pressure to equalize, and get going.

Same with burning vehicles. People very much underestimate how rapidly it is just not possible for all but the most adrenaline filled of mothers to get into that car to pull out someone who is unconscious or panicking because they can’t get their seatbelt off.

People who can’t get out of a burning vehicle because the electrical system has failed catastrophically but there is no meaningful damage to the doors is not nothing. But… 15 people IS nothing. Especially when you realize they might fall under a different category as well.

As per https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-research/fire-statistical-reports/vehicle-fires the NFPA estimated an annual of 215k vehicle fires in the US during the 2018-2022 timeframe with 643 deaths per year (I think. Kinda ambiguous). Assuming those deaths were within a single calendar year (too lazy to find an archive link or see if reader mode works), that is 2%. If it is spread out, that is even less.

The swasticar doors are fundamentally stupid and dangerous and have no reason to exist. But in terms of ways to prevent loss of life? They are REALLY low on the totem pole.

Whereas normalizing both drivers and good samaritans having tools to actually get into a car goes a long way. Because maybe that fire is because of the battery and the entire car is intact otherwise. More often you rae dealing with a jammed door because they got t-boned or rolled in a bad way. And the answer in both cases is to smashy-smashy.

A good way to think of it (that will remind us this is still essentially reddit and people hate metaphors) is like if Toyota decided every single car needed a dorsal fin… made out of sharpened steel. Yes, someone would inevitably get killed by it and that would lead to statistics. But it would have no meaningful impact on the lethality of a vehicle because so much else about cars is already so insanely dangerous.

But also… why the fuck would you duct tape a sword to a car? Don’t fucking do that.

There are layers to this.

No exterior door handles is a massive danger in the event of a crash that incapacitates those inside. No interoir door handles is a massive danger to those inside in the event of a crash that takes out the electrical system.

That said. Plenty of crashes will “disable” the doors just from the type of impact and so forth. And those tend to be the really bad ones.

Which is why EVERYONE should have, preferably a pair, of those car window breakers. Keep one handy to the driver and one either in the box between the driver and passenger or somewhere very visible in the back seat area.

In the event of a really bad crash? That is how you cut your seatbelt if it is jammed or you are otherwise unable to easily access it. And that is how you smash the glass to get out. And if you pull up to the side of an accident? That is how you get the injured driver out (keeping in mind all safety related concerns with moving someone who might have a spinal injury).

Just… also be aware that it has become increasingly popular (and not just among swasticars) to laminate many of the occupant windows. This DOES prevent shards of glass from flying into your face in the event a pickup truck tried to run you over. This ALSO makes escape a LOT harder. It is good to actually read your manual (or at least the labels on the windows) to know which ones you can escape from in the event of a crash.

But yeah., There is no fucking reason to remove mechanical door handles. But it is not THAT much of a danger in the event of a crash. Whereas it IS very much a deeply annoying hazard in the event of accidentally starting a firmware update with the door closed…

I don’t understand all the details (I assume Legal Eagle is already working on a video… that might even be on Nebula already. I should check) but there were specific legal clauses regarding what can and can’t be redacted.

So (massive grain of salt), I would assume we wait for the deadline on why things were still redacted to pass (probably a few weeks), then a formal complaint is made (a few weeks after that), and then that times out.

So… probably come March we see if people remember if they care about kids getting raped?

In parallel: it looks like mostly it was just (mostly dead?) celebrities and Democrats who weren’t redacted. Actual Democrats give zero shits about protecting clinton but the DNC does, so I am sure there are internal discussions on how to handle that which will end with Hakeem et al bopping their heads to Hamilton in a tiktok video.

(The estates of) said celebrities may actually care though and start going scorched earth. And I am sure at least a few of the redacted photos of child victims in adult male bodies and suits have public versions that will show up with a reverse image search.

And then you just have to wonder about the True Believer alt-right lunatics who are already breaking from trump because they genuinely just want to kill some pedophiles. And considering that the trump admin has very much been a who’s who of deranged vloggers with no understanding of data handling…