Lemmy - RazBot

If you have an old phone in a drawer, and you listen very carefully, you can occasionally hear the occasional tap of an emitted SIM card hitting the side of the drawer as the phone transmutes to a lower-end model.

https://explainxkcd.com/3071/

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20326500

Archived

The pursuit of net zero has relied on Uighur Muslims forced to work in appalling conditions. Experts say Britain should follow other countries and take tougher stance.

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Many of the Chinese workers who are helping us to go green do not want to be at those factories. They do not arrive at work to manually crush silicon and load it into blazing furnaces because of a love of renewables, much less to earn a decent wage.

They are there as part of a mass forced labour programme by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that critics describe as a genocide. A reliance on men and women from the Uighur Muslim minority living in detention centres has helped the Xinjiang region to become the epicentre of the solar industry over the last 15 years.

At its peak, analysts believe that 95 per cent of the world’s solar modules were potentially tainted by forced labour in the region [of Xinjiang, in northwestern China]. This reliance on products partly made through working conditions that would be unfathomable in modern Britain represents what the Conservative MP Alicia Kearns calls an ethical “blind spot”.

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It is not only solar panels that are linked to widespread human rights abuses in the so-called Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region. Fuelled by an abundance of cheap, coal-driven electricity, the region produces vast amounts of everything from cotton to the lithium batteries that are ever more essential to our tech-driven lives.

But as governments across the world invest in solar energy in the race to reach net zero, experts have described a critical opportunity to curtail what has been one of Xinjiang’s champion industries.

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Alan Crawford, a chemical engineer who authored a 2023 report that exposed several companies with ties to forced labour, said that transparency from Chinese producers had decreased as a result. “Transparency has gotten worse because the Chinese know that people like us are looking,” he said.

While the Chinese authorities maintain that the Uighur community is free, images of internment camps have shown razor-wire fences manned by police. Leaked police files revealed a shoot-to-kill policy for escapers.

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The pervasiveness of forced labour across the early stages of the production process makes it difficult to find polysilicon from Xinjiang that has not been contaminated by forced labour. Hoshine Silicon, the dominant MGS producer in Xinjiang and a major supplier to the region’s polysilicon producers, has engaged in “surplus labour” programmes at its factories.

One propaganda account from 2018 details how a married couple were engaged in a “poverty alleviation” scheme in which they were moved 30 miles from their home in the rural Dikan township to work at a Hoshine factory in Shanshan county, leaving behind their children. The couple were described as being “relieved” of their worries by transferring their seven-acre grape farm to the state.

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[Laura] Murphy, a senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said legislation introduced in the US in 2021 showed how supply chains can be cleaned up. The Uighur Forced Labour Prevention Act, which bans the import of goods linked to the region, has led to thousands of solar panel shipments being stopped by US customs.

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It is for this reason that Murphy believes the UK should mirror the US approach, a strategy already being pursued by the European Union. If the UK’s controls against forced labour are not robust, there is a high probability that the UK will simply become a “dumping ground” for the tainted goods not wanted by the US.

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Andrew Yeh, executive director of the China Strategic Risks Institute, said relying too heavily on China for solar energy products could also leave Britain vulnerable in a geopolitical crisis.

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For Murphy, legislation is the only meaningful response to the issue. [...] She said: “Whatever it is that other countries think they might be doing to discourage it, shy of legislation, shy of enforcement, it is not working.

“We can be morally outraged all we want and we can express our desires not to have forced labour-made goods, even at governmental level. But until we actually put it in law and enforce it, companies will continue to import goods made with forced labour into the UK.”

For me Ireland and Taiwan, how about some others

They hate VPNs

Using something like Graphene OS or Lineage will result in less ad tech monitoring you, which may be useful in the event of sudden increased persecution (worse than what exists).

Keep your phone in airplane mode unless absolutely needed to avoid providing information about your routines that can be used maliciously by corrupt government forces. The government doesn't need to know your route home, so go into airplane mode!

KryptKey is an excellent FOSS App and that allows cryptography in regular text messages. If a conservative coalition blocked VPNs, KryptKey provides ways to communicate using traditional methods if certain servers for encryption Apps are blocked.

A low tech way of letting people know you aren't being held or killed is to update your voicemail with the date. For example. "Hi, it's me SATL. Today is April 2nd as of this recording and all is well. I'm still a Windows user not spending all my time on a Linux addictuon! Leave a message after the beep." A failure to update the message for an extended periods could indicate a problem. Because people can sometimes get arbitrarily banned on Facebook for no reason, relying on Facebook for this function is a bad idea.

Community Assistance Groups using SimpleXChat: create a group using SimpleXChat of other marginalized people and make certain agreements. In the event anyone is missing, the remaining group members will place at least 10 calls per day trying to find them, and if they know where they are they will continue to each spend at least 10 minutes per day trying to make contact. The reason for this is if you are locked up, you can only hope people are trying to find you, but a contract like this let's you know in advance people will be looking for you, providing comfort. The rules of the groups could be modified as needed.

Go Bag: everyone needs a good go bag. When you really need to flee, your ability to this plan is going to be diminished because of stress. Stress result in flight or fight: logic skills go down and running speed goes up. That's why you want your go to bag packed beforehand. You should know that when the emergency happens, you will always accidentally leave somethings behind. So a go to bag, in any easy to grab spot, helps and if it's economically possible don't take stuff in and out of the bag. It is very important to already have a different burner phone ready to go with a different IMEI, preferably with Graphene OS installed or Lineage. You must not connect to any accounts like Facebook with this phone. Instead, use SXC and invite your contacts to the burner phone before you leave or reach contacts using Signal, storing numbers in the Graphene phone using a notepad App. It maybe beneficial to get a non-Graphene phone with a removable battery so you can keep the battery out of your phone unless needed if you wish to be especially careful.

Plan to flee: if you plan to flee, having a go to bag isn't that helpful without a way to eat and sleep. Consider a sleeping bag or tent, car, and cash. Consider bags of rice, noodles, and oatmeal to keep locked in a car as well as plastic bowls. These items can be edible with gas station water given a long enough wait for them to become less hard and dry

Know the route to take: if you notice someone following you and expect you are being sent to an oppressive prison, you may wish to flee to Mexico or Canada and then depart from there to another country to avoid inhumane treatment. Have an exit plan in advance and know which way you intend to go.

The biggest threat marginalized people may face is if VPNs and other remote encryption technology are banned. A result of this could mean Signal Servers are banned, SimpleXChat servers are unreachable, and there is no way to send secret messages. This is why it's so important to download KryptKey now, not later.

Briar can work via Bluetooth even if cellular technology is down. It should be in every emergency phone.

Financial prudence: with prices going up and the economy being difficult, sometimes just surviving is a victory. But if you can, be careful to save, lower expenses, and be strategic with money so that you can be more ready for emergencies.

What can less marginalized folks do to help? Offering an coffee/sleepover area for any of your friends to stop by is a wonderful way to connect with your neighbor, like a modern day salon! You can get the games and crackers and snacks in advance and have pillows waiting for anyone who needs to stay the night, as well as some pre-selexted philosophical topics. "Do parallel universes exist? What is the best food and why? Do NPCs really exist? Why or why not?"

Please add suggests or criticisms.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/41229463

From Discord:

Hello @everyone,

Unfortunately today is the day I have to announce that LunaSea is no longer being published and all related cloud services (including notifications) will be shut down in the near future.

For more information on when things will be shut down, please read the details here: https://www.lunasea.app/

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I understand that this comes as a surprise and originally was not the intention for the project. However, with recently enforced changes by the Play Store (and possible other storefronts in the future) to require showcasing your legal personal residential address, I am no longer comfortable publishing mobile applications for privacy reasons.

Luckily for some time I have been able to get around this by utilizing an older ID to showcase an address I no longer reside at. Unfortunately, this no longer works and I am required to re-verify which I am not willing to do.

---

With this shut down also marks the closure of the Discord and Subreddit. For the time being this Subreddit and Discord will remain open, however all channels have been removed and no new posts allowed in the subreddit.

Once again, thank you to everyone for everything over the years, I couldn't have asked for a better community. ❤️

Maybe an ivory backscratcher?

As an example, I recently encountered one of these AI bots ^[1]^ in Ibis's GitHub repository ^[2]^.

I have several services on my home server, most of which I access using Tailscale, and it works great. I had a couple services on Cloudflare tunnels in order to access them from devices that I can't put Tailscale on.

Plex is going to start charging for remote access. So I figured now would be the time to migrate to Jellyfin. But using Jellyfin on Cloudflare tunnels is against their TOS. I have a Roku TV at a remote location that I use to watch Plex. I won't be able to do that anymore. And I can't put Tailscale on it to serve Jellyfin that way.

I was going to set up Nginx Proxy Manager to use my domain name for Jellyfin so I didn't have to use Cloudflare tunnels. But in setting that up I found out that my ISP is double NATting me, and I haven't been able to find a way around it.

So I'm left with two options: 1) buy Plex Pass so I can continue to stream remotely; or 2) get a VPS, run Tailscale and NPM on it and switch to Jellyfin.

I'm looking for a sanity check to make sure the VPS thing would work the way I think it would. If it's running Tailscale then the double NAT would be a non-issue, correct? Is there another option that I haven't thought of yet? Which of the two options would you choose?

It's common to the point of mootness, but: when describing the planet, Earth is a proper noun and should be capitalized. Otherwise you are referring to soil.