Saying they banned VPNs isn’t completely, technically correct I’d guess. If I were another country then VPN’d in to my house, I would probably be fine. A pedantically correct statement would be that they banned known VPN IP ranges, so if you’re attempting to connect while your traffic is routed through one you get blocked.

I’m slightly less mad now that I know this has precedent. I’m still fucking furious that the only precedent I’ve heard about is corporations and Trump, since the law should be equally applied regardless of absolute amounts of money and I’m pretty sure that someone living in poverty isn’t going to get the same treatment for a $50k (or whatever is a proportional amount) judgement against them.

That wasn’t what was at stake here. Trump was already found guilty, he wasn’t bonding out of pretrial detention he was having to post bond in order to appeal the ruling, which typically requires the person making the appeal to post a bind to make sure they don’t spend all their money fighting on appeal, just to lose the appeal and not have any money left to pay the original judgement.

So my expectation was that yes, he would have to follow the same court rules as everyone else and put up the bond in order to appeal. While I do think we should get rid of requiring pretrial detention bond, I don’t necessarily see an issue with requiring pre-appeal bond. I don’t know, you don’t want to create a situation where you’re means testing the right to appeal, but you don’t want people to indefinitely delay enforcement of judgement against them or to allow them to spend away their ability to pay the judgement on appeals. Maybe forcing either the entirety of the judgement to be paid into a more traditional escrow account, or a payment plan for the judgement to be accepted and that paid into escrow, before an appeal can be started?

Any way you cut it though, I can’t fault this chuckle fuck for playing the court game but I’m fucking incensed the court is enabling it.

It is part of the deep web, just like Discord or any sites hosted on private companies intranets. Lemmy is not, you can just hit any instance with a web browser and view stuff.

To be completely clear, dark web/net and deep web are two different things. That wiki link you used is describing dark web stuff like tor etc.

detailing that he had been promised 500,000 rubles ($5,418).

Fuck me, this really hammers home that first world privilege. More than that amount of USD hits my checking account each month in my direct wages. This guy knew what would happen to him when he was caught then decided that risking misery in Siberia before being executed was worth less than a month of my take home pay. I mean i get that some level of radicalization is involved here, but still what the fuck.

Imagine the uproar if China demanded that Google stopped being a US military contractor.

China is actively demanding that all Chinese companies excise American hardware and software from their technology stacks. They know that they can’t divorce a US tech company headquartered in the US from the US intelligence agencies, so it is the next best option. This is colloquially known in China as “Delete A” or “Delete America”. Who is being xenophobic again?

Except that’s not my point, but you already knew that didn’t you? It’s pretty obvious you’re not actually here for a conversation.

Who are they worried China is going to influence? Children, right? If it's adults, that's almost more insulting, they think we don't deserve to be able to see all sides of an argument and are too stupid to discern fact from fiction.

Yeah fam, you and me are definitely way too smart to ever be manipulated by military units whose sole job is to effectively manipulate large swaths of the population.

The answer is everyone. They’re worried about anyone and everyone, because they do it also.

https://youtu.be/VA4e0NqyYMw?si=u_d-eDOMYA-FetVn

I mean I’m not saying that this is being gone about the right way or for the right reasons, but when an adversarial nation-state is working to undermine US economic interests within its borders is there really anything wrong with punching back? I personally don’t think so, but I’m fully aware that I’m probably in the minority on this here.

https://twitter.com/lizalinwsj/status/1765615508357779477

(paywalled article from author above https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-technology-software-delete-america-2b8ea89f)

And if the jury really needs to know the contents of the files, I don’t see any issue with just swearing in a jury of already cleared TS SCI w/Poly Commissioned Officers, or just full send it and let Trump get prosecuted in a military court. I’d love to see a bunch of GWOT brass ream that dudes asshole.

Matrix would also be a viable alternative to Discord.

Well, this isn’t exactly how I saw the Singularity Church of the MachineGod getting started, I’m still here for it.