too glam to give a damn

They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.

Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.

You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.

This article specifically notes:

For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.

Other important quotes:

What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.

Two things back that up:

There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.

Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.

Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.

I also made a PDF version!!

For comprehensive deets, tomshardware explains

duct tape scars on my honey

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman 

he invaded egypt

the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”

then napoleon showed up

napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus

the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”

this did not make napoleon happy

in fact it made him jealous

…and like this…

…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…

:-D

I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…

And for those of you who would like to try audio versions, this is what is on LibriVox, the free, volunteer run audiobook version of Project Gutenberg:

It's here!!! Our community-sourced Mines Monday August Anniversary Ask game! @bolithesenate and I got so many great submissions from y'all; thank you all so much!!!!

Reblog this post to open your asks to the following Sifo-Dyas-related questions:

What’s your favorite prompt you’ve used (or maybe just favorite prompt in general)? 

Sifo-Dyas Takes a Padawan: who’s your pick for his apprentice? 

Tag another miner you admire and why.

Was there a specific fan work or canonical appearance that caused you to fall in love with the character? 

What emoji/meme is Sifo-Dyas-coded to you? 

Do you have any Sifo-Dyas headcanons you’ve never shared?

Sifo-Dyas gets teleported to your town. Where are you taking him for dinner? 

What aspect of Sifo-Dyas' character grabs you the most?

What does your perfect Happily Ever After look like for Sifo-Dyas?

Looking at Dooku and Sifo-Dyas as characters with fatal flaws, which of them do you feel is blessed with the worst flaw and why?

Tell us about a WIP you have percolating. 

Share another creator's work from the Mines that spoke to you / you still think about to this day and why you like it. 

 Drop Sifo / Jocasta / Dooku in a classic fanfic AU setting: what happens next? 

Share a screenshot from your phone that applies to Sifo-Dyas.

Which lightsaber form do you headcanon for Sifo-Dyas and why?

‎Thoughts on his padawan years with Lene?

As a reader, what would be your ideal "ending" for Sifo-Dyas' story arc? 

‎Are there any similarities between you and Sifo-Dyas?

‎What type of official content with Sifo-Dyas you would love to see in future?

‎What writing tropes in fics with Sifo-Dyas would you like to see more often?

‎Do you have a favorite official image/art?

If you could insert Sifo-Dyas to take the place of any other character from an existing piece of media, who would you choose and why?

‎What are your headcanons on SIfo-Dyas’s appearance?

‎What does Sifo-Dyas’s presence in the Force look or feel like? 

‎What headcanons do you have about Minashee?

‎Choose violence: what fanon/headcanon/interpretation of Sifo-Dyas annoys you?

‎Who do you ship Sifo-Dyas with?

‎Dress this seer up like a doll! Show us something pretty or not you'd dress him in.

Favorite Sifo-Dyas post of all time? Could be your own or someone else’s. 

Go set a timer for 1 minute and draw him. Even (especially) if you don’t usually draw.

What is your favorite/wildest/most interesting Sifo-Dyas AU? (your own or from another Miner)

Share something from your Tumblr drafts related to Sifo-Dyas that you haven’t shared yet.

What character(s) from other media remind you of Sifo-Dyas?

If you can remember, how did you come to find/join the mines?

Do you have any controversial opinions about Sifo-Dyas?

Share a song, poem, or painting that reminds you of Sifo-Dyas.

What’s a Mines Monday prompt that you wish you’d gotten around to, but haven’t yet? 

What’s your favourite way(s) to think of / describe Sifo's Force abilities?

What was the first Mines Monday prompt you participated in? Would you execute it the same way if you were to re-do it today? 

You all know how big a rabbit is.  Jack Rabbits and hares are much bigger. they’re the size of large cats or small dogs or just-walking-age children.

They also like to hang out in gangs of a hlf dozen to over 30.

and in the middle of backcountry dirt roads.

perhaps they’re dustbathing

or blood sacrifce

I don’t know because when you come up the road at night because your dog has a tiny bladder and needs to go out at midnight and you have no yard so you’re walking him on the dirt road around your neighborhod because you might aw well get some stargazing in, and you come just over the ridge to see a coven of twenty jackrabbits in the middle of the road

and

they

all

stand

up

not just onto all fours like a proper prey animal

No they get up on thier hind legs and don’t just sit but STAND like tiny rabbit-skinned toddlers, wobbing slightly as they stare directly at you eyes shining in your flashlight’s glow

…Blood Red.

And a chill goes through you on that warm july night because while they’re a puntable size and allegedly herbivores they’re standing and watching you just like people and you are vastly outnumbered.

everyone freezes

you’re considering your odds aganst roughly 200lbs of Suspiciously Humanoid Hare

and they’re considering their odds against you

the only sound in the never-ending high desert wind 

somewhere in your peripheral vision you can see the streetlights but they seem awfully far away

The nearest Jack Rabbit

Blinks

and takes a single shuffling step

forward

You area an overdevloped monkey and your prefrontal cortex is capable of some amazing feats but it runs very slowly compared to the reflexes of a rabbit and you’re frozen as you desperately scramble for the appropriate course of action, hands feeling thick and useless, mouth dry and feet imeasurably heavy there’s no way you’d outrun THESE, god there’s a rabies outbreak going around that shit’s not curable-

The Dog

L U N G E S

It’s only the briefest of movements but the animal you’d picked out for his gangly legs and floppy ears and goofy smile is suddenly a dark shape of muscle and teeth and had flung himself at the horrible goblin rabbits faster than mere physics should dictate, appearing in the circle of the flashlight for only the briefest of moments before the jolt from the leash makes you stumble and the light falters

The Jack Rabbits

Scatter

Vanishing into the faintly starlit sagebrush in as so many faint gray shapes that might be mistaken for the dustclouds they kick up

Later, you sit on the couch disquieted

and you wonder

If the sight of the Jack Rabbits standing and studying you was frightening enough to make you yearn for the safety of the yellowed streetlights

what must it be like from thier end?

what terrifying creature 

deliberately ties itself

to something so horrible

CONGRATULATE, THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I WAS GOING FOR.

obsessed with how all you need to do is throw money at public education and eliminate most standardized testing and you will start getting smarter, more engaged, kinder adults. obsessed with how giving people safe housing, reliable access to good food, and decent wages dramatically reduces drug overdoses and gun violence. obsessed with how much people actually want to get together and fix infrastructure, invent new ways of helping each other, and create global ways of living sustainably once you give them livable pay to do so. obsessed with how tracking diseases, developing medicines, and improving public health becomes so much easier when you just make healthcare free at point of use.