LUCARIO ZONE

our air conditioner is out during the florida heatwave

Hi so I am genuinely about to lose my mind. Our air conditioner just broke after the heat wave reached 113 degrees today and the temperature in our house is actively rising while the sun isn’t even out right now. our best guess is that some part of the outdoor portion of the unit went out. we are under an extreme heat warning for the next week at least

my partner and i are both chronically ill and on medication that significantly increases our heat sensitivity. we have three cats and no insulation in part of the house, once the sun comes up tomorrow it will be hot as fuck. i work from home for 50% of the week, and our car already doesnt have AC so now we are facing having absolutely nowhere of our own to get respite from the heat.

our home has an appliance warranty but they can only get a technician out here within 48 hours, and it’ll cost $100 minimum. the work is not guaranteed to be finished at that time; the only guarantee is the initial diagnostic visit. If the work needed is extensive, it might cost more. In the meantime we urgently need to get at least one window AC unit which during the summer is going to cost multiple hundreds of dollars.

we hate asking this when we know so many are struggling too, but time is of the essence for this and it can quickly become dangerous. we just don’t have the means to fix it ourselves right now, especially between paychecks and especially while also paying the elevated power bill that’s resulted from the heatwave already. we already struggle to afford bills and groceries each month, we wouldn’t ask if it weren’t a desperate situation. our savings is unspeakably meager and our debt is embarrassingly high

pp: here

ven: @cpmost

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!!

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

and you proved them right! you used them speaking up about this subject as an excuse to harass them. you made a spectacle of their every move, you branded them with words like "pedophile" and "predator" so that you had a justification to stalk them, to keep tabs on their every move. you saw that finally you had a woman you were ALLOWED to stalk without being called a fucking creep. you finally had another woman to put into your modern day freak show. and even so-called "feminists" took that opportunity with glee.