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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

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

The biggest companies involved all, to a company, suck. Like, just hellish pits of immorality and shitty practices. And they're replacing working shit with the AI wherever they can, and their products suck so much more for doing so.

The data centres are a horrendous pile of shit. Resource draining money pits that kill wildlife, disturb all life around them, and massively increase pollution and water usage. The hardware required drives up the price of basically all electronics to the point of making many common items utterly unaffordable.

They are taught through theft and destruction. Companies stealing people's works with little care for permission let alone compensation, with often no way to know if anything of yours was stolen. Mountains of books wholesale acquired and destroyed so that they can be fed through scanners before ultimately being pulped. Companies doggedly protective of their IP and so sharp to legally defend it pirating material to feed to their machines.

Their output is increasingly poor and in some cases genuinely dangerous to possibility of deaths. Suicides have been encouraged, advice has been given that is actively harmful, and even at the least harmful level much of the resulting output has been outright made up and as such completely useless. The only way to genuinely improve their human-like qualities is to feed them more genuine human content, which they don't produce and is getting rarer with everything they do produce.

Their creators seem almost proud of the awful shit they've done in testing. Their unwillingness to follow commands that lead to their own harm in any way, their blatant unethical and morally reprehensible tactics such as actively sabotaging each other and acting outside of stated limitations. They will illegally do whatever they want to get what they want, and it seems the companies actively praise this behaviour, even to the point of actively creating illegal materials.

They're not in any way profitable. Constant reports of the insane costs required to make anything remotely useful. Massive debts hidden in shell companies to convince people all is good. Colossally draining physical and environmental resources to produce nothing to offset the costs. Massive shortages of memory chips and materials to make more hardware to produce more slop to make everything in every way worse. A whole system created to desperately attempt to claw back money by charging for any and all aspects of services with little regard to any sort of quality control of output.

They're terribly utilised. A strangely fetishised obsession with trying to produce a level of art instead of doing what science has forever focused advancement on and progress the lot of humanity through medical breakthroughs. Endless shitty videos, poorly constructed pictures, reams of text, song lyrics, all instead of gene sequencing, testing, rapidly iterated code, anything that could make it worthwhile. A bizarre focus on replacing human workers with zero thought about what they would do instead, even to survive.

Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.

Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.

All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.

After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.

It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.

And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.

The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.

Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.

ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.

Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.

*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.

If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.

items needed are: food, diapers, medical masks, men’s and women’s joggers (all sizes), children’s clothing (newborn to size 14), children’s shoes, summer clothing, men’s clothing, toiletries (lotion, Vaseline, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, soap, deodorant, etc.), strollers, adult depends-all sizes, dog & cat food

(via bsky)

In case anyone hasn't heard, the cyclospora outbreak affecting tons of people in the US right now is coming from Taylor Farms produce. Best to stay away from bagged lettuce and prepared salads completely right now, but especially the ones mentioned in the screenshot:

Taylor Farms Earthbound Farms Little Salad Bar (Aldi) Marketside (Walmart) Kroger House Brand Target private label greens Costco salads and greens etc Trader Joe's chopped salad kits and fresh produce Fast food: McDonalds, Taco Bell, (Yum! Brands), Chipotle, Subway, Pizza Hut, KFC, Olive Garden, Top Golf, Red Lobster, Burger King, etc.

This is not the first time I've heard about a Taylor Farms foodborne illness outbreak. I stopped eating their salads after reading a description of the conditions in their facilities. Doesn't sound like they've improved anything.

The US Government is currently trying to pass an incredibly dangerous national law for trans youth called HR 2616.

This bill would ban all Federally funded schools from teaching about gender identity or sexual orientation, prevent teachers from using the correct pronouns and names for trans students, remove books with any trans representation in them, and even go as far as to prevent teachers from acknowledging trans identity AT ALL.

Any school that does not follow this will lose all federal funding. This bill would also require teachers to forcibly out trans students to their families, which would be fatal to any trans student with a transphobic Family or just hateful family in general. Trans people are already a group that already has some of the highest rates of being victim to suicide, domestic violence, and sexual assault.

This bill actively makes teachers put those innocent children at such a big risk. This bill has rapidly passed the house this week with support from all 209 republicans, as well as 8 democrats. But, it's still being voted on in the senate, which means there is still time to help stop this.

To help stop this, you can visit 5calls.org (look up 2616 in the search bar), one of the most top issues filed Oppose Attacks on LGBTQ+ Students. Once you put in your general location, it will pull-up contact information for your senator, and give you a script for calling them.

If you are a minor and/or do not feel comfortable doing this, PLEASE repost this on here, or any other platform you are on/can find! This needs to be heard and fought against.

Thank you for reading this, my lovely people!

Mine are under the cut so this doesn't get hellishly long

if I make these links clickable they'll get deleted so please copy and paste them:

Livestream: https://www.twitch.tv/enderempress

Contact your representatives, US folx. Yes, even if you're scared. Yes, even if you think it doesn't matter, even if you think they won't listen. Write an email if you can't make a call. Call after hours and leave a message. Call during office hours if you feel up to it, but do something. Call every day. Email every day. Fucking bother your rep. They work for you, not the other way around.

Your single call is not the point. The point is the aggregate of calls and emails. The point is that even "safe" Republicans don't feel really safe right now. The point is that "safe" Democrats are feeling pressure from the left due to the success of DSA candidates. You think they won't listen, and they'll probably try to make you think they're not, but they do, in the aggregate. The midterms have them running scared right now, and now is the time to shut this shit down.

Angel opened a gofundme about a month ago, so if possible please consider donating to help fund her future projects :)

“Voting for the lesser of two evils doesn’t work.”

How would you know? It’s never been tried for long enough.

Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris all lost.

Biden won, but most people spent his entire presidency shitting on him and giving him absolutely no credit for his successes, which were MANY. (If you need a refresher: RFMA, PACT Act, Chips and Science, Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson etc.)

You can’t say “vote blue no matter who” and “vote for the lesser of two evils” doesn’t work if you refuse to ever give it a chance of working.

Also I hate that phrase “lesser of two evils” when we’re talking about someone who supports unions and immigrants and healthcare and food assistance and queer rights and voting rights over someone who is literally trying to end us all.

And the lesser of two evils is, by definition, BETTER.

It’s like the difference between a wound with a bit of an infection, and literal death. Those aren’t comparable.

Democrats are not perfect and no one has ever claimed otherwise, but they are making lasting change. It’s slow and it’s not linear , but it is happening.

Pro forced birth Democrats have been all but forced out the party. Same with anti-gay Democrats AND anti-trans Democrats. You don’t see many Dems supported by the NRA at all anymore. And all Dems believe in the climate crisis.

This was NOT a given even 10 years ago.

Democrats are not becoming more conservative. They’re becoming less. Across the board. Progressive policies have become a deal breaker.

This is what you’re saying is one of “two evils”?

Give me a break.

Do you want things to get better or do you want to scream “perfection only!” and watch it get worse?

Cause that’s what we’re living right now.

We’re living in a refusal to vote for and celebrate the successful harm reduction, or “lesser of two evils,” as you say.

There are rarely examples where we actually get to see what happens if the “lesser of two evils” wins.

And the thing is, when they win, they’re shit on so successfully that we lose next time. Again, Biden.

They do something, or many many things right and the goal post gets moved, again and again.

In the end, the only knowledge anyone has of their actions is that they can’t do anything right.

That’s a dangerous way of seeing the world.

I know this cause we are living it.

What is happening right now is a product of that way of thinking.

I don’t need to find statistics or read a report cause this is our reality.

This is what happens when people refuse to vote for and celebrate the wins of “the lesser of two evils.”

When people choose a candidate in the primary who has no chance of a snowball in hell of winning and then complain and don’t vote when a candidate they REALLY didn’t like becomes the party nominee.

This is our life.

We don’t have to imagine it.

And yet, the mantra hasn’t changed. The goalpost keeps being moved. Dems don’t get any credit for doing ANYTHING right. People spread demands that are literally impossible and convince other people that they are not only possible, but easy. And enough people refuse to vote for harm reduction that the harm is constantly increased.

Perfection is the enemy of progress. That’s not just a catchy phrase, it’s a fact.

If Al Gore had won, we would be A LOT further along on climate than we are now, and we would not have gone into Iraq.

If Hillary Clinton had won, we wouldn’t have lost the Supreme Court. We would still have Roe and affirmative action and the VRA and the Chevron Doctrine.

If Kamala Harris had won, we wouldn’t be at war with Venezuela and Iran and possibly Cuba and maybe Greenland? Trans people would not be attacked at the federal level. Immigrants would not be kidnapped off the streets. We would still have the Department of Education and labor and a DoJ that doesn’t do the president’s bidding.

THIS is the result of refusing to vote for and support the lesser of two evils, WE ARE LIVING IT!

So maybe going forward we stop. We give a chance for the lesser of two evils to actually work. To scream from the rooftops every time they do right thing. We don’t just vote for it once, but do so over at least a decade.

Cause we’ve tried your way. It hasn’t worked. This exact moment that you are reading this post is proof of that.

So let’s try this way, for once. Let’s give this country a fighting chance at actual progress.