Who is Ravio?

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

which one would be more dangerous when encountered in the wild: a sun bear, a polar bear, a grizzly, a spectacled bear, or a black bear?

THE POLAR BEAR, FULL STOP.

all of the other bears on that list may very well attack you with fatal results if they decide you're a threat or an interloper, but the polar bear is the one that WANTS to eat you, and if you're not careful, WILL eat you.

prey is scarce in the arctic and polar bears are big animals, so they've evolved to be long-distance stalking predators that will NEVER turn down a warm meaty meal, weird opposable thumbs or no!

if you see a polar bear in the arctic, even if you're with a group, take extra care the next few days to make sure that it's REALLY gone and not just following you at a distance to learn your habits and ambush you when you least expect it!

more than one arctic researcher didn't change up their routine often enough and opened the station door for their smoke break only to find a polar bear waiting for them patiently on the other side, at which point they were dragged off onto the ice and never seen again.

It's the sloth bear.

Sloth bears are not the biggest bears. They primarily eat ants and termites. They do not see us as food. Hardly a contender for most dangerous bear, right?

First of all, sloth bears evolved alongside tigers and leopards and the saber-toothed cat Megantereon. And they still are routinely hunted by tigers. As a result, they've adapted to fight back as aggressively as possible, and in fact are aggressive towards all large mammals (Servheen et al., 1999). In addition, their long, curved claws, adapted for tearing into anthills and termite mounds, prevent them from climbing trees to escape, and their snuffly rooting behavior means they often don't notice tigers until they're too close to make a run for it (Sharp et al., 2024).

When faced with a threat like a tiger, sloth bears rear up and charge, slashing away with their claws. In a study on 43 filmed encounters, 86% of the time this scared the tiger off. 9% of the time the tiger won and killed the bear anyway (Sharp et al., 2024). Humans are notably squishier than tigers.

The sloth bear defense in action. From Sharp et al. (2024).

And second, sloth bears live in a historically densely populated area with rural communities dependent on the forest and farming. So the heightened chance of running into an (unarmed) human, coupled with their hair-trigger aggressiveness, makes them far more likely to go on the offensive and maul intruders. Most attacks involve the bear charging rapidly into the human before they even knew what happened.

I was following two of my companions and saw a black form lying at the foot of a clump bushes, about 10 m from me. I called out to my companions. Before I knew it, the impact of the charging bear knocked me off my feet. It happened so fast, I didn’t see the bear coming… just dust, flying leaves, and the screams and roars of the bear. (Ratnayeke et al., 2014, p. 476)

In one region in Chhattisgarh, 137 attacks (of which 11 deaths) were recorded over a 2-year period (1998-200) alone (Ratnayeke et al., 2014). In Sri Lanka only rogue elephants are more feared than sloth bears (Servheen et al., 1999). But of course, those numbers pale in comparison to the sloth bears killed in retaliation or harvested for their gallbladders.

Yes, polar bears are top predators and yes they do see us as prey, and you should absolutely be as careful around them as any other unpredictable large animal. But their remote habitat means they rarely have the chance to do so, and the few people they do encounter are - as you can tell from the above posts - well-armed and expecting trouble. A 20-year study in Canada, for instance, recorded 6 human deaths and 14 injuries; conversely, 251 polar bears were shot and killed in self-defense (Floyd, 1999). And while they can kill and eat people, they have been described as "largely indifferent to humans and often demonstrate behavior that is more curious than aggressive" (Floyd, 1999, p. 79). A much larger study of verifiable recorded attacks, covering the polar bear's entire range (Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, US) and spanning 1870 to 2014, found 20 deaths and 63 injuries caused by polar bears during that time. Despite their reputation, polar bears were found to have a 24% fatality rate (20 of 84 deaths), compared to a 42% fatality rate for black bears. And 88% of polar bear attacks were predatory compared to 87% of black bear attacks (grizzly bear attacks tended to be defensive, females with cubs and so on) (Wilder et al., 2017). In conclusion, "to date polar bears have been no more likely to actively hunt and kill people than black bears" (Wilder et al., p. 9).

This thing is as predatory as a polar bear. Despite being less capable of inflicting damage than grizzly and polar bears, and far easier to scare off, black bears usually attack with intent to devour. Chalk that one up for this humble ursine.

*Wikipedia says the sloth bear is the bear that has attacked the most people... but the source they cite states plainly that that distinction goes to the brown bear.

References

Bargali, H. S., Akhtar, N., & Chauhan, N. P. S. (2005). Characteristics of sloth bear attacks and human casualties in North Bilaspur Forest Division, Chhattisgarh, India. Ursus, 16(2), 263-267.

Floyd, T. (1999) Bear-inflicted human injury and fatality. Wilderness & Environmental Medicine, 10(2), 75-87.

Ratnayeke, S., Van Manen, F. T., Pieris, R., & Pragash, V. S. (2014). Challenges of large carnivore conservation: sloth bear attacks in Sri Lanka. Human Ecology, 42(3), 467-479.

Servheen, C., Herrero, S., & Peyton, B. eds. (1999) Bears: Status survey and conservation action plan. IUCN/SSC Bear Specialist Group.

Sharp, T. R., Garshelis, D. L., & Larson, W. (2024) A most aggressive bear: Safari videos document sloth bear defense against tiger predation. Ecology and Evolution, 14(7), 1-22.

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

For anyone who'd like to follow along, I'm gonna share how to get around those things with group policies bc they're more user friendly and descriptive than registry editor imo :3 I'll also show how to get around needing a Microsoft account to get setup.

For the Device Setup

"OOBE" stands for Out Of Box Experience which is what that setup workflow is. But it also happens to be a folder with a little program in it that'll let you skip connecting to the internet; this makes it so you don't have to sign up with a Microsoft account and can just use a normal local one instead. And it already comes preinstalled! Here's how you get to it:

Hold Shift + F10, or Shift + Fn + F10 depending on your keyboard.

Click inside the window that pops up, type the following and press enter afterwards to run it: OOBE\BypassNRO

I believe it should restart your computer automatically, but if not then restart your computer or type: shutdown /r /t 0 /f

Now when you're brought back to the setup workflow, the page where you connect to the internet will have a new button on it that lets you say you don't have internet. Clicking that and proceeding through the rest of the setup lets you get around the Microsoft account thing.

Group Policies

You don't have to know much about them, these are just a bunch of specific settings for what your computer can or can't do that lets you decide how it works in different ways.

I'm gonna show you how to turn off the recommendations and internet stuff basically. For now bring up search and type gpedit, pick this

It'll open up to Local Group Policy Editor and we can get started :3c

Start Recommendations

In the side menu, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar. Click on Settings to sort them with all the "Turn off" ones bumped to the top.

Here's what you should set:

Turn off user tracking: enabled

Turn off feature advertisement balloon notifications: enabled

Remove Recommended section from Start Menu: enabled

Remove Personalized Website Recommendations from the Recommended section in the Start Menu: enabled

Do not search Internet: enabled

Windows Spotlight

Back in the side menu, go down to Windows Components > Cloud Content

Turn off all Windows spotlight features: enabled

Do not use diagnostic data for tailored experiences: enabled

Cortana

In the side menu, this one's back at the top under Computer Configuration. You're gonna want to go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search

Allow Cortana: disabled

Don't search the web or display web results in Search: enabled

News and Interests

In the side menu go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > News and interests.

Enable news and interests on the taskbar: disabled

Microsoft Account Login Nudges

When you don't use a Microsoft account they'll nudge you repeatedly to sign in so you can "get the most out of your experience" *gag*. The group policy for turning that off has a note that suggests it might not work with Windows 11 though (implicitly), so you can close the group policy editor window now and for this last one let's just open up the regular settings.

Go to System > Notifications > Additional settings, then uncheck all the boxes. And there ya go! (✿◠‿◠)ﾉ u are done.

As a bonus, run Chris Titus Tech's debloat tool on it.

WAIT

STOP SCROLLING !!!!

Have a bunch of hornet doodles, I'm gonna dissappear soon for a few days to not get spoilers :]] I'm so excited!!

Bonus mspaint doodle:

Personality hire