snuggledick

joined 2 years ago
[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 6 points 6 days ago (3 children)

I think it was hard because we had to learn all that abstract advanced stuff (Plusquamperfekt Futur II Temporaladverbial Reflexivpronomen, all that shit) that you'll probably not learn in a language course for non-native speakers and that you don't need to know to speak the language in normal life.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Important detail that is missing in the article and that some are getting wrong in the comments: This is not about forcing messengers to add backdoors for mass surveillance or weakening the messenger/its encryption in general (although that indeed is the wet dream of some governments/agencies). It's about infecting the phone/device of a suspect with spyware (either by hacking remotely or with physical access, although in secret of course) and sniffing their communication before it's encrypted/leaves the devices (or after decryption for incoming messages). Every case must be individually approved by several judges so cops can't just use this willy-nilly, the crime they're investigating must be quite serious (punishable by at least 10 years in prison) and it's limited to 30 cases per year.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For a "privacy-focused" search engine that's "operating in “no tracking” mode by default" I find "only" 9 trackers 9 too many TBH.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

A lot of speculation in the comments here but there's some context/details missing.

  • "Germany" didn't buy the tanks but the German company Rheinmetall
  • While the price isn't known, another company previously bought 25 of those tanks from RUAG for lousy 500€ a piece and then didn't even bother to come pick them up, so I assume Rheinmetall got a similar deal
  • Lots of countries still use them, Greece even wants to enlarge and upgrade their fleet of Leopard 1, they're still in demand and with a purchase price of 500€ and a bit of repairs there's probably a ton of money to be made

So my guess is this has nothing to do with Ukraine, just a company seeing a business opportunity.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Maybe they'd get on steady if you asked them. Many people are very cooperative when there's money to be made.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

tl;dr:

  • Hüseyin Dogru and others worked at "redfish", a russian propaganda outlet owned by russian state propaganda media Ruptly/Russia Today
  • When "redfish" was sanctioned for being, well, a russian owned propaganda outlet, Hüseyin Dogru was in charge of liquidating the company
  • At the same time he registered a new company called "red"
  • He and others from "redfish" seamlessly continued working at "red" (including the managing director of "redfish")
  • Their "redfish" telegram channel was simply renamed and is now the telegram channel of "red"
  • "red" is funded with "donations from [undisclosed] organizations and individuals"

Make of that what you want, but it's the same people as redfish and they couldn't even be fucked to get a new telegram channel or at least think of a company name that's just a tiny little bit more different from the last one. If they're not a continuation of "redfish" then for some reason they tried really hard to make it look like they are. Hüseyin Dogru calling Ukrainians "nazis" and the threat from russia "fictitious" also doesn't really help distinguishing them from russian propaganda.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

For little fun projects I really like uberspace.de. it's a shared hosting platform, basically you get a user account on one of their Linux servers where you can login and do whatever you want. Price is 10€/month by default but you can go down to 5€ if you're low on cash. They let you pick your own price, just try to be fair. You can't register domains directly from them but your account comes with a yourname.uber.space subdomain and setting up domains you bought somewhere else is super easy too, they also take care of SSL certificates automatically. They also have a lot of documentation about how to run practically any service you'd want there. Here's the page for flask for example: https://lab.uberspace.de/guide_flask/

EDIT: German company run by some nerds that are really helpful if you need something.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah but he's in a coalition with the SPD and if they really want to, which it seems they do, they can block Taurus or break the coalition. https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/ausland/internationale-politik/id_100720802/wird-die-taurus-lieferung-zum-streitfall-miersch-spd-gegen-union-.html

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Merz didn’t mention the Taurus missiles by name during his interview, but has suggested that unlike former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he was not against supplying Kyiv with the missile, which can hit Russian targets deep in the rear or could destroy the Kerch bridge connecting Russia to the Crimean peninsula.

Scholz may be out but his party SPD are still in the coalition and his goons already ruled out sending Taurus. And without Taurus, the entire statement is kinda pointless, as Germany hasn't sent anything else that could reach far inside Russia, and France and UK never opposed using their already delivered Scalp/Storm Shadow to hit targets inside Russia.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago

About OTTO prices and shipping: they do have a program similar to Amazon Prime where you pay 10€ a year and all orders that are shipped by OTTO directly (marketplace items not included, just like with Amazon) are shipped for free. The fun/weird thing is that for orders you collect points which you can use for a discount later and by paying the 10€ for one year of free shipping you get points that equal a 10€ which you can immediately use for your first order, so in a way free shipping is indeed completely free.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 13 points 1 month ago

Not an expert but it looks like it very much detonated in the end.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Probably too easy to confuse with mm.

Interestingly megaton is rather common unit but not teragram.

 

Quick and incomplete summary: In recent years Lidl invested heavily in cyber security and cloud computing, first for their own independent infrastructure, but they're already selling their security and cloud services to other big companies. The video makes the point that eventually they could become a proper competition for Amazon AWS and other services.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/59070760

Tickets for watching it online for a donation, all donations go to aid for Ukraine.

 

Heyho! Last few days I've been working on leaving Amazon and in particular Kindle for ebooks, so I've been looking for alternatives for my reading needs. While I can't recommend a specific book shop yet I'd like to recommend checking if your country's or city's public libraries allow you to take out ebooks online.

I'm living in Germany and found that there's an app called Onleihe which lets you read books from German public libraries as ebook for basically free, you just pay a tiny fee for your library card which you can get online as well. I registered with VÖBB Berlin for example which is some kind of union of all public libraries in Berlin.

Pros:

  • Flat rate reading – library card costs 10€ per year, discounts available for students, unemployed or disabled people etc.
  • Huge selection of not only books but also audio books, magazines and even movies.

Cons:

  • If you don't like the built-in reader of the Onleihe app there's an option to read ebooks in an external app, however that app as to support DRM and as far as I can tell that limits the options to PocketBook Reader (which isn't too shabby though and made in Switzerland). You also have to register with Adobe to get some kind of DRM decoding account or whatever, which is an annoyance but free.
  • Taking out ebooks works the same as with physical books, meaning you can only take out books for a limited duration (maximum 21 days) before it's "returned", and for a lot of new or very popular books you have to wait until someone else has "returned" their ebook before you can have it. Yes that's stupid given were talking about ebooks, I assume it's due to licensing stuff or whatever.

My conclusion: if you need a specific book NOW, you might be out of luck and better off buying it somewhere. If you just wanna browse a huge selection and look for something for entertainment then a reading flat rate for 10€ per year is a great deal.

Either way, might be worth it checking out if there's something similar available where you live. If there is please share!

 

Hey there, I wanted to get away from Amazon Kindle but of course take all my ebooks with me, I paid for them after all. Unfortunately Amazon tries really hard to stop you from doing this by introducing new file formats, DRM and encryption, disabling functionality on their website and so on, making this endeavor quite a hassle, but I finally managed to liberate my books so I can use them with other ebook readers. There's a bunch of different tutorials for this out there, but I found each of them lacks one or two crucial points that prevent it from working, so I thought I'd write up a short tutorial with all the bits of information collected from all over the web and save you some frustration and time (took me a couple of hours to make this work).

I'm not sure if this is the best community to post this to, if you know a better one please let me know or feel free to cross-post it there.

So here's how to get all your ebooks out of Amazon, strip them of DRM/copy protection and convert them to EPUB for use with other ebook readers:

  1. Install Calibre (available for Linux, Windows and Mac) using whatever method works best for your operating system. I'm using Arch Linux and running "sudo pacman -S calibre" did the trick.

  2. Download the latest release CANDIDATE! of the DeDRM plugin, NOT! the latest release! All tutorials I found referred to the stable release v10.0.3, which does NOT work with Amazon's latest DRM shit. At the time of writing this "RC1 v10.0.9" was the latest available version. You'll find it here: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools/releases/tag/v10.0.9

  3. Download the plugin "KFX Input.zip" at the bottom of this forum post: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=291290

  4. Unzip the DeDRM release you downloaded, inside you'll find a file "DeDRM_plugin.zip" which is the actual plugin. The KFX Input plugin does NOT need to be unzipped.

  5. Start Calibre, go to "Preferences / Advanced / Plugins" and with the button "Load plugin from file" install the two plugins you downloaded. For the DeDRM plugin make sure you select the unzipped file "DeDRM_plugin.zip", not the downloaded release package.

  6. Restart Calibre.

  7. Go to your "My Devices" page on Amazon (I can't provide a direct link here because it's different for every country, but you should be able to find it). Select your Kindle device and copy its serial number. Alternatively you can look it up on your Kindle itself in the device information in the settings, however you obivously can't copy/paste it from there and I found it hard tell letter O and digit 0 apart, so the first method is probably less error prone.

  8. Back in Calibre open the plugins section in the preferences again, search for the DeDRM plugin and double-click it. In the new dialog click "Kindle eInk ebooks", then the green plus icon and paste your Kindle's serial number. The fact that you need the serial number was also missing in most tutorials, took me ages to figure that out.

  9. Optional step: Go to your "My Content" page on Amazon where all your purchased ebooks are listed. Select all and click "deliver to device" or whatever it's called in your localized Amazon, and select your Kindle. Hit sync on your Kindle device. This is to make sure that all your purchased ebooks are actually saved on the device as we're gonna copy the files from there in the next step. You can skip this if all your books are already downloaded to your Kindle or if you only want those that are.

  10. Connect your Kindle to your computer via USB. Calibre should automatically detect it. Make sure your Kindle is in "USB Drive Mode", not "Charging Mode", so Calibre can access the files on it. For me this was the default when plugging the USB cable in.

  11. In the top menu in Calibre click on "Device", this should give you a list of all books on your Kindle.

  12. Select all or some books you want to liberate, right click and click "Add books to library" in the context menu. Your books should now be all be copied to your library on your computer, but they're still in Amazon's proprietary AZW or KFX format

  13. To make them usable with other ebook readers switch back to your local library ("Libary" button in the top menu) where you should now find all the books you just copied. Again select all books in the list and click "Convert" in the top menu. In the new dialog tweak the options as you wish or just hit "OK" to start. Depending on how many books you got this may take a little while.

  14. Done! You now got a bunch of DRM-free EPUB files in your library that you can use with whatever ebook reader you want.

Few notes:

  • If you get errors like "books can't be converted because of DRM" in step 13, make sure that the correct version of the DeDRM plugin is properly installed and you configured the correct serial number and start over from step 11.

  • A bunch of sites tell you that you can download AZW directly from your "My Content" page on Amazon, but they removed that function in February 2025.

  • If you've tried this before you probably stumbled upon a tool called "epubor" quite often which is trash and tries to make you pay for liberating the ebooks you already own, it doesn't offer anything that Calibre doesn't do for free.

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