Let’s give this classic poem a tweak shall we…

First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trans community (The UK is currently here) And I did not speak out Because I was not trans

Then they came for all people of colour (The USA is now here) And I did not speak out Because I was not a person of colour

Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me

Not caring because it doesn’t directly affect you is how you end up on this road to fascism to begin with. It’s why there have been thousands of arrests of innocent people in the UK for simply protesting about a ban on a group of people who threw paint on some RAF planes and vandalised some genocide supporting israeli weapons manufacturer… because some people do care about others, because they have compassion and a conscience.

If the UK goes ahead with plans to ban protests entirely as they saying… those numbers will increase because it won’t stop the people and the numbers continue to grow and if you try to stamp it out, there will only be one way it ends… with state authorised violence and death against people protesting the killing of innocent civilians.

That’s the road you are on with that attitude, and then you’ll be screaming that last line and playing the victim.

No, it’s because imgur has refused to conduct the simple ‘are you over the age of XX’ when people create accounts, which is required by law… there’s no verification of anything involved. Just a tick the box exercise… they couldn’t even be bothered to do that and that’s why they’re being investigated and are facing massive fines for years of refusal to do what every other site has done for probably 2 decades now… It’s got nothing to do with the draconian online safety act that was recently brought in… it’s imgur throwing their toys out of the pram and screaming ‘LALALALALALALA’ we can’t hear you now. it will have zero effect on the investigation and fines for their previous failings to follow the law… it’s literally cutting of their nose to spite their face.

You’ve failed to understand the problem entirely… the entire internet asks users to confirm they are above a certain age when creating accounts… and that happened because the USA demanded it. There’s nothing authoritarian about it… it’s a simple ‘Are you over 13yrs of age’ and you tick yes… that was it.

Can you just browse other peoples uploads on there looking for funny pics and memes?

You’re not being asked to, the UK govt hasn’t done anything to them… they did this to themselves by failing to do anything about age verification long before the online safety act came in recently. This is about their failings over the prior years to do basic age checks that have been common on the internet for decades now… going dark in the UK doesn’t affect the ongoing investigations or the fines that will be imposed… they’re basically throwing their toys out of the pram and shouting LALALALALALALALA we can’t hear you anymore.

Imgur had gone to dogshit anyway, it’s no real loss and the new owners keep making it worse and after the last round of protests from users, went on a mass banning and censorship campaign to further alienate and anger the users they desperately need to shove an ever increasing amount of ads too.

Blame the right people… the greedy, ignorant techbros who want to extract every ounce of ad revenue they can to line their own pockets at the expense of killing the product they bought.

It’s been dying for a long time, the vpn blocking started ages ago and the UK block entirely was recent as they’re facing massive fines in the UK… nothing to do with the online safety act that recently came into effect… but due to an ongoing investigation over imgurs failure to do basic age checks at all… and blocking the UK is tantamount to them throwing their toys out of the pram and going LALALALALALALA we can’t hear you now. It won’t affect the investigations and fines over the years of failings prior to that.

After the last wave of protests over the shitty new owners and their repeated firings of staff and the degredation of the service… they went on a mass banning and censorship spree and further alienated the users. I can’t imagine there are that many left there now.

Not worth the effort trying to get around it… there are alternatives that are actually better.

I lay in bed at night looking up at the stars and the only thing I’m thinking is ‘Where the fuck is my ceiling’

I pay for netflix… dumped prime a couple of years ago and got given disney+ for free for 12 months. I have my own server and am on version 3.2 of it after my first dedicated one I built in 2009. I’ve kinda had others before then, but it was an old PC I hooked up to my old CRT tv in about 2002 which struggled to play some mpeg2 content due to the weak single core CPU it had in it.

Now it’s running on an AM4 setup with a Ryzen 5 5600G, so I can use the PCIE socket that used to have a GPU in it for a SATA expansion card, so that I can triple the number of HDD’s it could hold. I’m slowly going through it once a year replacing the oldest 6TB drives (without about 80,000+hrs of uptime on them) with 14TB archive drives I rip out of seagate external drives. 4 more to go… to add to the 4 already done.

I think my first dedicated server had 3TB of storage (2x 1.5TB) and I still have one of those drives in an external drive that I use occasionally to fill with movies and shows when I go away and take one of my shield tv boxes with me… but mostly I take an external 500gb ssd as it doesn’t require a power supply and I rarely have enough time to watch 1TB of movies and shows whilst away.

Over the last 15yrs, it’s been rebuilt a few times and upgrade many… adding extra drives, swapping out CPU’s and so on. 3 ground up builds with the last one being built in 2020… Normally when I build a new system for myself, the mediaserver gets upgraded with my old parts… Hence the last one being on windows 7 and an AMD FX 8350 with DDR3 ram until mid 2020.

Currently about 70TB capacity.

My next one will have a dedicated raid setup with parity… it’s the one thing I’ve never been able to do with such a random collection of different size drives… hence normalizing them all to the same kind of 14TB ones.

I used to have a wileyfox phone using cyanogen OS, which was a fork of android with a lot of security and privacy features. That forked again into lineage OS at some point in the latter half of the 2010’s.

I mostly stuck with motorola phones after that, as close to a vanilla OS as possible without going google… but I stupidly bought a Pixel 6 Pro about 2.5yrs ago… the price was hard to ignore, but regretted it ever since.

I only replace phones when the become obsolete and security is an issue, or the phone actually fails… this one is going strong and I keep meaning to look if it can easily be jailbroken to install and alt OS… But it’s been a very long time since I did anything like that and I find myself falling behind on modern tech stuff as I get into middle age.

I pay attention to everything, and refuse to install any apps. I block 90% of the data from apps I have installed, only allowing a couple to access certain things (banking for example). The first thing I do with any android phone is go through and disable all of the bloat from google, disable chrome and turn off most of the settings. Install a decent browser and plugins to block tracking, ads and so forth. I don’t install social media apps, in fact I’m not on any corporate owned social media, I use signal/telegram for messaging… I deleted old SM accounts starting in 2012 with facebook and ending with twitter in 2018. I use email services like a duck.com address or proton mail for online signups where required, along with alias spam accounts for certain things that can easily be deleted and stop spam.

From next year, I will only be buying phones that can be jailbroken and an alt OS installed.

I go even further with my home PC’s to protect my privacy… I can’t stop it all, but I can render what they do collect as worthless as possible.

In some countries you can, I believe Canada is one of them… at least I believe it’s legal to do so in Toronto.