The fall of Great Britain

So Brexit happened last year with just above 51% in favor of leaving the EU, and a majority of those being 65 years of age or older. The fallout has already begun, with Scotland likely to push for a second attempt to exit GB in order to remain in the EU, and Northern Ireland isn’t expected to sit idly by while this all goes down.

What I have noticed amidst all this is that most people don’t have a clue what the EU actually is and what it does.

Ironically, Nigel Farage being the puppeteer pushing for Brexit said prior to the referendum that if the remain-side got 52% of the votes, that would be unfinished business and cause for a second referendum, until they were victorious. However, with the leave-side getting almost 52% of the votes and over 4 million people signing petitions for a new referendum, the situation is apparently a completely different one.

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The left will be our bane, but the right is no solution

When I was little, I was a proud anti-fascist. The worst people around at the time was the right-wing extremists, with their signature bomber jackets and boots. But the ones I encountered, although maybe not being that extreme weren’t that bad. They had opinions, but they wouldn’t resort to violence to get their gibberish heard, and the debate was encouraged. Many were the hours spent intensely debating points presented by both sides, and I think in the end it left us all the wiser.

Fast forward 20 years. I’m still strongly against fascism, but just like the label feminist has been hijacked, so has the label anti-fascist. The worst people around today are the left-wing extremists, and society is bending over backwards to accommodate them. The anti-fascists have become the new fascists. And they aren’t afraid to use violence to silence the voices they don’t agree with.

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IoT, D-Link and Third-Party Firmware

In the early 2000’s, everybody was talking about IPv4 address exhaustion. As some of you technically enlightened readers probably know, IP stands for “Internet Protocol” and version 4 of the protocol coincidentally uses 4 bytes for the address. This means a logical span of 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255, or 4294967295 possible IPs (including the unusable or private ones.) And had we kept giving out public IPs to all connected devices we would have been screwed by now. The solution was thought to be IPv6, with 16 byte addresses; enough to give a unique IPv6 address to every grain of sand on this planet.

But it wasn’t IPv6 that saved us, but rather a feature called Network Address Translation, or NAT for short. This feature usually lives in your router and bridges a private network with a public one. This is the reason you see IP-addresses starting with 192.168. in many places as that is one of the private IP ranges mentioned before. But for this to work your router also need to have a public IP address, an address that is reachable from the Internet, and therein lies the crux.

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I can’t believe this actually need explaning…

The cesspool of ignorance that is BuzzFeed has done it again. “Three women experience what it’s like to manspread and take up space for one week” is the subject of a video posted a month ago, lowering the bar even more if that is even possible. The article can be found here but if you want to watch the actual video you have to do so on YouTube. They have disabled embedding for the video, meaning it won’t even play on their own site. They have also disabled comments, so for those you need to visit the article. Geniuses at work, obviously.

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The only winning move is not to play

It is just starting to become clear just how fucked up the US elections was this year. Not that any election really is a bundle of happy ecstasy, but this one was something special.

Trumps motivation is obviously the same as it has always been; money. The names he has picked from his hat so far emphasize this. Just look at Myron Ebell, another climate change denier with a major in philosophy and no scientific education whatsoever.

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