Using lasers for satellite communication is hot new thing right now actually. Although not for navigation, lasers’ advantages (bandwidth) are not relevant there.

Same as in this image. It even says that the signal would be automatically processed by a computer.

This can be easily bypassed by joining the seeding/downloading of popular torrents which gives access to peers’ IPs.

That’s how you get “general secretaries” and “chairmen of military commission” who are totally not Supreme Leaders.

Any attempt to “limit” power by declaring that there are no rulers and everyone is “just a comrade” only leads to obfuscation of power and complete shift to backroom politics.

There are people who like being told what to do and there those who enjoy giving orders (and “apolitical” people who “just want to live their lives” are actually part of the first group). Hierarchical systems will form one way or another, whether codified or not.

The purpose of this “verification” bullshit is to prevent piracy and adblocking via patching apks. So there will be a restriction that a given application can only be associated with one developer account (and verified at install time via apk’s signature).

Theoretically F-Droid could also change app ids when building apps which will allow them to be registered to F-Droid’s dev account but Google will likely frown upon that. There will probably be some clause against “impersonation” in their rules (Play Store rules already technically prohibit forks of open source apps, though it’s rarely enforced).

There does not need to be any connection. Any state that has a specific ideology that it pushes on its people will be concerned with making sure that new generations follow it. And the earlier you start to do it, the most effective it will be. That’s like priority #1. Typically it’s done through controlling the kids’ school (or even pre-school) curriculum, so that certain societal values and appropriate attitude to major historical events are instilled. These “youth groups” are for most suspectible kids with cooperative parents to instill extra loyalty and encourage them to fully participate in and uphold the system that the state created.

Oldest trick in the book. If you left a country for a reason, always remember that no matter how homesick you get. And never trust any offers of pardon or forgiveness, or “heartfelt” pleas that “your country loves you” (it does not).

F-droid doesn’t just check for reproducibility, they build and sign apps themselves. They don’t take apks from devs, only source code (this also means that F-Droid apks are not compatible with play store apks and can’t be mutually updated die to different signatures. I.e. you can’t install app from play store or directly from dev and update it from f-droid, and vice versa).

Nah, all Android phones are like that, even Pixels. Android set hard limits on how much memory apps can use and it doesn’t take into account the amount of actually available memory.

My previous phone was Pixel 4a 5g it wasn’t much better. I don’t remember any issues with it’s camera app specifically, but it would occasionally unload apps. Especially when it’s battery was under 50% even though there wasn’t any power save modes enabled (this might be a cognitive bias, but subjectively I noticed a correlation).

My Galaxy S23 with 8gb kills all other apps when I open camera and take a photo. Meanwhile actual memory usage never exceeds 50%, including “cached” apps that are kept in background.

Where are all the fuckable men?

They’ve all been in prison

Nah room temperature pizza is not the same as pizza from the fridge

Yeah OpenVPN is often used for business reasons (e.g. by remote workers), so it’s usually not blocked wholesale, only throttled (and known public VPNs providers and blocked via blacklisting their endpoints’ ip addresses). Wireguard meanwhile is used much more rarely so there is less fallout from blocking it completely.

Wireguard is not difficult to block either, it’s not designed to be hidden. China, Russia, etc have learned long ago how to detect and block it. The only semi-reliable way to bypass sophisticated VPN blocking techniques is to use protocols that mask as regular https traffic (and self-host it since well know public VPNs will of course be dealt with by simply blocking packets to their ip addresses).

I’m not saying such agreement won’t be reached, I simply don’t believe it will be honored when the time comes. It all rests on the assumption that Putin will be deterred by existence of such guarantees, but he won’t. He will attack Ukraine again, and then what EU gonna do? They will do all they can to weasel out of it in order to avoid aforementioned all-out war. Maybe not by outright refusing, but by stalling, or sending only a token force, etc.

“Supporting Ukraine” by itself is just a sentiment, what matters is actions. And there is no universal agreement on how far Europe should go in that support.

So any Russian incursion would be attacking EU directly.

No, because Ukraine is not a part of EU. Politicians can (and do) debate what exactly “direct attack” means, who was actually at fault and even if the attack was real. Recent sabouteur and hacker attacks against EU countries by Russia have been called a “direct attack on Europe” for example, and many people have been calling for “harsh response” and for Europe to invade and destroy Russia in a curb-stomp battle. Politicians can slither their way out of any agreement, especially with uncertainty of war and Internet giving them ability to influence public opinion through social media.

Security guarantees are meaningless either. European countries would not enter was with Russia with their own soldiers unless directly attacked by Russia. Even if they join some kind of binding security agreement with Ukraine they will find a way to not send their soldiers, and instead provide material/moral support from afar. Mobilization and actual war are extremely unpopular topic in Europe. Any government that sends their soldiers to Ukraine will collapse immediately and outsted by right wing nationalists (the only country that can probably pull it off is Poland).

These days it’s Russia in the back