And not that i plan on it, but since you mentioned it i have
always wondered how those darknet marketplaces work.  I
understand the payment side via crypto, but how do you actually
get your stuff without going to jail? Or do you get caught? Or
do they just steal your money and run? At least doing it in
person, while it still could go bad, you get the goods as you
hand over the cash.

Darknet markets are a Casino. You pay your crypto to some guy who promises to send you stuff, and you wait to see if you get the stuff or not.

There are some mechanisms of varying efficency to solve the trust issue. For example, some cryptocurrency under-the-counter markets have a PGP-like web of trust. The idea is that if enough people you trust likes some other dude, you can be reasonably sure that the dude is trustworthy. The web of trust is sometimes open so you can see if some seller is popular or not, a bit like ke Amazon and eBay vendor ratings. Amazon and eBay ratings are not great so I guess you can already figure out this system is far from perfect.

Then there is the Film Noir technique, in which somebody who is utterly trustworthy because he has been in the business for ages is designated as the middleman. The idea is that you ask the vendor to deliver to you that book full of pictures of naked horses (how dirty!), and you send the money to the middleman. The middleman sends the money to the vendor once you get the book. If there is a dispute, the vendor is supposed to offer evidence that the item was actually sent.

The cool illegal wares themselves are often sent using regular snail mail or parcel agencies. Customes are very bad at finding stuff such as weapons and drugs in certain countries, probably because they'd rather inspect big containers and try to apply huge tariffs to them. A lot of illegal stuff makes it through because custom agents don't know what it is. Like you could order a custom made leather blackjack and have it delivered to you in the heart of the Euro-peeon empire.

2025-04-26 23:21 from SamuraiCrow
Subject: Re: META is a bullshit company
It's not even a very good filesharing service! They only let you
view stuff but not download it for offline use! If they were
truly a file sharing service, you could actually share files!

META has a download functionality. Maybe there are things that can't be downloaded directly because the uploader has downloads disabled, but I would not know because I am not that familiar with the service. In any case, the downloading interface for MEGA is retarded.

Texas house bill 366.

"screw your freespeech, serfs"

I read the text of the bill. I agree with the intent, though making it a class A misdemeanor seems a bit ridiculous and harmful to me, and I question whether the law is needed at all in deference to existing FCC regulations.
For decades, political advertising has taken candidates' words and mish-mashed / cut / edited them to misconstrue the original intent. Dishonest? Yes. Intellectually bankrupt? Yeah. Illegal? No, unless candidate A promotes that candidate B said 'X', when in fact they never said 'X' or anything close to 'X'. The law says those ads have to come down. Using GenAI to do the same thing seems like business-as-usual to me: misconstrue all you want, but cross the line to outright lying and the ad has to come down. Allowing a disclaimer to excuse the behavior seems like being even more permissive, but I suppose that is okay if that is what Texans want.

That didn't last long. I thought free speech was a human right.
Not wanting to be insulted, isn't one. Last i heard.

The litmus test that has never ever failed me is this one:

Something is a right if it cannot be given, it can only be taken away.

So as it applies to free speech ... free speech itself is a right ... but forcing someone else to subsidize your broadcasting of free speech is not a right. This is similar to how you have a right to life but you do not have a right to force someone else to subsidize your health care expenses.

People like Zuck and the other big tech oligarchs who use censorship in an attempt to steer the culture aren't infringing on anyone's rights, they're just very bad people who I hope die in private jet crashes. They're not backing off right now because they had a change of heart; they're backing off because that kind of change is in the wind right now and they're opportunistically rolling with it.