The object of a system of authority is order, not justice. Justice matters only after injustice sufficiently compromises order.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Oh look, a hit piece put out by a media company that’s owned by a capital investment group that is shorting UIs stock…I wonder what this could be about?!

    Ubiquiti may not be blameless but this article is ridiculous.

    Ubi isn’t selling this stuff to the Russians and neither are their vendors. Their vendors, most of them in the article are from overseas, are selling them to middle-men who sell them to another middle-man who then physically gets the equipment into Russian hands where it potentially goes through ANOTHER middle man before its used by Russian troops. There’s almost no way to control that and if you read carefully the “legal experts” quoted toward the bottom of the article use some very careful language in order to not tell you this.

    You can’t just “shut it down” either, although even the article notes that Ubi is trying. Most of the gear that’s getting into Russian military hands for use in the war is stuff that you have probably never used. It’s PowerBeam and NanoBeam product that’s most often used by WISPs, which makes sense because that’s precisely how Russian forces are using it. What the article isn’t telling you is that this stuff does NOT need hooked to the Cloud in order to function. In fact it doesn’t need Internet access at all and so there’s no way for Ubi to know where it’s being used or even that it’s been powered up!

    Even if Ubi can tell that the equipment is powered on and in use they may not know where it’s at with sufficient accuracy or knowledge to do anything about it. The damn thing could be on the Internet via Starlink sitting in Pokrovsk. On December 1st, 2025 was a SL system with Ubi gear attached to it in Pokrovsk being operated by Russia or Ukraine? There’s literally no way for Ubi or anyone else to know.

    As for Ubi doing more if you read the whole article you’ll find that more than a few of these bad distributors HAVE been caught and shut down across the globe which almost certainly means that Ubi is helping at some level.

    In short the article looks bad but when you start breaking down the individual points it quickly falls apart, especially when the media company behind it has a monetary interest in sinking Ubiquiti’s stock.

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  • Tech Aura. If you have it you understand. If you don’t then you watch in awed frustration as the computer that refused to work 10 seconds ago suddenly starts behaving when I.T. touches it. As an aside you know your I.T. are real wizards when stuff starts working just because they walked in the room or answered the phone. :)


  • Microsoft should not have the keys to decrypt Bitlocker ever.

    Windows is a closed source and proprietary commercial Operating System. Microsoft is going to do whatever they like with it. If enough people get angry about an issue they may change their mind but that doesn’t change the nature of Microsoft’s ownership over their products.

    I’ve been participating in discussion about what Microsoft should and shouldn’t do since the late 80s and it pretty much boils down to this: You need to select and use software that works the way you want it to. So if you don’t want MS to have your disk encryption key then don’t use Windows. If you don’t want MS to have access to your documents then don’t put them on any system that MS has control over.

    It can be terrible inconvenient to protect your data in this way but this part and parcel of the privacy movement.


  • It may seem that way but I’m really not. An encryption key is just data. It’s critical security data to be sure but it’s still data and like other data you shouldn’t share anything that you wouldn’t want made public.

    Don’t want MS to cough up your data when asked? Then don’t give it to them. In regards to your BL key that means storing it another way, such as on a jump drive or printing it out.

    In the end if you have data of any type that you absolutely DO NOT want made public then you need to retain that data locally. If that means leaving the Microsoft or any other ecosystem then that’s the price that needs paid for keeping your data under your control.

    This is the foundation of the entire privacy movement.










  • Motors used to be BOLTED together, now they are GLUED together.

    50 years ago you were working on brushed motors with relatively sloppy tolerances, less torque, and more electrical consumption. Today’s brushless motors are faster, stronger, lighter, more efficient, and designed to higher tolerances.

    It used to take me a half hour to change the clutch slave cylinder on my truck. Now (newer truck) I have to PULL the transmission to do that.

    Very few vehicles in the U.S. have a manual transmission and the prevalence of them is decreasing quickly in all western countries. No matter how much we may prefer manuals it’s inarguable that modern automatics get better fuel economy, are easier to operate and are often stronger than their manual equivalent.

    My point here is that often the same advances that make things better make them more difficult to service.