What makes you think they’d be unhappy about it?

My wife has a good way of putting it; “We can’t be a progressive country if we’re not a country at all.” It sucks that we live in a world where such things are necessary, but they are necessary no matter how much we wish they weren’t. You don’t have to be pro-war to be supportive of a strong enough military.

I mean, that’s pretty obviously not what he’s talking about here. It doesn’t even fit the context. What you’re saying would argue that it’s dangerous for Alberta to stay.

I’m not disagreeing with your characterization of Alberta’s economy, but trying to shoehorn that in as an interpretation of Carney’s statement is just bonkers.

Yeah, I don’t like that Carney is framing this as dangerous, because that suggests it’s possible. It’s like the toddler in the back seat threatening to crash the car; that’s not dangerous, it’s just them acting like a child.

Interesting. If I’m following this correctly, the architecture is very similar to how services like Tailscale and Zerotier work; every client contacts a central server to say where it can be reached, and then the central server shares that information with authorized parties, but the actual communication is all peer to peer.

Assuming I’ve grasped this correctly, this sounds like a very smart use of a proven architecture. I guess my main question would be, how does the central server determine when to share contact info between two clients? Is everyone essentially aware of everyone else (on the backend at least) and then some client side component restricts who can actually communicate, or is there some pre-shared secret that would authorize the server to connect your client to someone else’s?

Edit to add: The other thing I was going to note is that obviously removing the central server means there’s no way to retrieve your messages if you lose or wipe your phone, but I see you’ve already included robust backup options. Thumbs up for that.

Edit 2: Just to clarify my question, I see that theres a system for scanning or importing QR codes in order to add someone as a contact (I do want to suggest that you should also be able to use a code; not everyone always wants to be sending an image in place of, effectively, a phone number), but my question is more about how this is architectured on the backend. Does the key encoded in the QR code authorize the TURN server to connect you with the other user?

It’s cool, I bought one for you.

The Soviet term for this was glubokaya operatsiya or “deep operation”, which is more commonly anglicised as “deep battle doctrine.” But yes, you’re absolutely correct that it’s a variation on defence in depth.

To be fair, it’s a little more nuanced than that, since much of that dirt has people living on it. But the crucial point is that, up to a point, lost territory can be regained. Lost manpower, materiel and political power are much harder to recover. Territorial gains only really matter if you can make them stick, especially when Ukraine can effectively, and literally, move their manufacturing into friendly territory beyond their own borders.

But you’re absolutely right that Russia has essentially been claiming territory largely for the optics of it. It’s gotten so bad that there are now credible reports of Russian units basically running the Ukrainian lines, getting as deep as they can before planting a flag and posting a photo (which will immediately be geolocated by OSINT sources) and then running back home.

So, first off, we have to be clear about whether we’re talking about tactics or strategy. Those are very different things. I’m describing strategy. We’ll come back to that later. But when it comes to every layer of warfare, there’s been a lot of Western myth-making about Soviet doctrine that doesn’t really hold up to reality.

The beloved popular image is the “Human wave tactics”, massed assaults where the Soviets senselessly and moronically launched huge waves of soldiers at heavily defended enemy positions in the vague hope that they would somehow eventually prevail.

I mean, obviously, that would be stupid right? Who would ever send a mass of troops and armour to assault a heavily defended enemy position?

Oops, how did that picture of D-Day get in here? Huh, can’t imagine how that’s relevant.

And no, I’m not criticizing the choices made on D-Day; I’m pointing out that a lot of what the West later recharacterized as a senseless waste of life on the Soviets part was just… well… warfare. The other belligerents engaged in plenty of their own massed assaults. It’s not a uniquely Soviet tactic.

Now that’s not to say that’s no truth to the idea that the Soviets were willing to trade lives at a higher rate than other nations. The notion that the USSR could use it’s vast manpower pool as a military resource was certainly present in the minds of Soviet generals, and some were known to be quite careless about their soldiers lives. But the popular image of troops being sent in mass waves without enough guns and ammo, a la Enemy At The Gates is basically a Hollywood invention.

Where Soviet battle doctrine most strongly diverged from their Western partners was in the question of attrition vs destruction. The West preferred a slow, grinding war, gradually beating down their enemies defenses. This avoided some of the more costly assaults that the Soviets were happy to engage in, but it also drew out the fighting. Warfare claims lives all the time, from sickness, cold, heat, hunger, accidents, endless skirmishes, bombardments, etc… The reality is that when you keep a mass of millions of troops on a frontline, every day will bring new deaths. When on the offensive, the Soviet calculation was that a faster victory at the cost of lives up front was preferable to a slow and grinding battle that is claiming lives constantly. While they weren’t necessarily right about this, it was a decision that came from a genuine intent to win in the least costly way, not simply a callous disregard for casualties.

I’m not going to claim that any of this comes from a place of deep compassion. Stalin certainly had little care for the lives of individual soldiers. Not One Step Back was a real thing, and his own pride almost certainly played a part in the refusal to give up Stalingrad (it was, IMO, the right call either way - the Germans desperately needed the Ukrainian oil fields and Stalingrad was the best place to stop them - but a right call can still be made for the wrong reasons). But at the same time there was no point in squandering their labour force senselessly. Every dead soldier is a man who can’t work in a factory or a field after the war is over. Those lives are valuable, one way or the other.

There is one other nugget of truth in the Western popular image of Soviet warfare, which is that generally Soviet tactics - a term that more or less refers to the section to company level of warfare - were relatively unsophisticated. That doesn’t mean they were stupid, just simple. The Soviets were mobilizing a LOT of people very fast, and like every country in the world they were trying to adapt to a very rapidly changing state of warfare. They squared this circle by favouring simplicity at the squad level. Don’t try to expect a guy from Siberia with zero education to memorize a tonne of shit, just give him clear and simple instructions about what to do when you make enemy contact. But while their tactics were simple, their operational and strategic thinking was much more advanced.

At the strategic level, which is really what my comments were about, the Soviets very smartly traded land for time in exactly the same way that Ukraine has. They knew that the Germans favoured speed and manuever, hyping themselves up on the myth of “blitzkrieg” (a propaganda term for “Truck, tank and amphetamines make army move fast”), so they allowed and encouraged the Germans to massively overstretch their own supply lines. As the Soviets retreated they sabotaged roads and railways, leaving the Germans with no way to maintain their own logistics. With stretched, inadequate supply lines (combined with the crippling lack of fuel that was a major factor in the decision to invade in the first place) the Germans struggled to maintain operational tempo as they increasingly found themselves floundering against the depth of Soviet defences. People love to talk about how General Winter saved the Soviets, but it wasn’t actually winter, it was the fact that the Germans couldn’t supply the food, fuel and equipment that their troops needed to survive winter. This, in combination with the fact that Germany deeply underestimated the depth of the Soviet’s reserve defences, lead to their lightning advance rapidly bogging down into an endless slog. This wasn’t luck, it was planning and forethought.

As a quick aside, the Soviets actually lost less of their industry than they should have, because they engaged in a massive program of evacuation, in which 1500 entire factories (along with 16 million civilians) were packed up and moved to the West of the Urals, out of range of German bombers. By the end of the war the Soviets were producing as many tanks as the United States, despite the latter having the advantages of a more advanced industrial base and not even being remotely under threat of invasion. Anyway, not actually super-relevant, I just think it’s neat. Once again, planning and forethought.

True. But then a lot of strategy is knowing how to recognize the realistic option.

I think that calling this a winning streak in the first place deeply misunderstands the dynamics of warfare. Ukraine have been intentionally trading land for time, allowing the Russians to advance at a contained, manageable rate, while inflicting a heavy and continuous cost on them in materiel and manpower.

Ironically, this is exactly how the Soviets defeated the Nazi invasion.

I think Russia messes with their satnav and machine vision sometimes fails.

Your supposition is entirely correct. Russia engages in extensive jamming in that region, and not just because of Ukrainian drones. There are days on end when you basically lose cell service because of how bad the Russian electronic warfare is.

Most likely these are Ukrainian drones that went off course due to Russian jamming. The same thing happened in March. Ukraine has been launching long range strikes against Russian infrastructure up in the regions around St Petersburg and that naturally tends to put you near the Baltics.

I’ve worked at a company where the entire billing system ran on a Windows Server 2003 machine, running in a Vmware Workstation Player 15 VM on a Windows 8 PC.

The billing software wasn’t actually billing software, it was a kind of build your own software toolkit heavily customized. Like, a sort of simple scripting engine. The actual program was no longer available and would only run on older versions of Windows even if it was. There was no installer available for it. If any part of this setup failed they would be unable to process invoices. The data format was totally proprietary with no way to export it to any other platform.

The whole setup was accessed by remote workers using an unprotected RDP connection. No VPN.

To his credit he is slightly less homophobic than is the norm for the Catholic Church. But that’s kind of like saying someone is less fascist than Mussolini. Objectively better than the alternative, but not actually good.

Yeah. Cause he’s still a homophobic piece of shit, he’s just an anti-war homophobic piece of shit. We should not be surprised by this.

Do I have to be the one to say it? If their profits have doubled, the war didn’t set the new price, they did.

BP could have raised prices only as high as needed to absorb the increase in their baseline costs. Instead they - and every other gas company - chose to use the war as an excuse to double their margins. That’s just profiteering, plain and simple.

Otaku has essentially become a loan-word in English. It’s somewhat derogatory and generally used to refer to people who are really into anime and manga.

You’re uh… Way off. Good try though.

Putting aside specific etymology, what it means in common parlance is basically “nerd” with a heavy implication of “really into anime and manga.”

I think an absolutely great use for an old server at a youth center would be whatever the kids decide to use it for. Seriously, put it to a vote. There are lots of fun options, like a Minecraft server, one of the various Discord alternatives, a private wiki, or whatever else you find on the Awesome Selfhosted List . Just let it be their choice.

And, more importantly, set it up with them. Let anyone who wants to be involved in the process join in. If you’re kind of a newbie to Linux yourself, that’s even better; let them see you fuck up. Let them help you search for answers when you run into problems. Make it into a collaborative project.

Now, as for the actual hardware you have there… Man, that thing is ancient. If it’s what you’ve got it’s what you’ve got. As I’ve already indicated I think the process is worth more than the result here. That said, if you look around you can almost certainly find a refurbished old corporate PC for a hundred bucks or so that will be more powerful. Liquidation auctions are especially good for that kind of thing.