Buelldozer

Nope, that’s a user created account and a user created note. 😊

What context are you asking for? Seems like Draconic has explained why that account exists and even put in a note explaining.

Not unless you are buying Power or Nano beams. The equipment being used by Russian forces is the stuff that WISPs use, not the stuff that most people use at home or even their business.

You also need to know that the source for these allegations is Hunter Media which is owned by Hunter Capital and that Hunter Capital shorted Ubiquiti’s stock…which means they need UIs share price to go down so they can make money.

This isn’t a “reveal”, it’s a hit piece funded by Hunter Capital. They shorted Ubiquiti’s stock and they NEED the share price to go down so they can make money.

This article is based on a hit piece written by Hunter Media which is owned by Hunter Capital…who has shorted UIs stock. They need UIs stock price to go down so they can make money. There’s a much longer article out there with Hunter Media’s research but even that is meant to leave the reader with the impression that UI is up to no good.

Aw man. I’m gonna have to stop buying their shit, and stop recommending it to friends :(

That’s exactly what Hunter Capital wants. It’s why they paid for the research that Hunter Media (the source of this article) did, why they spent more money to get a carefully written hit piece that pushes a narrative, and why they are spending even more money pushing this into the media.

Hunter Capital shorted UIs stock and they NEED the price to drop so they can make money. There’s a much longer article out there but even it is hit piece meant to leave the reader with the impression that Ubiquiti is somehow directly involved in this or doing nothing about it, both of which are false.

There is a MUCH more in depth article available and I wrote a comment that addresses most of your points. You can find it here: https://lemmy.today/post/46512183/21904347

One of the MANY things this article isn’t telling you is that the source is Hunter Media, which is owned by Hunter Capital who has shorted Ubiquiti’s stock.

…I’m not sure how much power they have to lock down remote devices completely,

They have zero ability to shut them down and that’s if they can even tell they’re being used. These aren’t the “normal” Ubiquiti products that most people use, they are WISP type equipment meant to be used for long range Point to Point or Multipoint connections. They can easily be run without internet access at all.

Do they take action against their official distributors or is this just their policy the official distributors are following?

Considering more than a few of their global official distributors have been shut down by US authorities I’m confident in saying that they are already taking action. They’ve also taken action to ban updates to Ubiquiti equipment that is in use inside Russia but even that is of limited value when geo-location is impossible or wildly imprecise.

Too many people thought that Twitters Blue Checkmark meant you were special. That attitude carries over to Bluesky and being verified.

f the reason EE is shutting down due to lack of staff why would anyone go to a smaller one/one run by a single person?

Small instances can have far less drama and workload. Just because an instance isn’t popular and has a small admin team doesn’t mean it’s in danger of folding up. 😀

If you are looking for a small and stable instance you should evaluate lemmy.today. It’s hosted in the U.S. (Pacific North West) and has a high degree of federation.

Apple Intelligence and the first versions of Gemini are the perfect examples of this.

Add Amazon’s Alexa+ to that list. It’s nearly a year overdue and still nowhere in sight.

“Game-Key Cards” so it’s a licensing dongle with a fancy name and peculiar shape.

Otherwise we may have a Trump in Europe.

You have at least two, and arguably more, right now. Historically you’ve had some real fucking doozies too, people that make Trump look like a school child.

I don’t want a singe person as powerful as a medieval monarch to decide over about half a billion people.

That’s what you’ll get eventually.

Will be interesting to see how long globalism lasts once everyone involved has to start paying to maintain it.

XenoForo is a bit spendy but they’re providing the software, hosting and data storage. IIRC the forum I’m talking about is on the “Business” plan due to how busy it is.

there’s no persistence or community.

That’s it right there, that’s what you are missing. The older forum communities were small enough that you could keep track of whose who, something that isn’t possible when the user counts are in the tens of thousands to tens of millions. I think a lot of us olds would like to go back to that but its impossible; our monkey brains can’t handle communities of that size.

To use an extreme example, if I saw someone just spamming the hard-R I would want their comment immediately removed.

In the forum days those users would get attacked and / or blocked by other users. If they caused enough havoc for long enough then the mods / admins would step in. The expectation NOW is that the mods / admins will actively monitor every post and comment in order to remove disagreeable content before it can be seen. That’s quite the change over the last 20 years!

The funniest part is that this mirrors real life. If someone did that IRL, I would just leave.

“Mirror” is probably more apt than you realize. IRL you would leave but on the internet you want them to leave. I’m not blaming you or saying that you’re wrong, I’m just pointing out the difference.

I agree that all forums require some level of moderation in order to keep from turning into total troll-fests however there’s a wide chasm between moderating someone because they won’t stop posting racial slurs and moderating someone because they’re going against the grain / hivemind.

Being designed around persistent topics rather than the ephemeral post model

Hmmm, you’re probably on to something there. I think Lemmy could do that but no one cares to set it up.

and more visible user customisation (more prominent avatars, signatures, that sort of thing).

I’m honestly not sure this is a bad thing. Dear God, remember how threads would get blown out by hyper-configurations? Sig blocks that were 20,000 pixels long and endless GIF spam? Not sure I’m in a hurry to get back to that!

One of my favorite forums has been around since 1999 and is currently running on XenoForo which is very phpBB-esque. Anytime I get a nostalgia hankering I drop in for a few minutes. It’s not always as good as you may remember. :)

The fact that most internet discussion happens in extremely censored places is bad.

Many people, including a large chunk of Lemmy, are perfectly fine with censored discussions. They honestly want it that way…as long as the discussion is censored such that it agrees with their opinion.

I want the rest of the world to change and this is another tool to help towards that end, not merely an escape.

It’s extremely difficult to free people from things that they want.

What are we going to do about it?

Do nothing, nothing about it. The great hordes of the unwashed have ruined every single place they’ve showed up starting in the early 90s. They don’t want to be saved from the commercialization that has taken over the internet, to the contrary they thrive on it and are willing to put up with nearly anything to attract and keep it.

If most of Reddit shifted over to Lemmy it would get commercialized into a smoking crater. As soon as there’s enough regular people using a thing the companies and venture capitalists will show up and at that point the game is over.

The best of the internet has always been built by and populated with people who don’t fit into a box. It’s that internet people keep trying to bring back but you can’t hold the castle once it’s being assaulted by the normies.

So the solution is to do nothing. Let the normies stay in their palaces of commercialization and corruption. It’s for the best.