They are waiting for a new jurisprudence that has decided how police are expected to respond to information from the panopticon.

If the new decisions end up painting a picture where it’s okay to be shown hearsay by the panopticon then as long as there’s a sound investigation and solid evidence they’ll be able to keep using these systems, now with codified policies.

If it comes down that cops aren’t supposed to look at the panopticon then they will just sell them off to people who can (the prison system) and cover up everything they did as best as is possible.

It lowkey literally is. They make these stretchy pull over balaclava things as athletic wear that you can pull up over your face.

You can always cover your face in public. Islam is the light.

I know it seems like pick me mansplaining but I have bad manual dexterity and a bunch of shitty habits from working on cars so I see things like “no, actually disconnect the battery”, “this is how you remove mini pcie devices” and “here’s how to not cross thread a screw” more charitably.

If you really want to exhaust all software troubleshooting options, check if the card has a firmware update available then once you’re sure you’re on the latest one try the card in a usb boot environment for a little bit and see if the same problems crop up.

You want air if you’re not Italian.

Oh that’s an easy one.

When you’re ready, yank all the screws, run a guitar pick around the outside edge (there’s a ifixit article) and disconnect the battery.

You have to disconnect the battery. Put a piece of tape in between the contacts on the board and the battery cable so they can’t come back together.

Locate the wireless card. It’ll have some little wires going to it, those are the antenna wires. It’ll have a screw holding it down, take out the screw and see if the card pops up for future reference. Wiggle it gently back and forth while gently pulling it away from its black connector on the opposite end as the screw.

Once it’s free, insert it back the same way it came out and put the screw back in. Make sure not to cross thread the screw by “backing” it up (turning it lefty-loosey) until it “drops” into place.

Remove the tape and reconnect the battery cable. Put the back panel back on and all the screws in.

See if that fixes your problem. If not you can repeat this process but pop out the antenna wires and replace your mediatek with an Intel 210. It was an option on your model so I know it works.

Just cover your face in public

E: Islam is the light

Everything works fine. Stop worrying.

If you want to be 100% sure (and this is smart in general in all of life!), open a bank account and get a credit card tied to it for payments. Go to taobao or AliExpress or something where Alipay or WeChat are used and try them out with your new financial details.

It doesn’t matter what credit card you get because credit cards are an incredibly not private method of paying for stuff and merchants, processors and everyone else are strongly incentivized to collect and sell user transaction data.

This is going to sound counterintuitive, but don’t get a vpn to bypass the firewall if you don’t have a non-espionage reason to do so. The reason I say that is you’re pitting yourself against a nations cybersecurity people and there’s a good chance they’re smarter than you. It would be better to be able to say “I saw on reddit that I could use this vpn to access this forum for a game I play” and then show the cops all your cringey posts and your hundreds of hours of playtime than to say “I wasn’t doing anything!” or “I just value my privacy!”.

Well you missed the holiday deals but mullvad, air (if you’re not Italian), windscribe and of course proton are the usual suspects.

Air, windscribe if you’re paying for it and proton if you’re paying for it are the ones with port forwarding.

Mullvad takes cash and doesn’t store user accounts.

E: what are you trying to accomplish? A person trying to dodge their employers spying is different than one who just wants to access banned pornography sites is different than one who wants to avoid run of the mill government scrutiny is different than one who is under active investigation etc.

What laptop model?

You can’t turn back the clock. Meaningful changes require a different social relationship between people and production.

Journalctl is telling you the kernel is having a problem with establishing and maintaining a pcie link to the wireless card and the card has a driver in the kernel for a long time.

On the off chance I’m wrong, yanking the card, turning on the computer and seeing if all the errors and bad behavior goes away then turning it off and reinserting the card will give you proof positive that you’re barking up the right tree with the wireless card and if it fixes the problem for good then I was right and that’s an L but at least your wireless is working…

The wireless card is not seated properly. Open the laptop, remove the wireless card and reinsert it.

If it’s simply putting your money where your mouth is then that’s perfectly good.

If you’re worried about being in the crosshairs of that intelligence apparatus it would be good to limit what information stays outside the encrypted vault of whatever password manager you choose no matter where the service is based or servers are located.

The mullvad port forwarding takedown is a great example of legal denial of service if you’re wondering to what extent these different agencies collaborate across oceans and borders.

This won’t work.

Not because you don’t know how to do it, or because they’re not using user generated content in the training datasets, but because all the services are hardened against specifically this vector.

Imagine you’re one of a large handful of ai companies offering cheap or free services at far, far below cost in an effort to be the guy once it all takes off. What’s the literal first thing you’d do to kneecap your rivals? You’d load their service down generating garbage so they have to waste money on it for no (or even negative) return!

So naturally they have all worked soft limits into their apis and worded their terms of service to prevent vaguely worded “abuses”, presented as a few bad apples who live in vans down by their respective rivers needing to be reined in before they can poison the well, all to prevent corporate sabotage.

The proliferation of “slop art” like yapdollar or the millennial memory care smiley are great examples of corporate versions of the cias support of the tomato soup can man in the 60s. Ostensibly saying something about our world but literally funded to prevent the opposition from being able to function.

Once the obvious vector of “waste a billion gpu flops making a picture of your competitor suffering over and over again” ran up against a wall, companies did a bunch of distributed versions, often under the guise of “reverse engineering” or “research” then pivoted towards encouraging the most brain broken festies to use their competitors services and presently are all in on social media grifters doing the same.

Your program couldn’t possibly do more damage than a hundred million zoomers making tool covers animate or having Colby the Christian computer narrate their resumes.

If you just skipped to the end then this reply can be filed under “the revolution will not be televised” because we aren’t living in they live or the running man. Simply sabotaging or taking over the media apparatus used to harm people can’t “set them free” because that apparatus is part of a greater system that is self repairing and self replicating. Adventurism is frowned upon not only because it’s an a-1 way to see who’s a fed but also because it doesn’t fucking work.

Oh I wouldn’t self host that, all I was trying to do was examine what business or compliance reason you might have for wanting to stay out of servers in us jurisdiction or not use a service that might be subject to us laws.

Remember to focus on machines with no bios lock. It’s not a problem to message an eBay seller and ask them if that’s the case. For that model of dell, some of the cheap ones will have the much lower resolution screen, keep that in mind.

Okay, if I were you I’d look for eBay or local Lenovo thinkpad T14 gen 1 (not the t14s!) or dell latitude 5510, both are a year or two newer than even the computer I linked you earlier and can be had with 16gb of ram, 256gb ssd and good batteries for 150 before shipping.

Both of those options have upgrade possibilities down the road and lots of available parts for when something breaks.

Unfortunately newer computers don’t have disc drives usually so you’d have to buy a cheap $20 usb dvd drive but that’s no big deal.

Okay. I’m gonna lead with questions and put information at the bottom:

Can you install an operating system on the laptop?

Are you comfortable installing “user serviceable” components (ram, ssd, etc.) on the laptop?

Do you need a cd drive?

What’s your budget?

I5 is intels marketing term to differentiate their different “tiers” of cpu features. The i5 you posted is a third generation two core processor and the i5 I replied with is an 8th generation four core processor with many significant upgrades in comparison.

More ram is better. Computer programs are getting worse over time and 8gb is realistically the minimum for a decent experience right now.

A new battery on an old laptop is still gonna be at best new old stock and third party batteries are often not the best. So I’ll try to recommend newer but still affordable models with user replaceable batteries unless you feel comfortable replacing a possibly glued in battery.

Dedicated gpu in a laptop is a liability. It just uses power to make heat. I’ll stick to integrated.

Do you mean the us government or just into us jurisdiction?

I’m pretty sure that even with a service based in another European nation whose servers are in that nation you couldn’t rely on either…