“But don’t forget the situation we are in. Now is the time of military censorship, unprecedented for our country. After all, the war is going on in the information space too,” Peskov is quoted as saying by the magazine.
So it is a war after all? And that front goes both ways, you can see even here on Lemmy comments which could be paid actors on behalf of Russia. Most likely not all of them get paid, but I’m pretty sure at least some do (obviously not focusing just on Lemmy).
As long as there’s no military need for them against an invasion there will be zero mines in the ground. No one will hurt themselves with them, unless some storage worker happens to drop a box on their toes.
As of why now, you can’t pull out of agreement and start to build up manufacturing and logistics if there’s active invasion going on. I hope not a single one of them is ever dug on our Finnish soil, but I’m glad that our military is prepared to use any viable option if they need to.
Here in Finland we just might hit +20C this week. Maybe a bit over that in the south. Maybe not coldest since forever, but definetly colder than last couple of summers so far.
Based on news lately cracks on Russian economy start to show and their meat grinder in Ukraine crawls forward with massive casualties. At this rate they can’t attack a garden shed.
Putin himself can preparen and wish to conquer whatever he wants but as long as the little remains what’s left of Soviet Union might is scattered around Ukraine, Russia can’t really do anything. If Europe can’t get their shit together and Russia eventually wins (after several years at this pace) in Ukraine it would still take years to build up any kind of military force against anyone and even then they’d need to fight against whole EU and whatever remains are left of NATO.
Detroit Electric from 1907 then. They produced 13 000 units in ~30 years. Obviously small numbers compared to today, but mass produced models anyway.
The first would be the GM EV1 in 1997:
The Flocken Elektrowagen is a four-wheeled electric car designed by Andreas Flocken (1845–1913), manufactured in 1888 by Maschinenfabrik A. Flocken in Coburg. It is regarded as the first real electric car.
Companies also probably have servers in other places, meaning perhaps they’d connect through elsewhere
Depends on company, but that worst case scenario is that all US companies would shut down all their services in Europe overnight. Every big player has datacenters around the world and if it’s just the traffic between continents which is shut down then the effect is way less radical, absolute majority of Europe already connects to datacenters near them even if they use Microsoft/Google/Amazon/etc services.
For example with my employer dropping every US based company would be a hell of a work, specially if it’s needed in a hurry. We, as well as a ton of others, rely on Microsoft services for all kinds of communication and should that go away we’d need to make quite a few phone calls around couple of continents just to set up a common ground on where and how to start building new infrastructure and how to keep communication lines open.
Though if it were for a few hours, maybe let people see the consequences of their dependence, and what life would be like without these services
Few hours is a short time. There’s some problems around the globe all the time which affect various services on various levels for few hours all the time. Few days of complete blackout and C-suits start to really sweat (plus it costs significant amounts of money via lost productivity).
if anyone knows how to block connections based on location, feel free to enlighten me
You’ll need a firewall/router which can do geoblocking. Based on quick search at least pfsense seems to have some options available. If I were to try that I’d set up a pfsense on a virtual machine, set up geoblock on that and use that as a gateway for my testing devices while leaving the rest of the network as it is so that I could limit/choose what devices may behave strangely and still have normal functionality for the rest.
I assume there’s a ton of other options too besides pfsense, but the key words are ‘geoblock’, ‘firewall’ and ‘router’ or something around that. Also I assume that most of the stuff you find explains how to block incoming traffic based on geoIP, but it should be relatively simple to adapt those for outgoing traffic as well.
It’s the latter. But as a crapload of our everyday services depend on US companies and their servers it would be a service outage we’ve never seen before. Big US companies (Microsoft, AWS, Google, Meta…) could technically mitigate at least some effects if it’s just the actual connectivity which is missing but if they’re forced to shut down all European services it’s a whole another matter.
For your everyday consumer it would mean missing a lot of streaming services, email, personal backups of your photos on cloud services and stuff like that. On some cases even access to their bank accounts would be lost. Depending on your usage patterns a majority of your digital life could vanish overnight. For companies it would be even worse, a ton of them rely on AWS and other services to keep their business running and all that would come crashing down and a massive amount of them would not have workforce, knowledge nor resources (money mostly) to switch over to something else. Also a lot of tax paid service rely on M365 and other cloud based stuff so they would be affected too, but maybe/hopefully not quite as badly as commercial side. Also, our credit card processors are mostly US (Visa and Mastercard) so a ton of money transfers would be halted as well.
So, it would be pretty much a digital catastrophe on government, commercial and consumer fronts for majority of the people. Technically there’s nothing we couldn’t rebuild on our own, but it would take at least months and more likely several years to get everything back online and the bill for that would be astronomical. And if it’s a total kill-switch for US services then Europe would need new mobile operating systems to replace Android/IOS, new OS for their computers as Windows wouldn’t work anymore and so on. And on top of that, GPS would go too, but with Galileo that might not be the biggest problem around. And also a ton of other stuff I can’t remember right off the bat.
Sure, US would be stranded on the internet (and in the real world too at least to some point) after that and EU/UN/some other entity would take the role which is now on ICANN (and the same for other administrative entities). US would of course get a massive economical hit as well by losing all European customers, but on the worst case that would pretty much mean that the Europe’s internet access, at least as we know it now, would end and something else would be built on the ashes.
But hey, at least I personally wouldn’t have a problem to find a new job should I want to.
They need to bring back the sporty station wagon/estate.
Or “soccer mom” cars, there’s very little on minivan market today at least here in Finland. My wallet says that I don’t drive fully electric for quite some time but about a year ago we had to get rid of our Toyota Previa (too expensive repairs were needed) and there just isn’t too much to pick from. With 3 kids and a dog we just can’t fit the whole circus in a VW Golf and there’s less and less cheap used cars on that category. Sure, if you throw 30-40k€ to the table then you can get a newer VW Caravelle or MB Viano, but below 5k there just isn’t much to choose from. Currently we have Mitsubishi Grandis but with all 7 seats there’s not much room for luggage.
We used to have E-class Mercedes (S210) and it could easily fit the whole family (with child seats) and have plenty of room in the trunk for the dog and luggage, but if you try to seat 3 nearly adult sized kids on the Grandis the middle row seat alone is really not comfortable for multi-hour trip. And it’s pretty much the same for all the station wagons we’ve had over the years. Sure, we’ve had a lot of them, but I think it’s better for not just my wallet to get old ones and drive them “to the end”.
But even if we use bigger cars none of them has a bonnet you need a ladder to reach. Grandis, Previa, Hyundai Trajet, Renault Espace and Peugeot 807 all had very rounded front end and “normal” height bumpers. That makes services a bit more pain in the rear, but you can easily see what’s going on in front of your vehicle.
I heavily doubt Germany could make that change. It’s pretty analog country still on a lot of things and stuff like card payments aren’t available everywhere. My bet would be Estonia. Here in Finland we’re pretty digital on everything already but a crapload of offices (both public and private) are pretty heavily married to M365 (and microsoft in general) environment and workflows and have been for quite a while so even if I would absolutely like to see the change I don’t see it happening any time soon.
And then there’s the plain scale of things. You can find at least half decent windows helpdesk/admin staff everywhere but (at least in here) similar linux knowledge just isn’t around. Plus then there’s areas where linux just don’t have replacements on windows environment. Basic desktop stuff is easy, but replacing AD forests with GPOs just doesn’t have similarily easy replacement. There’s of course workarounds and you can get similar end results but you’ll need a skilled admin and pretty tightly controlled environment to do that.
They even said that if it proves too difficult, they will return to Microsoft
And, unfortunately, I’m pretty sure they’ll decide it’s too difficult. They’d need capable linux-admins and helpdesk personnel, training for employees and someone to deal with the people who just won’t even try to change. All of that costs money (and time, but that’s the same thing), and quite a lot of it at first and benefits will come slowly over time.
No. Don’t try to twist this into something that it’s not.
“Up to now, prosecutors have had to show that an attacker used violence or threatening behaviour, or had sexual intercourse with someone who was unable to resist, to secure a conviction for rape.”
“Under the new law passed by parliament, anyone who has sex with someone who has not consented to it by word or deed could be convicted of rape, even without violence.”
The “keeping it weak” approach, after all, has already led to Putin.
No one kept Russia weak when Soviet Union collapsed. Yeltsin brought a lot of democractic traits into Russia and it was heavily leaning towards west on multiple areas. Should they kept going on that direction they’d be a global superpower on pretty much all fronts by now, surpassing US and even China.
But they had also pretty big internal problems and a ton of people who desired old soviet times and whatever, so we ended up with what we have today. Wikipedia has way more info and links to study it further.
Or put data centers where the air itself is colder. There’s been small-scale studies on how servers work on greenhouses at the Finnish winter and they are just fine with air cooling at below zero temperatures. I’ve also ran my own homelab in an non insulated attic without issues. The only problem is that if your hardware shuts down it starts to gather ice, so you need to move them in a warm location during maintenance, but they’ll run just fine even at -30C as long as they’re shielded from elements other than temperature.
And in colder climate the excess heat is a resource in itself as you can pump it into district heating loops and not just dump it to the environment.
You don’t even need to push. Just wait a while until the toddler finds something else to focus on and forget what happened today.
It was some time ago but a response from Canadian supplier to US customer went few rounds on social media. They informed that the item customer was buying was under a tariff and gave options to either pay up the tariffs, cancel the sale with no extra cost or just wait for few days and see what happens. And the really stupid part is that it was (and largely is) a viable strategy, at least on customer sales. For businesses that’s obviously a total nightmare, but that’s just one example on how ridiculous any kind of trade with the US is right now.
You are absolutely correct on that, but I find it a bit ironic anyways. Trump seems to be quite fond of royalty, at least UK kind, and this underlines even more that relationship with Europe is going down the drain and fast. Royal families across the Europe are more or less either family or at least friends together and this will play it’s small part on US failures to maintain any kind of political or other power across the pond.
which was a ‘neutral’ border back then
There’s quite a few unmarked graves along that border and immense effort from my countrymen to keep the border where it is. It hasn’t been “neutral” for too long. And being prepared to keep that border where it is plays a part on why our president from a small country is on discussions with Ukraine, EU leaders and that orange clown across the pond today.
Murmansk is few hundred kilometers from Finnish border and it’s been there for “a while”, it’s no more bigger problem now than it has ever been. And Norway border is slightly closer than ours and Norway has been a NATO country for quite a while.
Their bases have been about where the tent villages now are for decades. They’re training grounds for new conscripts until they’re moved to die in some ditch in Ukraine. Who knows why they’re more active now, maybe Ukraine is getting pretty good to hit their targets deep in Russia so they need to move further away from the front line or whatever.
This has absolutely nothing to do with Finland, beyond the fact that our border just happens to be nearby. And should they actually try start an active war with NATO from there, these grounds are mostly in reach of Finnish artillery and our artillery is pretty damn efficient on what they do.
I’m pretty sure there’s already a gambling website around where you can bet how long these announcements last. Could’t find one on o quick google search, but I’m quite sure there is one.