Obviously it was implied that I meant the USSR times. I do have parents and grandparents that could narrate how awesome the gulags were.

Because the USSR fell 100 years ago.

I know exactly who thrived during those times. Party members. If you only listen to them, sure, you’re going to get a different story.

I am just telling you how things were from the perspective of someone that lived those times and their aftermath. Long lines to everything, incompetence and kafkaesque bureaucracy, one factory that produced stuff efficiently had to be a crutch for the inefficient ones, people that had to work in mandatory coops including children. Oh, and the means of production never went to the people, it stood within the party. And that’s just the general stuff in both EE and USSR. I won’t go into details on how Stalin was the head of a single party which had absolute control over the people, ergo dictator. And I am sure he wanted to step down, just like Putin allowed Medvedev to be a puppet for a few years. Oh wait, this new Russian dictator actually truly stepped down for a bit unlike the pretend attempts from Stalin. Let’s be real.

Do you want me to take you by the hand and show you the spectacular progress made in the eastern European countries? All run by dictators , all answering to the Bolshevik boss. Stalin was a dictator by definition. The USSR was just another colonizer. And I say all this because I have first hand experience, most some nostalgic books. That does mean the current system is good, I want it gone. But the romanticization of USSR remains nonsense.

Rights? In the USSR? All I know is that they bled dry their satellites, kept under severe pressure their so called allies and it was run by a dictator. Weird nostalgia, but misplaced.

Are you serious?

Babe, wake up. New shit corpo practice just dropped.

I’m in Italy and outside cities, the Internet is still horrendous. And as I said, if you have a remote farm or garden, which are fairly common here, then you are on your own. Sim based internet is a thing, but there are monthly limits which are risky when you need surveillance and automation to be always live.

There are remote areas where cable won’t reach. For example, I need surveillance on a remote farm and I would love to get internet there.

They think that their domination is strong enough so that after an initial backlash, the users will come back since they have nowhere else to go. And they’re kind of right.

It’s strange how the Internet has been flooded by this news. Like leave Google alone or Firefox gets it. Very strategic use of the media might I say.

Propaganda? Judging by the number of downvotes, I assume people didn’t even bother watching a 5 minutes video. Set it on 2x speed.

Well…the domestic routers also conduct in heavy data collection and some have technical backdoors, so I don’t know.

Some data is definitely collected especially if the router is made for mainland China.

I don’t know about evil, but it’s curious to see that the OS that Xiaomi uses is a modified version of OpenWRT, so the support could have been there. I mean it could still be an option in the future.

No, it cannot.