Hypothesis A:

• his name is J. Random Error

Hypothesis B:

• he’s real, has a brain anomaly, and is taking androgen antagonists (e.g. 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors) for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s not testosterone which has most biological effect, but dihydrotestosterone. T is just the guidance signal from the brain. DHT does the heavy lifting in tissue. If you don’t want to operate on the brain, you can block the result and leave the guidance signal going wrong.

Note: design and licensing is a far cry for semiconductor fabbing, and not every country can do the latter.

Most countries depend ridiculously much on TSMC (from Taiwan), while TSMC depends ridiculously much on instruments from ASML (from the Netherlands). Grossly simplified, getting where those two currently are takes a decade, and by that time they’ll be a decade ahead (unless they get lazy).

As far as I recall, Samsung (South Korea) can fabricate large quantities of semiconductors on their own (but several times less than TSMC). Then come several Chinese companies, one in the US and one in Israel. Beyond that, there’s very small fish. The only European foundry worth mentioning (X-Fab) has dropped out of the top 10.

Same here. Forums (about science fiction, aeromodelism, electric vehicles) have been important to me, and continue to be important in some fields.

I checked now, and apparently there is none - but LibrePay claims to accept “direct debit from an euro bank account”, so small donations over Librepay should not feed any banks. :)

Regarding e-mail: “riseup.net” requires that a long-time user vouch for a new user and invite them. If the new user quickly turns into a complaint magnet (there’s a coming-of-age period after which their actions are considered their own), both the user and the inviter will be held responsible (kicked off the service). I think (hope) they aren’t so strict with VPN, but they have limited people and could not administer a mess made by a big bunch of people.

Needless to say, none of my (anarchist) comrades have ever been kicked off RiseUp, but they don’t send spam or threats, they just send their cat pictures encrypted with GPG, causing the authorities endless work. :)

Just like every reasonable service, RiseUp has a few technical mechanisms to ensure they aren’t compromised (disk and inbox encryption, etc) but obviously those can’t help against a dedicated and well-resourced adversary.

So, whatever e-mail server you use - use PGP / GPG. :) Then the adversary must compromise your device. If you are hardcore, encrypt and sign on an offline device. Then the adversary must breach the air gap.

(I used to sign releases for some anonymity-related project years ago. Those were the times when I seriously took measures because others depended on me. Currently, not so much.)

P.S. As for the lack of resources at RiseUp: this can be alleviated by donating to them. Which reminds me, I should set up a small regular donation to their representative organization in the EU.

Under the divine guidance of Elon Musk, I strongly doubt if emperor Trump will break any big tech. More likely he’ll pat them on the back (while requiring more surveillance data to be submitted).