Again, while I would like to be hopeful… I really can’t express enough how much I genuinely think they would absolutely push the button. I think a lot of these people are so wrapped up in their ideology (look how Trump is just straight up breaking shit he doesn’t understand. Sometimes even accidentally doing good stuff) and they’re so lost in some fantasy world resulting from like 60 straight years of neoliberal and libertarian jerkoff sessions that they are detached enough and/or deranged enough to do it. Like true radical thought processes of “No, I’d rather be dead than…” insert whatever situation is happening or they imagine is happening. Like if China is just steamrolling every single US Navy vessel within 1000km of China’s shores (which, btw, I personally think is justified. The US would certainly never tolerate the opposite. A Chinese aircraft carrier just setting up anchor 1000km from Hawaii)… I dunno. Maybe the US takes that. That’s the one situation I could see restraint happening.

Any sort of perceived “encroachment” on US territory becomes much more certain in my mind. The “losing abroad” situation also relies on their mindset which, if you listen to them, is basically “Wow, how could China dare have planes and ships in the South CHINA Sea?!”

If their actions follow their ideology and statements… they really do see China having sovereignty and expressing it in much (MUCH) less overt ways than the US does as an affront to the US. I can’t read their minds, but their words certainly indicate that anything China does feels like an existential threat to them and must be responded to.

Unfortunately I see this sentiment escalating and not deescalating. The US media diet is just “Bad things because China china china Russia! China china china cuba russia China Venezuela Iran china china china” 24/7 non stop. The politicians who you’d think would know that the media is bullshit and only exists to help them do evil shit would realize like “Ok, yeah. I want to fuck China over, but… we can’t do this thing.” and yet, I don’t think many of them realize it. They eat the propaganda and gobble it down the same as normal Americans with no political power. Everyone in charge here is a legitimate fucking moron. And we’re only slated to get dumber (less educated)…

I assume you meant win not when

While we can all hope that is the case… I think you misunderstand what nukes are there for. In the US’ case anyway.

There’s no real strategy to the nukes… it’s just “attack us and we’re losing? Nuke. So don’t even think about it.” That’s the entire concept of mutually assured destruction. Nuclear armed nations with properly hardened nukes (which the US absolutely has and China, I assume, has equivalent nukes. In the ground, under the sea, on stand by for planes as well) all exist under the constant implicit and also explicit threat of what I wrote above. They are called deterrence missiles in the US. Deterrence against other nuclear armed nations even thinking about a first strike nuke or invasion.

I suppose the only “what if” is “what if the US loses horribly abroad. But the mainland isn’t attacked by nukes (or something else) and there is no invasion?” Maybe that’s what you meant?

It’s still plausible to me that the US president smashes that button. We aren’t exactly known for having sane, rational people in that position. But that’s about the only scenario I can see direct US/China confrontation without nuclear exchange. If the US fucks around with, I dunno, Taiwan and immediately China shuts it down. Maybe the US takes the L. Still, over the long term if such a conflict begins… nuclear exchange seems inevitable. From the US side starting it due to losing.

I remain doubtful on that front considering the result of forcing a war with China… doesn’t really matter because we’re just all dead then. Like the entire world.

Yeah, “proxy wars” and such. China isn’t taking that bait though. The US keeps whining on about Taiwan, but I see zero evidence of an “aggressive, forced” takeover of the island. (And yes, takeover is loosely used there. If the idea of states and sovereignty is “real” then China “invading Taiwan” is impossible. Yes, I understand… everyone knows what I mean. “Liberals in the walls” moment)

Hope you aren’t American or Western European… got bad news for you on the “government lies” part

Sure. Although that means very little considering most people have dynamic IPs. You also can’t do anything with an IP… not much anyway. Assuming they even grab a long term dynamic IP (some ISPs rarely change the IP, this is true) it only gives them your generalized geolocation which is often off by hundreds of miles. And your ISP, although that isn’t always clear either. It’s not like an ip tracing to your home directly. That would make literally every single connection you make to any website a security risk. My point being, if your personal security risk levels prohibits connections to websites… this is just another drop in a bucket.

I’m not trying to be flippant here or overly dismissive. I just think this isn’t as big of a concern as some are imagining. I agree generally something should be done to alert users that the website is no longer “safe” or “genuine.” Beyond that, barring a lemmy decision about how to handle expired/stolen domains, not much else can be done. 🤷‍♂️

Maybe see if someone can add it to a large Adblock list so that ublock, etc. pick it up as “potentially dangerous.”

That’s assuming the hexbear admin team isn’t able to snag it. Last I saw it’s like ~$700. There’s absolutely some IT nerd with a bunch of cash who might buy it from the auction and gift it to hexbear. Who knows. There’s many more shitty NATO IT libs who would buy it and sit on it for years just to pretend they “owned the tankies.”

Ultimately I find it hard to not find a lot of fault in the admins of hexbear for letting this go for months and months. They should’ve begun migration to a new domain as soon as the old admin/owner disappeared.

TL;DR unless the shitlib did a Mission Impossible style heist, all the registration data is just on someone’s server, likely in a massive data center wherever they were paying to host the site from. It’s probably encrypted (well, it should be) and effectively inaccessible to anyone without the proper keys to access it.

The domain name is just the domain name

When you type in a domain name your DNS resolves that name to an IP address

Without dragging this out overly much, it’s like someone stole your phone number. Not your phone.

When people call your stolen number they expect that Illuminati answers. The thief could fake being you, if they were good enough and wanted to.

But they don’t have your data. That resides on your phone. The server(s) that were being used to host hexbear, to leave the analogy behind.

There’s currently nothing to worry about data theft side of things.

However, with minimum due respect, whoever managed to let the domain registration expire is a top tier… dingus. I honestly don’t even know how they let that happen. 🤷‍♂️

Zoomers gonna zoom

E: Apparently zoomers can’t take a joke. Get over yourselves nerds