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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • Dunno, my cousins’ dad was a 17yo soldier. One can say it was a better time cause he was on the winning side, and now that has become the losing side.

    Mass surveillance was more old-school, but governments were still pretty harsh.

    They had Trump. He just was younger, Democrat and apparently popular.

    They had AI in your spam mail.

    Climate collapse … again, where half my family is from, war broke logistics in the 90s, so to have heat at winter people would cut down trees. A lot of forest lost. But one can say it was a better time because “the world” cared more about civilians suffering than about forests. I suspect now climate activists would act differently.





  • Telegram is not a privacy tool.

    I mean, if he’s convicted for a privacy tool, while it’s not a privacy tool, we have a bit of ambiguity.

    Arguably advertising something which is not a privacy tool as one is fraud. Maybe even phishing, since TG the company has in plaintext all the chat history of its users.

    And this

    The meaning of that word “complicity” seems to be revealed by the last three charges: Telegram has been providing users a “cryptology tool” unauthorised by French regulators.

    in non-libertarian language means something similar, that is, that something not confirmed to be a privacy tool is being provided as a privacy tool.

    I am a libertarian, but in this case they are consistent, if I’m reading this correctly. They are not abusing power, they are doing exactly what they are claiming to be doing.

    Also maybe I’m just tired of Telegram. It’s engaging, and I have AuDHD, which means lots of energy spent, and I can’t drop it completely because work, and also some small communities are available as TG channels. Would be wonderful were they to move at least to WhatsApp, but it is what it is.

    Still, ability to easily create a blog (what a TG channel really is for its users) reachable without bullshit is a niche in huge demand. LJ filled that at some point, Facebook did at another, TG does now.

    Something like this is desperately needed. I’d say the solution should be complementary to Signal - that is, DMs and small groups should not be its thing. Neither should be privacy of huge chats and channels - they’d be public anyway. However, anonymity with means to counter spam should, so should be metadata of user activity.


  • If Signal was really as secure and private like everyone says it is then their executives would already be in jail and whatnot for “enabling criminal activities”.

    It doesn’t have anything to do with what “everyone says”. We don’t do that with security. Well, Telegram users do, but Charles Darwin wrote about that process. Others look at what academics say or are competent enough themselves (no, you are not).




  • I’m actually sympathetic to anyone having an ideology not to help their identity, but trying to imagine a structure that works.

    Ancaps are expected to be good in that regard, tankies are expected to be bad in that regard, but in general there are good and bad people in any group. I’ve met almost (the premise of racial difference in quality is still wrong obviously) reasonable Nazis, and not alt-rights at that, but real honest Nazis.

    I’ve been excited about Trotskyism at some point, because while there are problems with their proposed ideal state (which is similar to what’s described in Norbert Wiener’s “Cybernetics”), they have a proposed mechanism and it’s been even tested in Rojava (their bigger issue is with armed apes around them though, and also with the USA abandoning them after not needing them against ISIS).



  • Maybe the US government (or even “deep state” or something) has realized that making everyone use insecure devices for easier surveillance is as smart as forbidding fire exits so that people would be easier to arrest.

    I haven’t heard too many bad things about Signal.

    Various dictatorships want to simply read correspondence because the social graphs producing actual value and keeping stability in our world, and also protecting their embezzled value stored abroad, are all abroad too, and they won’t hurt these. Some politicians in the west want to invade privacy for the same reason - what they embezzle is stored in ways unaffected by insecure communications in their own countries.

    But if you are part of some establishment, even if not well-meaning, you are interested to protect the system from outright erosion, meaning secure communications.

    Other than that, WhatsApp and FB Messenger are owned by Zuck and he’s become too big to tolerate, Telegram is an African brothel with no protection and plenty of diseases, and in general it’s all corporate around.

    Let’s please also remember that there are people of various views and interests in every organization and force.


  • A lot of software nowadays is doing a real disservice to their users by continuing to lie to them like this by selling them the notion that they can control their information after it has been sent. It’s really making people forget basic information hygiene. No app can guarantee that message won’t be intercepted or mishandled. They can only give you tools to hopefully prevent that, but there are no guarantees.

    Oh, yes. These “deleted messages”, or these “hidden likes”, or whatever else.

    I mean, there are fundamental things and algorithms allowing to create such a system, with blinded keys, ghost keys and what not, only these disgusting cheats have a centralized service where any employee can see everything, yet pretend that they have “a security feature”.