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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I have no doubt that China can and does buy data from data brokers. I think it’s unlikely, however that any of the major players are going to be willing to sell all their data on anyone- being able to target ads to individuals is their entire value proposition after all. On top of that, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have fallen pretty heavily out of favor with folks in their teens/early 20s (i.e. the demographic most ripe to be sources of bad OPSEC).

    But even assuming that an adversary could buy all the data they could possibly want, doing so could tip off anyone who cared to be watching about the sorts of data they’re interested in. This is generally not something you want as it can reveal your own strategic concerns/intentions.

    Having your own app that can collect whatever you want, where you can promote whatever information/view that you want is a pretty big advantage over buying data.

    If the argument is about privacy, I think banning tik tok is complete bullshit. If it’s about limiting intelligence gathering and influence campaigns, I think it makes more sense.


  • Yes and no. Without endorsing them, the arguments for banning Tik Tok are subtler than Chinese = security risk. The fears, however reasonable you may find them, are largely that it presents a danger of foreign information gathering of detailed behavioral/location/interest/social network information on a huge swath of the U.S. population which can be used either for intelligence purposes or targeted influence/psyops campaigns within the U.S. When you look at the history of how even relatively benign data from sources not controlled by foreign adversaries has been used for intelligence gathering, e.g. Strava runs disclosing the locations of classified military installations, these fears make a certain amount of sense.

    Temu, et al., on the other hand are shopping apps that don’t really lend themselves to influence campaigns in the same way (though, if they are sucking up data like all the other apps, I wouldn’t be surprised if folks in the U.S. security apparatus are concerned about those as well.

    Ultimately, I think the argument fails because it assumes an obligation for Congress to solve every tangentially related ill all at once where no such obligation exists.


  • For a company, it’s essential to be able to monitor/review employee communications for legal/compliance reasons. That said, while you should assume that any communication made with your official email/slack/teams/whatever can be seen by the company if it needs to be (e.g. somebody sues for something, even something potentially unrelated to you, that creates a need to search for relevant records), it’s unlikely that Slack is actively reporting your conversations to your boss.

    As others have said, if you don’t want your company to see something you’re saying, don’t say it at work or on their platforms. In the U.S. at least, you have no expectation of privacy at work. If you’re worried about something you’ve already said, you might just be screwed. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯











  • I’m a big fan of cheap (as in ~$10/yr vps) and reverse proxy over wireguard. My home ip isn’t exposed and I’m able to quickly spin new containers up by updating my reverse proxy config and adding a wireguard peer.

    I keep two VPSs- one as reverse proxy for all my miscellaneous services and another solely for email. The latter port forwards raw traffic over wireguard to my email server container. That way, even if the VPS gets compromised, my personal data remains secure.

    I end up paying ~ $30/yr (+ whatever I’m paying in electricity) for domain + VPS. It’s a bit more involved than tailscale, etc, but I’m willing to put in a little extra work to make sure I’m not at the mercy of some company getting up to some rent-seeking bullshit.





  • The only option that fits your budget today I can think of would be picking up one of the old xeon combos off of AliExpress. I spent like $100 on a MB+CPU+64GB DDR4 combo with a 2880 v4 I think. 14c/28t at any rate. You can probably grab a case/power supply/video card used for under $50 on eBay.

    Please note that I’m not saying that this is a good option; it took a lot of fiddling for me to get mine running smoothly. But if you’ve got more time and patience than money, it might work for you.




  • Doesn’t this only put a (statistical) limit on how cheaply a civilization can launch planet-ending attacks? It may well be feasible for a civilization to aim and accelerate a mass to nearly the speed of light in order to protect itself from a future threat. It doesn’t necessarily follow it would be feasible or desirable to spend the presumably nontrivial resources needed to do so on every planet where simple life is detected.

    Add to this the fact that, at least I understand it, evidence of our current level of technological sophistication (e.g. errant radio waves) attenuates to the point of being undetectable with sufficient distance and the dark forest becomes a bit more viable again.

    Personally, I don’t like it as an answer to the Drake equation, but I think that it fails for social rather than technological/logical reasons. The hypothesis assumes a sort of hyper-logical game theory optimized civilization that is a. nothing whatsoever one our own and b. unlikely to emerge as any civilization that achieves sufficient technological sophistication to obliterate another will have gotten there via cooperation.