Aah… Boomer bait, we get that a lot :s

Best thing after “Those people who enjoy your memes, are they in the room with us now?” - therapist session.

IA is a pillar of internet activism, and an exceptional instance of the spirit of the web pioneers. No real hacktivist would take them on. These guys are spooks, black hat, or corporate actors.

Archives work against information control. “Who controls the present now controls the past”. They wouldn’t like archived versions of things get in the way of their very, very expensive narratives they are pushing, now would they?

All this is speculative of course, but those domains you listed are vanity domains in lucrative markets. I call them vanity domains, because it can easily set you back 3-4 figures to get a domain like me.blog , let alone yourname.cars which is quite desirable if you sell cars. As with everything else, domain prices are simply subject to the laws of supply and demand.

Regarding .io , compared to average country code domains, such as .de for example, that tend to be quite modestly priced, .io has seen substantial increase in the past 5 or so years, transformed from a geeky exoticism to a symbol of AI-hype tech companies.

At least from my perspective.

Certainly. I try to do the same, in fact I craft my comments so that they are immediately useful to others. Nonetheless, this might be not enough. Trolls are there for a reason, and you have to accept that our comment-section skirmishes do not add up to much, especially when you consider state-sponsored trolling and mega-corporate push of the far right agenda, across all media outlets, including social media.

Perhaps peppering responses with links is counterproductive. Why not follow a more consistent strategy? Such an approach would for example summarize the opposition’s view in good faith, give a name to the fallacies in it, and respond not only by providing a link, but a short synopsis of what the link is and how it refutes those fallacies. This approach helps not only rebut the opponent, who may be unwilling to listen to reason, but everyone following the conversation in real time or in the future. For this reason it is also great to use archived versions of links, whenever you can.

Possibly the domain is visible with a traffic monitoring tool. Everything else is between you and the bank via HTTPS. Having said that, whatever is not over https is visible to whoever sits on the same network as yourself.

This trick should come in handy pal

12ft.io/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-altman-mythmaking/680152/

Not to mention that people have jobs and use their credit cards, no way even to hide the most important personal identifying information.

Exactly, this is a lost cause. If you participate in society your essential data are simply out there. For most people the task is to minimize their footprint. If we are talking about evading mass surveillance, then we should take for granted that the person will be to one or another degree marginalized, or lead a fringe lifestyle.

Sure, I see where you are coming from. I used to be in favor of PGP as well, but I think I just was conditioned to it because it was everywhere, eg Linux repositories. The argument I found more convincing in this article is that PGP is a swiss-army knife. You might want to use it in an emergency, but professionals have special tools for each different task. In fact, the article suggests very nice alternatives for each task: Encrypt with age , sign with minisign. Two different tasks, two different tools, no need for a web of trust. Just for the arguments sake why do you think that PGP is worth it given the burden of entry?

People say this over and over “depends on your threat model” and yet people seem to have a hard time understanding that. Your threat model is “who is your adversary and what he is willing/able to do”. Your security goal is what do you want to keep from your adversary.

As others said, if you are an activist or sth important, perhaps you might want to build a working knowledge of cryptography yourself. If you just want META not being able to see your NSFW chat with your romantic partner Signal might be more than enough. In fact, people way more relevant than me also suggest that Signal is good even for bounty hunter vulnerability reporting.

Having said that, what bugs me most is that people think the instant messaging format as suitable for everything: activism, jobs, crimes, broadcasting 1970’s prog rock for extraterestrials , whatever lmao. Do you really want to use your phone for all that? Like, just carrying the phone around in the first place nullifies your other precautions, for all advanced threat models beyond privacy of non-critical social messaging.

Persistent/resourceful adversaries can eventually get to you, using a set of penetration and intelligence techniques, which means, if you are involved, the convenience of messaging your partners in crime from the phone in your pocket while waiting for a bus is a convenience you probably can’t afford.

protected by PGP

Someone here recently linked to this gem https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/

The article warns PGP over Email is a safety concern. They suggest Signal instead. (And several other tools to replace PGP)

I can’t help wondering what is up with all those people fighting in comments about encryption. You make the point time and again that having encrypted media is somehow suspicious. I see where you are coming from.

• There are cases where people have gotten in trouble for using TOR/Signal, because it was presented to the court that “this is what criminals use”.
• There are those Wall Street companies that got in trouble for using encrypted messengers with trading partners.

We know about these, because it makes headlines when it happens.

Yet, there are people here, in any similar discussion, not just this one, that keep telling us that encryption is useless because authorities can more easily break your bones than brute force your private key, and you are going to be in trouble just for having encrypted media.

Is that so? Remember the fuss when federal regulators wanted Apple to install backdoors to encrypted i-Phones? Why so? No no, bear with me, if you people are correct, then every person with an encrypted i-Phone should be in a watchlist? What about all these Linux laptops all with LUKS on the main hard drive, flying around?

How come we don’t hear about those people being prosecuted and brutalized every other day in all of these alternative media we are following?

Regarding encryption, I have a right to my fucking privacy and if you want to know what is in my hard drive, then you are the weird one. Now let’s discuss criminal prosecution. If the authorities have something on you and they need whatever is in your encrypted drive to convict you, then they do not have anything on you unless they break the encryption. The more people practicing encryption the less fruitful their efforts will be. Your argument amounts to little more than the very authorities slogan “if you don’t have something to hide”. More people using encryption should make it sink that not only people with something to hide will use encryption, and indeed, all these everyday, non-criminal people are already using Encryption in i-Phones and Linux without having their bones broken.

Yet you keep repeating this rhetoric, which seems to have no other purpose than deter people from using encryption.

Now let’s discuss brutality. If you live in a police state that can kidnap you and rough you up to forgo your protected right to privacy, then you don’t have a problem with encryption, but a huge political problem. In that case encryption won’t liberate you, but at the same time you have much bigger problems, and an entirely different threat model.

So the only thing you people could, in good faith, add to the discussion is “If you live in a police state, don’t rely solely on encryption, and update your threat model”. The other things you keep going on and on about are essentially a rebranded “if you don’t have something to hide” and they only seem designed to discourage people from adopting encryption altogether, and the fact you don’t let go can only mean one fucking thing.

This is a story from August 2023, and was covered in many outlets (I quote here NYT for reference only)

Federal regulators continued their crackdown against employees of Wall Street firms using private messaging apps to communicate, with 11 brokerage firms and investment advisers agreeing Tuesday to pay $549 million in fines.

Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Bank of Montreal were hit with the biggest penalties by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Together, the brokerage and investment advisory arms of those four financial institutions accounted for nearly 90 percent of the fines, according to statements released by the regulators.

Original NYT

Archived version

Right enough, I came across a Wikipedia article “Politics of Harry Potter” yesterday, it was weird to read. Especially under the light of Rowling’s (um… post 2015ish?) transphobic saga, most of the cringe article reads as a complete trainwreck in hindsight, since Rowling had been celebrated by the Left and condemned by the Right at the time. Hilarious.

Some random quotes for your entertainment

Bill O’Reilly joined in the political fray over Harry Potter character Albus Dumbledore’s outing by asking if it was part of a “gay agenda” to indoctrinate children. He called J. K. Rowling a provocateur for telling fans about Dumbledore’s sexuality after the books were written. His guest, Entertainment Weekly Senior Editor Tina Jordan, called his “indoctrination” claims “a shallow argument”, saying “indoctrination is a very strong word” because “we all know gay people, whether we know it or not.”[11] O’Reilly continued the following day, saying that the real problem was that Rowling was teaching “tolerance” and “parity for homosexuals with heterosexuals”. His guest, Dennis Miller, said that tolerance was good and didn’t think you could indoctrinate a child into being gay.[12]

(Replace gay for trans in the statement above and try to not roll on the floor laughing)

Catholic fantasy author Regina Doman wrote an essay titled “In Defense of Dumbledore”, in which she argued that the books actually support Catholic teaching on homosexuality because Dumbledore’s relationship with the dark wizard Grindelwald leads to obviously terrible results, as he becomes interested in dark magic himself, neglects his responsibilities towards his younger sister and ultimately causes her death.[46][unreliable source?]

Rowling herself says:

“I do not think I am pessimistic but I think I am realistic about how much you can change deeply entrenched prejudice, so my feeling would be that if someone were a committed racist, possibly Harry Potter is not going to have an effect.”[21][non-primary source needed]

“People like to think themselves superior and that if they can pride themselves in nothing else they can pride themselves on perceived purity.”[25]

“I’ve never thought, ‘It’s time for a post-9/11 Harry Potter book,’ no. But what Voldemort does, in many senses, is terrorism, and that was quite clear in my mind before 9/11 happened… but there are parallels, obviously. I think one of the times I felt the parallels was when I was writing about the arrest of Stan Shunpike, you know? I always planned that these kinds of things would happen, but these have very powerful resonances, given that I believe, and many people believe, that there have been instances of persecution of people who did not deserve to be persecuted, even while we’re attempting to find the people who have committed utter atrocities. These things just happen, it’s human nature. There were some very startling parallels at the time I was writing it.”[78][better source needed]

Might I add, the latter statement (likening DeathEaters to terrorists) and her expressed belief that the trans movement are like the Death Eaters, leads to the logical conclusion that she thinks trans activism is …terrorism? I would not put it past her, and I can’t fathom what a real Ministry could do with such a false equivalence.

you are still an asshole

Thank you

the error of explaining your post with the typical US

Sure enough going after your colloquotors’ nationality was an ill-chosen angle, since you wanted to criticize the idea of one-gender, reducing it to Americans. Same goes for another asshole who was quick to attribute it to me supposedly being the speaker of a “genderless” language.

This is a bullshit attitude because you are going for the extra step.

“You don’t get the nuances of our language to understand what this is about. It is because you are not German / you are the native of a genderless language / you are a US defaultist who wants to impose his own view”

For one thing I hardly think English is a genderless language, and second has it crossed your mind someone can speak several languages fluently, some of which “gendered”.

I am not responsible for the lamentable state of internet discussions these days, but next time try to formulate and debunk the opponent idea before spewing several extra thought steps, bringing ad hominem and national origins into the mix, if you don’t want to be spoken to like that.

an error to call me nationalist. I am not

Great, Good for you

There you go

Since this vile comment goes against Lemmy etiquette I need not provide a response. But I will.

how other people call themselves

You must be another level of stupid to write this out. Perhaps you mean, I shouldn’t care what other “governments” or “majorities” want their citizens to call or not-call themselves. Only a nationalist would say such a thing, that your government has the right to self-define (or …impose?) how its people call themselves. This is some true Orban-level shit you managed to fit in your, well, fit.

And, yes, this is a politics issue I want to see in the same maps we monitor US gender politics with.

obviously not German

Very proudly not so. I cherish the fact that German nationalists tend to end up shot or hang, as one of the few things that provide meaning to my post-WWII life. The historical equivalent of a narcissist man-child demanding attention to himself, a real small-dick energy nation, that enthusiastically voted for a mustached idiot for the job. So, not German, and so happy about it.

obviously scared about inclusivity

The fact that you fail to understand this is a pro-inclusivity post means that you are so dump that you would have been euthanized in your own country, less than 100 years ago, unless you enrolled to a specific party of anti-intellectual idiots. Ah I forgot, you already are. Sound survival of the fittest strategy.

Now, let’s sit around waiting you to ridicule yourself with another one of these comments ROFL

That is great to hear