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Cake day: March 9th, 2024

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  • For me it’s the high-horse holier than thou attitude most of them seem to carry in online conversations. I know a fee vegans and they are mostly fine in person after the first few months of radicalization, but I imagine they just suppress it in person to maintain the acquaintanceship and then bitch in their vegan echo chambers about how “my co-worker who knows I’m vegan had the audacity to order a hamburger and eat it in front of me knowing I’m vegan, does he know he’s destroying the world with that Burger… AITA?”

    If you’re looking for scientific answers, good luck they, Inrhjnjbmost people stop worrying about micromanaging people after a few years of academia.


  • The upper crust and intelligence apparatus was incredibly uncomfortable with OWS for obvious reasons.

    Preface: short (2min) video of an Occupy meeting near the end https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W81A1kTXPa4

    Pre-occupy, gender identity and race-based issues were known but not talked about a great deal in the public sphere. They weren’t the core identity of a large number of people, and they were something that was ‘allowed’ to be discussed without blind following or rage.

    During occupy, OWS organizers started what they called an ‘egalitarian stance’, which was a way to reframe the available classes to fight against in class warfare, were those more privileged than you (race, gender, identity politics) instead of financial privilege. If you were a white male, whether disabled or had a speech impediment or whatever, you were more privileged than anyone and you lost your rung in the ladder, you were now the lowest class. White women were just above you. Minority groups (race and gender, poverty level not included) became the prevailing upper-class and had the most right to speak.

    OWS quickly lost momentum after a number of changes like this, and the conversation was no longer about class warfare, but about privilege, meaning only race and gender (initially). I believe there were leaked documents (unsure if verified) that the FBI was seeking, or had gained, access to OWS leadership positions. It seems obvious they would attempt it. This is something someone will have to confirm or correct me on, because a quick search isn’t pulling the documents and I need to run.

    Tangentially related, because who doesn’t love graphs and data: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/










  • Once this bill passes, there is absolutely nothing stopping the NSA from doing an IP lookup on this comment/my account, and putting me into a “potential domestic terrorist - watch closer” list. A list that will eventually be used later, for some reason or another, so let’s just hope we never get an authoritarian in the White House with stacked courts! That could never happen here, could it?

    P.S. If you live in the US, just part of your connection going to another country (be it a CDN or server hosted in Canada, or US server gets overwhelmed and switches to Canada) - full content logs for you.

    Cointelegraph is (was at least?) a reputable source for national security news. It’s mainly for OSINT and national security interested folks who know better than to do the majority of their research on a smartphone, so it may not be great on mobile, I don’t know.

    Snowden chose Russia because the other option was life as a political prisoner without a chance at a fair trial. Egotist, sure, but at least we know what we know now. Can you imagine how fucked we’d be if he never leaked them?

    And regardless of the source, (site or person quoted), what he’s saying is absolutely true. The NSA is about to be able to gather ALL mass communications and look at them whenever, without a warrant which was the only safeguard before.

    I’m legitimately about to throw my tech into a fucking dumpster and get a dumbphone and a smartphone with all hardware removed besides what’s required by Briar.

    Most will read this and think I’m being overly paranoid. When I talked about the FVEY (now 14EYES) surveillance dragnet before the Snowdon leaks, everyone thought the same.


    Since some people are having issues with the site, here it is from the ACLU:

    https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/congress-passing-bill-that-massively-expands-the-governments-power-to-spy-on-americans-without-a-warrant

    ACLU Statement on Congress Passing Bill that Massively Expands the Government’s Power to Spy on Americans Without a Warrant

    This bill would reauthorize Section 702 surveillance for two more years without any of the necessary reforms to protect Americans’ civil liberties

    WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives passed a bill today that will reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for two years, expand the federal government’s power to secretly spy on Americans without a warrant, and create a new form of “extreme vetting” of people traveling to the United States.

    When the government wants to obtain Americans’ private information, the Fourth Amendment requires it to go to court and obtain a warrant. The government has claimed that the purpose of Section 702 is to allow the government to warrantlessly surveil non-U.S. citizens abroad for foreign intelligence purposes, even as Americans’ communications are routinely swept up. In recent years, the law has morphed into a domestic surveillance tool, with FBI agents using Section 702 databases to conduct millions of invasive searches for Americans’ communications — including those of protestersracial justice activists, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, journalists, and even members of Congress — without a warrant.

    “Despite what some members would like the public to believe, Section 702 has been abused under presidents from both political parties and it has been used to unlawfully surveil the communications of Americans across the political spectrum,” said Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “By expanding the government’s surveillance powers without adding a warrant requirement that would protect Americans, the House has voted to allow the intelligence agencies to violate the civil rights and liberties of Americans for years to come. The Senate must add a warrant requirement and rein in this out-of-control government spying.”

    In the last year alone, the FBI conducted over 200,000 warrantless “backdoor” searches of Americans’ communications. The standard for conducting these backdoor searches is so low that, without any clear connection to national security or foreign intelligence, an FBI agent can type in an American’s name, email address, or phone number, and pull up whatever communications the FBI’s Section 702 surveillance has collected over the past five years.

    The House passed all the amendments to expand this invasive surveillance that were pushed by leaders of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), the committee closest to the intelligence agencies asking for this power. The bipartisan amendment that would have required the government to obtain a warrant before searching Section 702 data for Americans’ communications failed 212-212.


  • I see. Textual communication has a pesky habit of not conveying tone unless you intentionally craft it to. It bugs me that there are so many people who negatively judge someone for decades-old attitudes and worldviews, when positive change should be commended.

    Not you, since your comment was in jest, but I question the motives of those think that way unironically.



  • It’s not even a matter of gaining control of nodes, they can simply blackhole your access to good nodes so you end up with nodes controlled by them. Easy but loud, although it seems to be what’s going on in a number of cases, and not many people are talking about it. Tor used to alert you to this, but now it’s quietly tucked away into a log file. There are other vulnerabilities present in tor and the tor project devs don’t seem particularly interested in them, with the DoS attacks requiring the community itself to step in with hacky solutions. I’m of the mind (never would have found myself saying this) that the tor project at large is compromised.

    Monero is currently being hit by a (likely) black marble attack which is why it’s so slow. They’re basically flooding transactions (1/3 to 2/3 of all transactions able to be processed at any given time) so that the anonymity that makes monero work is severely degraded. Whether it breaks past transactions remains to be seen, but it absolutely weakens the anonymity of transactions done during (possibly shortly before and after) the attacks.





  • What I’m talking about wrt tor is traffic shaping or node DoS leading to a Sybil attack. When the (state)actor has the ability to drop all packets from you to NON attacker-controlled guard nodes, and then once you’re connected to a dirty guard, drop all connections to non-controlled relay and exit nodes, it’s done. There’s also an ongoing DoS attack that is able to make any guard/entry/relay/exit use 100% CPU making them unusable and it’s been going on for months now. You can see it on the tor forums (relay-operators) and someone posted about it in more detail on the monero subreddit the other day.


  • If everyone gets busted all at once (2022-2024 market takedowns is as close to that as it could come IMO) then everyone immediately stops using tor and starts using i2p or freenet or whatever system they may not have broken yet. That’s baaahd for business, said the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

    Although they did run a cp site for months before shutting it down, so they’re clearly not opposed to the long-game, especially if it involves national security (it does.)