sr2

It won't stop the army of fact-checkers debunking articles for having no reliable sources, and denouncing them on social media. Social being both the main distribution for fake news, and also the platform where articles are routinely ridiculed and mocked. Something like Wales' WikiTribune[1] are a response to fake news and propagandists, and are a welcome step to try and address the issue. Facebook are also up in arms about this and are trying to spot fake news either algorithmically or using a paid taskforce of highly trained fact checkers (the mechanical turk approach). Reddit also warns users of posts which are regarded as fake news and warns users to take them with a pinch of salt.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitribune

There are people that customize Firefox with plugins to make it look like TorBundle. All you need is FoxyProxy[0] hooked up to tor and a useragent spoofer which mimics common TorBundle useragent strings and you're set. This is very dangerous though as FoxyProxy could potentially leak your IP, aswell as a slew of other things that could go wrong.

TorBundle devs have stripped out a tonne of things which increase attack surfaces and the fingerprintability of mainline Firefox. Best just blending in and looking like everyone else and use TorBundle.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxyproxy-sta...

Seems pretty silly putting any form of security apparatus into a technology which could possibly have been engineered from the ground up to be SIGINT-enabled. It's as if GSM was deliberately designed by the intelligence community to be available for eavesdropping. They build the protocol with just enough good security that Johhny can't intercept his wife's calls to check for cheating, but with enough bad security that intelligence services (and sophisticated criminals) can play Mallory[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob#Cast_of_characte...

Oh okay thanks for clarifying.

Surge is not notable enough to be on that list. I think it only applies to institutions, museums, and things like that. Judging from this anyways: https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat

Fair point. I get funny looks when I say something like this though: "I was living in Alaska in the holocene era". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

Yeah it does, but it's a corruption of the previous attempts at labeling decades and doesn't really solve the problem of labeling decades. A decade is actually meaningless in terms of what it represents culturally, and since the explosion of The Internet, culture is now smeared and has no basis in a decade anymore. We've reached a post-post-post-post modern era. Rushkoff goes into this more in his 'present shock' theory https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4131130/obsessed-with-now...

I still see the term 'millennial fashion' and 'the noughties' been thrown around, but these are meaningless terms. Here's an interesting talk by Adam Conover debunking the term millennial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ

"Your emails may not be as private as you think". When has email ever been private? Even if you're using PGP there is still the issue of metadata leaks and people who don't understand PGP and reply with the unencrypted text in the reply (botching your attempts at secure comms). Not to mention people storing their whole life in a single email account and making it easier to build up a dossier of the person over time.

https://satelliteobservation.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/ech...

It's a fascinating subject. Worth reading this entry for more details:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku_solving_algorithms

And apparently quantum computers can solve them using sheer brute force alone, but these articles don't go into enough detail (i.e: can they solve the 'evil' puzzles?)

https://www.engadget.com/2007/02/14/worlds-first-commercial-...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-commercial-...

This could be useful whilst waiting for a train, or waiting for a friend in a crowded public space. There's nothing more excruciating than having to wait in a public space. I always feel really awkward and end up phubbing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phubbing

> Imagine the day when worthwhile content with journalistic, artistic, or intellectual value is posted by machines

One way to cheat at this is to use existing intellectual discourse as a template, and simply swap out nouns/verbs with other ones, and change the structure slightly perhaps using Markov chains.

Another way to appear more credible is to generate sources to backup your statements. Wikipedia is full of links and footnotes which prop up their entries. All that's needed is to scrape these and use them for your natural language generator.

Things like Mastodon[0] and IPFS[1] are always worth checking out, if you want to get a sense of control over your data. With regards to the argument that these companies are so entrenched in our society that they are very difficult to remove, almost like barnacles, then I agree that something has to be done. The real problem exists when there is no other choice for people. For example, the default search engine on Android phones is most certainly Google and not DuckDuckGo. Another example of terrible monopolistic practice is that Android phones are so fragmented. It seems kind of odd that in order to have the most secure Android installation, that I also have to have the latest hardware. I find it very unfair that legacy devices are locked to a single Android install and can't upgrade properly. These things should be future proof and be able to respond to threat landscapes. I feel very uneasy communicating on legacy devices because there is the uneasy feeling that the device has been infected by either low-level attackers, or nation states.

[0] https://mastodon.social/about

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

And its opposite:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandiose_delusions

I keep seeing Seychelles[0] popping up everytime I research offshore hosting providers. I don't know why this is. I think it's one of those rare countries where you can't simply subpoena a hosting provider and ask for specific data / business records. I'm not sure if this helps with doing illegal crypto programming[1], but I do know in the early crypto wars people had to travel far and wide to weird countries to do their programming.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seychelles

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_the_import_of_...

Yes but you have to keep the phone registered on the network by topping up every 3 months and 'nursing' your burner phone. At least where I live this is the case. Apparently this is the case to stop terrorists holding onto sims for long periods of time and then using them in IEDs, or using them to start plotting at a later date.

Also, Google will periodically check to see if you still operate that number and will perform spot checks on the number, asking you to verify the phone again.

> FB seems more appropriate for teenagers or young adults.

They're all on Snapchat now, and the teens who joined FB early have since locked down their FB accounts to super-private and use it to talk to their parents, because their parents shy away from Snapchat.

Generally I tend to avoid doing things that would keep me up at night. I used to be fascinated by the dark web / dark net, but some of the stuff on there is enough to give you post traumatic stress disorder, and I still have to be careful surfing the dark net. I usually stick to political blogs where people would be very soon silenced if they tried voicing those opinions on the clearnet. Marginalized communities, whistleblowing blogs, tutorials on how to 'exit the matrix' and become independent from Big Brother, etc

Sounds like a Sybil attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

But even if they had dino DNA, would they be able to reconstruct a dino from it, like they're trying to do with mammoths?

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/16/woolly-mammo...

> As in trying to get the FBI knocking on you door?

Yes, to put it bluntly. Then you can blow the whistle on them because there's no way in hell they could have known were it not for them intercepting the plot. Maybe it won't hold up in court, but it's an interesting idea.

Well one way to test for backdoors is to do fake plotting and watch for a response

Monero and zCash are better alternatives. True crypto-anarchy can happen there. Crypto-chaos is a bit different, and we typically don't want that. But a bit of chaos amongst order is sometimes healthy

We have to terraform Earth first incase of climate chaos surely?

Interesting reading the conservative party one, regarding their plans for digital:

    Success and Security in a Digital Age
    Theresa May’s Conservatives will deliver


    - The world’s most dynamic digital economy
    Help digital businesses get the money,
    skills and people they need to succeed.


    - Safety for people’s data online
    There will be a new data protection law.


    - Safety for children online
    New rights to make social media
    companies delete information about
    young people as they turn 18.
    20


    - Digital government and public services
    To use data and digital technology to
    change school choices, local services
    and issues like planning and social
    care.


    - New rules for the digital economy
    This will be supported by a national
    ruling and an international partnership.


    - Security online
    There will be a lot of money spent on
    cyber security and stronger cyber
    standards for government and public
    services.

> It looks too much like welfare

It's unconditional income though, in the sense that you are entitled to it regardless of your circumstances. To put it in the same class as welfare is naive, I think. It's not 'something for nothing' in the sense of a free handout. It's infact more than that. Think of it as a safety valve in the face of western hyper-capitalism gone awry.

And the sticker shock with the pricing https://www.peer5.com/pricing

As a single hop proxy, VPNs are pretty limited in terms of the OPSEC they provide. Personally I only ever use them to route traffic over hostile networks, and spoof my geolocation to access geo-blocked content. That's all they should be used for[1]

They for obvious reasons should not be used for anonymity[2] although for some this is the sole reason they use a VPN. I think, since they are a single hop proxy, that chaining VPNs together and buying subscriptions anonymously with tumbled Bitcoins/Monero is the only way you might get anonymity, but the overhead and potential for things to go wrong is massive. Things like Tor already solves many of these obstacles and provides reasonable OPSEC, providing you use it correctly.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

[2]: http://blog.hidemyass.com/2011/09/23/lulzsec-fiasco/

Twitter should be a public utility like water. It shouldn't rely on surveillance capitalism to make money. There's another social network called Ello and it's essentially a registered charity. Twitter should be like that.

But who cares? Most of these hacks consist of an email database that is used to then spam or phish, and a few weak MD5 non plaintext passwords, which can be useful, but not entirely useful. If you're lucky you might get a few real (legal) names which can be paired with the email (for doxing). These actions are egregious at best and not constructive in any way.