PassingThrough

Note what they continued to allow. They could still text and call, they did not completely isolate. They just shrunk their bubble.

Instead of being bombarded by global stressors, international conflicts, and the need to participate on a massive stage, they were limited to those friends and family they would give a direct line of contact to.

An echo chamber, if you want to think negatively about it. A village, for a positive label.

The internet is an ongoing experiment, what happens when you take a being who for thousands of generations commonly only directly interacted with his village and neighboring villages, for whom “The World” and all its glories and shames, was just an abstract concept brought home by stories from wanderers…what happens to that species when you put the whole world, up to the minute, within reach at every moment?

What happens when you can subscribe to every conflict and decision made way above your pay grade, and worry how it might hurt you? What happens when you don’t even have to choose to subscribe, it’s injected into your data stream because your anxiety and need to know bring revenue? What happens when you don’t even seek it, but it is delivered right to you?

From the looks of it, the variety of ways you can purposefully or accidentally destroy your local database, and the strict limits on accessing your profile, really gives me the feeling SimpleX is intended to be extremely disposable and deniable.

After playing with it I just don’t see it being used for anything expected to be convenient or ongoing. Regarding the one device per account thing, I think the whole point is you just protect your one app, nobody is sneaking in your laptop or tablet, no remote leaks possible from a sync engine. On iOS you can link to a desktop app, but your phone must remain not just on, but in the app and on the pair screen. One twitch out, PC disconnects.

Feels like something for journalists, whistleblowers, protesters, and all the bad ones. It’s a burner app for your burner phone.

So what’s the opinion here between Signal and SimpleX?

Signal gets all the attention, and seems more approachable but ties to a phone number which can be a big deal.

SimpleX ties to nothing but I could absolutely see people I know fucking it up and wondering where their “account” went.

So, Signal as an common man’s adoptable compromise and SimpleX to nerd out with full “opsec” and disposability? That about right?

Use plz and add a Makefile? :)

plz make sandwich

Might I suggest a hybrid approach? Pull from a DDL, verify quality, fix metadata, and then put your whole library up on a searchable DC like Soulseek or a DC++ group(are those even still around anymore?) Torrents if you want to make the effort of compiling the torrents.

I looked at Soulseek and it appeared like a mess of disorganized libraries, random compilations, and I couldn’t even find some major bands or albums on it. But I suppose that’s to be expected.

I mean Felon is pretty up there, he’s President! Note you have to think about which I may be referring to.

How they got it doesn’t much change that they do got it. And they want more, and they want anything slowing them from more or threatening to take any of it, to go away.

Is it? The bottom of the totem pole might believe that and feel empowered by it, but I think the top is only concerned about themselves. I just don’t see them wasting the McCalories sparking a real thought about anything but their own gains. Sure, they don’t like us poors, but really they don’t like being told they have to treat us fairly. Or that there’s anyone above them that can say that.

As in, they don’t exactly want to gut the government purely out of desire to throw us into suffering, the suffering is just a bonus to the original goal of never ending wealth, and never being told what they can’t do.

Cut the spending, cut their taxes. Cut the public agencies, open up private revenue streams. Big G wants to say you can’t destroy your competition and become the only company people can send money to? Says you can’t bulldoze that forest? Can’t dump your waste in the river for free? Can’t have your workers working for next to nothing? Cut the agency. Cut the program. Become Gods.

I try to wonder, what’s the 4D chess here?

R’s always want to dissolve these agencies, claim they overreach and abuse, and suppress their poor, unfortunate monopolies. But the mass opinion so far is hell no, we don’t want the unregulated hellscape that follows, we don’t want unchecked corpus.

So now that they can, do they order said agencies to actually overreach and abuse, so when it is offered to end it later it gets celebrated and accomplished?

Or should I give up because it’s not actually supposed to make any sense or semblance of a plan? Or is it all just a mess of distraction and unrest?

This is the future they want.

Why get warnings for “free”(tax funded) through a costly government service when you can get warnings for $19.99 per month, with annual price hikes for “inflation”. EULA declares warnings are not guaranteed, and subscription is non-refundable.

Won’t someone think of the C-Suite and defund NOAA and NWS already?!? /s

This is why I can’t/don’t have a lot of the “best practices” in my family archive. I’m not encrypting local drives, I’m not using BTRFS, or a ZFS pool. If I did I’d have to ensure my Will provided for the lawyer to hire a tech shop to help recover them. No, exFAT and NTFS, in the clear so those left behind can just plug them in and get to making their own copies. Otherwise the archive would die with me.

Does that mean someone could steal my drives and go through my family photos? Sure. I hope it brings them much guilt, something a garbled encrypted drive could never do.

exFAT is a newer and viable alternative to FAT32, with better size limits and some pretty good cross-platform capabilities. That said, if your primary access is through Windows, NTFS may have some better features and is at least read-only on other platforms.

As I understand it, their data does in fact enter into the Wayback Machine. They are just also available in the direct WARC archive files(which IMO sounds beneficial to the idea of exporting in bulk to another backup host). At least that’s how their FAQ reads.

And given that they focus on web crawling, and not other arbitrary data formats that IA accepts, 2.8% of over 100 petabytes is still a respectable amount of data.

That said, help is help. If another archival project team wants me to run a worker node so they can distribute load and dodge crawler blocks, let me know, I’ve got space.