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.

Are you my …therapist?

(Read this as in the butterfly meme LOL)

At the same time they are OK with Hooters.

(Let alone they root for child labor, child marriage, domestic violence, corporal punishment, sexual harassment and rape of women by prominent figures, and covering up for tens of dozens of republican sex offenders against minors and women. But this is where they draw the line: “sex ed is PorNoGraPhy librarians should be LoCKkKeD uPp”.)

Redefine it and then …criminalize it, right? Otherwise how is a librarian a “sex offender”?

A librarian of all people!

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.

organised system of reproduction

Yes, that would be great. People put so much stock in peer review because there is the myth that every statement undergoes under a rigorous process of verification in multiple laboratories. The reality is, as you said, there is a culture of active discouragement of reproduction and the pushing of novel results.

Not to mention that to foster reproductions, researchers should be trained into a culture of replication and collective metanalyses. As it is now, reproductions are less than an afterthought for the vast majority of researchers, and virtually none knows how to handle multiple replicatory studies instead of p-hacking.

As an innocuous example of sharing data with pure bash and Arise, these people here have preserved the Trigedasleng dictionary, the fictional language from the science-fiction/young adult show The 100, after another fan site was taken down. They use a github repo as data backend, and Arise as a static-site generator for github pages. All their data are stored in lots of version controlled JSON files instead of a database. According to the authors, this democratizes the process of forking and adding data to the repository.

I think Arise is sth I had seen and at the time motivated these thoughts. It is a bash based static site generator, that, according to its docs, it is build with the philosophy of minimal language requirements as well as other dependencies.

I would argue that a solution like this is better than heavily nested JSON files, or a cascade of Ordered Dicts in Python, or even a db.sqlite that would require the user parse or query the data somehow. In fact, a user could retrieve the static site from their own distro package manager and run it in bash with minimal dependencies.

I haven’t tested this solution yet, but it looks very promising as to what I originally had in mind.

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.

In AI-generated sound you can see it in the waveform, it has less random noise altogether and it seems like a huge, well, wave. I wonder if sth similar is true for images.

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?

Perhaps we could benefit from sth like MetaCritic for science.

As far as I know the peer reviewers are in most cases now selected by the editor, they self-select to respond, are not paid for their work, and the process for alarmingly many journals is not even blind. I always thought that this makes the process vulnerable to network effects in the field, since people are obliged to a certain etiquette when commenting on established figures in their own field. So yes, I get where you are coming from, but similar to the scientific method, peer review is also great to describe in theory, in practice it would require much more precise protocols, like Web protocols I might say. I really don’t want to be a pessimist about science in the current political climate, but if we want these great ideals (Scientific method, Peer Reviewed evidence) we will have to abandon the existing situation as soon as possible.

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.