• 0 Posts
  • 54 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: September 15th, 2022

help-circle








  • Though he was named directly and is still just an economist.

    Well he’s a famous guy and knows a lot of important people, directly worked with the CIA and USA government before. And Davel wasn’t saying “The Lancet published this conspiracy” but that the guy that the Lancet - who is very trustworthy - trusts and says is qualified to weigh in, is independently pushing it. So Jeremy was borrowing his authority from having been associated with The Lancet, and he has some authority already from his celebrity-status and previous work, not necessarily from his hard skills (economics).

    That’s a far cry from “CIA bioweapon” like the OOP believes.

    Okay. I believe that. I haven’t read the article and don’t want to weigh in. I haven’t investigated the claim, anything I add can only be nonsense. I wasn’t pushing a Fort Detrick bioweapon conspiracy, I just wanted to clarify Davel’s comment because I didn’t feel your objection to it was fair, or if it was just a question with no position then I answered the question. Feel free to discuss the article with Davel since you have both read the article.



  • I’d think there’d be at least as much pro-China content on a Chinese platform.

    There is a lot of Chinese state-sponsored propaganda on TikTok, as well as pro-China speech by unaffiliated users. This is true of TikTok and of YouTube and Twitter. (The state-sponsored propaganda I’m highlighting isn’t particularly insidious, it’s things like student exchange or paid travel bloggers, Chinese news spending budget to create English language content). But you aren’t more likely to come across it on TikTok than western platforms, because China doesn’t control the algorithm. TikTok was forked off a Chinese product, but it’s controlled by Oracle and the USA in terms of tuning and moderation. The Chinese just collect rent.

    Now if your angle isn’t that TikTok pushes those things, but just that kids use it and kids are impressionable, then I don’t have any objections with what you’re saying. I haven’t seen any Chinese state-sponsored content that plays well with kids, but I wouldn’t expect to either since my recommendation feed looks different (and I don’t use TikTok).


  • Would it really be a shock to anyone if a global superpower spread propaganda to be viewed more positively by people around the world? Russia and the USA do it all the time. Why wouldn’t China?

    Completely reasonable.

    I’d say it’s quite likely.

    But this isn’t reasonable at all, and it’s what you’re trying to defend.

    Lemmy has no value. It’s a waste of resources. Your assertion wasn’t that China is has propaganda. I know they do, there are hundreds of officially disclosed initiatives. Your assertion is that Lemmy users aren’t genuine.

    You also implied that TikTok - A platform globally moderated by the the USA - is a hotbed for PR Chinese propaganda, which isn’t reasonable either.






  • The first sentence was a response to you asserting voting is essential to democracy, which is false. The rest of the comment was a response to you not accepting Nemo@slrpnk.net’s argument.

    If you can’t find an instance you agree with, and you have a mass of people who agree with you but are collectively too lazy to create a new instance, you would communicate your stance with words. Lemmy has a system for leaving text statements. You seem to be familiar. But there’s no mechanism to force the instance operator to obey you.




  • If I share an IP with 100 million other Signal users

    That’s already not very likely, but ignoring IP, you’re the only one with your SSL keys. As part of authentication, you are identified. All the information about your device is transmitted. Then you stop identifying yourself in future messages, but your SSL keys tie your messages together. They are discarded once the message is decrypted by the server, so your messages should in theory be anonymised in the case of a leak to a third party. That seems to be what sealed sender is designed for, but it isn’t what I’m concerned about.

    daniel sent a user an image…

    Right, but it’s not other users I’m scared of. Signal also has my exit node.

    What you’re describing is (not) alarming (…) Signal’s security team wrote.

    I mean if strangers can find my city on the secret chat app I find that quite alarming. The example isn’t that coarse, and Signal, being a centralised platform with 100% locked down strict access, they well could defend users against this.

    What do you mean when you say “conversation” here?

    When their keys are refreshed. I don’t know how often. I meant a conversation as people understand it, not first time contact. My quick internet search says that the maximum age for profile keys is 30 days, but I would imagine in practice it’s more often.

    Even if we trust Signal, with Sealed Sender, without any sort of random delay in message delivery, a nation-state level adversary could observe inbound and outbound network activity and derive high confidence information about who’s contacting whom.

    That is true, but no reason to cut Signal slack. If either party is in another country or on a VPN, then that’s a mitigating factor against monitoring the whole network. But then if Signal is sharing their data with that adversary, then the VPN or being in a different country factors has been defeated.

    Here’s the blog post from 2017

    I appreciate the blog post and information. I don’t trust them to only run the published server code. It’s too juicy of an honeypot.

    I don’t have any comment on SGX here. It’s one of those things where there’s so many moving parts and so much secret information, and so much you have to understand and trust that it basically becomes impossible to verify or even put trust in someone who claims to have verified it. Sometimes it’s an inappropriate position, but I think it’s fine here: Signal doesn’t offer me anything, I have no reason to put so much effort into understanding what can be verified with SGX.

    And thanks for the audits archive.