See https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ with Tor set to the Safest setting. The user share for Tor might be very small. However, because all Tor users have the same configuration, it doesn’t matter whether a fingerprint differs from Chrome. Among the x% of Tor traffic, x% traffic shares the same fingerprint. Chrome might account for y% of the traffic where each user has a unique fingerprint. But as long as x is not negligible, the fact that you’re using Tor provides very few bits of information (as an example, about 8 bits of identifying information) compared to a unique fingerprint (which provides much more information). I agree that Tor is not without its flaws, but saying that Tor deanonymizes you because of its user share is wrong. Also, please note that the EFF link I shared may be biased in the data it collects.

The point of having nukes is to threaten destruction of an enemy even at the cost of one’s own destruction. Analysts understand that actually using nuclear weapons benefits no one. Nukes don’t benefit the party that launches nukes upon event X taking place, the party that causes event X, or most bystanders. Saying that any party responsible for event X will be nuked is intended to ensure that event X doesn’t occur. Threats are not reality: threatening retaliation is not the same as actually retaliating.

Some facts have been simplified in this reply. Reality is more complicated but these basic principles do seem to hold most of the time.

A Layer-3 (network-layer) blacklist risks cutting off innocent CGNAT and cloud users. What you’re proposing is similar to mechanisms that already exist (e.g., access control lists at the ISP level work by asking computer B which requests it wants to reject and rejecting those that originate from computer A). However, implementing any large-scale blocking effort beyond the endpoint (i.e. telling an unrelated computer C to blackhole all requests from computer A to computer B) would be too computationally expensive for a use case as wide and as precise as “every computer on the Internet”.

Also, in your post you mentioned, “A host would need to have a way to identify itself as authoritative, responsible for the IP address in question.” This already happens in the form of BGP though it doesn’t provide cryptographic proof of ownership unless additional mechanisms are in use (RPKI/ROA).

I also agree that there is something that superficially seems to be supernatural. However, I believe that the reason things appear to be supernatural is because all supernatural-looking events (i.e. all correct predictions about a room) are being presented as supernatural despite random guesses accounting for a lot of these. Whether or not these events are actually supernatural may be checked by the experiment I proposed in another reply. Please do tell me your thoughts on that experiment.

Claims of the supernatural are a subset of correct claims. We can’t comment on the supernatural aspect if all we know is that a claim is correct. This is affirming the consequent.

This can be verified by asking people who have had near-death experiences whether or not they experienced something correct in their near-death experiences. Obviously, such experiences are traumatic, and multiple studies show that people can hallucinate due to the release of various neurotransmitters associated with the same.

We want to calculate the probability that someone manifested as a ghost given that they had an interesting near-death experience. We assume that anyone having a true supernatural experience experiences visions that are absolutely true. For each person, there are two possibilities (we’ll calculate the probability of each later).

The first possibility is that a person, in fact, experienced hallucinations. The second possibility is that a person experienced a ghostly manifestation.

Now, we further give people an objective multiple-choice quiz about the positions of various objects in an environment. To generate this quiz, we ask each person to choose the environment they believe themselves to have manifested in. We verify that they have never been to this environment before and did not have any method of knowing about this environment (e.g., if a subject saw a person going into a room and later gave an exact description of the person in the given room, it will be disregarded). We only test people who believe that they experienced a supernatural event. All options are framed in an equivalent manner and are presented in a randomized order to remove cognitive biases and implement double-blind protocols. We further use questions with non-obvious answers such that they differ from previous implementations (e.g., a vision of a surgery table with an overhead light is obvious, and by itself, not indicative of supernatural phenomena).

If the subject hallucinated, we assume that they have a random chance of predicting the positions of various objects. We now repeat this quiz a large number of times in accordance with the law of large numbers. If, after many repetitions, we find a sufficient deviation from the expected result (e.g., if each question had one correct answer and three incorrect answers, with the observed rate of correct answers being 50% instead of 25%), then we would have evidence supporting the existence of ghosts.

If, however, the results show no sufficient deviation from the expected results, then we would find that the probability of a perceived encounter being supernatural is approximately zero.

In this way, we can use scientific methods to test claims of ghost-like phenomena.

NOTE: If we only focus on the 25% of the cases as mentioned in the above example, we find that we are not focusing on the remaining 75% of the cases. Presenting only 25% of the cases, without giving any thought to the remaining 75% of the cases is an incorrect method of analysis as explained above.

I assume good faith unless clear evidence indicates otherwise. I try to adopt a more general version of WP:AGF in life.

If you mean an anonymous account from an email service trusted by other online service providers, it’s not possible to get one for free. Even among paid email providers, very few accept anonymous payment methods such as cash or XMR.

Excess opioid use can cause dependence and increase tolerance to the painkilling effects faster than tolerance is built to the effects it has on respiration. As such, certain types of opioids are exceptionally dangerous when abused without mechanisms to deal with overdoses. Therefore, we say that abusing opioids is bad for health.

On the other hand, we can take the example of the early human who found joy in gathering food. Similar to the argument about “pathways being influenced”, we see that neural pathways are reinforced because of repeated concentration on the same goal. However, treating this as an addiction means that once this “addiction” is cured, humans will no longer want to get food. That means that humans will suffer adverse effects due to giving up the desire to gather food. Someone particularly ignorant could even extend this argument to call water and oxygen addictive.

Clearly, a line must be drawn to distinguish between things that are addictive and those that are not. You gave the example of reading and said that excessive concentration causes reading to behave in mechanisms similar to drugs and I totally agree with that statement. However, the fact remains that reading does not cause negative impacts on health despite repeated exposure to reading whereas the same is not true for drugs.

Since you asked for a narrower and non-speculative explanation of the fact that drugs do damage and books do not, let me ask a concrete question in reply. You stated that you have taken psychedelics in the past. Do you feel that if you had encountered a bad episode, you would have had the ability to leave the episode immediately? Would there have been a way to flush all psychedelics from your body? Clearly, with books, you can just stop reading the book, throw it in a paper shredder, or burn it to ash. Can you do the same with all drugs? Is reversibility really that easy for every single drug?

One could argue that binge reading is harmful and I totally agree. But the overall benefits of reading are sufficiently powerful as compared to the extremely low rate of addiction.

In fact, if looking at DSM-5 criteria, we can almost entirely ignore all points related to social impairment as reading is a major social obligation in a lot of places. Similarly, tolerance does not build up when reading. Another example of DSM-5 criteria we can ignore is the fact that physical and psychological problems do not occur. In fact, we can say that the only meaningful criteria are those related to withdrawal and those related to impaired control.

In books, the rate of impaired control is generally negligible as is the rate of withdrawal. Similar to how someone who drinks fifty litres of water a day is generally considered addicted to water, so is a person who reads instead of eating, taking care of personal hygiene, and sleeping. Yet the general rate of both water addiction and reading addiction is absurdly low when compared to the benefits.

Generally, books are considered non-addictive because they enhance one’s quality of life without causing negative health effects. It is a non-speculative fact that books have very little adverse effects. Requiring concentration alone is not sufficient to call something addictive. While it is true that anything done in excess is bad (e.g., getting too much oxygen or water), most people read in moderation. Something addictive needs to be damaging to the general quality of life. That is precisely why all pharmaceutical drugs given for medical purposes are given with one question in mind: will taking a given drug increase or decrease the quality of life in the short and long term.

NOTHING IN THIS REPLY CONSISTS OF MEDICAL ADVICE

I have not added inline citations as I do know which of these points are likely to be challenged. For further reading, please read about the DSM-5 criteria.

I agree Melania can be seen as a passive participant. I never objected to you being critical of her. Instead, my issue was with the reason you gave, which compares survivors of sexual abuse to an embodiment of evil. That comparison is deeply offensive to people who were abused. Calling my response “virtue signaling” misreads me: I genuinely found your message hurtful.

There were many people who experienced Trump, Epstein etc. “cumming in them” through no fault of their own. Please don’t compare survivors of sexual abuse to an entity that many associate with evil.

Assuming a mechanism exists that changes the universe from being singly connected to multiply connected (i.e., wormholes exist), it is possible to have wormholes permitting faster-than-light travel without time paradoxes, though some additional restrictions may apply.

We have already shown that wormholes connect across both space and time, so that a trip between star systems could take you hundreds of years into the future, and the return trip takes you hundreds of years back in time. And this is even before we throw in how time slips between planets when considering relativistic time dilation due to different speeds and gravitational potentials.

Fortunately, all the weirdness of different time rates and going backward and forward in time can be ignored by the average person. This is because you never need to go from one world to another, or back, across the vast gulfs of interstellar space. You just take the wormhole between them. All you ever need to worry about is the coordinate frame that goes across the wormhole. When considering this reference frame, you’re not hopping all over the place in time. If it takes ten minutes to cross the wormhole between the two planets, when you get to your destination world the clocks will read ten minutes later than they did when you left your departure world. By coordinating their time-keeping across the wormhole network, all of the worlds of the network can agree on a common time to coordinate their activities. This is all travelers ever need to worry about, and they can then ignore all the relativistic weirdness. Your network engineers will still need to keep track of relative time drift and how close a given configuration is getting to a time loop. But unless your protagonist is a network engineer, they can just ignore all that stuff. And, as an author, so can you! Assume your engineers are competent, you have good regulatory bodies and standards institutions, and don’t worry about any of this “time travel” that doesn’t actually let you cause paradoxes.

source: Galactic Library

Yes, it is visible when a new trusted device is added. The QR code you scan to link a device contains a one-time public key for that device (ECC is used partly to fit the public key more easily into a QR code). Signal on the phone then sends a lot of information, including the identity keys, to the new device. The new device uses these identity keys to communicate. Note that the transfer of identity keys is fully encrypted, with encryption and decryption taking place on the clients. This can, of course, be bypassed if someone you’re talking to has their security key compromised, but the same risk exists if the recipient takes a screenshot or photographs their device’s screen.

Edit: The security key refers to the one-time key pair generated to initiate the transfer of identity keys and chat history. It can be compromised if someone accidentally scans a QR code and transfers their identity keys to an untrusted device.

I assumed that not only the entire app but also the entire client device had been audited. This was a client-side attack, not Meta momentarily adding itself to the trusted-device list. I’m confident it was a client-side attack because it would be impossible to hide even a momentary change in keys from the client without modifying the client app to conceal such a change.

Even in an “insecure” app without air-gapped systems or manual encryption, creating a backdoor to access plaintext messages is still very difficult if the app is well audited, open source, and encrypts messages with the recipient’s public key or a symmetric key before sending ciphertext to a third-party server.

If you trust the client-side implementation and the mathematics behind the symmetric and asymmetric algorithms, messages remains secure even if the centralized server is compromised. The client-side implementation can be verified by inspecting the source code if the app is open source and the device is trusted (for example, there is no ring-zero vulnerability).

The key exchange itself remains somewhat vulnerable if there is no other secure channel to verify that the correct public keys were exchanged. However, once the public keys have been correctly exchanged, the communication is secure.

There is no central location to donate to open source software in general. Most open source projects include donation details on their website or in their code repositories.

Could the app be using cell tower data to bypass mock location settings? The Github repository says it identifies a user’s location using cell tower data.

99% isopropyl alcohol is ideal as a solvent or cleaning agent for industries that produce water sensitive items, therefore rapid evaporation and low water content is favorable. 99% USP IPA provides the lowest presence of water and in some forms is free from denaturants. Computer technicians, medical device manufacturers, printed circuit board manufacturers, and soldering and rework technicians prefer immediate evaporation for work with sensitive devices such as integrated circuit adapters, computer chips, and circuit boards. 99% IPA evaporates cleanly and minimizes residual substances. Rapid evaporation reduces shelf life but is more effective against sticky residues, grease, and grime than 70% concentrations. Because isopropanol is hygroscopic, acetone may yield better grime fighting results for inks or oils.

The URL you shared recommends using 99% IPA for electronics.

The individual who readily labels others pedophiles merely for wanting to rescue kids (see Unsworth) yet creates tools lacking any reasonable safeguards against child abuse material (measures that should have been relatively simple to implement) does not meet my definition of success. Likewise, a person who fails to meet his own deadlines is not successful even from some capitalistic perspectives. Someone who constantly seeks validation is not considered successful by most standards. All in all, Musk is an unsuccessful pedo guy.

Planners do a lot of preparatory work before laying cables, but based on the few articles and studies I could find online, it appears they rarely share their findings with the public.