The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
The refusal of advisors to adapt advice about the 60/40 portfolio feels more and more like a social injustice.
I'm not trying to make you guys wrap yourself in tinfoil— almost nobody needs to be as paranoid as I am, and even I am tremendously lazy about opsec these days. The key is *awareness*: to simply be cognizant of what kind of records you're generating as you go about your life, so you can make informed, reasoned judgments about how much of it you can leave hanging out, and what parts of it you'd rather pay an effort-tax to shield from appearing in somebody's (or everybody's) database.
If you take your phone between even just your home and work —doxxed locations— it is trivial to associate it with your true-name identity even if all of the hardware and services are perfectly anonymous. Even journalists have managed these kind of investigations. "Anonymized" location data is unfortunely not anonymous — it *can never* be anonymous. And yet it is sold like any other product.
Your phone's movements through physical space are unique. Even if you live in a building of 400 people, the movements of 399 of them are not going to match the tower records of your phone's movements. Even if you work in the same office. People's geographic movements are unique—and identifying.
GrapheneOS is good if you've got to carry one. The point is never to forget that if you're carrying a phone, you're still being tracked, even if you're limiting the damage from app-based threats. It is baked into the design oftheinfrastructure: if you can see the network, the network can see you. And it takes notes.
Your phone could be made of magic, but it's still gonna leave a record of your movements with the cellular towers.
People really don't realize how utterly dependent modern surveillance is on the idea that everybody is carrying a phone — which is always tracked. Their car has a cellular modem in it — which is always tracked. 99% of investigation is one guy and a search box. If you're not low-hanging fruit, you aren't gonna merit the Eye of Sauron of manual, well-resourced, focused team attention—and if you did, you probably planned ahead for it, right? Because it's not a mystery what would get you on Santa's Naughty List.
Anyway, the point is that even in a big city, the phoneless guy in a "covid" mask is going to be invisible to anything less than that exhaustive manual investigation — at least for a few more years. That may go away once they start networking all the cameras and having AI start trying to match up clothing sets moving from camera to camera, butthat capability is hard to hide, so it'll be in the news. And it won't work that well in places with less camera density and, perhaps, for people who wear the most-common outfits (the visual equivalent of a "shared fingerprint").
Remember: Phones are useful, but dangerous. And the people who will still wear covid masks to the beach are helping to normalize facial obscurity—regardless of their intention. Don't be mean to them. Encourage them to wear them everywhere. For passport photos. In police booking photos. At the customs desk. Family portraits! The sky is the limit—let them push the boundaries so that you don't have to.
nostr:note1dufu3sutqcu4er2pj9k7zmxdf7k23qxn3eskwdr8tp3ffvg7g9qqsv4lrc
Happy Halvening to those who celebrate.
Read just the first chapter of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (free via Project Gutenberg etc) and tell me that he didn't have his finger precisely on the pulse — in the 1850s — of the root cause of the authoritarian war for majoritarian supremacy that we're witnessing today. Censorship, the compelled worship of an ever-shifting orthodoxy, the construction and desecration of idols before the temple of consensus— it's all the same thing, arising from the same source, and awaiting a similar solution. In times of trouble, we should look more to our history.
Read your Mill, brothers.
🫂
Thirty-pound brain on you, king. Thanks for helping us all!
I'm suddenly getting traffic from damus now. Thank you both! Other relay operators should take a look at this:
Damus blocks tor connection.
Theres a few relays with .onion in this GitHub repo
https://github.com/0xtrr/onion-service-nostr-relays
https://relayable.org/ also has a .onion
Thank you.
Thank you. Fwiw I hate cloudflare too. But I get it.
Looks like I was able to get this working again, sort of. It says I'm connected to 9-11 relays, but only shows that I have 100 followers (and even Jack only about 40, so it has to be a data gap), and very few notes on timelines (with obvious gaps even for hugely active accounts). Relay.damus.io never seems to pass me any data (0kb both up and down) to me, which j assume is due to my connection coming via Tor, but honestly I don't know. I'm connecting using Amethyst, if anybody sees this and has any ideas—what's the best, biggest relay for Tor users right now?
Secondly, and most importantly for anyone who sees this note, please make some noise to try and stop the passage of RISAA (the FISA 702 reauthorization) that's about to hit law as soon as this Friday. Please read about it and push it out on all of your socials, if you agree it's a problem. It's going to be hard to stop this thing, even with all hands.
Whoever sees this, thank you for hearing me. 
It was a long time ago, but when I lived in JP, the McD's were always top shelf compared to the standard suburban ones back home. And they had a local specialty — Shaka Shaka Chicken — that was great
I know everybody is dunking on the random governor who decided that she could just wave her hand and unilaterally suspend any right she dislikes simply by hissing the word "emergency," but the problem is that she's only wrong if another political force — the courts, politics, disobedience, or Locke's old Appeal to Heaven — proves her wrong. Enforcing the limits of official power isn't some American $currentYear problem, it's a recurring issue throughout history.
The question is why we're suddenly seeing the authoritarian instinct activating so much more openly — and frequently. In prior decades, they had to be cute in how they went about it, often requiring laws and lies. Now they're remarkably comfortable simply stating "because of the 'emergency,' you can no longer {travel | donate | engage in commerce | read | communicate | carry}," and that's the whole of it.
The next question is what you're going to do about it.
This really is the worst. Instagram started the trend with their hideous "log in or else" flow. Then Twitter and reddit went to insanely privacy-hostile API changes instead of simply requiring a proof of work or anon payment. Even some major nostr relays seem to be doing Tor blocking now (damus? Not sure, but I get a ton of errors connecting to certain relays via Tor.)
Platforms have become so fearful of bots/spam/scraping (or rather pretend to be fearful, so as to justify blatantly commercial and anti-social decision-making) that they've totally destroyed the open access model that a functioning freenet depends on.
This is the main reason I want to see "unowned" protocols succeed. Jack has it right: we're at a turning point.
Still need a way to break the "Tyranny of the App Store" though.
Good day to check out nostr again. The primary reason I'm not here more often is I connect through a very jank VM. Elon is working hard to incentivize me to fix it.
Yeah, I got this too with the dfault relays. And media posts are slow to load (but that's 99% Tor's fault). As the network matures and relays start mirroring each other more (so you don't lose content when one goes down), I think the user experience will greatly improve.
Working beautifully for me, but I had to swap out a bunch of the default relays that seem 💀
I can see! I can see! It's beautiful, I can see again!
Yeah very weird that there's no option in settings, or just on the sidebar. You know anything about this, #[4]? 🙏