Now this was a rollercoaster to read. I'd be curious to hear how you think KDE, Linux and BSD are all tapped, cause it's all open. You don't have to use proprietary blobs.
If you desire to stay in the behind times, sure. And I myself would but my daily workstation uses an 5600XT AMD card and AMDGPU is based on the DRM of the Linux AMD driver so this too raises suspicion. And that's if I was to gripe that's the back door is held as the same with nvidia.
I keep all my networking to self-hosted. I own colocated servers in two different DC's. I switch regually routing for my apartments ISP traffic, I don't use ISP routers. Everything is ad-hoc and I get it. As a rookie network engineer due I do understand that due to the nature of the internet connectivity they don't always follow the same network hops. But the paths I've seen the data flow through have been strange, it's been spooky.
An example is Overwatch the game I loved, and where I have been ahead of the game and then suddenly I get disconnected. My server route path out of no loses network path or where on many occasions will take a random laggy network path and switch back when I disconnect from the game. People do get DDoS in game so this isn't uncommon but it's weirder than that. I trust my DC, and I pay for premium. Their own reports show nothing on their end, so this has to happen at the TCP stack or within netcode. Blizzard isn't exactly saints. Anti-cheat engines are untasteful
Discord was my main communication play-forum until I fell out with some users and deleted my account finally. Again traces where my network has suddenly been siphoned. Users have been hearing me in crystal quality and then suddenly drop to echo where my monitoring shows difference in bandwidth exhaustion especially when I bring up controversial topics including my CPU/GPU spike. This is on a USA server.
My recent "paranoid freak" is that don't use LSP Servers.
For my coding I did use Kate. With LSP Servers turned off, I have had console messages trigger within Kate terminal console of it trying to connect to Javascript, JSON, HTML and a ClangD servers. I have started dabbling in C like I always have wanted too and after which it's as if I am triggering a code pattern.
This started occurring when I discovered how to display a grid on screen in Tk and TCL. Why now, I don't know. Never had this issue before without any of my other projects.
Including Git trying to commit to a sub module, where I don't even use git, I use fossil. Maybe a setting, bug or something else but I can't locate it. I compile the kernel from source and applications from ports.
It's these odd oddities that are near unexplainable without another user with knowledge present. Why wouldn't technology be tapped? Linus sold himself out with WSL and such are such controversial subjects. I believe Linux is unsafe but this post isn't to debate that, each to their own.
The big one that speaks loud to me, I used to play an old FPS game called Dirty Bomb.
Apart from a few friends outside of the IT field it's safe to say I have zero contacts on steam, I don't own facebook, discord et cetera but joining upon a near empty server and coincidentally there were four users.
One as my real life name, fine. Google me and you'll find my home address as that's my registered business.
There was a player with my younger brothers name, who isn't exactly some famous online person, keeps to himself and a few more oddities based on past history. As if they were trying to fear me by doxing myself apart from my business and company registered in my deedpoll'd name you won't find any references to my real name. The other user was trying to throw psychological trauma back in to my life.
Tech gremlins or backdoors exist and they exist within Linux and FreeBSD. China has known to back door chips Supermicro, Cisco can tell you the story of that. And this has all started since I started to rebel against the main stream crowd about years ago.
I don't use frameworks and in a way a digital anarchist. I have used TOR so if I was on some LEO list, I do believe am for the aske I am unorthodox. 37, plus my older history, it's just more sheer coincidentally than "David, you're being paranoid again".
So in the long run I just accept the sabotage and keep quiet about it and work on effing them legally until I do or they do me in.
If you know me you'll know I hate this world. How it's rejected me and how history is constantly repeating it self foolishly. I'm not scared anymore, I hate being at a computer so you'll normally find me outside of my apartment. Coming home from work makes me psychologically vomit looking at other computer screens. I'm past burnt out, but yet I have no other income, nor grades because of "hacking" to actually do another subject.
I don't but have on occasional occasions smoked cannabis but not while coding. I have struggled through life with bullying but since fighting back I have encountered many strange encounters, real life and online. I don't have paranoia voices, nor do I believe in relgion of god, heaven or hell. But am agnostic if I was to pick.
I did use to mess around as script kiddie when I was 13 with botnets. RxBot, PhatBot to name a few but I keep clean now because my moral compass says so maybe this is catching up with me but as everyone knows IT is boring af to anyone outside of the field.
It's the most boring field alive and I hate it. Sadly I have no other knack and I've tried many. If I could break free from this suffocating field I would but adult responsibilities.. all I wanted to be was a vet at 16, not some system architect at 37.
Maybe it is, maybe it's not. Who knows, it's hard to prove paranoia.
>to allow the British secret service to eavesdrop more easily. The British proposed a key length of 48 bits, while the West Germans wanted stronger encryption to protect against East German spying, so the compromise became a key length of 54 bits
>Documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 state that the NSA "can process encrypted A5/1"
Why? The FBI pitched a fit over access to a shooter’s phone in the press a few years ago, then stopped.
Now, you have a multiple products on the market that can crack passcodes by utilizing flaws that allow you to brute force PINs, which are by default 6 digit numbers. (Despite most guidance demanding 8)
I have no idea if anyone has covered it. It's industry knowledge. Source: me
I figured it would be generally known at this point, especially with the whole perceptual hash debacle (intended to satisfy LEAs despite the plan to finally enable image encryption). I'm not sure what the internal politics looked like after the perceptual hash snitch got axed - my friends who would know quit Apple by then.
We need to shift the dynamic in America from relying on these media conglomerates, to individuals doing their own research on things. Everyone knows the news media is rigged beyond saving, we need to let them die out, it's what they all deserve for betraying the trust of the people.
Oh man yeah. Individuals doing their own research. They'll just pour over minutes of committee meetings, develop contacts in government agencies, and explore a bunch of primary sources all in their spare time! It's so simple!
As much money as they lose; they make enough returns for their owners in indirect ways to be worth the investment. Murdoch and Turner are many things, but poor isn't one of them.
Btw, did anyone else find it disturbing how "do your own research" became a trigger phrase that allows a rather large group of people to discount anything and everything you said? And at the same time, for an opposite but similar group of people, "trust the science" did the same thing?
trusting science / expertise has always been a turn-off for a certain portion of people with some sort of inferiority or persecution complex or oppositional defiant disorder
unfortunately some politicians seek to gain power by appealing to this
And at the same time, blindly trusting institutions and their dogma has long been a turn-on for people with a superiority complex, or those content with the status quo.
Each cheek of the political arse seeks to gain power by simplistically appealing to these groups, because it's more effective for raising funds and votes than it ought to be.
one thing is for sure, though: falsely portraying trust in expertise and science as,
"blindly trusting institutions and their dogma"
or
"for people with a superiority complex, or those content with the status quo",
has been a trope of those same anti-science, anti-expertise politicians for even longer. As Asimov wrote:
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
You may want to read what I wrote again. I did not "falsely portray trust in expertise and science" etc, not in any way; nor would I. It's rather aggressively wrong to attach such to my point (which you missed).
You seem to have jumped from me saying that some put too much stock in dogma and institutions, to believing that this was an attempt to attack expertise and science. There was nothing in my comment, even implicit, that would lead someone fair to this conclusion.
This assumptive leap typifies the 'with us or against us' thinking I'm talking about; tribal thinking which short-circuits reason, and harms genuine scientific thinking.
Even if you didn't mean to imply this, what you wrote has that effect; consider re-reading your own comment if you don't see that.
You may want to read what I wrote again. I did not accuse you personally of falsely portraying trust in expertise and science, not in any way. It's rather aggressively wrong to take personal offense at such an accusation you imagined.
You seem to have jumped from me criticizing those who do (particularly those who are anti-science and anti-expertise), to an accusation that you personally did so. There was nothing in my comment, even implicit, that would lead someone fair to this conclusion. If you aren't doing it, the criticism doesn't apply to you.
This assumptive leap typifies the persecution complex I'm talking about: emotional thinking which short-circuits reason, and harms genuine scientific thinking. Consider re-reading your own comment if you don't see that.
> Everyone knows the news media is rigged beyond saving
Is that true, though? Or do we, in our bubble, just believe that? I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of people think the news media -- at least the particular subset of the news media they choose to watch -- is more or less ok.
Here's [1] a survey from the end of 2022 asking this exact question. Across all adults, those who have at least "some" trust in the news they personally get from national news orgs has fallen from 76% to 61% in the past 6 years. While that's still a majority, and a sizable majority, it won't be for long on the current trajectory. And that's for when the bar is set to "some trust"!
Unfortunately, regular folks have no idea how to do proper research. Not even academic level, but merely separating out low-quality obvious misinformation.
The second I clicked in here, I immediately remembered your website. (That green theme is very iconic and memorable). When I was a young teenager, I remember visiting your site plenty of times and downloading things off of it. Probably something like Linux ISOs, or music. I was a nerdy kid who really liked the idea of peer to peer stuff, I guess.
I probably tried to contribute some RuneScape-related content, but it likely didn't stay seeded for long haha.
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