Because an appeal to authority isn't an argument and scientists have a whole replication crisis going on, so they lost lots and lots of credibility over the past decades.

Now, if you trust your government and what the high priests tell you about sacrificing virgins to appease the thunder god, that's fine, but not everyone can be naive and trusting like that.

Especially not with how weird this whole situation has been handled over the past year.

I don't think any trust in the so called democratic government is warranted. A government that poisons it's citizens with LSD and pretends a magic bullet that curved in the air killed Kennedy cannot be trusted. Not even a little bit. And those are just on the top of my head on what everyone can agree is bullshit. Duck and cover, amirite?

Nobody needs to keep their mouth shut. As long as enough people accept bogus primary sources, like the ones retelling them through their own media outlet, it's going to be enough.

With lies it is like with projects. The bigger and grander, the easier it is to get people going along. If you want funds for a nuclear plant, nobody bothers checking everything. Try to build a bike shed and things are different.

Wikipedia has a whole long ass article about things people got wrong just because nobody bothered checking and verifying primary sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

"The government isn't spying on us, they have better things to do" and "over dozens of independent rivaling news organisations somehow collaborate to keep information hidden - all while all people in said organisations keep silent without any dissent whatsoever." Then Snowden came along.

There's precedent for the thing you try to frame as ridiculous happening in the past ten years. And after seeing how Snowden ended up, others will think twice about following his example.

I'd like to point out that the "A Hacker Got All My Texts for $16" is clickbait. wow, as if that never existed

But yes, stop using insecure SMS. Start using XMPP with OMEMO encryption.

I applaud your skepticism, the internet is frequently full of shit after all. I agree to an extent that most stuff on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt, but some trust in our democratic governments and census bureaus is warranted, I think. Society requires some trust in order to function. The CDC estimates the amount of U.S. deaths at 532,355. I'm sure that there's some degree of error in these statistics, but it should certainly be accurate enough to give an indication to what the order of magnitude of deaths is.

It's the same matter regarding the claims of election fraud in the U.S. The vast majority of people in various branches of the U.S. federal and state governments, legislature and independent observers have come to the same conclusion that there is no evidence of large-scale fraud. The problem with conspiracy theories in most cases is the staggering amount of people who would have to be "in" on the conspiracy. And most importantly: everyone would have to keep their mouth shut. A blanket statement such as "the mainstream media lies and cannot be trusted" implies that over dozens of independent rivaling news organisations somehow collaborate to keep information hidden - all while all people in said organisations keep silent without any dissent whatsoever.

In this specific instance, however, the primary source that the article's author mentions is this 8-hour livestream from the FDA which is summarized in this FDA report. In this document, the various known and potential risks of the Modena vaccine are assessed critically. Paragraph 8.3 and 8.4 describe these in particular.

This site uses Clownflare (clear net only), visit it in archive.org (clear net only) instead.

TL;DR: the "safest apps" are the most dangerous apps, including Etsy.

---

Now, I don't care about most of the article - we all know big corpos collect as much of our data as possible. I care about the so called "safest apps", while in reality, they're dangerous.

They're also saying that:

Even with video calling service Zoom’s conferencing flaw from last year, it managed to crack the top 10.

Well, what are you doing, Komando? Defending Zoom? This piece of rubbish? And what about the "safest apps"?

• Signal and Telegram - they require your phone number. You really claim to be private with this?
• Clubhouse - this app is kind of obscure to me, and I can't even visit their Clownflared website because Wayback Machine doesn't like its JavaScript (so no reading their privacy policy there - although, I obviously know that Clownflare will collect your data from the shadows), but what if I check their App Store listing (clear net only), what do I see there? Contact info, identifiers, contacts, usage data, user content, diagnostics? And you call it private, Komando?
• Netflix - this attempts to enslave you with Digital Restrictions Management. Obviously, those are only attempts, and I refuse its usage. I hope you are doing this too.
• Teams and Skype - they're owned by Microsoft, and Skype works with the PRISM and also used to redirect Chinese people to an even more censoring version of Skype. Next!
• Classroom and Shazam - owned by big corpos. Google and Apple, respectively.
• Boohoo - Uses Clownflare. Good luck trying to make me think you're private with a MITM attacking me, boo hoo.

So it doesn't look great at all. But wait, I skipped Etsy. Why? Well, here goes a long section about it.

Let's see what the situation with Etsy is, in terms of privacy:

• Tor support - no onion domain, but it looks like you can log in without getting your account terminated. Not sure about registration or shopping, though.
• Monero acceptance - no cryptocurrency to select in the bottom left corner, or anywhere else.
• No personal data required for registration - obviously requires your e-mail address and password, but also your first name, but it's not that tragic.
• Compatibility with established standards - Etsy doesn't have OpenSearch, but you can use the Mycroft Project search engine plug-in (clear net only) if you use a web browser derived from Firefox, like LibreWolf. You can't receive e-mail notifications encrypted with PGP, though.
• No Cloudflare - obviously, if it had Clownflare, BCMA would automatically redirect to an archived version of the website, and I would say to bail immediately.
• As little downtime as possible - not a privacy issue, but it's still important. It doesn't look like Etsy has much downtimes, really.

So, by looking at those points alone, Etsy seems to be okay. But what about the privacy policy? Let's see another six points:

• IP addresses - paragraph two, point three, says that it will receive them from your web browser, mobile app, and Internet of Things (a thing you can give up). There is no duration on how long they are stored.
• Content data - paragraph two, point six, says it stores your location to "improve" search results. So probably not storing search results itself, but there is still no duration on how long the location is stored.
• System info - paragraph two, point three, says Etsy will store your device-specific information such as the operating system, with no duration attached.
• Metadata - there doesn't seem to be a mention of it. However, looking at all of the other points, it's likely it is collected.
• Interaction data - paragraph two, point four, says the information collected from their vendors and suppliers includes customer service interactions. You should know what duration is attached by now.
• Third party sharing - paragraph two, point eight, says that your information will be shared to third parties like Twitter. Only if you actually connect your accounts, I guess, but still.

So, no, it doesn't look great at all. Bail.

Use Session?

I'm waiting for a few months before getting it. The vaccines out there right now are day one unpatched versions (think Cyberpunk 2077) there will be some undiscovered bugs.

It's some nobody writing words on the Internet. How would you be able to trust that? Media have been caught lying too often. The only way to trust this would be the ability to verify all the claims. For example by having a list of all the names of the 307.000 Americans that have died supposedly from Covid-19 with time stamps of their deaths, location etc. and then personally investigating every single one of them.

Obviously this is impossible. It's truly unfortunate that we live in a world were nothing can be trusted that isn't personally verifiable.

On what basis can these sources not be trusted?

Unfortunately, these sources cannot be trusted.

surprised twitter doesn't collect tons of data, especially if you configure your settings properly.

its a real shame, notEvil is a fantastic search engine

I just refuse to take anything from china. But people have good reason to not want to take it, politicians just want to create narratives and now days its hard to know who you can trust.

I completely agree with you that it remains to be seen what, if any, long term effects the vaccines will have. I certainly understand your reservation in this regard. So that's a fair argument.

I trust the judgement of the various medical agencies when they say that the benefits outweigh the risks, I'll send you a message when I grow an additional toe :)

I believe that authorities genuinely have the best interest of the public in mind. I also believe they tend to be incompetent idiots.

I don't buy any of the conspiracy theories floating around either. I do buy that it's physically impossible to foresee any side effects that may appear 5 years after vaccination for a vaccine that has been in development for 9 months or so.

So, everyone, please go ahead and beta-test this thing for me. I'll join you in a couple of years.

Not from the UK so can't comment on that.

Call me naive but where I come from the authorities traditionally have the interest of the public at heart. Sure, I might not like all of their methods: the lockdown sucks, mismanagement happens and wrong decisions are made from time to time. But if you, like me, share the opinion that a vaccine really is the only way out of this mess (because natural herd immunity isn't really taking off), then of course you want to encourage people to get one by using social media and influencers. It's a good strategic move. I absolutely don't think that critical news should be censored, on the contrary that's imperative for a healthy discussion. On the flip side, much of that "critical news" is unscientific populist fearmongering that does not contribute at all to an end to the situation. I certainly understand that it can be frustrating (for politicians and authorities) to see this impair genuine effort to fight the virus.

So just say and leave it like that. Why enlist celebrities, heads of state, who-knows-who-else to promote the vaccine? Why is the Labour party in the UK proposing to pass laws that censor news critical of vaccines? Something smells fishy to me.

"They're selling it too hard, so something must be wrong."

Man, I really wonder what kind of reason they could possibly have for wanting people to get vaccinated. It's not like 2.7 million people have died because of covid-19.

https://coronavirus.medium.com/what-to-know-about-serious-adverse-effects-and-deaths-in-the-moderna-vaccine-data-1031aa7f2582

This information was included in a briefing document published by the FDA ahead of Thursday’s meeting. As in Pfizer’s trial data, which showed that six people had died but that none of those deaths were related to the vaccine, the Moderna data also included some deaths. Thirteen people in Moderna’s 30,000-person trial died as of December 3. Seven of those people were in the placebo group and didn’t receive the vaccine, and six were in the group of people who got the vaccine. None of the deaths were deemed related to the vaccine treatment.

It’s worth noting, for context, that the deaths of over 307,000 Americans have been attributed, definitively, to Covid-19.

Same. It is rather interesting to read how many people on the internet consider themselves to be experts on virology and pharmacy and believe that they are more knowledgeable on matters of science than the experts in the global academic community. There's been a metric fuckton of peer-reviewed research, both theoretical and practical on the various vaccines and the vast majority consider them to be safe. Only incident I've heard of recently was a small minority of people getting trombosis from the AstraZenic vaccine, but that's already being disputed.

I'm a fan of BSD, but your review makes me not want to even try that version.

I'll stick with NetBSD. It's easy.

Good to have everything back up! Thank you for your hard work.

What, your parents didn't give you birthday money as a kid by having you pull it out of some dude chick's thong? /s

Will resist as long as I can, I ain't gonna volunteer to be a guinea pig for it!

From what I hear there's actually a death rate associated with the vaccine, so I think I rather take my chances with the holocough itself, which I might not even get.