Well, it has been previously blocked in Iran as well, so I think we can expect additional TLS proxies set up to avoid censorship. Or maybe you will be able to use existing TLS proxies, I don't know.

By the way, why did no one learn that centralized instant messaging apps can easily be blocked in this world of censorship? I really don't understand.

I recommend XMPP than Signal, especially for Chinese people. I think XMPP's main features are anyone can select from many servers and it have easy to use End-to-End Encryption implementation.

"Is Jabber accessible from China?" - reddit
libreddit. (webproxy frontend for reddit) URLs: clearnet, Tor

I'm in China and can access many XMPP servers, e.g. xmpp.jp, swissjabber.ch, chinwag.im, yax.im, disroot.org, member.fsf.org.

From what I understand about China's GFW, and I am American so no direct experience, it'll work at the beginning if you use TLS. Maybe not STARTTLS?

However, I do know that all VPNs will eventually stop working, forcing you to switch IP or protocol - the GFW has some basic machine learning. If all you do is connect to a specific IP, it'll start throttling connections to said address. It may do the same if it can't scrutinize the encrypted Jabber connection.

The bigger issue is that Jabber is still more complex to set up securely. That's probably why it doesn't have as much mindshare. Given that reputation, and the state of clients across platforms not all implementing the same features (not even equally well), it's harder to convince someone to deal with all of the headaches involved.

I actually had a plane get delayed in Shanghai, and I had no phone plan so the internet was my only option for communication back to the US. Couldn't use Facebook or Instagram. Forget Gmail, because even the Google homepage couldn't be accessed there. Hotmail said it delivered, but I found out the message didn't get received until about 3 weeks AFTER I arrived back in the US. Jabber was the only thing that DID actually work.

By comment on "Signal's open sourced server code hasn't been updated for over a year. Should we be concerned?"

Well, while open source does not mean it's secure, this is still a weird thing to do.

I would simply recommend to stop using Signal and start using XMPP with OMEMO encryption, since this is the gold standard of instant messengers, at least for me. You should especially stop using Signal because it requires your phone number, which immediately disqualifies it for a private messenger.

I'm suspicious of the vaccines and will probably wait and watch for at least a year and may not get it at all. I explained why in an effort-post on a different thread

Clearnet: https://ramble.pw/f/conspiracy/2792/-/comment/3666
Onion link: http://rambleeeqrhty6s5jgefdfdtc6tfgg4jj6svr4jpgk4wjtg3qshwbaad.onion/f/conspiracy/2792/-/comment/3666

If I had to choose a vaccine, maybe I would choose Sputnik V. It's not mRNA based and it has been out longer than the AstraZeneca vaccines. Sputnik will probably not be available here in the US and maybe for good reason, but if I lived in country that was importing it AND that country was friendly with Russia, I would consider it more trustworthy than the others.

Thanks, upvoting you for the same reason. I certainly hope you are right about the vaccines being safe since some people I care about are planning to take them. I am glad that a lot of countries have their eyes on the vaccines that have been developed in our country and I will continue paying attention to which vaccines are suspended by countries and why. I’m still suspicious of the vaccines partially because the average time it takes to develop a vaccine is 10 years. That gives more time to see if there are are long term effects from the trials.

It is also concerning that scientists are not sure whether it prevents transmission. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/opinion/covid-vaccines-transmission.html Leaky vaccines can lead to more dangerous pandemics. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/leaky-vaccines-enhance-spread-of-deadlier-chicken-viruses

My lifestyle puts me at low risk of contracting or spreading the virus and I am careful when I do go out, so I will probably wait at least a year after it’s available to me. Maybe I won’t take it at all and just focus on being healthy. I take vitamin D regularly which should help if I do get the virus.

I find it creepy how aggressively the vaccine is being pushed here in the US. If they want people to trust it, they should stop trying to manipulate and coerce people into taking it. I used to get irritated at anti-vaxers for the same reason you mentioned- reemergence of the measles etc. But I kinda get it now after seeing how hard they push the Covid vaccine.

It’s creepy to me especially since I learned about how many unethical medical experiments the CIA has done. I think this is a pretty good list. https://web.archive.org/web/20090204190831/https://www.counterpunch.org/germwar.html\

Edit: This one includes sources http://rambleeeqrhty6s5jgefdfdtc6tfgg4jj6svr4jpgk4wjtg3qshwbaad.onion/f/conspiracy/125/list-of-proven-conspiracies
This is the type of thing that gets people theorizing about Bill Gates, nanobots, 5G etc. There are many things that have actually happened which would have sounded like a crazy conspiracy theory at the time. There’s nothing about my government that makes me look at a list like that and say “yeah, my government did that in the past, but they wouldn’t do anything like that again.” I don’t know about the Bill Gates nanobots theory, but I wouldn’t put it past the CIA to do some experiments. Gene therapy is something that can be done with mRNA injections. But they’re interested in nanobots as well. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238677

Even if there are no crazy experiments and no one is forcibly jabbed in the arm, society could get pretty dystopian. Lets say only 50% of companies choose to require all employees to be vaccinated. Now you have a class of people who are only 50% as likely to get hired as other people, on the basis of their own personal medical decisions.

And the people who refuse the vaccine on both the left and the right are disproportionately anti-establishment and more suspicious of the government. So if the government wants a crack down on people who have anti-establishment ideologies, allowing this type of discrimination is an easy way to do that. In the US it is already illegal to discriminate on the basis of private health information but it looks like they will make an exception for this.

Something that really annoyed me about the “ethics” professor in this video I posted was that he was endorsing discrimination by basically saying “Yeah, it’s normally not allowed for companies to make hiring decisions using private health information, but this is different because telling a company that you took the vaccine can HELP you get a job! It can’t hurt you!”. It’s such an obvious and slimy rhetorical trick. He must think people are really dumb.

I think immunity usually lasts for a long time since only about 50 people have been documented to have been reinfected so far https://www.marketwatch.com/story/only-50-people-are-known-to-have-contracted-covid-19-more-than-once-but-medical-experts-are-on-high-alert-11613743994

When they measured the degree of natural immunity in your country during peak infections, were they only looking for antibodies or were they studying T cell immunity? You don’t have to answer that since this is a privacy oriented forum and the answer might reveal your country, but I have read that around 20% to 50% of people have some natural immunity even without being exposed. And 83% of COVID-19 patients have T cells as well.

"T cells have been reported in unexposed individuals, suggesting cross-reactive T cell memory in 20-50% of people…T cell memory to coronaviruses that cause the common cold may underlie at least some of the heterogeneity observed in COVID-19 disease." https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/08/04/science.abd3871

"Remarkably, we detected SARS-CoV-2-specific [T-cell] responses in 19 out of 37 SARS-CoV-1/2 unexposed individuals" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z_reference.pdf

"We detected cross-reactive T cell responses [to] SARS-CoV-2 in 28% of unexposed healthy blood donors, consistent with a high pre-existing immunity in the general population…these data were from cryopreserved samples, so this figure might be considered a lower bound" https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)31008-4#secsectitle0055

"We demonstrate the presence of S-reactive CD4+ T cells in 83% of COVID-19 patients, as well as in 34% of SARS-CoV-2 seronegative healthy donors, albeit at lower frequencies." https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.20061440v1

I don’t think the vaccine is necessary for lockdowns to end. IMO they should have ended a long time ago, or maybe not happened in the first place. It isn’t very clear that the lockdowns are effective. https://apnews.com/article/public-health-health-florida-coronavirus-pandemic-ron-desantis-889df3826d4da96447b329f524c33047

Obviously the lockdowns have resulted in increased depression, suicide, drug abuse, domestic violence etc. But also, harm to economies in the first world has affected the economies of third world countries. Many more young girls are now being sold into child marriages partially because of the economic impact.

A nationwide requirement that all companies provide 2 weeks of paid sick leave could be an effective but still freedom respecting alternative to lockdowns since asymptomatic transmission does not drive the spread of the virus as much as previously thought

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/4/20-4576_article https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4851

I agree that it is worse than “just a flu”. The CDC once reported the death rate as .26% while the flu death rate is .1% Maybe it’s 3x worse or something. But I think the response has been excessive and there is a lot more danger that comes from allowing governments and companies to too much power. The idea that freedom is a privilege rather than a right shouldn’t be normalized but that is what is happening.

Maybe you should check whether that trust is warranted..

https://ramble.pw/f/funny/2583/i-m-a-scientist-you-can-trust-me

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.