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.

Lol, that is quite a list you have compiled. Is this... a problem for you or something? Yes, popular products are often copied by other companies.

Like Rambler said, these are used for camping, hiking etc. I do think there are some wacky things being pushed related to gender norms, gender identity and such, but this is not an example of that.

The alternative to this product is that women would always have to pull their pants down and squat in the woods, and there is some risk being seen doing that, especially in an area where trees and bushes are more sparse. This is helpful for modest women who are nervous about being seen. With this, they only need to face away from the trail and do not need to pull down their pants.

Yeah, supporting this is a good way to ensure that many fellow working class people are made into second class citizens, including many blacks since they are aware of Tuskegee Syphilis experiments and other historical experiments on blacks. Maybe blacks will be exempt from requirements for this reason, but that would probably just increase racial divisions since people of all races have been subjected to unethical medical experiments. Everyone has a right to be suspicious of the government and big pharma and make choices about their own body.

No one knows the long term effects of mRNA vaccines in humans. Not enough time has passed. Anyone who says that they know people will not experience complications from this new type of vaccine five years down the line is lying because it is impossible to know at this point. And the Johnson & Johnson/Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines are not mRNA but they are produced by the same company that knew Asbestos was in their baby powder for decades.

You have only presented choices where freedom is limited as if they are the only choices. How about people who want the vaccine choose to take it, people who don't want it don't take it, and herd immunity is achieved through a combination of vaccinations and infections? Maybe it will make some nervous, but they are free to take extra precautions. They can even wear a gas mask if they like.

This virus is worse than the flu, but relatively speaking, it's not that bad. Many people just get some minor symptoms or no symptoms and that's it. If this was something really serious like the black death, there would not be such a big effort to convince or coerce people to take vaccines. Nearly everyone would be desperate for them.

At first I thought this was sarcasm and you dropped the /s but after reading Imperator agree with you, now I am not sure. Do you actually think it is possible for something to be a fair trade in exchange for the return of your freedom?

I can see the argument that it's in a companies right to discriminate against people for their personal health choices because it's THEIR company, though by that same "my company, my rules" logic, discrimination for other reasons should be fine too. I'm not really concerned with this.

But if the government starts encouraging or even requiring companies to do this, that is crossing a line into state coercion, and many state and city governments have already crossed a line with lockdown orders.

I was surprised by this

“Law enforcement… use these tools to investigate cases involving graffiti, shoplifting, marijuana possession, prostitution, vandalism, car crashes, parole violations, petty theft, public intoxication, and the full gamut of drug-related offenses,” Upturn reports.

This other article it linked to about consent searches was interesting too.

Imagine this scenario: You’re driving home. Police pull you over, allegedly for a traffic violation. After you provide your license and registration, the officer catches you off guard by asking: “Since you’ve got nothing to hide, you don’t mind unlocking your phone for me, do you?” Of course, you don’t want the officer to copy or rummage through all the private information on your phone. But they’ve got a badge and a gun, and you just want to go home. If you’re like most people, you grudgingly comply.

Police use this ploy, thousands of times every year, to evade the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that police obtain a warrant, based on a judge’s independent finding of probable cause of crime, before searching someone’s phone.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/so-called-consent-searches-harm-our-digital-rights

This is old news but it was news to me. I remember the 8chan users migrating to Zeronet in 2019 but I was not aware that so many had their IP addresses exposed.

Peer-to-peer networks expose a user’s internet address to anyone who cares to look. That’s how copyright lawyers catch people trading movies, music and software, and it’s how police and FBI agents arrest pedophiles trading child porn online.

ZeroNet works the same way, a fact that’s been much-discussed on the new site. For that reason, ZeroNet integrates tightly with Tor, an anonymity system that places layers of cut-out addresses between a user and the websites they visit. But only 41 percent of 08chan’s users’ are using Tor, based on our analysis of the peer-to-peer traffic at the site.

Users on 08chan have been complaining that the site is buggy and slow over Tor, and the site’s own administrator initially encouraged anons to just connect directly.
...
The Daily Beast captured 819 IP addresses for 08chan users connecting from 62 different countries.

Also, the users were concerned about child porn

“Say someones a f****t and uploads cp [child porn],” one Zeronet user wondered on Wednesday, as 8chan users flooded Zeronet’s discussion board. “If i happen to download it, it gets shared from my computer, right? And if i dont notice it bunch of people can download it from me? So im a distrubutor at that point, arent i?”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/8chan-refugees-worried-theyre-downloading-child-porn-on-peer-to-peer-site-zeronet

I think the main takeaways from this is that an ideal network for users of 8chan, Parler etc. to migrate to would be

• Anonymous by default, and fast regardless.
• Text only, so that no one worries about accidentally downloading and distributing child porn.

I'm aware that even a regular web browser downloads child porn when a user views a page with it. But anyone who comes across child porn is required by law to report it. That puts people in a weird legal position if they come across it by accident while using a network like zeronet. Legally and morally, the correct thing to do is to remove it from the zites you are distributing and then report it but reporting might bring more attention to yourself even if you use the anonymous report feature, especially since you were briefly a distributor.

I think using a peer to peer network is one thing they got right, because there's no individual that can be threatened, coerced, or persuaded into shutting 08chan down.

People can delete their messages but I haven't seen it happen enough that it really bothers me.

Yeah it's preferable for news stories to remain up forever. Maybe IPFS could eventually become popular enough that news organizations use it as well. But in the meantime archivists can use it to archive news stories permanently. I agree that it's important for news articles, scientific articles, statements from politicians etc. to not be memoryholed. But ideally, right wing groups should use private anonymous networks with auto-disappearing messages because it's safer. Members being targeted by law enforcement has a much worse effect on a group than any negatives that might come from people deleting their own messages.

Not sure what malicious use would be. I haven't ever seen the type of drama where someone says something, deletes it, and then denies ever saying it and gets into arguments with people about it.

Ultimately, advantages are subjective for different people. You value posts existing forever but many people prefer the opposite. Signal is popular partially because of the disappearing messages feature. I think especially on the right, people will increasingly value privacy over convenience. I think we are probably heading into a very totalitarian, technocratic future where it will be more and more dangerous to have right wing views.

Personally, if I see a very interesting post online, I sometimes just save it in a document on my computer. If scuttlebutt implements the delete message feature, it would be nice for them to also have a save message feature that saves the message but not the username. Or allow users to just remove their identity from messages that they don't want associated with themselves any more. Similar to how reddit shows [deleted] for the username after someone deletes an account.

Patchwork and apps like it could agree to not show deleted messages in their user interface. That way, if someone was making backups, it would be harder to read deleted messages. It would still be possible, but the person doing it would need to know how to decrypt them. Don't know if that would be a desired feature by the community or not, but it would be a way to get the delete feature as complete as possible.

Btw, I just found the part of the docs that explains how their cancel culture type views have influenced the protocol. You can publicly block someone, and that is announced to your peers. So for example, if a popular leftist scuttlebutt user publicly blocks someone saying it is because "he is a racist/sexist/homophobe/whatever", there would probably be peer pressure for others to publicly block the same person.

If someone is bothering you or saying things you don’t want to hear, you can block or ignore them from their profile page (in the Options button). This will hide their messages and comments from you. You can loudly block someone, or quietly ignore them. A block is public and everyone can see it. Blocking is a way to demonstrate community norms and alert your friends to someone they may also want to block. Sometimes it starts useful conversations. Ignoring quietly is a secret action that only you will know about. It hides the person from your view.

https://scuttlebutt.nz/docs/introduction/detailed-start/#stay-happy-and-safe

It could be pretty useful feature for the right as well though. If some user was posting child porn and a peer publicly blocked them for that reason, I would appreciate getting a heads up so I could block them as well. Same if leftists attempted a raid on right wing "pubs" and users. They could be blocked.

I think the main advantage of decentralized over centralized is that other people can't memory hole your posts. If you can memory hole your own posts, that is an advantage. If you ever get in trouble with the law, it's helpful to have no online history that they know about. Ideally, they will not know your username, but the right is too online now compared to the left. The right really should be using the internet to facilitate offline organizing more often, and that introduces the possibility of law enforcement knowing your online identity. But for example, if you are defending yourself from Antifa and get charged with assault, you may be happy if you deleted all your posts before meeting up with people so nothing you said can be twisted and used against you (though they might say it's suspicious that you deleted all your posts. It's nice that in Matrix, changing your password encrypts all your old posts by default, which looks less suspicious). The NSA or FBI could certainly still have the posts you deleted and know that you made them but local law enforcement is not so sophisticated.

I think you could have scuttlebutt or something like it, which stores all messages for you to read offline, but also have a feature where if you say that you want all of your posts deleted, then your computer could send that message out to all of your peers. They would forward that message to any of their peers who can also read your messages. (See the "Follow Graph" here https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#follow-graph ) The peers that are already online would respond immediately and delete your posts from their local store. Some of your peers and peers of peers with access to your posts could be offline so they would still retain your posts temporarily, but when they connect to the internet again, those peers would see that you want your posts deleted, either by checking with you or their peer who is connected to you, and they would immediately delete them as well.

In the scuttlebutt documentation I saw that in the future they do want to allow people to delete posts and it is just a feature they haven't implemented yet. They also want to hide IP addresses by default.

We want Scuttlebutt to be a safe cozy place but there are still some things we need to fix: Blocked people can see your public messages.
Content from blocked people is still on your computer. (This is almost fixed!)
Patchwork has some bugs that let you see blocked people in certain situations when they should be hidden
Scuttlebutt doesn’t provide IP address anonymity by itself, but you can use it with a VPN or Tor.
Messages can’t be deleted yet.

https://scuttlebutt.nz/docs/introduction/detailed-start/#stay-happy-and-safe

Matrix is federated, not p2p, but when using it I noticed that if I changed my password, the encryption key for my posts would change as well which would make all of my past posts unreadable to everyone including myself, but my new posts would be readable. Of course if my past password was weak, it would still be easy for someone to decrypt my past posts.

It was possible to delete and edit posts as well. And if you disabled an account, you were met with a warning saying that people would not be able to read your past posts, which may disrupt the flow of conversations. Also, creators of a room could set it up so that any new user had no ability to view the old posts in the room. You could change your display name at any time, but your unique id is the name you chose when signing up. Your unique id is visible to anyone who right clicks on your display name.

When it comes to p2p tech, so far everyone is saying what you are suggesting is impossible, but I am at least interested to know whether it would make sense to code something similar to this, or if something similar already exists:

All posts are encrypted. nodes you connect to store your posts, but in encrypted form, and they store the encryption key for your posts. They store a generated unique id, not your display name. So if someone wants to save your posts to use against you, they have to have some basic technical capability. They need to know your account's unique id, not display name, and use the stored key to decrypt the posts associated with that id. (Most would just screenshot it in this case, which can be more easily faked so there is more plausible deniability for you)

You can change your encryption key at any time. If you change the encryption key for your posts, then the key will be changed for all nodes connected to you, making your past posts unreadable to yourself and connected nodes

if any node disconnects from you or you disconnect from it, your files automatically get deleted from their store and their files get automatically deleted from your store.

If someone really wanted to hold on to someone's posts to use against them later, they could of course make a copy of the store before they disconnect from the other node, but they would need some basic tech knowledge to decrypt what is in it. Unlike making an archive link of some centralized page which requires almost no tech knowledge. If the p2p network gets popular enough, someone might make a service to simplify this process for people (similar to archive.org). But privacy would at least be comparable to centralized services.

But I know jack shit about coding p2p protocols and applications.

True, I was aware of the leftist leanings of the developers and much of the community.

Still, it appears that if conservatives and free speech supporters decided to connect to each other, there isn't much that the rest of the network could do. They could make sure they're not connected to us, so we would have less visibility from their part of the network, but they wouldn't be able to break up the existing connections between right wing users. One of the worst things about de-platforming for the right has been that people end up losing connections to each other when a platform gets taken down.

They are partially just relying on deterrence right now, as that PDF mentioned.

SSB has never advertised itself as a free-speech platform though it does have many of those qualities at a technical level. Additionally designers have Rebellious Data LLC & Emmi Bevensee ​| 15 purported that they pursue a range of aesthetic choices aimed at attracting or repelling certaintypes of users. For instance, clients and the official webpage often use pastel colors, on the homepage​ there is a cartoon about an inter-racial queer love story that explains how scuttlebutt works, and many clients have implemented content warnings. Interviews stated this was all intentional to turn-away hateful users.

All that said, privacy is generally more important for the right than the left because the left is allowed to get away with more. So a different project that is not so leftist and more focused on privacy may be a better choice for conservatives to migrate to.

From the pdf:

Those guided more by right-wing ideologies in the P2P space tend to focus more on things like crypto-currencies and extremely privacy focused free-speech tools, which are more ​likely​ to be abused by hate-groups whether that is the intention of the developers or not. There are powerful positive implications in both P2P privacy tools and crypto-currencies, however it is important to acknowledge this potential alongside their built-in affordances.Those focused more on social-justice influenced liberatory tech tend to focus more on P2P tech geared towards connecting people and try to build in more protections to protect abuse.

I wonder if they're doing this because they're planning something that would make A LOT of people angry. I mean something that would make both sides want to storm the capitol. Maybe some kind of engineered economic catastrophe to accelerate "the great reset"? Maybe hyperinflation that would wipe out the savings of most average people but spare those who are in the know about what's coming?

I have no idea, but they keep making up BS excuses for why they need so many troops there.

This is the website for the project

https://scuttlebutt.nz/

Shit, I should have downloaded it. No, I couldn't find a mirror. Guess I'll delete the post.

reddit.com/r/redditalternatives has links to several others

I read a blog post by some people who started living off the grid who were talking about their mistakes. Not having running water from the beginning and having to go to the stream to collect water was more demoralizing than they expected.