It’s 孟子 for anyone wondering

There’s a lot of answers itt but heres a simpler one:

If you want to prevent people in power from having access to communications there are two methods employed, broadly speaking:

The first is to make a very secure, zero knowledge, zero trust, zero log system so that when the authorities come calling you can show them your empty hands and smirk.

Signal doesn’t actually do this, but they’re closer to this model than the second one I’m about to describe. Bear in mind they’re a us company so when the us authorities come to their door or authorities from some nation the us has a treaty with come to their door signal is legally required to comply and provide all the information they have.

The second is to simply not talk to the authorities. Telegram was closer to this model than signal, using a bunch of different servers in nations with wildly different extradition and information sharing mechanisms in order to make forcing them to comply with some order Byzantine to the point of not being worth it.

Eventually the powers that be got their shit together and put hands on telegrams owner so now they’re complying with all lawful orders and a comparison of the tech is how you’d pick one.

The technology behind the two doesn’t matter really but default telegram is less “secure” than default imessage (I was talking with someone about it so it’s on the old noggin’).

The barrier to entry was intended to refer to others since it’s already installed on over half their phones to start with and most people are gonna be using a messaging program on their phone.

When there’s above a 50% chance the person you’re talking to is already using a particular encrypted messaging program that’s the lowest barrier to entry.

The barrier to entry always refers to other people because the hardest part of establishing private communications has always been convincing other people to actually do it.

If you really wanted to get on imessage for the least amount of cash out of pocket possible, the bluebubble bridge application random letters person mentioned is ~$100 for an old mac, and tbh that’s a high estimate in my experience. People are just giving those things away nowadays.

People will dislike this:

The most basic one with little barrier to entry is imessage. Theres a good chance your friends and family already have it and with a few setting changes (no sms fallback, set icloud recovery key, probably some stuff I forgot) you’re damn near at parity with signal.

All without dad having to download a new app onto his phone and make a new identity!

Of course you’ll need signal or something for people who don’t use it.

I use that combination and it’s excellent. If you can be on imessage with someone you’re good and everything works, if not you do signal.

There will be people you gotta use sms with. They just won’t be able or willing to do something new. Sometimes there’s an equipment problem, their super old provider version of android can’t get an app you both agree on. Sometimes they’re using a Nokia.

Interacting with sms often may help keep you on your toes about it. I know I’m more careful over text now.

That combination, imessage and signal, also has a benefit of reducing the chances that you’ll broadcast an awareness of and desire for privacy and security to the whole world all the time.

In the us, there’s a 50% chance you just look like a normal person and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Make sure it meets your needs of course

As of the time I’m writing this comment literally none of the suggestions made actually matter for the ambiguous goal of “general security and privacy” more than building in a neighborhood or community that meets the occupants desires.

Pick a place with people you want to be around who you trust to look out for you.

Hexbear was right about downvotes.

Some food for thought:

Absence of information is its own sort of information. You may find it worthwhile in your search for an acceptable compromise to place some kind of value on “looking normal”.

So go ahead and take a look at your journalctl output. The left hand side should be timestamps, so you can immediately figure out if it’s starting a million years in the past or sometime you know you had the problem.

If it is a million years in the past, use the —since flag and specify the time you want to start at as enumerated in the manual file (man journalctl).

Once you’re looking at the logs in journalctl from a day you know the problem happened, go ahead and use arrow keys and pgup/pgdn to find a reboot. You’ll know when you find a reboot because it’ll look different. The messages will be about figuring out what hardware is attached and changing runlevels and whatnot.

Once you found where the reboot is, go backwards to find something weird happening in the logs.

E: By default the parser (program used to handle text) of journalctls output is “less”. If you want to get out of it, press “q”, and if you want to know more “man less”.

Someone already linked to journalctl, but if you just quickly want to look, the command journalctl and the flag —since will get you going.

Journalctls output can be piped, so if you know what you’re looking for you can grep it easily.

Just a heads up for people reading this:

小红书 is a Chinese language app (it added translation just a week or so ago!). The founder claims to have chosen the color red and the 红 part of the name because of his Alma mater stanford [!]. The app is pretty much targeted at lifestyle influencers and women and features prominent shopping and payment integration.

English speakers nicknamed the book Quotations from Chairman Mao the “little red book”. The Chinese nickname is 红宝书 “treasured red book” or “cherished red book”, not “little red book”.

Many posts on 小红书 are making light of the fact that Americans flocked to the bored housewife shopping app.

So that we’re 100% clear, the site and app only stopped working in the us.

If you were in the us on a browser and used a fresh cache and a vpn in another country it worked fine, famously Canadian users used the time to shit talk American users while they “couldn’t” hear.

While there’s an argument to be made that the law only explicitly prohibits new downloads (distribution) it also makes reference to maintaining the service. A company that wanted to continue running the company without any ability to gain American users could attempt to skirt that, but eagle eyed readers of law will recognize that sec2.a.1.B pretty much squashes that. Not only does it make datacenters in the us and elsewhere culpable, but the generally held legal definition of words like “internet hosting services”, “distribution”, “maintenance”, “updating” and “application” are not the narrow often colloquial meanings we’re used to, but broad definitions intended to give the maximum applicability to laws regardless of specific technology involved.

So I think unless bytedances strategy was to explicitly skirt the law and try to keep the servers up for the American users then the “correct” decision was to follow the letter of the law until the new regime that had promised to offer a stay was in power and made that offer officially and in writing.

From a business perspective, for a company caught between two regimes, giving the “win” to the one you’ll definitely be working with longer is a no brainer.

I haven’t seen significant right wing or pro trump content on TikTok after it came back on. I have seen plenty of users saying thank you president trump with a whole spectrum of intonation and doing thinking emoji at the message when it came back on. I also haven’t seen decent analysis of its algorithms behavior since then, which makes sense because making a decent analysis of such a black box would take time.

Changes to a persons recommendations take time. The way that 小红书 surfaces this by changing the “reels” offered to the users explore page when they’ve accumulated enough information to make a change and finished processing it.

Part of what made TikTok’s algorithm and recommendations seem so magical is that it had a really good way of spicing things up and not getting stuck in a rut and because there was only one scrolling feed, changes to recommendations were just suddenly there.

Just having said that and having experienced the rinky-dink recommendations after the downtime I don’t think it was a shut down specifically for changes (although they definitely did, why would t you take the opportunity to update everything if you’re doing mandated spin down?) but because it was the smart legal choice.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/(your drive)

You can do status=progress if you want like someone else posted and if you pick a block size go with either the physical block size reported by the disk in smartcontrol or some multiple of it that coincides with a big even division of your controllers memory. The drives physical block size will be “easy” for the drive, bigger blocks are faster.

People saying physical destruction are operating in a different world than you and people saying urandom or shred are operating off old (>30 years) information. The same technology that makes ssds unrecoverable black boxes was originally developed and deployed in spinning drives to eek out speed gains because the disk itself can be expected to know better than the operating system where to put shit and makes techniques (which were postulated but never actually implemented successfully in the wild) to recover overwritten data infeasible.

Alternately just reformat it and don’t worry. No one doing drive rmas cares about your data. They’re already on the razors edge with feedback and customer trust, you think they’re gonna burn their above board bread and butter to run a harvesting operation for a few bucks on the side? That’s usually the purview of your local pc repair shop…