keyme

You are actually right :) Stupid me. But other similar searches have failed me in the past.

The internet is too different now to what Google (or any SE) was designed to index.

Too much of the up-to-date high value information is posted onto semi-public channels. Like facebook groups, instagram posts, telegram channels, etc.

At the same time, too much of the publicly available websites are becoming clickbait and mindless marketing drivel.

Just try to research anything slightly obscure that has to be up-to-date information (from the last few years).

Like "how to get from Nairobi to Kisumu by bus". Google maps doesn't have this (not surprisingly), but what about the SERPs? Nothing there. 90% of the results are useless bus ticket sale websites that have no info, just SEO. (You can't buy this ticket online anyway).

Is Kenya just such an off-the-map destination that no backpacker has ever written about taking this route? No!

The information is out there. You'll find it inside the related facebook groups for travelers in east Africa. And if not? That's where you'll ask. But the answer? It'll never reach a SERP in the future.

Even more sad, is that if you keep looking on Google, you may find buried results from years ago. From travel forums and such. What's sad is that the info will be 10 years old, since no one uses public forums anymore. (Unless it's on reddit, pretty much the last public forum with any reach).

Brave new world

Good. No one verifies this crap anyway. Even in Israel where it's a digitally signed government issued token, nobody has actually ever verified it (that I've seen). Only at the airport, maybe.

The amount of emissions from a large bonfire is literally 0 in comparison to what it takes to bring half of the participants aboard jets from halfway around the world. Since that would make all festivals "over", by your logic, I can guarantee you that will never happen.

If you use Tor, and you're not a criminal, you increase the deniability of anyone else who uses Tor. Thus, ever so slightly, you help everyone else to have an easy way to be anonymous.

Of course, for any serious anonymity (against western LEAs, not against corporations or 3rd world governments), you're most likely correct.

Ugh. All the way through I was imaging that Siamese twins wrote this piece or something.

Your phone? Double redundant networking, UPS protected power supply, and plenty of compute resources. Writing this from an android with 16G of RAM.

Facebook are much much worse.

An NSO, a Candiru or a weapons manufacturer provide tools to governments, who are at least in theory (but usually in practice) accountable to their people. Occasionally governments even act for the benefit of their people.

Facebook only acts for the benefit of Facebook, to the detriment of everyone else in society.

You tech bros have seriously lost it at this point, haven't you.

You are literally comparing selling gas that was essentialy designed to mass murder people in camps, to selling a surveillance tool that can hack your precious iphones.

What an obnoxious piece of drivel.

"Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime."

The HN California tech-bros could be forgiven for not "getting it" 2 years ago. However, when leaving your own damn house became a crime, this lack of understanding is beginning to become infuriating.

The value proposition of cryptocurrencies is not only in shielding you from the whims of bureaucrats that are in charge of monetary policies, but of idiotic changes to all policies.

When my country was in a full insane-mode covid lockdown, no centralized database helped me to get a haircut. That haircut guy took only cash or crypto.

When the next insane demand is inevitably decreed upon you, maybe cash won't do anymore either.

Or, in most cases, they are victims of government overreach.

The world isn't closed. I've been traveling for most of 2021, and when I started, I was "shocked" to find fellow travelers who've been traveling throughout 2020 as well.

Asia is fully closed. That's due to their culture. Latin America is fully open, due to the same reason. The Covid restrictions map is the new map of the world. Pick a green spot and go.

I quit my ridiculously well paying cybersecurity job in January. Went traveling for most of the time since. Most of Latin America was/is consistently open, if you're wondering. So is some of eastern Europe and the neighboring Asian ex-soviet countries. Africa has potential too, I think (haven't been). If you're vaccinated (which I was, pretty early on) most of Europe opens up too (but probably not for long now).

You've read the cliche reasons for doing this kind of thing many times before, and honestly I don't think this newyorker article is saying anything very different.

My additional, edgy, uncensored reason: I couldn't shake the feeling that I was picking up the check for everybody else. I was paying very high taxes to essentially finance crazy government overreach, only to later lose the value of what's remaining to inflation due to all the money printing.

What am I doing to fix it? Nothing!

I'm dependent, just as you say, and have no illusions about that.

Getting into this situation wasn't my decision (it was a collective "decision" of our society), and getting out of this won't be due to anything I'll personally do either.

The only difference between me and the average joe is having understood that we have a problem earlier than most.

Dear humans,

1) You willingly delegated the decision of what code is allowed to run on your devices to the manufacturer (2009). Smart voices warned you of today's present even then.

2) You willingly got yourself irrevocably vendor-locked by participating in their closed social networks, so that it's almost impossible to leave (2006).

3) You willingly switched over essentially all human communication to said social networks, despite the obvious warning signs. (2006-2021)

4) Finally you showed no resistance to these private companies when they started deciding what content should be allowed or banned, even when it got purely political (2020).

Now they're getting more brazen. And why shouldn't they? You'll obey.

Isn't there client side code in every Whatsapp client that analyzes your messages and sends data to FB for ad targeting?

I know for a fact they can block certain message content from being sent. So at least a hash of every message is sent to FB. This isn't very far from it.

Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault.

I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated software and keygens, detailed instructions for a variety of useful things. That was the golden age of the web.

These days, all the "interesting" data on the Internet is all inside closed Telegram chats, facebook groups, Discords or the rare public website here and there that Google doesn't want to index (like sci-hub, or other piracy sites).

The data that remains on SERPs is now also heavily censored for arbitrary reasons. "For your health", "For your protection". Google search is done.

Also drugs, software exploits, anything that sells itself really.

That's not consistent between phones. I have a low end Redmi 9T with a 6AH battery. It lasts 2 days of relatively heavy phone usage. I'm guessing it would last a whole day in a Termux shell.

Edit: if anything the real issue is thermals. I also have a high end phone with a Snapdragon 888. This thing has a faster CPU & GPU than my Intel desktop. However, it's only fast for seconds, until it gets thermally throttled.

I've dealt with this before. It's a pain.

Look at this security research about bypassing NATs: https://www.armis.com/research/nat-slipstreaming-v20/

Look at the section "Creating NAT pinholes to any internal IP using the H.323 ALG" for example.

This is using a bug ("feature") that your CGNAT may have implemented (depending on the brand of CGNAT used). Fairly likely that one of those NAT slipstreaming vectors will allow you to punch a hole through it.

Is this reliable enough to actually use for self hosting stuff? Probably not. If you do, tell me :)

Edit: even the oldest versions of this technique (https://samy.pl/natpin/) may work for you. Depends if you're lucky. You don't need any of the exploit details that make this into an attack, only the basic concept of using NAT ALGs for unintended purposes.

Reminds me of Apple removing the headphone jack and being so proud of themselves for "being brave".

Just yesterday I found a link to FTP while researching something. Was pretty annoying to go get another FTP client up and running to get it.

Anyway, the movement away from unencrypted protocols to TLS-only is moving us closer to a fully censored internet. Sure, an unencrypted internet did not have any integrity guarantees, and thus was easy to censor (and worse) by totalitarian nation states.

However, a TLS-only internet is very easily censorable by our new global central planners (FAANG). This way, they'll have much more control than was available to the common MITMing nation state.

NSO are literally owned by a Europe based private equity firm, and previously owned by a US based one. Their clients (Saudi & UAE) are very much NATO buddies.

>50% bitcoin mining capacity is already in China since like 2014 (unless something drastically changed).

The beauty of the PoW blockchain is that if a nation attains this kind of power, then still, the most profitable thing to do would be to keep playing by the rules. This is why bitcoin works.

Why isn't there something that turns a rooted Android phone into a VOIP <-> Cell network gateway? Something that allows incoming calls to be forwarded to SIP, and vice versa?

I haven't found something like that.

It feels to me that Telegram is the closest thing to old school IRC that we "have"* right now. You can have public/private channels, you don't see other peoples phone numbers for no reason (you see their chosen nicks), you have bots, broadcasts and more.

* That has any reach beyond the people who would scoff at this sentence.

Of course.

All these articles and "criticisms" of Signal started popping up right after the recent WhatsApp mini exodus. What a coincidence.

You can extract it yourself.

https://github.com/YuriCosta/WhatsApp-GD-Extractor-Multithre...

I do not vouch for this repo, but it gets the job done.

The only creds required are your Google account creds. No per-user whatsapp keys necessary.

I've posted this here before.

> It is encrypted with a per user key known to WhatsApp.

This is no longer true! For a few years now. The backup is stored on Google Drive in plain text.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/about-google-drive-ba...

Funny. I've seen talk of making Cloudflare ban thedonald.win (the reddit clone of trump supporters).

What's next? Make your own routers? Lay your own cables?