OneMeaningManyNames

Not to mention that people have jobs and use their credit cards, no way even to hide the most important personal identifying information.

Exactly, this is a lost cause. If you participate in society your essential data are simply out there. For most people the task is to minimize their footprint. If we are talking about evading mass surveillance, then we should take for granted that the person will be to one or another degree marginalized, or lead a fringe lifestyle.

Sure, I see where you are coming from. I used to be in favor of PGP as well, but I think I just was conditioned to it because it was everywhere, eg Linux repositories. The argument I found more convincing in this article is that PGP is a swiss-army knife. You might want to use it in an emergency, but professionals have special tools for each different task. In fact, the article suggests very nice alternatives for each task: Encrypt with age , sign with minisign. Two different tasks, two different tools, no need for a web of trust. Just for the arguments sake why do you think that PGP is worth it given the burden of entry?

Perhaps we could benefit from sth like MetaCritic for science.

As far as I know the peer reviewers are in most cases now selected by the editor, they self-select to respond, are not paid for their work, and the process for alarmingly many journals is not even blind. I always thought that this makes the process vulnerable to network effects in the field, since people are obliged to a certain etiquette when commenting on established figures in their own field. So yes, I get where you are coming from, but similar to the scientific method, peer review is also great to describe in theory, in practice it would require much more precise protocols, like Web protocols I might say. I really don’t want to be a pessimist about science in the current political climate, but if we want these great ideals (Scientific method, Peer Reviewed evidence) we will have to abandon the existing situation as soon as possible.

People say this over and over “depends on your threat model” and yet people seem to have a hard time understanding that. Your threat model is “who is your adversary and what he is willing/able to do”. Your security goal is what do you want to keep from your adversary.

As others said, if you are an activist or sth important, perhaps you might want to build a working knowledge of cryptography yourself. If you just want META not being able to see your NSFW chat with your romantic partner Signal might be more than enough. In fact, people way more relevant than me also suggest that Signal is good even for bounty hunter vulnerability reporting.

Having said that, what bugs me most is that people think the instant messaging format as suitable for everything: activism, jobs, crimes, broadcasting 1970’s prog rock for extraterestrials , whatever lmao. Do you really want to use your phone for all that? Like, just carrying the phone around in the first place nullifies your other precautions, for all advanced threat models beyond privacy of non-critical social messaging.

Persistent/resourceful adversaries can eventually get to you, using a set of penetration and intelligence techniques, which means, if you are involved, the convenience of messaging your partners in crime from the phone in your pocket while waiting for a bus is a convenience you probably can’t afford.

protected by PGP

Someone here recently linked to this gem https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/

The article warns PGP over Email is a safety concern. They suggest Signal instead. (And several other tools to replace PGP)

This is not just about the pressure put on academics to publish, but it is a whole systemic rot, that is not even remotely living up to the “peer reviewed evidence” myth.

The whole idea of an intermediary authority for scientific publishing is a scam, and it corrupts people who want/need to be in the pyramid. The whole thing is ill-conceived, needs to be abolished, and a new thing should be put in its place. At some point someone said, “I can ditch all this and just publish research on my blog, then people will criticize and build upon that”. No publisher, no paywall, no problem. If we follow this example, all of these issues can disappear overnight. But the vast majority of professionals value their career more than anything else, including our tantamount tenets of what science communication should look like.

You might object that “intermediary authorities” and “peer review” are essential to prevent disinformation and conspiracy theories. Well, we are past this point aren’t we? Did this system prevent conspiracy theories and disinformation, hoaxes, and fraudsters this far? No, so how exactly will it prevent all of these terrible things in the future? If anything, building arguments in the open without paywalls might deter at least some of the conspiracy theorists that brandish paywalls as further evidence of cover-ups and secrecy, and ditching the horrible jargon and high-brow style might actually help the common sense of scientific arguments just shine, and combat the rising anti-intellectualism of right-wing conspiracy theorists.

Like, if you explain Elsevier’s etc business model to any lay person (Pay me money so that I let you publish to my super-selective journal and feed your vanity) they have the most funny reactions, because to anyone who is not conditioned to this absurdity, it just sounds like a pyramid scheme.

I can’t help wondering what is up with all those people fighting in comments about encryption. You make the point time and again that having encrypted media is somehow suspicious. I see where you are coming from.

• There are cases where people have gotten in trouble for using TOR/Signal, because it was presented to the court that “this is what criminals use”.
• There are those Wall Street companies that got in trouble for using encrypted messengers with trading partners.

We know about these, because it makes headlines when it happens.

Yet, there are people here, in any similar discussion, not just this one, that keep telling us that encryption is useless because authorities can more easily break your bones than brute force your private key, and you are going to be in trouble just for having encrypted media.

Is that so? Remember the fuss when federal regulators wanted Apple to install backdoors to encrypted i-Phones? Why so? No no, bear with me, if you people are correct, then every person with an encrypted i-Phone should be in a watchlist? What about all these Linux laptops all with LUKS on the main hard drive, flying around?

How come we don’t hear about those people being prosecuted and brutalized every other day in all of these alternative media we are following?

Regarding encryption, I have a right to my fucking privacy and if you want to know what is in my hard drive, then you are the weird one. Now let’s discuss criminal prosecution. If the authorities have something on you and they need whatever is in your encrypted drive to convict you, then they do not have anything on you unless they break the encryption. The more people practicing encryption the less fruitful their efforts will be. Your argument amounts to little more than the very authorities slogan “if you don’t have something to hide”. More people using encryption should make it sink that not only people with something to hide will use encryption, and indeed, all these everyday, non-criminal people are already using Encryption in i-Phones and Linux without having their bones broken.

Yet you keep repeating this rhetoric, which seems to have no other purpose than deter people from using encryption.

Now let’s discuss brutality. If you live in a police state that can kidnap you and rough you up to forgo your protected right to privacy, then you don’t have a problem with encryption, but a huge political problem. In that case encryption won’t liberate you, but at the same time you have much bigger problems, and an entirely different threat model.

So the only thing you people could, in good faith, add to the discussion is “If you live in a police state, don’t rely solely on encryption, and update your threat model”. The other things you keep going on and on about are essentially a rebranded “if you don’t have something to hide” and they only seem designed to discourage people from adopting encryption altogether, and the fact you don’t let go can only mean one fucking thing.

I mean, even the struggle to self-censor crap beliefs is pathetic. Most guys don’t even censor themselves or outright announce that they self-censor. Like refraining from spewing transphobia and misogyny in front of women is like refraining from farting on a date. Most women are not even that pedantic with these things. The fact that this poses a mental toil on you as if you cannot tell a radicalized incel from an average dickhead is really alarming. I hope you find peace.

Right enough, the old standard is toxic and must go. You can wear a dress, cry in public, take it up yours. You still will be a manly man.

there are legal reasons to worry

"You could go to jail for saying the wrong thing! And how you are supposed to know what is considered offensive this month? Who knew you will have to subscribe to a feminist newsletter to be a man? " Did someone get addicted to old privileged sex roles, and now they feel they will be persecuted for hating women’s bodily autonomy?