Look at the PDF carefully before sharing it. Most academic publishers put a timestamp on it that reveals who downloaded it, at least at institution level. Sometimes this is even embedded as metadata. If the PDF says anywhere “author personal copy”, please don’t share it on the author’s behalf.
This is mostly to avoid getting them into trouble.
I’m not surprised. Propaganda as a systematic process of human psychological manipulation was essentially born in Russia, and they’ve been honing in and practicing those skills ever since.
also free speech and independent media civilizations tend to provide more attack surface. so countering it is inefficient and only resilience really helps.
luckily it’s not very subtle and rarely hard to spot.
Edit: after typing all of this, I re-read your comment and realized I simply argued your point for you further. Initially misread.
luckily it’s not very subtle and rarely hard to spot.
The abrasive propaganda that’s easy to spot, sure. But I’m positive that’s a minority of if unless you’re hyper vigilant in which case you’re also going to have a ton of false positives.
Now to preface this next bit. I don’t categorize myself politically. I’m very open to many different viewpoints but I saw Trump winning as a very dangerous thing, so some people would call me liberal, although plenty of liberals have called me a conservative in the past. I’m pro-choice, but I can understand that many really do see it as murder. I’ve had insults from all across the spectrum accusing me of fitting nicely into a box.
The first example of a western media type of propaganda that comes to mind in America-centric media is how the COVID lab leak theory was so heavily associated and linked with the far-right and discredited that even when the Department of Energy (they handle nuclear secrecy and many other things) and other official agencies released their assessments earlier this year that said the lab leak theory is the most likely by far, few seemed to believe it and not many news networks reported on it longer than a day, if that. And, since scientists work in provable facts and China hid the initial infections for over a month, even though they studied all the data and said it’s the most likely theory, they said they had “low confidence” in that assessment, because you can’t go back into the past and investigate things that are now covered up. Many if not most virologists who specialize in coronaviruses extensively now say that coronavirus jumping from an animal to a human with the highly-contagious specific modifications it had for binding to the specific receptor say it’s highly unlikely that it occured naturally in the wild. We (including American and other western scientists) went searching in caves and forests for many months for any mammals that had a previous version of the specific mutation that led to COVID-19 before it jumped to humans. No animal coronavirus with that precursor mutation has ever been found.
We now know that at least 3 people who were working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology where gain-of-function research was being done (in a level 2 lab – only medium security, if I recall correctly - think gloves, masks, change of outfit… no serious sanitization) were hospitalized for COVID symptoms a month before the first infected masses started showing up to hospitals with covid symptoms. The 3 scientists tested negative for everything they tested them for.
But the majority of people will still tell you it was caused by a wet market infected animal, and if you bring up the evidence and official opinion that it was a lab leak they will fight you on it and make up excuses.
Whether it’s a case of political bias, or self-censorship for fear of repercussions of subscriber numbers, or a message came from the top of the networks, it was a very effective campaign of propaganda. Even though it would be beneficial for the “China is incompetent, and dangerous, and we need to spend as much as we can to protect ourselves from them” narrative the DoD has been pushing (true as it may (or may not, I’m not an expert in geopolitics) - the majority of major news networks decided to brush it under the rug.
Also consider that you’re arguing from high grounds.
While we will read/hear/agree majorly about the true origin of COVID eventually, in places like Russia there’s no open discourse ever or discussing sensitive topics is dangerous and almost only happens between closely related people behind closed doors. There is almost no development of public opinion beyond closed online discussions outside of echo chambers.
If the USSR would still exist, russians & east germans would still believe that AIDS/HIV was manufactured by the USA although even the worst critcis of the US have agreed on proof, that it must have developed outside of labs.
Links out of order but are the sources. I’m short on time right now. You’ll notice the US IC still thinks it was not a lab leak, while the FBI and DoE think it is from their research, but China won’t cooperate in the investigation of the source of COVID-19 so that makes things hard… Biden is attempting to get the IC to declassify and release their info about the origins. Right after the reports from DoE and FBI, China released data showing it appeared to come from wet markets again. I’m happy to be proven wrong but my understanding from people discussing the experts is that the lab leak theory is most likely. The article about the toxic debate is full of info and I believe newest iirc.
Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here
In your linked WHO report:
Assessment of likelihood In view of the above, a laboratory origin of the pandemic was considered to be extremely unlikely.
In your FBI article which blames China lab with no evidence:
Many scientists point out there is no evidence that it leaked from a lab. And other US government agencies have drawn differing conclusions to the FBI’s.
Why did you even link a news article citing Energy Dept. making the accusation with, by their own words, “low confidence”?
I’m happy to be proven wrong but my understanding from people discussing the experts is that the lab leak theory is most likely
Your own evidence argues against your point. Your understanding is wrong. Scientists will ofc hedge and say the probability it was an accidental release from the Wuhan lab is ‘not zero’, but this is what being precise with language and honest looks like. It does not mean they believe it is actually what happened or that it is even likely. There is no actual evidence to suggest it was an accidental release, and even less that it was engineered.
Biologists know that as the population of the planet increases so too will the occurrence of pandemics. Just look at the last century or so: Spanish flu, Hong Kong Flu, Bird Flu, Aids, Bubonic Plague. Look earlier than the 1700s and you get 1 pandemic a century at most.
;tldr get used to it and stop believing conspiracy theories on something that is going to be a regular occurrence.
Kill and torture citicens, force remaining people to join your dictatorship, draft them and give them military training and guns. What could possibly go wrong with that plan?
That's the epitome of peaceful operations right there... Take over people's land, make fake elections to say that the people want you there, then force them to renounce their citizenship to you in order to get healthcare.
Hey Putin, you know if those people wanted to Russian, you wouldn't have to force them to be!
Snapchat and Instagram are in a traffic jam for third place, with the ephemeral messaging app used by 60% of respondents and opened every day by 58%.
Interesting. When I was in high school 6 years ago everybody had snapchat, and most people had instagram. And I mean everybody. Everybody I knew had me as a friend on snapchat and your clique was whose snapchat group chat you were in.
@bermuda When Snapchat was popular, I had a shitty phone that I could not even upgrade WhatsApp on. This lasted for a few months to a year. Insta was already quite popular beforehand, but since I had no smartphone, I got late to the game. So my account was inactive for quite a bunch of time. Later I got in college and got a Huawei P8 Lite, and I used it for a while, with my friends, but more for the camera effects. We weren't really chatting there. But there were more people posting stories there indeed. Now almost everyone is on Instagram.
I mean, TikTok is comparable to YouTube Shorts rather than regular YouTube. I think that YouTube is useful, but don’t like TikTok or YouTube Shorts, the model where the service has a recommendation engine and just chooses a collection of short clips of videos to constantly feed you, one after the other. Apparently there are people who do like it, but…
I personally find them both useful. Well, Tiktok specifically not youtube shorts.
My thing with tiktok is that their content recommendation algorithm is best-in-class at knowing what sort of content I want, and it starts edging away from what I want, just marking stuff as “not interested” a few times will bring it back in line. By modulating my behaviours on certain types of content (i.e. making choices over whether to watch or skip, mark as “not interested”, view comments, comment myself), I can customize an algorithmic feed that delivers what I want.
Granted this is quite an amount of work to use a “social media app”, unlike the other platforms, it’s possible and it’s good.
Youtube (long-form) I think is extremely useful when I’m looking for something in-particular, especially if it’s something that doesn’t age very much. Guides and tutorials, let’s plays, retrospectives, etc. They both fit better with the long-form content, and are much easier to find on Youtube than Tiktok.
The content recommendation algorithm of Tiktok is what makes me use it, while the discovery of specific content and access to longer form content is what makes me use Youtube.
I find YouTube unfortunately to be the best at grabbing my attention
They’ve cracked the code with their UX to make it as addictive as humanly possible
Open YouTube to watch a long form video, get shown about 5 shorts per one video and inevitably end up seeing something interesting in a short, then end up scrolling for way too long on your very own skinner box
Yeah, it’s happened to me a couple times and I hate it so much when I finally wrest myself out, on top of the anti-adblock shit, that I’ve basically stopped browsing YT altogether. If I get a link I’ll watch a video but the quality of the experience has dropped so drastically since the early days. I actually lament the fact that because of how the algorithms are tuned, it is impossible to get to the weird part of YouTube organically - You have to already know about the weird shit in order to see it.
Not 100% related, but Chrome is crashing my computer. Started happening like a month ago, I would be dinking around on the net and everything would suddenly become unresponsive, can’t even open task manager, have to power cycle. This would happen anywhere between three days or thirty minutes apart. Nothing shows up in the event viewer before any of the crashes, all the hardware I can test comes back clean. I have a friend who said he was having the same issue, he switched to Firefox, hasn’t had it since. I’ve had a week of uptime now since I did the same. I’m beginning to think Alphabet just makes bad products now.
To paraphrase Angus Young: "I'm tired of people saying that we put out 11 albums that are exactly the same. We've put out 12 albums that are exactly the same."
Although I think that was a while. I think they've released a few more versions of their first album since then.
“We’ve been accused of making the same album over and over 12 times,” guitarist Angus Young once said. “The truth is, we’ve made the same album over and over 15 times.”
Email hosting is hard for two reasons. The first is that there are too many parts to configure - MTA, MDA, DKIM, RDNS, spam filter, webmail, etc. The viable solution is to use a turnkey solution like mailinabox, mailcow or mailu.
The second problem is deliverability. At the minimum, you will have to ‘warm up’ the server. You will have to send a few dozen mails to others and ask them to mark as not-spam. Even then, a lot of other factors come into play - like the IP address block (for example, mails from AWS always gets blocked), domain name and even the top-level domain - they all influence the spam filter score.
Meanwhile, deliverability with Google and Microsoft (incl google workspace and ms 365) are lost causes. Google sends your mail to the spam folder irrespective of your spamassasin score. They provide no viable solution to this. MS on the other hand just drops mail silently. This isn’t a bug. Both of them are trying to destroy the federated nature of email and consolidate all email business to themselves.
Meanwhile, the big players like fastmail and migadu get better treatment. Especially, migadu is a good choice if you want unlimited aliases.
Finally, talking about aliases. Most services (except migadu) offer only a few aliases. That limitation is not there for selfhosted email. An alternative to aliases is to use + addresses (eg: [email protected]). The advantage of this method is that you can make up multiple addresses on the fly (without registering) using a single alias/address. You can use this in combination with a filter like sieve (server-side) or notmuch (client-side) to sort and filter incoming mail.
@tesseract Yea, I was thinking about using aliases and alias providers as a middle-man to send&receive emails to&from providers that are known to be hard to tackle for people self-hosting their email. I understood from the article I linked that setting up an email server and maintaining it is a hassle itself, but I was wondering whether doing what I said above does make things easier for me or if it would be an extra burden.
@lemann Thank you! Yea, many of my contact's emails are probably on Yahoo instead, so it's not that much of a biggie. I know nobody using Tuta or Proton or whatever. And probably they no longer care since most people use their emails only for logging in to websites that don't support SSO with social networks/Google and just outright create a new email if they forget their password to that. But hey, less data for Google is still less data for Google.
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