Mostly AFK

  • 7 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: October 16th, 2019

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  • I had a similar experience with ketamine. I accidentally did a line that was a little too long and k-holed for the first time. During the trip I convinced myself I went insane and that I would have had to live the rest of my life inside the mind of an insane person, with no chance to ever experience the outside world again. But I was ok with that, I was like “well, it happened. Nothing I can do about it. I just got to roll with it now” lol. Then I snapped out of it. Never touched ketamine that weekend again, but the following week I wanted to repeat the experience.

    Ketamine is not a psychedelic but a khole can make you experience stuff that maybe only DMT can. Illusion of timelessness, lack of physical dimensions, absence of linearity in time and space, it’s something I’ve only been able to experience during my first k-holes




  • Especially since they are aiming the service to improve sign-up reliability in countries that block telegram

    It’s mainly to offload the cost of sending verification codes via sms to users, which is one of the costs that Telegram wants to cut. As far as I remember, it amounts to, like, 7% of all their annual expenses (I will source this later). A couple of years ago they decided not to send sms verification codes when you sign in from a third-party app, and just send the code to active session. This sounds like recipe for moderation headaches and privacy disasters, but also good way to boost their premium metrics :)














  • Metadata is not a concern with family and close friends, which is what one should be using it with onl

    Unfortunately this is the real world and whatsapp is used by two billion people for all kind of stuff: work chats, meme chats, business-to-client chats, local chats, news chats, even public chats which invite links are posted on Instagram pages and Facebook groups. Of course the app being very popular and, in some countries, almost impossible to leave behind (“how could I ever stop to use whatsapp? I have all my contacts and chats there!”) makes a very fertile environment for spammers, scammers, stalkers, and all this kind of people whatsapp doesn’t want on its platform. Cause they are annoying and dangerous for tech-illiterate people and boomers. So yeah at the end of the day, in a platform that is already compromised at its roots, moderation have a reason to exist even if the chat app is encrypted because it helps to flag actually annoying or dangerous accounts, and of course it helps big corps to keep their image clean - they don’t want to be associated with spam or other shady stuff.

    Also: assuming even the dumbest of the users would come to the conclusion that if you use a red button labeled “report”, the message is going to be examined by some platform moderator to judge whether it is legitimate or not, why would you be so scared of a scenario where your chat partners have the ability to willingly send your plain text messages to WhatsApp/Facebook? If this is a possibility, isn’t your chat with this person compromised already in first place? As they can willingly do whatever they want with the unencrypted content they receive anyway


  • Hmm, honestly, I don’t understand what’s weird about it. Of course if you report a message, it will be sent in plaintext to some moderator which then will have to evaluate the report. How would reports work otherwise? Among all the things that make whatsapp a compromised platform (obfuscated closed source code, constant push to enable google/apple cloud backups, recurring vulnerabilities being discovered every other month, being owned by literally Facebook, metadata being collected and kept at the disposal of Facebook), this seems the least relevant to me. I mean, I didn’t expect their report system to work any differently. I definitely back your suggestion to move to Signal or some other alternative of course!