Spyke

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Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump

My problem with preppers is the over estimating on whether they’ll be in a position that these skills will have any effect, and the under valuing on steps we could just take to not have this future in the first place.

Like, you’ll need a farm right off the bat, or your first steps in any guider are how to violently take somebody else’s land. Followed by step two, keeping that land from other humans who don’t want to die.

Instead of prepping, become nomadic scroungers or live in a fricking farming commune in the first place. Basically descend a couple levels of societal development and you’ll already be self sufficient and ready. Like the Amish.

Or, you know, voting for politicians who listen to scientists.

Anything beyond being self sufficient for a month is overkill in my opinion.

privacy

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Is Signal safe and still private on an IPhone?

Theoretically: fuck no. Private operating system, not open source code, installation source is Apple itself, Apple helps law enforcement, Prism scooped up all unencrypted data.

Practically: signal wouldn’t keep developing an iOS app if there was hard evidence Apple couldn’t be trusted, Apple gives plenty of options for your data to not be collected in plain text and given to law enforcement (turn off iCloud backups, turn off biometrics, lockdown mode, advanced data protection) but not default because they’re trying to balance being a luxury product with compliance, as a luxury product it’s used by rich people and rich people love their privacy (citation needed), Apple is the only practical choice if you don’t get a google pixel, FBI is always fighting them on allowing full phone encryption, they rolled out a contact encryption key verification feature for their own iMessage.

Signal explicitly doesn’t allow its files to be uploaded to iCloud. You practically will be fine using it on iOS. Unless you are in China which has its own iCloud/Apple servers, or the UK where Apple disabled advanced data protection.

Apple provides encryption for its customers, but not by default. All its encryption features hint to me that they would prefer not having anything to hand over to the hundreds of law enforcement agency’s around the planet, but don’t want to piss them off by making it default. This aligns with it being a hardware and service company, vs the advertising company Google.

Privacyguides has a page on steps you can take in your iPhone to harden it.

You are in a better situation than most. Make plans to get onto a graphene pixel. But if that wasn’t available then an iPhone is the next best choice.

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Is it better or worse for your vision to display text on your smart phone as small as possible?

PerlyWhirl (https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1cx9qe3/comment/l52ia12/)

Reading small font text has not been shown to cause damage to the eyes (although you may experience eye strain from prolonged accommodation). However, long-duration near work has been found repeatedly to be associated with a greater risk of developing myopia or nearsightedness: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-14377-1

I’m a visual psychophysicist. We often recommend that people take breaks when doing near-work. The 20-20-20 rule: look at something that is 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes.

news

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*Permanently Deleted*

It could literally have an x.509 signature from the Chinese government written in the DNA. What would Republicans have done about it? Nothing.

Lab Leak is bullshit, but the bigger problem was the reaction.