jadero

This sounds like just standard traffic analysis. Nothing to do with WhatsApp or any other messaging platform. It’s been in use since at least WWII.

Who is talking to whom? How often? Under what circumstances? How do patterns of communication correlate with events? Who are the hubs of communication (ie leaders)?

The big difference between then and now is that instead of needing rooms full of people drawing graphs by hand, there is software to handle it. In turn, that means it’s not really important to have initial suspects to get started, because the computers are quite happy to tease out interesting signals from total communications. That also increases the likelihood of false positives, but the kinds of people who do traffic analysis at this level aren’t usually the kinds of people who worry about a little collateral damage.

It seems like a pretty tall order to construct a system of communication that is useful for coordinating activities, affordable to operate, and secure against traffic analysis. At best, you’ll end up back in a situation where other intelligence will be required to identify a manageable pool of suspects.

I did not. I did only single-tie systems for mathematical purity. (Just kidding. I might have tried it if I had thought to!)

No problem! I was once at a place that imposed a mandatory necktie policy. I hate neckties, so I thought I’d at least have fun with it. I wore ties as silly and varied as I could get away with and tied them different every day. That book was a boon.

It seems to me that if you are going to include 4-in-hand, a traditional necktie knot, then you should include these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_85_Ways_to_Tie_a_Tie (at a minimum) and possibly reference this: https://phys.org/news/2014-02-mathematicians-ways.html (177,147 ways). 😀

I cannot know your experience and won’t pretend to.

Unless your objective is to be even more disliked and disrespected than you are now, being deliberately annoying will not get you far.

If you just want respect as a thinking, feeling human, you’re going to have to be respectful of other thinking, feeling humans, ignoring and blocking those who are too immature to have respect for others.

There are people out there who think that power is the source of respect. They are, of course, wrong. The only path to respect is through the elimination of power structures, so that respect can be mutually sought through understanding, not obedience.

I don’t like assholes, so I don’t seek them out. I try to give the assholes who engage with me the respectful engagement they crave but don’t deserve, then block the ones who stay assholes. If I feel surrounded by assholes, I disengage completely until I’ve figured out whether I’m actually the asshole or I’ve stumbled into a snakepit. (And everybody is sometimes an asshole. The secret is to not make it part of your identity or to assume that it’s part of theirs.)

Life is so much more pleasant when disagreements are respectful engagements with learning opportunities instead of just screaming matches.

Good luck on your journey.

Ingesting gasoline is deadly in far smaller doses due to something called hydrocarbon pneumonia. My dad very nearly died as a result of having a tiny amount get past his throat while siphoning gas to a small engine’s tank.

If you must siphon gas, go buy a cheap “pump siphon” from Canadian Tire.

Ingesting gasoline is deadly in far smaller doses due to something called hydrocarbon pneumonia. My dad very nearly died as a result of having a tiny amount get past his throat while siphoning gas to a small engine’s tank.

If you must siphon gas, go buy a cheap “pump siphon” from Canadian Tire.

Same with my dad. He said that the military liked red/green colour blindness for spotting camouflaged stuff.

At this late stage of my life, I think the future in non-union employment might be in some kind of collaborative enterprise. There is a local company made up of a plumber, an electrician, a couple of equipment operators, a bookkeeper, and an accountant. They were all independent businesses that decided to formalize their existing business relationships under the umbrella of a shared company name. They still take independent bookings, but all under the new company name. The bookkeeper already offered answering services, so that fits nicely.

If I were younger or interested in coming out of retirement, I’d try to throw in with them for networking, computer security, and automation.

I’m retired now. My experiences during 50 years of employment across a couple of dozen employers in several different fields is that employers, as a group, are heartless.

There are exceptions:

One of my first jobs was with an employer who taught me what he thought I needed to know, encouraged me to find my own ways to get the job done and didn’t reduce my pay or throw extra work at me when it turned out that I found ways to get the work done with less time and effort than he expected. This employer also hired a couple of young vandals to clean up the damage they caused, then kept them on as full time employees.

One of my last jobs was with an ambulance manufacturing company (Crestline Coach). The founders were making enough money to do things like fund the restoration of emergency vehicles with personal money and they shared the wealth with their employees. Every employee got the same financial reports as the owners. If an employee wanted to further their education, the owners helped with tuition and work schedules. At least twice that I know of, the owners helped employees start their own businesses. I don’t know what the place is like now, because the founders retired and the new owners drove me (and others) out.

No problem! If that’s as nasty as we ever get, then I’d say we’re doing pretty damn good!

We used to get at least some of them before the advertisers conned themselves (with the help of Google et al) into thinking that they had to know who we are instead of what our active interests are.

… it’ll likely only exist as an incredibly niche thing because not many people will hear about it…

Sounds like they need some ads! :)

There are actually such things as relevant ads. One of the paper magazines I used to subscribe to was “Small Craft Advisor”. In addition to the articles and editorial content, there were articles written by vendors about their products and traditional ads. Literally everything in that magazine was aimed at small boat owners and builders. No BMWs, no Rolexes, no shaving products, just very specific content and ads for those passionate about small boats.

When they switched to online only, enough subscribers reached out to them regarding the loss of vendor articles and ads that they now occasionally put out something to address that loss.

I don’t know where else I could learn about a new epoxy product or a new boat design so easily.

Within the context of the subject matter, that was a quick excerpt. And, in fact, the transcript from which that excerpt was extracted can probably be considered a relatively quick excerpt from the entire system.

Sometimes it is just not possible to simplify further or be more concise without just saying “trust me, it’s better than what we had up to now.” That is especially true when we have all learned, I hope, that “trust me, I saw it on the internet” is a really lousy way to make decisions.

They have similar legislation in other jurisdictions. Does anyone up to no good get to hide that fact? What about people who share a name and one person wants search results hidden and the other(s) don’t or even actively want to be searchable?

I used to be against this, but as time has gone on, and i’ve seen just how evil Google can be, i’ve become more and more in favor of it!

While I agree that Google is evil, don’t forget that they are a search engine. If Google doesn’t show the results, another search engine probably will.

Someone somewhere has to get it posted where people will see it. It might as well be the researcher.

Not your usual teaser, but still a teaser. “Look at all this techno-marketing. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. By then we’ll have some actual code to look at and toys to play with.”

In fairness, they are providing what looks like a decent overview of their underlying system (Rama) and how they used it to create their mastodon instance.

But I guess it worked :) I bookmarked their page and will check in from time to time. Maybe their toy (prototyping) system will be enough to run a personal instance…