Thank you for taking the time to write such a comprehensive reply.
- No, you didn’t say it, nor did I write it. I don’t know what you mean by a ‘prole’ except that it maybe short for ‘proletariat’, (and I don’t think you know what you mean by a ‘troll’ either, but that’s another point to come - I couldn’t resist the pun). I wrote that there are more than one billion crafty, evil bastards in this world, and then there is what you refer to as ‘The Herd’. The ignorant masses whom I refered to as ‘stupid’ because they thoughtlessly follow the lemming in front of them. I am sorry if I offended you or HulaHoop with the dirty word ‘stupid’. I did not mean to imply that you, yourselves are stupid, mentally-challenged, or whatever other politically-correct term you prefer for intellectual laziness. Where I come from, ‘stupid’ is not a four letter word and it tends to relate more to behaviour than innate character. Stupid is more of a state than a trait.
Understand that there are many amongst The Herd who may not be as crafty (lucky?) as Gates or Zuckerberg, but their inner motives are just as evil as they fight to survive, indoctrinate their children, and invest in real estate to profit from the essential needs of the rest of humanity. It would be quite a task to try to calculate exactly how many of our species are good and how many are evil. Many have tried to use religion or politics to determine the answer, and failed. It is not exactly an objective term of reference.
It comes down to a guess at best, because we are all a mixture of both in our thoughts, if not so much in our actions OR OPPORTUNITIES FOR THOSE ACTIONS. My guess is that if everyone on the planet had the same luck as Zuckerberg, half of us would have done much the same as he did, because we all know who has The Bomb and the GPS coordinates of our cellphones to know precisely where to drop it we don’t toe the line. It is just that some are better at playing this game than others due to their nature and the nurturing of opportunity.
- Yes, in principle you own the copyright of every stroke that you type into your keyboard and every .jpg that comes out of your camera. This does not include text or graphics that you download though, and that possibly constitutes enough reason for government snoops to come a snooping and stomping all over the UDHR and any other unfortunate human right that hasn’t been articled as yet.
You see, in practice, a far as I have read in propaganda on news websites and seen on the propaganda known as ‘tv news’, governments own the right to read your texts and see your graphics with the pretense of checking to see if you have written, photographed, or downloaded anything that they can lock you up for. If you piss off anyone who works for The Government, and they know where you live, it doesn’t matter whether you have done anything illegal because they have ways of making you guilty, and who is the judge going to believe? The unknown criminal, I mean, the defendant, or the known honourable Government Officer? No government likes to be reminded that it is a hive of clandestine corruption by the vengeful elements in its own staff. It also looks bad on the resume if they keep harrassing innocent citizens, so it is important for the career to ensure that everyone they arrest is found guilty, even if they were not. Then they can keep their jobs and invest in more property to screw over more poor innocent would-be homeless souls.
Personally, I agree fully with your point 2 in principle, that we are human beings and we own our own thoughts, our own minds, and our storage media are an extension of our minds, and nobody else’s business. I wish I was still so ignorant as to be such an idealist as to believe that what we both agree SHOULD be actually is, but I do not believe it is in practice what it is in principle, so good LUKS with it, T.J., until you can form some global political movement and install some intelligent life in The White House at last.
- Indeed, governments, whether they are labelled as capitalist or socialist or somewhere in the middle, are all without exception friends of the wealthy the moment the revolution is over and seek to demonise the vulnerable for popularity among the fearful ignorant masses; The Herd. Whenever regulation, ie. governance by governments, happens, it is most often the least powerful who are targeted for further reduction of their liberties.
The situation could possibly have been headed off, but governments, by the diseconomies of scale, are innately … not stupid, as such, but they are slow learners. There is a difference over time. I advise you to become established in a new industry before it becomes popular and suffers the inevitable government regulation, and then when the time comes, you have a better chance of selling out to them body and soul as one of their paid ‘experts’. (Joke).
- It saddens me greatly to see facebook try to monopolise what I consider to be a wonderful invention for humankind, the world-wide web. I believe it was intended to be a platform for a smorgasbord of websites for us all to share information, (and kinship for what it’s worth), and not some kind of fast-food chain which facebook is trying to turn it into. It saddens me even more that this facebook ‘fad’ has affected not just billions of individuals, but now even government departments are migrating to facebook FFS! It was no election promise that I ever voted for, I assure you.
You mention that 3/4 of the population are not on facebook, and I don’t see that as a good thing necessarily, because the reason that 3/4 of the population are not on facebook is because their government blocks the site (good thing) or they can’t afford a smartphone to get online at all. Last I read, (and this was a few years ago), 3/4 of the population are not yet online, but word has it that a large proportion of African and South American nations’ peoples are adapting to the dreaded iPhone as they can afford one and as it becomes the community norm’. The Herd is growing, sorry to mention. Let us hope that they are a wiser collective than we were in deciding where to socialise on the web.
- Semantics. By ‘stupid’, I used a common, simple word that I thought best spans across the various dialects of English for the benefit of forum members who are reading a non-native language here. Whether it is stupid to be governed by your emotions rather than logic has always been debatable. There’s an old adage, “Don’t let your heart rule your head.”
You don’t like facebook and you don’t think that The Herd should use it. You think that others use facebook to their own detriment. Most people think that it is stupid to indulge in detrimental activities. I agree that it is stupid to use facebook without good reason. I can explain the reasons for this facebook fad because most of the population are not that concerned with thinking carefully about the behaviour of The Herd, and to facilitate that explanation I used the word ‘stupid’ and you seem to have jumped to facebook’s defense by writing that human beings are not ‘stupid’ to use facebook because some research by some unknown academic proves that intelligent people are driven by their need to ‘Like’ and get ‘Likes’ more than they are by the underlying reasons for your political philosophy. Are you suggesting that intelligent people do not understand you? Well T.J. I know just how that feels too. I figured you to be somewhat intelligent in the beginning.
- If I had succeeded in contacting my absent friend a couple of years ago, what makes you think that either he or I would be so stupid as to share personal details with some yankee third-party ass-wipe, to use your gentle words? In the military, it is not the standard rule to behave so frivolously. At least you agree that facebook happened to be a good chance of success, especially when his squadron have their own facebook page. Unfortunately in the process of searching, I was inundated with friend requests by a plethora of others, some with the prettiest of photos, and all in all I got along with a lot of people for a long time. It was hard to do the right thing and stop facebook when it meant losing so many friends. That is why I first posted in this thread.
Just so you understand, I made the decision to stop posting personal information on facebook as a new year’s resolution, and only then, with the extra hour of spare time in the early morning did I finally get around to testing the Tails USB-based Tor-browser OS, and studying that OS led me to Whonix, which led to Qubes and that is how I got here, so you can thank Fuckerberg for my presence here today. If it was not for facebook you would not have been so lucky to know me ;-). Then again, if not for facebook, I might have been here long ago.
- Yes, real friends would not let politics get in the way of their friendships without good reason. So, I have migrated to Qubes, and use a dedicated AppVM for facebook once a week when I check in with one friend, on their timeline, not mine, to ask how their week has been, and to let them know that I am still alive too. I no longer mention my own reality there in any detail. I just report on the rough details of the main endeavours already well known. It’s a game, but at least we are still in contact.
Hopefully, as time goes on, my friends will find the nous to move onto other social media platforms. I have already offered them an alternative with a forum I built, but there are disadvantages for them in that they would then have to ask all their favourite friends to join my forum, and if that happened, then my hosting company would complain about all the bandwidth and MySQL resources I’m using and triple my monthly costs, but that wouldn’t matter too much if it happened. The other problem was that I can’t seem to get phpBB to work on their iPhone, much as I tried. Yes, my website worked reasonably satisfactorily on my little phone, but others had problems with it, and I can’t be bothered redesigning what works very nicely on a laptop monitor to suit a damned smartphone. I hate those things because my fingers are too big to type fast on tiny, little virtual keyboards.
On the numerous alternative platforms, it comes back again to convincing others to change, to finding a translation service which is secure, (is Google translate safe to use still?), and it must work on an iPhone and be easy for them to adjust from the facebook layout to the new platform. Would you believe that I have even suggested corresponding by old-fashioned email?, but that idea is still apparently under consideration, and I don’t think it is wise to share email addresses on facebook if you don’t want to be drowned in spam from every part of the Globe. I have ways around it, but it seems they don’t, and there is no great hurry enough to take risks with hyperlinks.
Don’t try to tell me that I have bad friends. It is a serious insult, and I suggest you get that sort of idea out of your narrow little mind, T.J. You do not know me. You do not know any of my friends, and you have a pitiful imagination because of political bent against facebook. I understand your reasons to hate facebook, but I am not Mark Zuckerberg. I am not your enemy, so lay off my friends. If I did not care about them, then why would I have posted here in the first place?
These are not very computer-literate people, and it is not my place to dictate their politics to them. You make broad generalisations just like psychological research is based on broad generalisations where p>.05 and all that. It does not apply to every individual, and your dictates do not apply to my individual circumstances. I just wanted to check with some ‘experts’ on the security offered by keeping facebook in its own dedicated AppVM, but I suppose I chose the wrong place to ask. I do not use Whonix in that AppVM.
-
True. How is this relevant?
-
I don’t know what Google Play or Signal are, sorry. I do not suppose that my friends do either, but can’t be sure. Are you suggesting that Google Play and ‘Signal’ are not as bad as facebook? It is worth checking out then. I’ll remember to have a look at it sometime.
-
Yes, it is mostly quite a pretensive facade - a reflection of the superficiality of our social lives in general methinks. Life is also quite a mostly uneventful bore on a day-to-day basis for most of us, and people will tend to try to jazz things up to please the crowd. It’s courtesy.
-
Yes and no. Those whom I have met are not the same as those I might perhaps one day meet elsewhere. They are human beings, not statistics. This is not some cold-hearted psychological experiment to put people into arbitrary categories. It is like saying to you that your mother is not of any importance because there are billions of other mothers out there on the planet, so why don’t you get rid of her and find another one if she becomes troublesome?
-
No, it is not your job to find alternatives for me. I just wanted to enquire of the ‘experts’ what risks there might be in visiting facebook from a dedicated AppVM to stop facebook following me around the web.
Conclusion: What the hell have you been smoking? I think I am starting to get some idea now about who it might be that are not my friends, but I have faith that somehow we got off on the wrong foot, and things can only get better or not at all.
Lastly, you not only insulted me and my friends up there, but you called me a troll! I assume that you have been affected by trolls in the past, and so you have become trigger-happy because of your own history, because like Mandela once wrote, people are not born bad. You were changed by something to become so afraid of trolls that you now find yourself unable to stop yourself from casting spurious accusations at legitimate innocent victims.
I wish you well in overcoming your troll phobia and hope that maybe I can help if I ignore your insults and accusations and try to see the good side of this Whonix forum. It gets harder every day, but I am not ready to leave just yet.
I hope that we can learn to trust each other in the future, because what good would it do to discuss security with those we do not trust?
Happy Valentines Day, T.J.