Why Facebook is Electronic Cancer

many people work for the gov and they like to be consumers, they don’t care if facebook collects information. only rebels can get problem if they use facebook, but as I see even militant Muslims and anarchists are using facebook. maybe because many of them do public actions and they don’t care. such groups are infiltrated outside of virtual world in any case. many anarchists also don’t have problem with going to the prison, they know they are observed, they will attack in any case, they don’t escape from repression. not all of us equally care about: freedom and cops.

but it is good to rise up awareness about facebook and prism and many other tools for building totalitarian capitalism. zuckerberg could make millions without cia/nsa, but to become a billionaire, he had to collaborate with the government’s agencies.

even tor developers can sell themselves for money and create tools for secure communication for some sold Arabs who work for the cia and made cia revolutions in the arab spring, to subordinate Arab oil countries to American billionaires. now they will subordinate europe to american billionaires, the oil price war is not only war against russia, the cia destroys the value of many non-american oil companies and they will buy them for 5 times smaller money and later they can make the oil price high again and they get rich. that’s something the cia learned from the former communists who became new capitalists: destroy company, buy it for small money and make it successful again. that’s what Americans do now with oil companies. and the whole capitalism depends from transport of products, i.e. from the oil, who controls all oil companies, he controls the whole world. I am sure now American billionaires buy shares of oil companies, many companies lost the value they had before 2 years.

facebook is just one tools in building totalitarian capitalism. there are many others. and prism-break is not guarantee that it is free from the NSA, in-q-tel invest money in silicon valley and together they produce opensource software and hardware that is good for the nsa.

Happy Greetings All, and thank you for the forum, and for the wonders of Whonix itself. This major change from vanilla Linux to Tor, Tails, Whonix, Qubes is a new trend for me, so please excuse inevitable peaks in my ignorance on this subject.

As much as one may want to avoid facebook at all times, there may be a reason why one would want to persist with logging in occasionally, even after reading the Washington Post article on the 98 points. Genuine friendships, as if there were any other kind …

Given that any brief and seemingly innocuous posts are made entirely on another user’s ‘Timeline’, without any new personal details being published, and if a specialised, generic AppVM clone is used solely for the facebook session, (in Qubes - security by compartmentalisation), I foresee no great threat to security, based on what little I have learned about it over the past week.

Can anybody assist me to understand why making my usual scheduled Sunday visit to maintain contact with a good friend, from a dedicated Firefox ESR AppVM in Qubes, (without Whonix/Tor IP obfuscation because I must log in anyway), could cause any ongoing system mayhem on Monday morning?

Thank you for reading and apologies for unfamiliarity with the atmosphere here at this time. I hope I have not broken any rules yet.

Note, I realise that my IP address and time of login, and posts made and
received, will be logged by omniscient state actors, but it is nothing they
don’t know already, in fact they just might miss me if I skip it this week???

Hi Damien

I think this thread is more about Facebook tracking your on-site activity and as torjunkie stated is “incompatible with privacy and anonymity” and less about security from attackers and using Qubes/compartmentalization to mitigate spread of malicious code to other VMs or dom0.

Thank you 0brand. I am glad I asked just to be sure, and for want of any dramatic warnings in your reply, I shall trust that facebook ise unlikely to have found some way to compromise dom0 if it is accessed from a dedicated AppVM with no other use. As long as I have not overlooked something obvious. Cheers!

Hi Damien

Facebook earns billions of dollars by tracking our every move on the internet. This money comes from the sale of your activities to anyone who has the money to pay. Even if Facebook isn’t uploading malware onto your computer there are “3rd Party” organizations (CIA,NSA etc.) that can and have shown that they most certainly will use date collected by Facebook to compromise or de-anonymize you, I, or anyone else when It tickles there fancy. Since you’re a Whonix users I take it you care about your privacy. Does hearing all of this not anger you?? Now I understand you want to keep you machine malware free but your missing the entire point of this thead. Facebook is a threat not just to privacy and anonymity but to security as well because the data they collect for marketing purposes is also data that the intelligence community can use to do their dirty work. Something to think about when you’re making your regular “Sunday visit to maintain close contact with a good friend”

Particularly when there are social network alternatives avaiable (see the wiki Damien).

Basically, Facebook is lazy, herd behaviour. Protecting anonymity and privacy takes effort and so the herd shuffles to the lowest common denominator - “free services” that digitally rape anyone who gets involved.

They are NOT a social media network. That’s just the shiny facade. They are a DATA AGGREGATOR, and all the revenue (80-90% related to advertising, trading of data sets etc) come directly from profiling. No more, no less.

Correction: actually that’s not all, they are also a censorship body that keeps Facebook users in their little media bubble that adheres to government narratives - witness their efforts to combat “Fake News” in recent times, along with their major partner in crime - Google.

“Fake News” in this context is any content not spewed out by concentrated media monopoly mouthpieces.

Yes indeed T.J. it certainly is sad that we are forced to live in an overpopulated world infested with billions of crafty, evil bastards, who love to screw us over any way they can think of, isn’t it? When I was young I never would have believed it myself, y’know ?

When I was young, I did not understand how damn stupid and lazy the majority of our seven billion brothers and sisters actually were either. You may suffer from anger when you think of the data-mining that facebook et al. are inflicting upon innocent, ignorant dunderheads typing away with their long fingernails on tiny virtual keyboards on the screens of their iphones, but to me that is not a cause, but a symptom.

The cause is that commercial entities have effectively monopolised the core strength of Sir Berners-Lee’s invention - a web of information for the whole World to contribute to and benefit from. Whether people’s innate average stupidity is the ultimate cause, and Gates and Zuckerberg are simply carpet-bagging the natural state of the collective conscience is debatable, but I have been quietly angry to see the way that humankind has abused the wonder of the world-wide web since XP was released; I never had very high expectations of facebook to begin with.

Originally, I ‘used’ facebook to attempt to locate a friend of mine who was transferred by his command to another country with a different ISD code and unknown phone number and never succeeded in that. What alternatives do you know of which can serve as a global phone book for finding lost friends? What alternative has more members and therefore more chance of locating someone?

I was soon befriended by various others at random and social media ensued. The most valuable social media IMO being the communication across different languages of which neither party knows both, using the google translate to interpret what each other one writes. I think that the importance of that level of multilingual communication is greater than politics alone.

Please provide me with the link to an alternative social media forum with an equivalent number of established members and access to translations for non-English speaking commentators and I will pass the link on to my friends next Sunday afternoon and see if they like me enough to emigrate to something else for no reason they personally give a flying fuck about, so that they can commence learning a new system and be apart from all their other friends already on facebook who speak their native tongue. It better have snazzy graphics or I can assure you there will be no takers. Thank you.

Its easy to turn this thread into an elitist circle jerk. Elitism and alienation of the crowd is the biggest enemy of anonymity and privacy that need a lot of people using them to be effective.

We must reach out to users and make their UX as smooth as possible if we hope for inceased adoption. Most people don’t use software because they find it difficult. A user experience study discovered that even for Tor Browser (which is super easy to use by our standards) there was difficulty for a group of regular people.

If a private Facebook alternative that was just as easy to use showed up tomorrow, many people would join. There are some Libre software projects that hope to do just that like Secushare. What have you done to help them become a viable alternative? Did you give them donations? Did you try submitting code or review their code?

The world needs more constructors not critics.

Hello HulaHoop. Thanks for such a quick reply. I am not usually this free with my time on a Monday and I wouldn’t usually check on forums that run at this pace until after a nice sleep and a new sunrise.

The alienation (driven by elitism?) seems to be mostly limited to the less yearful demographics across this Western world in my experience. We probably mostly grow out of it as we age, so don’t worry. If you can explain the success of facebook any better way than I did then I would welcome it most definitely. I just use my grand father’s understanding of the peculiarities of modern life in accepting his explanation that ninety percent of this world’s population are not too bright and far too lazy, present company excluded.

One of the most predictable ourtcomes of popularity of any thing in particular is that if the fad becomes a trend becomes the norm’, then the steamrollers of government will eventually start ‘shaping’ it until it becomes a 2-D facade of the trend it was once hoping to become when it was young. It happened with the computer industry and it happened with the security industry and now it will happen to the computer security industry, so as much as I value individual liberty and privacy and as much as I have tried to convert my dear Mother over to the Linux desktop and failed, it seems clear to me that the bad actors will cotton on to how things work well before the good ones ever will, so whilst in agreement with you regarding the will to spread the security across the population, HulaHoop, let me also warn you to be careful what you wish for, because there is every chance that one day in the future when you have nothing much else to do with your afternoon than sit and think, you will look back in time to the way that things were back in 2018 and wish you could go back to that time, so long ago … (in the future I mean ;-).

We do reach out to users in manifold ways, sometimes just by example if the chasm of computer literacy is too wide to bridge with the help of google translate. Note that when when you write in one language, and rely on the receiver to use their translation service to interpret your writing, it is not wise to write highly-technical information which you have learned from experience will be unlikely to be correctly translated into another language.

I did indeed build an alternative forum to facebook.
It is very easy to create the same user platform as facebook uses.
Nobody joined.
It is very difficult to to create the same user base as facebook has.
It is also very sad to spend a whole day building a new forum and then a whole week sitting around waiting for nobody but spammers to show up.

As stupid as my friends might be, they have their good points, and I am still dismayed at the thought of having to let my facebook friends get lost because last NYE I stopped posting on facebook. They won’t change their habits, and so I have been forced to compromise my politics for the sakes of my friends who do not even speak the same language as I do. All in all, I consider myself to be destined to failure should I ever put my IT security politics before my friends, and I am pleased.

I hope that when I have finished learning about Qubes and find something specific to Whonix and not related to anything else at all (except facebook of course), to post about, then I may be somewhat more constructive in my posts about Whonix, but for now, Whonix is running on autopilot while I learn about Qubes, so facebook is likely our only common interest at this stage. I have already been reprimanded by some authoritarian who lerks around here about being too Qubes oriented, and I confess it is a major crime in the Qubes-Whonix subforum to mention any AppVM which does not house Whonix.

I too think that this whole world needs more constructors than critics, but I am not having much luck in finding any here yet, am I?

Let’s hope I can have some problems with Whonix this week so that I will have something to post here that you lot approve of.

This smells like trolling, but I’ll bite because it raises some interesting discussion points.

1. I didn’t say the billions of proles are crafty, evil bastards. Most people are doing their best to survive, raise a family, stay off the streets etc.

However, when it comes to the management of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other large tech companies, then yes, they typically are crafty, evil bastards, since they claim an individual’s private data as their own, and heavily monetize it, with no opt-out provisions available. In their own lives - Mark Zuckerberg is a classic example - they insist on strict privacy, showing their utter hypocrisy.

2. The principle is this - my data, my thoughts, my emails, my photos, my documents etc belong to ME by default, unless I choose to share them explicitly in the public domain. No government law or tech company Terms of Service can unilaterally dispense with my privacy rights, and in that sense the current laws are illegitimate and I will do my damnest to thwart their efforts until I breathe my last.

3. This situation could have easily have been headed off in the early days with stiff regulation, backed by the threat of huge fines, and criminal sanctions for the worst offenders. Instead, we have complicit governments who have a serious surveillance hard on allowing it, because privately stored data complements their “collect it all” methodology i.e. allowing anyone to be targeted based on the electronic trails left everywhere when conducting any form of online activity.

So, the Fuckerbergs of this world get rich, the police state is strengthened, civil discourse is curtailed, propaganda is trumpeted, parallel construction is enabled, everyone stands naked in the face of unaccountable power, and the systems in place are used to target undesirables of various persuasions - 99% of which have nothing to do with terrorism or serious crimes.

4. The “herd” is an enabler of this system, because fully 1/4 of the world’s population has backed it in Facebook’s case. That said, 3/4 of the population has not, and surveys show strong resistance to government and corporate snooping across the board.

5. This issue isn’t really about “stupidity”. Psychological research shows people have a heavy need to feel connections with others, and in the Internet age, social media has replaced traditional means of fulfilling this sense of purpose. Loneliness is on the rise, more people live in single person households, people are more disconnected than ever, and Facebook and their ilk is obviously meeting an unmet psychological need in this climate (ironically research shows that heavy Facebook users can have greater feelings of loneliness, despair etc.).

6. Yes, 2 billion users on Facebook - certainly a good chance of locating some long lost friend, fling or other. That doesn’t mean that when/if they’re discovered, you need to allow some yankee third party to know everything about your connection with them going forward.

7. Real friends stay in touch regardless of whether it is face-face, mail, email, instant messaging, phone or other comms. “Glitzy graphics” isn’t the foundation, nor maintainer of a true relationship. There are numerous reliable and reasonably secure platforms available for maintaining a real connection without resorting to feeding the Fraudbook beast ad infinitum.

8. Research also shows the 100s or 1000s of “friends” that Facebook users have are anything but. Like in real life, you could cut out 995/1000, and you’d be left with a core inner circle of people that actually care whether you died tomorrow.

9. The laziness aspect is summed up by thinking like this - “But all my friends are on Facebook!”. Well, if your friends trust handsets (I don’t), what about Signal, Whisper and the like? If they know what they’re doing how about Retroshare, Ricochet IM or Tox? This will already significantly increase their defenses against passive surveillance by several orders of magnitude, while enabling chat, video, voice, pics, group chats etc.

10. Facebook is a bit like that song by REM - “Shiny Happy People”. It’s less about connections than projecting a false persona about how wonderful everyone’s life is, how delectable their salmon dinner was, how great their kids are doing at school, and other meaningless bullshit and exaggerations to impress strangers. It’s like that old adage - “We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.” In Facebook’s case - “We post things we needn’t, with friends we don’t have, to impress strangers we don’t like”.

11. You say you met interesting people there, from different cultures / backgrounds etc - like those you meet in any specific forum, IRC or mailing list across millions of websites that aren’t Facebook & which allow anonymous handles and use of Tor? Those ones?

12. It’s not my job to give you alternatives. It’s your job, if you care about privacy / anonymity, to actually search the wiki and conduct the relevant Internet searches. The information is already there, that’s why I mentioned it.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, if your “friends” won’t spend whole minutes of their lives to install apps/programs that allow reasonably secure and private communications - nor respect your decision to insist upon it to maintain a relationship - then guess what, they’re not your friends.

Its painfully obvious that you came here to incite. Sorry I’m not going to bite. However I would like to refresh your memory .

If you were to upload a picture of a big juicy steak on a vegan forum, along with instructions on how to prepare said tasty morsel, how do you think you would be received? This forum is about learning and educating others so they have a fighting chance against those who would take are freedoms from us. If you want to contribute to this community in a meaningful way, you will be met with open arms. If you want to post content that is contrary to what many of us believe in, you can expect to get a stark reply. And the thing is, if you want to continue doing that, no one will try to stop you. You see, freedom of speech is also something that we (as a community) also believe in.

Thank you for taking the time to write such a comprehensive reply.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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).

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. True. How is this relevant?

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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?

12. 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.

Thanks for the reply - I note your comments, without (much additional) comment.

For the record re: possible trolling. When I see this:

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?

&

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.

= “Concern Trolling” Exhibit A.

Concern troll - RationalWiki

A concern troll visits sites of an opposing ideology and offers advice on how they could “improve” things, either in their tactical use of rhetoric, site rules, or with more philosophical consistency. The “improvements” are almost exclusively intended to be less effective.

[…]

One common tactic of concern trolls is the “a plague on both your houses” approach, where the concern troll tries to convince people that both sides of the ideological divide are just as bad as each other, and so no one can think themselves “correct” but must engage in endless hedging and caveats. This preys on a willingness to debate critics and allow dissent; everyone wastes time discussing the matter and bending over backwards, so as not to appear intolerant of disagreement, all to the great amusement of the troll.

Sometimes outsiders will come by and make concern troll-like statements sincerely. Some are sincere but stupid. Some may be insightful, and justified iconoclasts, merely making valid observations unwelcome to the dominant ideology or culture of the forum (the Cassandra syndrome[note 1]). Often, of course, the person is misguided, wrong, and not intending to troll. However, an unsolicited tone argument is, in practical terms, not really any different.

Best of luck with Facebook. Say hello to Mark for me.

I wish I could pass on your sentiments but I do not think that my old mate Markie-Boy would appreciate my mention of good tidings from someone using your moniker. It is more the ‘Tor’ part than the ‘Junkie’ suffix.

T.J., (and I hope that you don’t mind my abbreviating your pseudonym to quite a common and classic kind of thing which is meant to make you look cool for the yanks, considering is not your real name in any case), I get a feeling however illogical it might be that you have now concluded that I am not here to troll this forum, and I am not all that ‘concerned’ about whether you do or not, quite frankly. The more I understand the benefit of Whonix and Tor for those of us blessed with dynamic IP addresses, the less important it is for me to bother with it.

Thank you for not insulting me this time, for I take the main text of your post as an explanation as to why you mislabelled me as some kind of troll, when I have no reason to and only want to participate in the forum which pertains to an important component in my 2018 OS.

I have no more to contribute here right now except for one postscript to my other thread in the Qubes-Whonix subforum if it is still alive, In time, I am sure I will encounter questions about Whonix which I hope to be able to ask here, and when that time comes, I hope that we can consider each other partly-trustworthy friends of a sort, because I swear honestly that I just want to move to a more secure operating system and I only want to bring good to this Whonix forum, for the sake of my new 2018 Qubes system of which Whonix is a neccessary part of which I have as yet very little understanding.

I am going to need some help with Whonix one day. Let us leave the politics behind and concentrate on technical discussions. That would be more beneficial and I hope that we can get over the personal bullshit. I came here and joined for one reason, and I promise you it was not to try to troll some forum that I only just found.

I want to be friends.

Thank you for your fast reply before I logged out and I hope that we can be reasonable towards each other next time we cross paths whenever that may be. Good Luck Mr TorJunkie. .

Heavens! About time.

From a look at your posts I conclude that its not Facebook that’s electronic cancer but your posts. Reading them causes cancer and IQ drops like that of dementia.

You’re certainly not a ‘concern troll’ are you?

Disparaging long-term, hard-working Whonix devs will get you nowhere fast.

Sorry TJ, I did not realise you two were an item. I wish you both a happy whonix together in the future.

welcome to infowars…