True, but they’ve certainly been doing it much longer than ten years. I’ll never forget this headline [0] that struck me as purely devilish, especially in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. Combine that with the knowledge that Trump has been anti-NATO since the 1980s [1]. Who knows how long Russia has been nudging him along. Who knows how many avenues they traverse? Take for example the letter to Senator Tom Cotton about Greenland [2]. What an embarrassment. I can only hope we are equally successful in our own PsyOps.
Yes, and it's successfully got to where his people are able to dismantle American infrastructure at scale, deliver IT systems to Russian hackers directly and coordinate death squads on the streets. I figure the primary reason we're not seeing 'little green men' in Minnesota, for instance, is that Russia cannot spare them. But the war here is arguably as important or MORE important to Russian war aims than the war in Ukraine.
Certainly more successful here than in Ukraine, for what that's worth. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion but they've certainly succeeded here a lot more than in Ukraine.
I was wondering the same thing about bio-tech years ago and never found one I trusted. Recently learned about “investment themes” offered by Charles Schwab, and I was actually impressed with their offerings and the ability to tailor your picks & percentages in a given “theme.”
You're welcome. I had to suffer a lot before I figured it out. My purpose in rewriting them was to remove the most common objection that they presuppose a Christian God.
In my experience a four day work week really gives space for work / life balance.
I worked that schedule last year and it gave me a great feeling of ownership over my free time. So much in contrast to these five day work weeks where I often think, “I wish I had just one more day off!”
I appreciate the final paragraphs which suggest a solid method for those inside the country and under this oppressive regime to remain connected without surveillance. I wonder how many are up to this, and what active resistance or movements inside the country look like these days.
Synapse sucks to run and it doesn't minimize metadata collection. It's not a great choice unless you're running it outside the country where they can't seize the server (but then you have all the problems of not being able to access it when the country is cut off from the rest of the world). It's a pig on resources which means it has to be run on hardware that can handle it, barely runs on SBC's.
Other stuff is weird in their post and suggests they are speaking for Iranians without actually knowing any online. I know a few from the Cellmapper community and SMS is very much not expensive. 1000 SMS costs around 0.03USD worst case: https://irancell.ir/en/p/3771/tariffs-and-voice-packages-en
Finally it's not really that Starlink uses proprietary encryption that's special. They can use any sort of common encryption standard and there's not much Iran can do but locate and seize the terminal since they don't have the keys to it. I imagine at some point they were start looking for signal emissions in known Starlink bands and use that to locate terminals. Allegedly Russia has a detection system 'Kalinka' already built: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/tech/russia-and-chin...
Does it, though? It doesn’t mention whether or not hosting your own encrypted messaging platform is illegal, what the repercussions are, or how to hide that you are doing so.
I found the whole article to be unfortunately light on both technical details and practical details, and certainly wouldn’t suggest that anyone use it as a guide.
I was wondering myself, if it isn't very dangerous to host those kinds of services in an opressive state such as Iran? Hosting a site on Iranian IPs certainly sounds easy to track and I'm sure a Starlink receiver also makes substential RF noise. Anyone has any information about how likely is the Iranian government is to shut down such a site/service? Also, doesn't encrypted traffic in general (like Matrix servers) fall into this category?
> I wonder how many are up to this, and what active resistance or movements inside the country look like these days.
Hard to find that out, as I can imagine outlets like HN are actively monitored as well - if an Iranian account would be like "hello I am in the resistance movement", they'd be painting a target on themselves.
But the US is heading this way too if I may put on my conspiracy thinking hat; "we" already knew, but the Snowden leaks confirmed that the NSA and co are inside all of the major internet companies, probably including Starlink.
When the shit hits the fan, it is us techy internet peoples' responsibility to ensure information continues to flow freely, be it through access to information (like these local portable wifi network devices that have a small internet full of knowledge like Wikipedia pages), communication (the Matrix servers mentioned in the article), and communication to the outside world.
On that note, what would be the next option if for example the US cut itself off of the global internet and Starlink? Ham radio / whispernet? I mean I'm pretty confident that at the moment there's just too much freedom still for an internet shutdown to be viable, but having the knowledge is important nevertheless.
ok conspiracy hat off. Disclaimer, I don't live in the US, but my grandparents did live through WW2, during which people had secret radios because the Nazis confiscated all of them to try and keep people uninformed. The radios were essential for the resistance movements, with public BBC broadcasts containing secret messages informing the reistance of e.g. sabotage supply drops. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance for a good starting point, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_during_World_War_II for the rest of Europe.
Parent comment is describing a solid green light (which is/was equivalent to flashing yellow). Never seen a green circle around a green arrow - lived in VA 20+ years
Samuel Pepys is mentioned quite often in Bill Bryson's book titled At Home. I had just read this paragraph yesterday:
> By chance, a Cambridge scholar, the Reverend George Neville, a master of Magdalene College, saw Macpherson's passing reference to Pepys's diaries and grew intrigued to know what else might be in them. Pepys after all had lived through momentous times - through the restoration of the monarchy, the last great plague epidemic, the Great Fire of London of 1666 - so their content was bound to be of interest. He commissioned a clever but penurious student named John Smith to see if he could crack the code and transcribe the diaries. The work took Smith three years. The result of course was the most celebrated diary in the English language. Had Pepys not had that cup of tea, Macpherson not mentioned it in a dull history, Neville been less curious, and young Smith less intelligent and dogged, the name Samuel Pepys would mean nothing to anyone but naval historians, and a very considerable part of what we know about how people lived in the second half of the seventeenth century would in fact be unknown. So it was a good thing that he had that cup of tea.
Your comment is especially relevant re this quote from the original article:
"Thus do we hear of Pepys’s plan to burn a compromising book so it won’t be found in his library, even though his library includes the diary in which he records the purchase and his plans to conceal it. It’s as if Pepys can’t suppress his compulsive candor."
Pepys wrote in a rare (Shelton) form of shorthand and then used code words as well, for further security. His writings were reasonably secure, in their time.
[0] https://www.rt.com/news/265399-putin-nato-europe-ukraine-ita...
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ilanbenmeir/that-time-t...
[2] https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/c2018djo