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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Personally I tend to think that the Bengal famine is better compared to the Holodomor, as it is closer in time, area, and effect. If there is a lesson to these things though, I think it’s that it doesn’t matter what economic system you use of the people in charge are fans of eugenics, and that’s why it’s so important that there be strong independent checks on the government and politicians, minority representation, multi-party rule, etc…








  • Yes, you could technically use email like SMS, while the standard allows for up to five days for the message to go through that’s pretty rare, in practice it’s primarily used to send long messages from one computer to another, not a single sentence or two between phones.

    In practice, it is about as secure as SMS, as both require similar levels of dedicated effort to interpret. Most of the actors with the hardware used to intercept and decrypt SMS are the same actors who can compromise a server, or outright have acess to the backdoor they paid 10 million to put in RSA. Not that they need it, as the largest email providers by far do often work with law enforcement anyway. Both SMS and email attacks are seen at about the same rate and scales, which is to say rarely outside of government agencies where both are unfortunately routine.

    Signal is primarily designed and marketed to fufill the same basic role as SMS, as evident from just how much of an afterthought anything but the mobile app is, how said app copies the same format as SMS for messages, how it required an phone number to use and sync phone contacts, and how it did support SMS for quite some time. It is emently reasonable for Signal to have continued to have featured the messaging format most of the people it could talk with used.



  • SMS is also the common standard for talking to people.

    For the vast, vast majority of people, the technical security of, ‘hey, you want to catch a movie next saturday’, is far less important then the message actually getting through.

    Qute simply, it is far more important for a communication method to be easy and universal then to be secure against attacks the vast majority of people do not think they will ever encounter. When most people want to tell their neighbor two houses down that the dog has gotten out again being able use the app they already use to communicate is far more important to them then then a bunch of technical jargon about end to end encryption.