Sorry you’re getting downvoted to hell. You’re right. Sometimes people want everything to be a conspiracy or something aside from the simpler truth which is that voters just wanted somebody different.

Cenorship-resistant protocols like ActivityPub (Lemmy, Mastodon), Nostr, Tor, I2P, and freenet solve this.

That’s an awfully… interesting way of saying he lost his primary, which as an incumbent is not a particularly easy to do. Blame foreign money all you want, your voters voted for who they wanted. Primary voters are the most politically aware kind of voters, most people don’t vote, even fewer take the time to vote in primaries. Apparently those voters wanted somebody new.

Check the wikipedia article, pretty neutral and factual reporting on the history. TLDR he revealed the US committing war crimes, they went after him with everything they had including planning an assassination attempt (which they never went through with). They tried to apply US law internationally to somebody who wasn’t a US citizen and wasn’t in the US. The UN said his detainment was illegal and torture. He’s been on the run, in some embassy, or jail for over 10 years for activity other news organizations regularly and legally engage in (leaking classified documents). Various US military, intelligence, etc agency heads have testified to congress that they couldn’t find a single death related to the documents he leaked, he didn’t put anybody at risk, in fact, Wikileaks sent every leak to the US govt before leaking it asking them for notes on what to redact. The US refused to participate in that process.

He also revealed the DNC was trying to bury Bernie, which the DNC didn’t even deny, they had to let a bunch of their top people go and do a bunch of primary reforms as a result. That’s when liberals started hating Wikileaks, because the DNC emails helped get Trump elected. They say the “timing” of right before the election makes his leak partisan. But wouldn’t you want that information before you vote? It is the job of wikileaks, or any journalist, to maximize the impact of information they are revealing on corruption. It’s not Julian’s fault the DNC was corrupt AF, all they had to do to avoid that was… not be corrupt.

There were also some sex assault allegations against him, which I tend to believe have some veracity to them however the accusers explicitly did not want him charged, it was a ploy to get him to Sweden where he would be extradited to the US. He was never even charged, only “wanted to questioning” but somehow got an interpol notice for it. His lawyers offered over a dozen times for him to be interviewed but Sweden insisted on an “in-person” interview for some reason. Curious.

Oh, and he helped save Snowden’s life by getting him a flight out of China.

OpenShot went terribly for me. Cool idea but did not work. Ate hours and hours of editing by failing to export. I tried everything, even opening Github issues to figure out where the problem was. Systematically re-cut and edited and moved every clip. Still couldn’t get it to export even though everything worked flawlessly in editing and previewing. Tried switching to latest, alpha, whatever, none of them could export. Absolute nightmare. Do not recommend. Eventually had to re-do everything in kdenlive.

!boinc@sopuli.xyz flatpak also needs a flatpak maintainer! Your work would help people contribute their spare computational power to scientific research. If you are passionate about fighting cancer, mapping the galaxy, etc this is an awesome way to contribute to that effort in a very force multiplying way.

Bitcoin transactions happen at the “speed of light” (~27:00) REALITY CHECK: As Bitcoin has grown, transactions have become slow. It’s in fact why many people do not accept it for purchases anymore.

Bitcoin is the same speed it’s always been. Blocks happen every 10 minutes. The transaction is transmitted at the speed of light but final settlement requires a block. Pay a high fee? Get in on the next block. Want to save on fees? Maybe it takes a few blocks for your transaction to go through. If you use Bitcoin lightning (a scaling layer built on top of Bitcoin which moves transactions off-chain but secures them on-chain), transactions take under a second for pennies in fees. Fees are much, much lower than credit card, paypal, or other similar competitors. You could send a billion dollars in a single transaction and pay $1.50 on main chain, or you could send $5 on lightning and pay <1c in fees. Lightning has been around for 5 years now, it works, I use it regularly.

Bitcoin cannot be diluted (~27:25) REALITY CHECK: Bitcoin is always being diluted until it reaches its hard limit.

The supply of Bitcoin, 21 million coins, is known and has always been known. It can’t be diluted beyond that point.

Nobody controls the network (~28:25) REALITY CHECK: If someone were to own 50% or more of the network’s compute power, they could control the network.

Nobody owns 51% of the network. Even such an actor can’t print extra BTC or force money to move without the appropriate private key. The best they can do is temporarily delay transactions while burning north of a trillion dollars in energy and equipment doing so. Which is why nobody has ever done it.

Bitcoin’s hard limit is likely very dangerous for the network (~29:00): Once the hard limit is reached, it is unclear if people will keep pumping computing power at it. If the creation of new Bitcoin is no longer allowed, it is possible that transaction fees will need to be raised to compensate miners.

Given that fees have continued to increase with time, this seems like not a problem. It’s not “dangerous”, it’s part of the design. If hashrate drops, it drops, but given that fees and hashrate have continued to grow despite continually minting less coins, it’s not really a problem.

Bitcoin’s lack of rules allow for massive amounts of fraud and prevents effective taxation (~29:25): While the video paints a cute picture of financial freedom, the reality is that Bitcoin allows for fraud on a world scale and does not allow for sales tax because of the way that anyone can have a cryptocurrency wallet without disclosing their identity.

Anybody can have a cash wallet without disclosing their identity, yet they still pay taxes. Bitcoin’s rules prevent the kind of fraud where the value of your money is printed away via supply inflation of central banks or “currency restructuring” on the global scale by the the world bank. People pay taxes because they think it’s the right thing to do and/or because the government has guns and makes them. Either way, if you run a company, if you are providing goods and services, you have a place you can send somebody with a gun and enforce those rules. All the companies currently paying taxes would keep paying taxes if they used Bitcoin.

The solution is apps and protocols that put the privacy in the hands of the user, not the hands of another entity which must be “regulated” by legislative bodies that have been subject to regulatory capture. Decentralize and distribute power. Use P2P/decentralized platforms like lemmy, mastodon, nostr, freenet, etc.

Aah yes, the electronic intifada, such an excellent, neutral source for reporting.

Don’t disclose all their big donors

Peter Thiel is also one of the big donors.

Many orgs don’t disclose donors, particularly those working on human rights. Imagine you are a rich person in a dictatorship who wants to improve human rights in your country, do you want your name listed on the donor registry for Amnesty International? Probably not. Amnesty, btw, sponsors the freedom forum as well alongside the city of Oslo. So Either Amnesty is in on this 4D chess you’re seeing where the far right is somehow using human rights as a cover to… give us all more privacy or something, or maybe Amnesty did their due diligence and concluded that this org is worth working with.

The article states that “Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is listed as the lone staff member.”, yet their site lists over a dozen people. So that’s just a clearly factually inaccurate statement right there, makes me question the validity of the entire thing if they can’t get something that simple correct. https://hrf.org/about/team/

“Halvorssen is the scion of an oligarchic Venezuelan family closely linked to the political opposition that formed against recently deceased former President Hugo Chavez”

Hmm… I wonder if living under an autocrat might have made him care about human rights and free expression.

Believe it or not, people on the “far right” can care about human rights too, and can donate to human rights organizations, and that’s ok. I challenge you to find any major human rights or civil liberties organization that doesn’t have somebody “far right” or whom you otherwise disagree with strongly. Human rights is an issue that cuts across many different political ideologies. And these organizations can build tools and infrastructure to support human rights all around the globe, and do. We shouldn’t be cancelling organizations just because they got money from somebody we disagree with or even detest. What they actually do with that money should be what matters, something your accusations against this org are completely devoid of because they are actually doing good things. What they’re actually doing is advancing the cause of human rights globally.

It’s organized by the human rights foundation, which is an intl non-profit organization headquartered in New York. The freedom forum is not only hosted in but also donated to by the City of Oslo. It’s all about resisting dictators and autocracy. Ask wikipedia if you doubt

In a time of rising political instability and distrust of institutions, institutions will turn more and more to censorship and surveillance. We need decentralized, censorship resistant networks to fight back. #nostr is one such network, so is #tor, #freenet, #i2p, etc. And yes, #lemmy #mastodon and #activitypub too.

deleted by creator

I’d love to see more nuclear power generation. Nuclear power is the densest form of power on earth, it’s safer than even renewables and doesn’t have the huge e-waste or energy storage problems that come with it. It’s very, very safe even compared to windmills depending on where you draw the box. I have never met anybody who actually understands nuclear power safety or waste disposal who is against it. At best, they say “renewables are currently cheaper so let’s focus there” but they’re not like “Nuclear is bad”.

In the ground, very deep, forever, for not nearly as much money as you might think. It takes up very, very little space. It’s not green liquid that can spill, it’s pieces of glass.

There are many open source wiki softwares: zim, dokuwiki, etc.

Nostr is an open protocol. Plenty of questionable people have contributed to Linux, I still use the OS. Tor was made by an alleged rapist. I still use Tor. Open protocols are sometimes used or made by nasty people. Lemmy and email are “censorship proof”, they are both good protocols. Lemmy used to be 100% annoying tankies, but as it grew so did the diversity of the userbase. Nostr is going through the same thing.

You choose who you follow, so you choose who ends up in your feed. For the “public square” areas (trending tweets etc), relays set their own moderation policies just like lemmy, that feature is identical. Find a relay that suits your moderation preferences. Most nostr apps can automatically filter out anything related to crypto/nsfw/politics/other less popular topics and prompt you to do so. If something slips through you can easily click ban and move on.

Tips are a cool functionality. On one social network, content creators don’t have an opportunity to get paid for the content they post. On the other they do. Which one do you think will attract the most content creators? My bet is on the second. I like being able to send tips to people who write good posts. But it’s an optional feature, you don’t have to use it.

It’s done off-chain because on-chain would be expensive and slow. On-chain takes 10 min and $1.50-$15 in fees depending on the day. Lightning takes < 1 second for < 1 penny in fees.

Lightning transactions are secured by the base chain, so you’re not at risk of losing any funds. The transaction data is “off-chain” because there’s no reason for it to be “on-chain”.

As somebody who:

• Uses nostr (and prefers it)
• Uses AP via Lemmy & Mastodon (and likes it)
• Knows what AP and Nostr are and how they work and the pros/cons of the two network designs are

I also found this site confusing AF. It sounds cool and interesting, probably? I can’t tell lol. Is it a network bridge operating at the level of a relay? Is it an app you can use to connect and post/read to/from both networks at once? What the hell is it?

Is there a system that can get information to someone, maintaining anonymity for the sender the whole way through? Like having an open drop box where you’d be able to put whatever documents you want into it.

Yes many journalistic organizations have secure drop-boxes for this purpose. You have to either trust that their drop-box doesn’t record your IP address/other info OR use an anonymity system like Tor or I2P to make sure whatever they record doesn’t reveal your identity.

Banning porn nationwide is part of Project 2025’s plan. defeatproject2025.org