This has a LED, is that ok?

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3423

“Breanna Olson, a mother of three, found out two and a half years ago she had ALS, the most common form of motor neurone disease (MND) and which, with no known cure, weakens muscles and over time affects speech, swallowing and breathing.”

Yikes. MND is what Stephen Hawking had.

Well start with a few not-that-private letters to check for evidence of their being opened. What happens with ordinary email by the way?

I think it’s hard, and even if there is something that works, its use can probably be detected somehow, and that could get your family in trouble.

Tbh I’d probably use snail mail letters for anything private on the theory that the RU govt doesn’t have the resources to open all the envelopes, and you can use special phrases for particularly private meanings. All that stuff like media attachments is asking for trouble. You could also send microSD cards by snail mail though that might attract attention.

Remember that Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan had no internet connectivity at all. If he wanted to send an email, he’d write it to a USB drive and have a guy on a motorcycle take it to a café 70 km away or something like that. Replies would be brought to him the same way. They still managed to find him and kill him in his bedroom.

Today with AI analysis of massive amounts of traffic logs, I’m sure signal ID is far easier than it was in 2011.

The 3 diseases:

The woman had a rare, life-threatening blood disorder, autoimmune haemolytic anaemia (AIHA), whereby rogue immune defences destroy red blood cells. … In addition to AIHA, the woman had two other autoimmune diseases. One, immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), is driven by immune cells destroying platelets, which raises the risk of bleeding. The other, known as antiphospholipid syndrome (APS), has an opposing effect and raises the risk of harmful blood clots. All three diseases were due to wayward B-cells which make infection-fighting antibodies.

Hmm ok, but it still sounds kind of sus. One of the insights of the Mixmaster era is that what really matters is the amount of message reordering you can do, and that’s why remailers typically had 24 hours or more of latency. So I’ve never believed in Tor (near real time). Even with a text chat network, more than a few seconds of latency will have a significant usability hit. And also, as mentioned, using the service at all probably makes you into one of the usual suspects.

The Guardian (newspaper) handles this in an interesting way, for 1-way communication from users to the Guardian itself. They have a news reader app used by millions of subscribers to access news articles and stuff. And if you want to send them a confidential news tip, the app has a feature where you can enter a text message for their editors. The news reading protocol includes some space for this type of message in every transaction, under a layer of encryption so that an eavesdropper can’t see if a message is present. Allowing user to user communication through such a scheme could easily lead to mayhem, but for sending stuff to an identified recipient (the Guardian) that has some establishment cred, it’s clever.

You’re trying to bypass an anti spam filter. If there was a consistent way to do that, spammers would exploit it til the vulnerability was mitigated.

I’ve been using fastmail and it works, but it’s on the expensive side, enough to be unattractive to spammers. So that’s one approach.

Wait you mean the chat users have to pay to send traffic through the mix pool? This sounds worse and worse. Is BitMessage still around?

I would say once you’re observed sending data into Tor or anything resembling it, you’re already compromised even if your correspondent hasn’t been uniquely identified. I can’t see getting excited about the app.

It costs money to run a node? That’s even worse. The people most willing to pay will be the ones up to no good.

Be pretty funny if there’s a legal challenge that goes to the SCOTUS. Last time I looked, 7 of the 9 justices were Catholic. It may be down to 6 now but it’s still a lot.

blockchain

Ok I still don’t know what this program does that’s interesting, but it sounds like another thing we don’t need.

Ontario, California (near Los Angeles), not Canada.

You want exactly what the scrape bots want, so it’s difficult.

Oh boy they were really good deals. I use one and have thought of getting another. I might get a carrier locked one super cheap since I only want it for local apps anyway.

Fair enough. Jump starters often have an override button so they’ll still operate when the car battery is at 0V, but IDK how it works.

Interesting. I don’t have a motorcycle battery around but I do have one of those lithium portable jump starters. I wonder if that could work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himachal_Pradesh

Northern India.

I’ve self hosted with icecast and it was ok but definitely DIY. Maybe there are more packaged approaches by now.

Lichess is great. TTT is more of a venue for following pro games, kind of an ESPN for chess. It’s also supposed to be good, but its purpose is different. Using Lichess as a gameplay backend lets them host online games without the effort of the somewhat evil chess dot com, or the unsuccessful Chess24. Seems like a win for TTT. I’m not so keen on Lichess doing something that commercial but we’ll see.

You can use Lichess online at lichess.org. It’s completely free, no ads, and no mobile app is needed. It’s the best fancy web UI I’ve ever seen by far.

Craigslist has worked fine for me in the past. Maybe there’s less there now but it hasn’t dried up yet.