I initially read that last sentence as “Hope his prostate collapses sooner than later.” and honestly couldn’t find a reason to disagree.

Sometimes their emotions have gone so far past reasonable that the first thing you need to do is bring them back to the point you can actually reason with them. After that, yes it’s really vital to take their emotions seriously, they need to understand them and trust that the people around them will take them seriously, but they also haven’t yet built the skills to moderate their own feelings, so sometimes you need to add those externally.

Oof, yeah I could see how that could happen. I guess you really should know the kid before trying something like that. I usually find that making mine laugh is enough to start to reset them, and then helping them calm down is a lot easier. Also, a question like that is definitely for small kids, not those who can fling furniture.

I was told that one way to help a young child break out of a tantrum is to ask them an odd question, something like “What color shoes are you wearing?” It does seem to work sometimes, usually by annoying them so much that they forget what they were upset about in the first place. I can well see it working for someone who needs to get out of a mental spiral.

Russia Putin is throwing their future away on the fields of Ukraine over a strip of land, it’s so mind-numbingly stupid evil.

Let’s face it, it’s a countries leader(s) that decide to feed their population into a meat grinder, not the people themselves. At this point there may ne little the average Russian can do to stop the process, at least, without significant retribution from the same government.

122L

Oof, that sounds rough. Are these the kids got hit hardest by the pandemic lockdowns? If so, maybe there’s a glimmer of hope that this is an aberration and next year will be a bit more 'normal ', if you can get through this year with your sanity intact. It’s got to be rough on the kids too, the ones who aren’t causing trouble must still be struggling to deal with itm and the ones who are just sound desperate.

I enjoy teaching, or at least, transferring knowledge and experience, I’ll do it to pretty much anyone who sits still long enough, and I’ve been told I’m good at it, but you couldn’t pay me enough to teach a classroom full of kids all day, so you have my respect for that.

Good luck, and I hope things get better for the kids and teachers everywhere.

It depends what you want to do with it. If it’s just for storing files/backups then encrypt them before uploading and make sure the key never goes anywhere near the VPS. If it’s for serving up something like a simple website, you probably care more about data integrity than exfiltration, so make sure you have the security, including selinux or equivalent, locked down, and regularly run integrity checks. If it’s for running something interactive, or where data will be generated or downloaded to the machine, you’re out of luck, there’s no even theoretical way of securing that against an adversary with that much access.

Maybe it’s just a different viewpoint, but I find the sarcasm of that headline vastly more damning than just saying ‘Trump lies again’. It basically saying that his brain is so fried that he’s unable or unwilling to engage with the reality the rest of us experience.

Not morons, just not educated enough about them to understand exactly what the implications of that action are.

Don’t go cold turkey, but if you reduce your intake slowly you can probably wean yourself off of it.

(Please don’t do this)

I agree that them having users’ phone numbers isn’t ideal. There are other identifiers they could use that would work just as well. However, both the client and server are open source, so you can build, at least the client, yourself. If you can content yourself that it does not leak your ID when sending messages, then you don’t need to trust the server as it does not have the information to build a graph of your contacts. Sealed sender seems to have been announced in 2018, so it’s had time to be tested.

Don’t get me wrong, the fact they require a phone number at all is a huge concern, and the reason I don’t really use it much, but the concern you initially stated was addressed years ago and you can build the client yourself to validate that.

You’re correct that if you use the system the way it used to work they can trivially build that connection, but (and I know this is a big assumption) if it does now work the way they say it does, they do not have the information to do that any more as the client doesn’t actually authenticate to the server to send a message. Yes, with some network tracing they could probably still work out that you’re the same client that did login to read messages, and that’s a certainly a concern. I would prefer to see a messaging app that uses cryptographic keys as the only identifiers, and uses different keys for different contact pairs, but given their general architecture it seems they’ve tried to deal with the issue.

Assuming that you want to use a publicly accessible messaging app, do you have any ideas about how it should be architected? The biggest issue I see is that the client runs on your phone, and unless you’ve compiled it yourself, you can’t know what it’s actually doing.

Strictly you’re having to trust the build of the client rather than the people running the server. If the client doesn’t send/leak the information to the server, the people running the server can’t do anything with it. It’s definitely still a concern, and, if I’m going to use a hosted messaging app, I’d much rather see the client built and published by a different group, and ideally compile it myself. Apart from that I’m not sure there’s any way to satisfy your concerns without building and running the server and client yourself.

‘Sealed sender’ seems to avoid this by not actually requiring the client to authenticate to the server at all, and relying on the recipient to validate that it’s signed by the sender they expect from the encrypted data in the envelope. As I mentioned in another reply, I’m just going on what they’ve published on the system, so either I could be completely wrong, or they could be being misleading, but it does look like they’ve tried to address this issue.

Whilst I absolutely agree it’s correct to be skeptical about it, the ‘sealed sender’ process means they don’t actually know which account sent the message, just which account it should be delivered to. Your client doesn’t even authenticate to send the message.

Now, I’m just going on what they’ve published on the system, so either I could be completely wrong, or they could be being misleading, but it does look like they’ve tried to address the very issue you’ve been pointing out. Obviously it’d be better if they didn’t have your phone number at all, but this does seem to decouple it in a way that means they can’t build a connection graph.

With ‘sealed sender’ your phone number, or any other identifying information, is not included in the metadata on the envelope, only the recipient’s id is visible, and it’s up to the recipient’s client to validate the sender information that is inside the encrypted envelope. It looks like a step in the right direction, though I don’t use signal enough to have looked into auditing it myself.

That only works if you can get everyone to stop talking about them. Unfortunately, he has a large enough cult that someone will always be talking about him positively, so the only reasonable counter is to flood the conversation with mockery. Against a more well balanced candidate that would just rankle, but it’s really got under his skin, and under the skin of those who support him, so it’s proving to be a worthwhile tactic.

Very well said. The key question is how do we, as a society, turn politics back onto that course, of considering the what and the how, not the person or the party.

The problem is more widespread than just America, it seems to take root anywhere you have an elected representative system and the electorate forget that they are the key part of the system.

How’s he doing? Well, he’s been up and down.