It’s a high dysphoria week and I gotta vent about it.

This is neither new information, nor something overlooked in the design of the software. Thats the point of end to end encryption and open source code: they can only give the data that they have access to, which is the sender, receiver, and timestamps, but we know they cannot decrypt messages in the middle, because it would show in the security implementation in the source code. This model prevents the carrier from knowing the contents of any messages they carry. Therefore, you have to attack one of the end point devices to get the contents, and all the warrants and secret letters in the world can’t compell then to give up the content of your messages, because they do not have the means to do so.

There are legitimate problems with the security model, like its use of phone numbers as account identifiers, that render it a poor choice for doing Certain Things, but that alone does not prove it was designed as a honeypot, or that it has been secretly compromised in some way that can’t be seen in the source code.

There have been rumors for years but as far as I know nobody has been able to substantiate the claim. The organization that eventually produced Signal, Open Whisper Networks, received some seed funding from the Broadcasting Board of Governors (today known as the US Agency for Global Media), from which has been spun some CIA fronts like Radio Free Asia. However, this is also true of Tor, and many other non-profit private communications projects during this time, and does not itself prove any technical subversion has taken place. The source code for both the server and client are open source, and have been subject to frequent scrutiny, including full independent audits and penetration testing. No backdoor has ever been shown to exist in the code itself. Beyond that, people mostly gesture towards Moxie Marlinspike’s radlib posturing and bad hair and invite people to Draw Their Own Conclusions.

It is the 90s again for Apple.

I am speaking from personal experience when I say you HAVE to stop arguing with people who hate you for existing. The very act of so-called debate is merely another theater in which to enact cruelty. More than that, you should simply not listen to or read anything they have to say directly.

I used to go on TERF blogs almost every night and it fully made me insane. Stopping was really hard, because it was a form of self soothing by self harming, but it was a huge improvement on my daily life.

Ah, sweet, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension.

There appears to be more evidence every day to support this hypothesis. And I’ve seen it before, so many times. A lot of repressed US transfems go into the military in the hopes it will “fix” then, make them proper men. It’s deeply traumatic for most I’ve spoken to.

Even as we honor Bushnell’s commitment, I want to remind anyone who reads this that a long life of organized anticapitalist action does far damage to the imperial state than a single act of self-annihilation. Stay with us. Play the long game.

I left one of those sumo mandarins in my fridge for two weeks and I just ate it and it was so sweet. I feel like it healed me.

You get used to them. My top tip, tap around the area you’re injecting for a spot with fewer nerve endings. You’ll feel it less, or if you’re lucky, not at all.

Protip: only wear black, everything will always match.

Got it. Definitely worth asking about with your doc, then. In the future, estrogen will help too.

Yep, those suckers are SHARP! That makes them work better, but you do have to go slower and gentler than you would with cartridge razors. I keep both around, just depending on what I need. I don’t always have time in the morning to baby my face, just gotta get the stubble off and go.

Nonbinary people are, without caveat or exception, an integral part of the transgender movement and transgender communities. As far as I’m concerned, there is zero tolerance in this group for prejudicial or exclusionary rhetoric or behavior towards nonbinary, gender nonconforming, or otherwise gender variant persons, regardless of their specific relationship to the label of transgender, or their manner of transition or lack thereof.

truly, like, have some self-respect, at least be an anarchist.

Are you presently on HRT? In addition to hair loss treatment, dosage adjustment is a reasonable response to changing lifestyle. If you are, and you don’t mind me asking, what meds, and if you’re on estrogen, in what dosage form?

Wish I could take all my rural comrades out for a night in the gayborhood up here in the city.

Reading chapter 6 of Capital and laughing my ass off as Uncle Karl refutes the notion that so-called service work isn’t “real labor” in the same paragraph that he defines labor-power by describing it as a use-value. Should have read this years ago.

Manjaro here. It’s essentially Arch with a pleasant installer, reasonable defaults, and a nice desktop theme. I recently had to switch from the KDE build to the Gnome build because KDE does NOT seem to get along with Nvidia GPU drivers right now. Now it’s butter. Use Lutris to manage your windows games in their own little sandboxes, 9/10 games you’d swear they’re native software. Some actually run better under linux than under Windows 11. Cities Skylines 2 was the most dramatic example. Like 20 extra fps.