PaX [comrade/them, they/them]

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  • 14 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2022

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  • It’s 100% a problem, for multiple reasons. First and foremost, it’s racist, so it’s already inherently a problem for that reason alone.

    Nothing is “inherently” anything. What makes, for example, anti-black (as contrary to anti-white) racism bad in spaces like this? It furthers the psychological harm caused by the racist material conditions of white-supremacist society and normalizes these conditions. Racist rhetoric is part of the superstructural justification for these conditions that makes the oppressor feel superior and the oppressed feel inferior and like they deserve it. This contradiction does not exist for white people and that is why anti-white racism effectively does not exist, except maybe beyond a limited level in inter-personal relationships. It might make individual white people feel a little bad but it has no material backing.

    But it’s also a problem because your [hexbear’s] moralistic self-righteousness

    I’m not the one pearl-clutching over anti-white racism.

    combined with your [hexbear’s] obvious hypocrisy gives people opposed to your ideals that much more ammunition (and of course you don’t care about that, but that itself is also part of the hexbear problem).

    This issue doesn’t really give anyone “more ammunition” against us. Part of the reason we do keep these kinds of jokes around (besides being funny) is because it tends to out reactionaries (like how you are being right now).

    And the worst part is that, as with so many of hexbear’s problems, there’s no reason for it. It’s such an easy problem to fix, and would give an instance like hexbear that supposedly prides itself on its inclusivity such a huge boost in credibility.

    I’m pretty sure most of the people making “cracker” jokes on here are white themselves. I don’t think Hexbear is known as the “anti-white” instance lol

    And sure, I get the importance of having a place where you can feel comfortable and meme hyperbolically about problems you feel are important, and about the people who don’t agree with you. That seems to be the direction that most hexbears seem to want to go.

    Yeah, I mean that’s pretty much what Hexbear is. I don’t think anyone here would want to be “morally-unimpeachable leaders” or even to what end that would be.




  • Hey, I’m a Hexbear user and I really think you have the wrong impression of what our site is. Idk if you’re open to reconsidering or if you’re just trying to get a few antagonistic words in but I’ll tell you my experience as a long time user:

    Being pro Russia

    Our site isn’t pro-russia. We just want the war to come to a swift end without any further bloodshed. Some people take offense to that because we don’t think the best way to do that is to send more guns, tanks, planes, dollars, etc into the warzone. That benefits no one except the arms manufacturers and the money lenders. Not regular people on either side.

    genocide denialism

    The only thing I can think of that you would be referring to is the “holodomor” or something similar that happened in the USSR. It’s not that we deny that many people did die in these horrible tragedies or that there wasn’t Soviet government involvement in some of them but that these very real events are being distorted for political reasons by people who want to paint the USSR in a certain, wholly bad, light. As communists (or anarchists), we try to be very open to criticism and new ways of thinking about or doing things but not when the intent is to do historical revisionism to make the people who liberated the concentration camps and ended the crimes of Nazism seem like Nazis under a different name.

    Authoritarianism

    Well, I guess this is true in a way. As revolutionists, we do seek to change the system by establishing a new authority with the capability to make this change. But have you ever noticed how the current system maintains and perpetuates itself? Sure, you can vote (and we don’t seek to abolish that!), but when that fails and working-class people take to the streets seeking change, why is it that people with guns and tear gas and riot shields try to stop them and maybe even imprison them? It’s not that leftists are uniquely “authoritarian” but that we want to use that authority for representing regular, working-class people and to bring about a better world where that authority isn’t necessary anymore. Our anarchist users probably have a somewhat different take on this but one of them will have to talk about it lol

    being hateful of ideas that don’t conform to their worldview

    Sure, there are a lot of ideas that we hate. But isn’t that everyone? I hope we could all agree on hating things like fascism, racism, sexism, transphobia, etc etc. Our users probably feel more strongly about that than most people lol but that’s just cuz a lot of us have been targets of those kinds of ideas. Other than stuff like that though… this site has been one of the most accepting places on the Internet in my experience. Sure, we argue a lot (sometimes too zealously lol), but just cuz we care a lot about getting things right. On our site, we don’t have downvotes to encourage users to actually challenge bad ideas and voice their opinion instead of just feeling satisfied having slightly influenced an algorithm.

    racism (just not towards the same people)

    This just hasn’t been my experience and I know most of our users would agree. Racism gets swiftly removed on Hexbear and lots of people replying challenging it. Do you have any examples? This has just been so contrary to my time on the site. Unless you mean jokes about white people but I hope I don’t have to explain why that’s not a problem lol

    Anyway, I just want our instances and our users to exist together in peace. I know we have very “different” ideas from what is considered the mainstream in the west and on most of the English-speaking internet but I know our presence on the “fediverse” can be a positive thing and that we can get along. I hope this helps you to understand our site a bit better.


  • Another thing to keep in mind is that imperialism also has the effect of driving down wages in the imperial core since the capitalist can pay their workers less if the price of basic, essential commodities can be decreased by super-exploitation in the imperial periphery. This is a major reason why real wages in the US have been stagnant for a while, for example. So this would have a counterbalancing effect on how much a first-world worker would need to pay proportionally to their income for a case of soda if the process of imperialism were ended.





  • Sorry, I should have been more clear. I agree with you. I’m not talking about text-based interfaces and commands. I just mean the way Unix/POSIX handles “terminals” (devices that accept streams of characters according to a protocol established in the 70s) is an antiquated way of handling simple plain text streams. It made sense back then when there was a need to send commands to dumb terminals in-band with the plaintext but this doesn’t really make sense these days when your “terminal” is actually just a program pretending to be a dumb terminal running inside a window. When was the last time you used job control instead of opening another window?



  • Well Linux is using rdrand in place of the fTPM one so … from firmware to hardware.

    That depends on your distribution’s setting of the CONFIG_RANDOM_TRUST_CPU compile-time configuration option and the random.trust_cpu sysctl setting. I’m not sure what the major distributions are doing with that at the moment.

    Then again even if you generate random numbers using pure software, is your CPU or firmware FOSS and without bugs (cough … Debian OpenSSL maintainers, cough …)? If not, and you assume you can’t trust the firmware and hardware - all your random numbers are belong to us.

    Like you said, it is impossible to be completely safe. But using proprietary cryptographic hardware/firmware, the inner workings of which are known only to Intel, introduces a lot of risk. Especially when we know the NSA spends hundreds of millions of dollars on bribing companies to introduce backdoors into their products. At least when it’s an open source cryptographic library they have to go to great lengths to create subtle bugs or broken algorithms that no one notices.

    Our CPUs are certainly backdoored too, beyond RDRAND. But it’s way more complicated to compromise any arbitrary cryptographic algorithm running on the CPU with a backdoor than making a flawed hardware RNG. Any individual operation making up a cryptographic algorithm can be verified to have executed properly according to the specification of the instruction set. It would be very obvious, for example, if XORing two 0s produced a 1, that something is very wrong. So a backdoor like this would have to only activate in very specific circumstances and it would be very obvious, limiting its use to specific targets. But a black box that produces random numbers is very, very difficult to verify.

    Ultimately, the real solution is the dissolution of the American security state and the computer monopolies.

    If I’m fucked, they’re fucked.

    Not if they’re the only ones who know about the backdoors.

    Edit: I started writing that before your edit about the “Ken Thompson hack”. An element of any good backdoor would include obfuscation of its existence, of course. The issue is it is impossible to predict every possible permutation of operations that would result in discovery of the backdoor and account for them. Maybe if you had a sentient AI dynamically rewriting its own code… anyway, backdoors in tooling like compilers is very concerning. But I’m not too concerned about a Ken Thompson type attack there just because of how widely they’re used, how many different environments they run in, and how scrutinized the outputted code is.



  • No, by running a relay or exit node you are opting in to routing traffic that could contain CSAM. This is a problem with all anonymous unmoderated distributed systems like Tor. With Freenet, for example, you’re even opting in to storing it (pieces of it in encrypted form that can’t be accessed without the content hash key).

    Privacy is good but so is censorship (moderation). The censorship just needs to be implemented by an accountable group of people that share the same interests of the users. Tor is trying to solve a problem that can only be solved through social struggle with institutions of power.