Oh, I thought it’s legit and started commenting before looking at the video.

LOL, apparently none of you guys have ever been in real depression, to sit at home for long time and not eat well.

Or none have seen real inmates of such prisons.

You might consider tan a racial trait, but it’s not and the guy would be pale as a corpse. Nobody in a Syrian prison would help him get more sunlight. Especially if he were locked in such a place. Walls and floors she shows are too clean. A guy under a blanket whom nobody found before a CNN correspondent got there? You really believe that?

He also looks as if he were fed well for a few months before that. Except for shaking hands, but tremor can be imitated. The blanket looks kinda whole and clean.

Fsck, reminds me of watching pieces of Soviet TV on Youtube, of the “Kalashnikov (the man) talks to soldiers in Afghanistan about their complaints and wishes for the next revision of the rifle” kind. That video I’m talking about had soldiers in the same 60s kit, despite actual combatants in Afghanistan having a lot of official (the so-called “Afghan” uniform, they say it’s kinda convenient, and also it looks really nice of photos) and unofficial (sneakers instead of tarpaulin boots, baseball caps) changes by then, awkward questions and answers, weirdly chosen location, too little tan on soldiers for Afghanistan … A very uncanny feeling.

There was also some other video, where an officer inspecting a column (looks legit, all the official and unofficial changes are there) somehow right on camera finds a Kazakh and someone else (non-Russian too) beating a Russian, stops that, scolds them, listens it all out, gives out that strict, but fair punishment … Very unnatural too.

My point - it’s a clear fake.

EDIT: Except not sure about tan, in some parts of the video he looks tanned, in some not. I think there’s been some lousy editing involved.

While I would expect Syrian prisons to be just like that, mind that there are a lot of fakes now. Yes, many good people are being freed. But also many ISIS fighters are being freed, many common criminals are being freed, and many good people are likely being murdered for their faith not being Sunni Islam.

See, those organizations that have taken power are jihadis. The northern ones are Turkey’s puppets, the central ones are ex-ISIS supported by Qatar (and declaring all sorts of nice things with a charismatic leader, but I think we’ll learn of a lot of gruesome shit after the shroud of enthusiasm falls), and the sourthern ones are kinda bland, but seem to have some silent agreement with Israel.

The SDF/YPG, aka Syrian Democratic Forces, aka Rojava, are Kurdish-led and Communist. They were the most Western-supported and the most democratic force there (which is interesting with the way they cosplay Stalin’s USSR, but this is factual), but they were friendly with the Syrian regime, sort of allies with it against jihadis and Turkey. They control the eastern parts, on border with Iraq and with most of Syria’s oil.

SDF is now being brutalized by Turkey again, and apparently those “revolutionaries” to the west are not going to negotiate with SDF. They are declaring they won’t hit Israel back (Israel is now occupying everything Druze-inhabited in Syria’s south, the Druze have a particular kind of Islam which they often don’t consider Islam at all, so it’s sort of an attempt at geopolitical engineering), and they are not saying anything rude to Turkey, but they haven’t said anything that can be interpreted as recognizing SDF’s right to exist. I may be wrong, of course.

The point of this long text was - the revolutionaries are all controlled by some power in the general, geopolitically predatory understanding of the West. Which means that you’ll see a lot of things like Powell’s “chemical weapons sample”.

This is not a case of “good defeating evil”, this is a case of “green defeating violet”.

Saving you the bother, Signal is good, but requires phone number and the desktop client sucks, while the generally recommended federated FOSS things are all over-engineered and morally obsolete. One can’t rework XMPP into a modern standard, and it’s complex. Actually Signal’s authors have published a couple of articles explaining their choices in making it.

Mr Brejvik is in jail, and also had the wrong mindset last I heard.

Which is a shame, his experience could be used for good.

Schmooze means smoochies or something deeper?

I don’t think Chinese propaganda has anything against hot singles in their area. They have a shrinking population problem now.

The latter portion, which wants portrayed evil to be grotesque and not like reality, because they are not going to avoid evil anyway, is even bigger.

I mean, I don’t like fools. Like half of my family are terrible fools. But the “smart” people with no idea of kindness, fair conduct or at least sport are worse, and in my experience more common than fools, not less.

Except maybe for children and the dumber types, most people already know what evil looks like. They are willing to pretend, so what more lifelike portrayals will do is irritate them.

People have a misconception that China is nazi Germany, or East Germany, but its not that bad. (I mean its not “great” but its not “nazi germany”, you get what I’m saying?)

This was the tremendous stupidity of Nazi Germany - open violence and cruelty against dissidents (and, of course, Jews and other people deemed fine to murder). Ideologically motivated, but counterproductive. They had that vampire “blood for the blood god” aesthetic, if you look at Nazi-time crests, it can be seen very well too, sort of a Satanist state.

Actually every sane totalitarian regime in existence feels not great, but not Nazi Germany.

That’s not how it works really. In Putin’s Russia, just like in every similar regime in history, most people talking free-minded stuff or even protesting don’t get punished in any way. But some random ones do get jail sentences with the whole list of convictions. And those sentenced are sometimes not even very keen in their views, that’s what helps the effect. You know that anything you say on political subjects can be used against you, and it will be random and unjust, because a lot of people say the same and don’t get hit with the proverbial brick of Russian law enforcement. So as a result some people talk all they want and some people are afraid of political subjects being even touched upon in their presence.

The former group existing doesn’t really hurt the regime. The latter group existing helps it. And they talk very little to each other on political subjects, which is the most useful result - another category of separation.

The whole point of Putin’s psychological strategy against Russians is in making a lot of categories of separation and reasons for apathy. It doesn’t rely on any beliefs being instilled or any active support being called upon. Just that nobody believes anything or does anything.

That’s optimal for preserving power, and support is replaced with enormous strategic resources, but as we can see, those resources are not enough. Still, I think it’ll be many years till that regime falls like Syrian one just did, and yes, just like in Syria, it may fall not to the most pleasant people.

It’s not about restricting information. It’s not a problem in Russia really.

It’s about simplifying surveillance, so that in some civil war scenario the Internet connectivity were still there, but only the controlled and monitored kinds of it.

And also it is - it really is - about preserving connectivity if backbone cables going into Russia from abroad get severed or shut down.

I still think all this is about civil war scenarios. Russia’s history in the last 30 years is about its elite preserving itself at the expense of geopolitical power. They are just preparing for another stage.

BTW, I’ve seen an article that China is considering the relaxation of their great firewall.

Something about Chinese citizens being ideologically solid enough. I guess that’s one way to say that now with Palestine and everything else nobody really thinks that the Western world and the free world are synonyms.

It’s not about what Russians can get from the outside, it’s more about what they can get to the outside.

I think the idea is to have some capacity to temporarily preserve some connectivity, while mowing down protesters or something like that.

They are doing such exercises for like 10 years btw.

But when the war in Ukraine stops with some “mission accomplished” ceasefire, there will likely be more violent signs of popular disagreement with Putin. Because, well, people with combat experience will come back. Some of them to ask for money on the streets, some of them to abuse their relatives and neighbors, and some of them to do crime, and some of them probably to stir shit up.

Like how many Russians are digital sex workers selling content to the rest of the world?

I think those will move somewhere with Internet connectivity.

It technically uses various zero-day zero-click exploits to get there. Which is why it functions like a service - they need to maintain relevance of those exploits. Imagine, a whole service of clearly illegal activity, which doesn’t get absolutely destroyed simply because it’s useful to spy on dissidents.

It went out of popularity for a reason. I’d love a new protocol with XMPP’s mistakes fixed.

BTW, OMEMO highlights one of those - it’s not as good as Signal by which it is inspired. Basically no metadata protection, which means that it’s as good as OTR with multiple devices.

Some kind of Signal with federation (and good clients, not like signal-desktop) would be interesting. Maybe even p2p with some kind of relays (like in NOSTR) for history, offline messages, some kind of Telegram channels and such.

I don’t know.

It’s not outdated, it’s just differently intended. OTR you can use over any IM allowing custom clients. OMEMO requires support in the protocol.

OTR is better than inline PGP for that purpose, because of temporary keys.

So if you have a legislation mandating that a certain IM network or social platform supports open API for custom clients, you can use OTR over it, you can use inline PGP over it, but you can’t use OMEMO over it.

Use Signal or XMPP+OMEMO or anything else.

Mandate social media to expose an open API and use the chat function with an OTR plugin.

The solutions are all old.

It’s just interesting how it all went from promotion of corporate surveillance to comms protection when supposed corporate shills won the election.

Easier, imagine half the strangers you’ve met during the day reading your messages aloud with orcish laughs and judging the pictures.