Nah mate. It would absolutely catastrophic. But the scope of who it would be catastrophic for is limited to the minority of known life. Humanity is insignificant to the universe but significant to us.

IMO, it is a distinction that is worthwhile. The universe is not anthropocentric. It doesn’t give two shits about humanity (it’s not, to our knowledge even sentient). Humanity is completely insignificant to nearly anything but humans. To me, it puts into perspective that noone and nothing in this indifferent universe is coming to save us from ourselves. It’s up to us.

Life will continue without us, just like it did before us. If the entirety of the world’s nuclear arsenals are used, there’s a good chance that microbes like Deinococus radiodurans will survive to evolve into new forms of complex life. The human species is far more fragile than the planet.

You could be sharing my experience. I’m still working at it and need to adjust meds some but getting treatment was life changing.

Good call. Might be good to start a wiki or the like for the purpose so that we can keep it up to date.

And now the media is all over Biden and again amplifying trump.

Seriously. Seems like they had pre-written attacks on Biden to push as soon as it was over. Media elites appear to strongly favor Trump.

I haven’t used Windows in years and rarely think about it. But, ads. I hate ads with the burning fury of a thousand suns. Therefore, MS catches some fraction of that hate by putting them in the OS.

Plus, it’s unix-like and comes when an ssh client.

And they’ll probably use statements Emperor Constantine as “precedent”.

It was all soft deletes.

Had a moment like this a few months back. But I don’t smoke weed and everyone just got to watch me eat granola.

Nova Scotia is not a US state.

Official act.

I don’t dare express the opinion to my wife, who is Irish, but I actually do enjoy both. They both have distinct flavors and are worth trying.

Douglas Adams was on to something. Though, it would probably be off-putting to have your food asking to be eaten.

On the last of the three, he did do some good in getting them housed during the height of COVID. But, he’s also sabotaged efforts to break up convicted killer PG&E and declared that he would never sign a wealth tax. He’s corpo to the core with a little occasional softness.

Lyon’s, the superior Irish tea.

I’m also a fan of Yunnan teas. Especially pu ehr (shou, sheng, compressed, loose, it’s all good) and Yunnan Noir.

Takes all kinds.

All good. I’m going to likely have bursts between the holiday, house guests, and other projects (ex. converting a “dumb” digital bbq thermometer into a Prometheus endpoint).

I agree with you there. The ballots and irrational voters are still my greatest concern. There were attempts to block Biden from the ballot in swing states because of the DNC convention being later than the state deadline. Look to any avenue open to electoral fraud being taken advantage of.

I’ve got a few things that I need to get done in the next few days (hopefully mostly sorted today) but you’ve got me rather intrigued with this as a puzzle. I’ll see if I can get some time to sketch some thoughts out and maybe some high-level implementation of some bits in Python (it’s faster to POC things).

A few quick thoughts:

• I think that an existing or novel protocol built on top of the Internet Protocol is likely the way to go. Following the OSI model, you can target Layer 4, with some simple stuff for higher layers. Client/Server (possibly the same binary) and associated automation should handle Layers 1-3 (translating between different carriers for Layers 1 and 2, and handling routing of data packets in Layer 3).

• Message routing strategies and their impact on OpSec is worth consideration. By this I mean: broadcast-only vs targeted-only vs both vs hybrid. All three have trade-offs.

Broadcast-only: Makes it harder to know the intended destination of the message. Conversely, by being routed to either all known addresses or all approved addresses, it can be more vulnerable to interception by a compromised endpoint.

Targeted-only: May be harder to intercept as the path that a packet takes should result in it hitting fewer potential endpoints. Conversely, some form of addressing is necessary to know, at the least, the next hop in transit. This makes tracing the intended endpoint, as well as network hops much easier (ex. running a traceroute).

Both: Gains the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches, depending on the which mode the data is transmitted in. Ensuring that data is transmitted correctly becomes important and has implications on the requirement of maintaining known good versions of the client/server software to avoid unintentional or malicious improper routing.

Hybrid: Could take many forms but the one that comes to my mind is a multilevel hub and spoke architecture (I’ll draw this out). Basically, you end up having 2-3 “modes” for a client/server: hub, spoke, and endpoint. One or more client/servers operating in a hub “mode” act like traditional servers, kinda like a bulletin board, holding packets for local delivery or transmission to another hub. Client/servers in the spoke mode act as hops between hubs. Client/servers in the endpoint mode are the actual intended destination (this could be combined with the spoke mode). To protect endpoint identity, the destination could be part of the encrypted data packet allowing an endpoint to attempt to decrypt packets received from a hub locally, making it harder to know which endpoint a message is intended for. This does still require greater visibility of hub addresses for routing.

• Encryption of packets is vital. Supporting some modularity might be of value so as to allow use of simpler cryptography for PoC but, the protocol should ensure that it is possible to break reverse compatibility (normally NOT what you want to do for networking protocols but avoiding an “it’s an old code but still checks out” situation would be more important).

• Amateur radio should be avoided both in PoC and hypothetical “production” use cases. The ban on encryption is insurmountable there and illegal use of encryption could lead to hightened visibility because the FCC, historically, does not fuck around with illegal radio signals. This means all wireless should be below 1W in the US, in bands that are legal for unlicensed use.

• Any physical layer that supports arbitrary data transfers should be possible. The implementation to support it would be part of the client/server. So, Bluetooth, 802.11, LORA, sneakernet, and many others could be hypothetically supported. Again, though, this relies on the protocol’s stack to be and to understand it, either directly, or translated by another component.

• A web of trust may be a good approach for authentication and identity.