No active broadcasts. It signals our technological level by the technology used.

Why assume the aliens are hostile? - Well, if we are not alone, there's bound to be much more than 1-2 other civilizations out there. This means that other civilizations may have tried contacting each other and it takes just one bad experience to become paranoid and protective.

Take the situation in "Independence Day". Once you've survived an attempted invasion you'll never trust aliens again.

This means that the odds of reaching a civilization that is both naive and with no bad experiences are low, real low. We'll most likely reach someone that either don't want anything to do with us or someone who'll use a preemptive strike to make sure we don't hurt them.

Are we as a planet ready to fight an interstellar war? - I don't think so.

One of the really bad things Thunderbird did was to drop support for self-signed certificates and the old TLS protocol. I have an old and perfectly fine mailserver that simply doesn't support the newer protocols so when Thunderbird dropped support I had a choice between downgrading and staying there or to connect in plaintext. I downgraded which also meant that I lost hundreds of filters... I was not a happy camper.

If people just stopped CREATING those photos and videos, there would be nothing to steal/leak.

What happened to that?

Just trust the students not to cheat, and if they do anyway - punish them hard (like with expulsion and blacklisting elsewhere).

In theory it should be possible to write a plugin (or an app running outside the browser) that redirects the camera and everything else and generates fake data for the monitoring plugin, and of course obfuscates its own existence.

Done properly (rootkit style) it cannot be discovered and renders the monitoring software worthless. Would be worth developing just for this. Such invasive monitoring deserves a countermove.

I suspect some users have moved on to MeWe where free specch still exists and is respected, and censorship is null and void.

Isn't that just newspeak for 'approved sources that follow the party line'?

There is never a single truth about anything, especially not when it comes to medical stuff. Let's take covid-19...

Where did it come from? - Some claims it came from bats, some that it came from pangolins and some that was bioengineered in a lab. What is true here? What is the single unifying truth?

What works to help ease the disease? - Malaria medication? The 100 year old Calmette vaccination? Both?

Bottom line is that there is no truth here and your mileage may vary. Hiding alternatives and shutting down discussions will only do harm.

Actually NO. A huge English study published in June that looked at more than 4000 chains of infection found NO examples of an asymptomatic covid-19 infected passing on the infection to someone else. The researchers suggests that asymptomatic covid-19 carriers probably don't have enough contagion in their system to pass on a dose large enough to infect someone else. This is actually quite similar to what we've found with other diseases caused by other variants of corona virus.

It is perfectly valid to remove posts praising bleach injected or drunk as a cure - because that is just stupid and very dangerous.

But they also remove posts that is critical of measures taken, arguments against facemasks and so on. That is pure political censorship and they do *way* too much of that.

If you have no symptoms, are you as infectious as people with full-blown symptoms?

This is very relevant as it would require different precautions if there is a significant difference.
Also, if people with no symptoms turns out to be almost non-infectious as regular science would suggest, should they still wear masks etc.?
 

Obvious? - Not at all.

Let me use my native Denmark as an example. We have not in any way used facemasks outside hospitals, nursing homes etc. and we've consistently held the reproduction number way below 1 since early April using distancing and hand sanitation only. Our numbers are here (sorry - danish text): https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/...

Mask are nothing but security theater. Most don't block the virus particles even when worn correctly - and many don't. Also, people touch both under the mask and their eyes all the time, and we already know that most infections are happening via the hands and a contaminated surface.

Proper masks will block the virus - and everything else. This can hurt your immune response and actually make you more likely to catch the virus if exposed. Also, such a mask traps humidity and may cause a fluid buildup in the lungs.

"The company has been removing bogus coronavirus cures and claims that social distancing or face masks do not curb the virus’ spread for several weeks. "

It's fine that they remove bogus cures because those can pose a demonstrable risk for public health.

It's NOT FINE that they censor claims that social distancing or face masks does not curb the virus' spread - because while distancing may have some effect, masks have no value for the general public unless you're sick and go around coughing and sneezing. There are several countries where masks are not recommended or even available to the general public, and they're well ahead with constantly falling numbers and an infection rate well below 1 - and are re-opening as we speak. My native Denmark is one of them. It is not illegal to wear a mask but 99% do not.

These lockdowns reveal that most nations were completely unprepared for a pandemic. Instead of handling things in a close-to-normal fashion they panicked and closed everything down. That was both stupid and insanely expensive.

A 'Sweden-style' response seems to be much more sensible, keeping most things open and running while introducing distancing rules and protective measures in both healthcare and nursing home care. The important thing is ensure that hospitals have more than adequate intensive care and ventilator facilities, and the staff to use them.

This instantly 'broke' the first site I accessed after the browser updated itself. Yes, I could enable them using a convenient button and access the site but this just shows that completely removing TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 is very much premature. Huge warnings are fine but removing them will force peolle to access those sites using unencrypted plaintext http and that surely is much worse?