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Cake day: July 20th, 2025

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  • People in the USA do have more rights than people here on Airstip One.

    Though we are both under the big black boot of government friendly fascism.

    Since October 2007, we have had Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 or RIPA.

    We cannot refuse to give up a password or access to an encrypted device.

    Section 53 of RIPA makes it a criminal offence to not comply with a Section 49 notice, carrying a sentence of up to two years in prison, and up to five years in cases involving national security, terrorism or child indecency.

    We have no Fifth Amendment covering self-incrimination laws to protect us from over zealous police and state.

    Who in society is going to argue against laws that are sold to us to protect our children?

    I am an old retired psychotherapist. I remember the introduction of the CRB (criminal records bureau) check, here on Airstrip one in the early 2000’s. Now called a DBS check.

    The CRB scanned the Police National Computer for any criminal offences that you had committed, this also included juvenile, aged under 17 offences. Which empowered all employers to use the CRB checks to get rid of staff and refuse to employ certain people. Discrimination was rife.

    You were now judged, not on your competence to do your job, but whether you had a criminal record.

    I would not have minded so much if they solely searched for any offence that were linked to child abuse, terrorism or national security, but they provided your entire life criminal offences.

    My enhanced CRB check showed that I had gotten fined £3 for riding my bicycle on a pavement in the mid 60’s when I was 11 years old. My mum had to pay. My dad earned about £10 per week as a lorry driver.

    What a danger to society I was! An employer could refuse to employ me just because of that little bit of information.

    Sold to the UK population as a means to protect our children from sexual predators. Of course no one complained.

    Yet, forward just a few years and you needed a CRB check to work at:

    The airport, the local supermarket, as a gardener in a school, as a handyman sweeping the car park of the local doctors practice.

    you needed to have a CRB check if you came within 100M of a child or vulnerable adult.

    Even University students now have to have a CRB checks if they are on a psychology, counselling or psychotherapy course, because they may come into contact with children and or vulnerable adults.

    This is the slow creep of government policies expanding, with no oversight, sold to us under the guise that they are protecting children and vulnerable adults.

    fear is a great driver for change. scare someone enough and they will give up their granny.

    I think this is also linked to Airstrip One’s governments, continually attempting to remove all encryption from devices by using child protection as a reason


  • As a retired psychotherapist I can tell you, that every single person on this planet has something to hide.

    Obviously, psychotherapy offers a safe, private and confidential space to speak about those things. Society does not offer this safe space. So Humans hide things.

    Sometimes these hidden things are even hidden from the person.

    we have all broken our own, and societies, moral codes, the things we do not share with other people.

    Our own sexual preferences are the most hidden of all subjects. Even in this so called Enlightened age. Sexuality still reigns supreme as the most hidden of all subjects.

    I always say to people spouting the “I have nothing to hide” argument.

    If you have nothing to hide!

    Why do you continue to wear clothes when you go out.

    Clearly it has nothing to do with the fact that: a CCTV camera on the corner of your street, a camera in a passing car, a RING doorbell facing towards the street, school kids filming with their phones, will film you and intrude upon your private life.

    It is because you have something to hide.

    For instance: Examples of the things that people hide.

    As we see this quite regularly with our politicians and those generally in powerful positions:

    The Pro family values political evangelists who espouses that homosexuality is a sin, and then gets caught with a male prostitute.

    In psychoanalysis this this called “Splitting”. Its where the politician projects all his hidden, unacceptable parts of himself, in this case his homosexual preferences, and projects them onto other people in society. Those bad bad people who are homosexuals.

    Or the pro child protection evangelist politician, who gets caught with gigabytes of child abuse images on their laptop. Same thing.

    Its the same with the recent rise in the Right Wing anti-everything brigade;

    anti-immigrant, who most likely had a foreign girlfriend when they were young, and are now ashamed of it because their mates are anti-immigrant. Group think.

    anti-abortion, probably got a girl pregnant, wasnt man enough to support her, and left her no choice to get an abortion. Misogyny

    anti-homosexual, probably a repressed homosexual who fantasises about sex with same sex partners. Far too ashamed to come out.

    anti-this anti-that; Oh the shame!

    This always speaks more about the hidden belief systems that those people carry. It is not about the people onto whom they are trying to project there own personal stuff.

    To be human is to have a private life, and to keep it secret.





  • Hey Truscape

    Thank you for the wonderful thoughtful reply.

    I particularly liked “the informed and the uninformed”. This is true

    Being a retired psychotherapist, I have known for all my professional life how easy it is to manipulate people. This is why, all practicing psychotherapists have to have, one hours supervision for every five hours of client work they do. This is to protect the clients from us, the therapist. There is no protection like that in the tech world.

    My heart sinks everytime I see some shill promotimg online therapy. without ever understanding the lasting damage that they will do to the human being.

    I do agree with all that you write




  • On linux you can access your Signal messages in db.sqlite.

    once you delete a message from signal, either through disappearing messages or manually, all those messages are deleted from the db.sqlite.

    They are stored in an encrypted db.sqlite here:

    /home/user/.config/Signal/sql/db.sqlite

    you can also extract it from you phone:

    only the messages that you can see when you open the Signal app are visible there.

    to access the messages:

    install:

    signal-bakcup-tools-git

    https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools

    and

    DB browser for sqlite

    https://sqlitebrowser.org/

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    The most straight forward way is to create an output file to html.

    copy the db.sqlite to a new directory

    open a terminal and run

    signalbackup-tools --exportdesktophtml signal.html

    this will create folders of all your contacts and messages and media.

    easily acessible. open the signal.html files in your browser

    =+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    To open db.sqlite as a Sqlite database;

    first you need to get the key:

    copy the db.sqlite to a new directory

    then run in terminal:

    signalbackup-tools db.sqlite --showdesktopkey

    OpenSSL 3.3.2 3 Sep 2024)

    Signal Desktop key (hex):

    58bfa167bb66b2b13b2ca6eadc33f4bf7275c254006d17ae5e3de5356c60f0b7

    copy the key to a text editor

    ===========================

    you must now add 0x to the beginning of that line:

    0x58bfa167bb66b2b13b2ca6eadc33f4bf7275c254006d17ae5e3de5356c60f0b7

    then open db.sqlite with the sqlitebrowser

    right click db.sqlite, select open with DB Browser for sqlite

    select RAW from the dropdown menu

    input the passphrase from above. make sure you added the 0x to the beginning.

    The entire database opens.

    you can view all the information that signal collects. phone numbers, messages, images, media etc

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    this is the difference between Molly and signal.

    In Molly you can password protect db.sqlite, Signal removed this a while ago



  • Reading stuff like this reminds me of why I have been a linux user for over 20 years.

    Its why I only use AOSP roms on my phones.

    Its why I have never used any USA surveillance companies. No one needs any of that shit!

    Its why I get in my car, and visit people I care for, and not send them a message or use facebook to see what they are having for dinner.

    I wouldnt even know how to turn a windows machine on. My last windows experience was with windows 95.

    Do you still press a button?

    I am a retired psychotherapist, 69 years old now, and have seen the devastating loss of our freedoms in my lifetime.

    we all need to get back to being human again. We are human beings not human doings.

    My display avatar is in fact a photo from a StoneHenge free festival in early 1980’s. A time when we actually used the word freedom and meant it.

    I do fear for you younger people and what lies ahead. What will be like in 20-30 years when I am long gone.







  • I only use Lineage and have done so for years without any problems since CyanogenMod 10.1.

    Do remember that it is the choice of the developers to use google services and nothing to do with google.

    When you say “Le Chat”, do you mean Mistral AI assistant/chatbot? Its probably stopped working since GPT‑5.

    Currently it is not possible to run “Le Chat” ai on a phone without google,

    Again its the devopers choice. They could develop a non-google Le Chat.

    who on earth needs a chatbot on a phone?

    I have never have any problems finding open source alternative apps.

    MAPS: Comaps, Organic Maps and MagicEarth, all provide Turn by Turn navigation

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn-by-turn_navigation

    I dont use any Banking Apps. Why do you need a banking app? I login to my bank in the comfort and safety of my home.

    Lineage:

    https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

    If you must use google try E/OS. It Uses MicroG and works very well.

    microG is a FLOSS implementation of Google play services

    https://doc.e.foundation/


  • yes, you can still use signal, molly and signal-foss. I have signal on my desktop and some of my family have molly and some signal-Foss.

    The signal servers are primarily hosted on AWS with redundancies on Azure or Google Cloud. Molly and Siganl-FOSS use these too.

    The official Android app generally uses the proprietary Google Play Services, although it is designed to be able to work without them.

    Hence we use the signal-FOSS and Molly on our phones that do not have any google services.

    Like any AOSP rom, Lineage, there are no google play services.

    Its the google firebase that manages push notifications that seems to be the main privacy issue.

    MollySocket allows getting signal notifications via UnifiedPush, not google firebase,

    https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android



  • I install a full MX-Linux distro on an old 32Gb usb drive.

    Particularly helpful when family or friends have IT problems.

    I install the latest downloaded distro on a usb with dd:

    sudo fdisk -l

    sudo dd if=MX-23.5_x64.iso of=/dev/sdX status=progress

    The /dev/sdX could be sdb, sdc, sdd, or microsd /dev/nvme0n1

    boot into the live distro F12,

    fully update the live disk.

    set it up as you would your new linux device. network manager, web browser, text editor, email, VPN, etc and any tools you want.

    whatever you change here goes into your new usb distro settings

    once complete, install and run bleachbit as user and as root to clear all the caches and install data.

    install another blank usb into the laptop

    Open MX-Linux tools to create a snapshot

    select Snapshot.

    select a different snapshot directory. use the blank usb you just inserted,

    usually: /dev/sdb

    rename the snapshot to a name of choice.

    once the creation of the snapshot is complete, safely remove the usb drive and shut down the live distro.

    boot into your daily driver.

    Insert the usb drive with the MX-Linux snapshot, and transfer it to a new folder/directory.

    insert the 32Gb usb. format it with gparted, fat32 is fine

    open the folder/directory with the snapshot.iso

    open a terminal

    then install the snapshot onto the usb with dd.

    sudo fdisk -l

    sudo dd if=snapshot.iso of=/dev/sdX status=progress

    The /dev/sdX could be sdb, sdc, sdd, or microsd /dev/nvme0n1

    always double check with:

    sudo fdisk -l



  • I have been using disktest to overwrite my SSD’s.

    I overwrite the SSD’s before encryption. works just as well on HDD’s too.

    A 2TB HDD takes about 3.5 hours to overwrite with the encrypted seed

    A 250GB SSD takes about 17 minutes to overwrite with the encrypted seed

    https://crates.io/crates/disktest

    https://github.com/mbuesch/disktest

    install with cargo

    cargo uninstall disktest

    much faster than your usual suspects like dd.

    it runs as root: so add this $PATH to the root .bashrc export PATH=/root/.cargo/bin:$PATH


    recent test run on 250Gb ssd with just write with no verify:

    disktest --write -j0 /dev/nvme0n1

    The generated --seed is: omNw4JreY1ZVAfwD4dgooF061R10Ra0vnmYv5SrU Use this seed for subsequent --verify.

    Writing /dev/nvme0n1 (512 bytes sectors), starting at position 0 bytes… [15:09 / 00h:00m:10s] Wrote 7.62 GiB (8.18 GB) @ 779.3 MiB/s …

    [15:26 / 00h:17m:16s] Done. Wrote 238.47 GiB (256.06 GB, 256059113472 bytes) @ 235.5 MiB/s. Successfully dropped file caches. Generated --seed omNw4JreY1ZVAfwD4dgooF061R10Ra0vnmYv5SrU

    Success!


    to check my SSD’s I use:

    prometheus-smartctl-exporter

    sudo smartctl -i -a /dev/nvme0n1