I can’t help wondering what is up with all those people fighting in comments about encryption. You make the point time and again that having encrypted media is somehow suspicious. I see where you are coming from.

• There are cases where people have gotten in trouble for using TOR/Signal, because it was presented to the court that “this is what criminals use”.
• There are those Wall Street companies that got in trouble for using encrypted messengers with trading partners.

We know about these, because it makes headlines when it happens.

Yet, there are people here, in any similar discussion, not just this one, that keep telling us that encryption is useless because authorities can more easily break your bones than brute force your private key, and you are going to be in trouble just for having encrypted media.

Is that so? Remember the fuss when federal regulators wanted Apple to install backdoors to encrypted i-Phones? Why so? No no, bear with me, if you people are correct, then every person with an encrypted i-Phone should be in a watchlist? What about all these Linux laptops all with LUKS on the main hard drive, flying around?

How come we don’t hear about those people being prosecuted and brutalized every other day in all of these alternative media we are following?

Regarding encryption, I have a right to my fucking privacy and if you want to know what is in my hard drive, then you are the weird one. Now let’s discuss criminal prosecution. If the authorities have something on you and they need whatever is in your encrypted drive to convict you, then they do not have anything on you unless they break the encryption. The more people practicing encryption the less fruitful their efforts will be. Your argument amounts to little more than the very authorities slogan “if you don’t have something to hide”. More people using encryption should make it sink that not only people with something to hide will use encryption, and indeed, all these everyday, non-criminal people are already using Encryption in i-Phones and Linux without having their bones broken.

Yet you keep repeating this rhetoric, which seems to have no other purpose than deter people from using encryption.

Now let’s discuss brutality. If you live in a police state that can kidnap you and rough you up to forgo your protected right to privacy, then you don’t have a problem with encryption, but a huge political problem. In that case encryption won’t liberate you, but at the same time you have much bigger problems, and an entirely different threat model.

So the only thing you people could, in good faith, add to the discussion is “If you live in a police state, don’t rely solely on encryption, and update your threat model”. The other things you keep going on and on about are essentially a rebranded “if you don’t have something to hide” and they only seem designed to discourage people from adopting encryption altogether, and the fact you don’t let go can only mean one fucking thing.

This is a story from August 2023, and was covered in many outlets (I quote here NYT for reference only)

Federal regulators continued their crackdown against employees of Wall Street firms using private messaging apps to communicate, with 11 brokerage firms and investment advisers agreeing Tuesday to pay $549 million in fines.

Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Bank of Montreal were hit with the biggest penalties by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Together, the brokerage and investment advisory arms of those four financial institutions accounted for nearly 90 percent of the fines, according to statements released by the regulators.

Original NYT

Archived version

Some US bank got in trouble for using it internally.

Sure, I understand Matrix fine. On the contrary, I don’t get why people find it harder to switch to than Discord?

Um, does community organizing have to be secret to be immune to trolls and bad actors?

I really did not mean to be insulting. I am just saying chart makers can choose to make a zoom in, and it is not automatically propaganda or something. All this has led people astray of the real issues, like WTF is measuring ‘happiness’ on a 1-10 scale, and what are the metric properties of this 1-10 scale. Then there are all the sampling issues and what have you. I just expected more people discussing this stuff rather than the Y-axis.

Oh sport, and I thought I was the one beating on a dead horse here. I understand why people claim to take issue with the Y-axis range. I am just saying chart makers can zoom in to make a point, and it is not automatically misleading. That is all. Anyway, thanks for writing this. Looks like a lot of effort, and some of it will make sense in my stats coursework, thanks!

This is indeed misleading. It has no numerical figures, and it wastes loads of ink and screen space. The other one is better structured as a chart. I a sorry you spent your time to demonstrate something we all know, but may be Excel has good reasons that cuts off the axis at 6.

Although there is a common tip in critical thinking classes that manipulating the Y-axis range can lead to misleading presentation of a difference, I believe in this particular graph, which clearly provides numbers to compare, you can’t say it is misleading.

People can read and compare the values and draw their own conclusions. And I am saying that without any consideration of the distros discussed, since I am impartial to distros, I like all distros I have tried.

This “study” almost certainly must have way deeper assumptions- and metrics- related problems to start with, so even finding myself having this argument is preposterous. But I am just pointing out the misapplication of critical thinking guideline, and this is a valid point which I insist everyone who relies on to consider, if you care about critical thinking at all.

No one said you are doing layman statistics, the pasted comment is from another discussion, provided here for context, and for very good reasons. It aligns with obvious misconceptions about statistics that should be pointed out. Probability and statistics are thorny subjects that nonetheless are inevitable in order to understand the world surrounding us, material, social, and economic, so yes I will nitpick here and call out the misapplication of canned critical thinking thought-terminating cliches.

This sounds valid. I wonder how many Scandinavians switched to Linux because of Windows 11.

Fair. You know these figures right out from the graph don’t you?

Ah the statistical significance, which as everybody knows is assessed …visually? Mic drop

BTW I have another comment here, totally irrelevant to this discussion, that I bring up statistical siGnifiCAnsE as an example of confident falsehood. Thanks for proving me right lol

Edit: here it is for context ( from https://lemmy.ml/post/17638298/12096466 )

Layman statistics is not the hill I would die on. Otherwise (being guilty of the fallacy myself) I now think that making a subject mandatory school lesson will only make people more confidently incorrect about it, so this is another hill I won’t die on for probability and statistics. See for instance the widespread erroneous layman use of “statistical significance” (like “your sample of partners is not statistical significant”) you see it is a lost cause. They misinterpret it because they were taught it. Also professionals have been taught it and mess it up more than regularly to the point we can’t trust studies or sth any more. So the solution you suggest is teach more of it? Sounds a bit like the war on drugs.

The difference (in self-reported subjective happiness rating 1–10 too) is not as significant as the graphic implies visually

Ah here is another one. So what? It makes the difference more distinguishable, which also the graph denotes numerically. Otherwise all Linux distros users would appear too flat to make any difference interpretable.

The fact that there are at least two such comments around here shows why teaching anything in schools is doomed to fail.

Even critical thinking skills are applied in a canned, thought-terminating fashion, similar to how XX/XY chromosomes are considered the only reality, in overconfident falsehood.

because the happiness view doesn’t start at 0

How is that so?

Absolutely cool. I will have to revise all my internalized cyberpunk imagery though.

convince friends to switch to firefox from chrome

Ah yes, you reminded me of this gem https://contrachrome.com/ (It is Scott McCloud’s Webcomic against Chrome’s data mining)

Agreed. This area of skills completely evades me though. So, yes, if you have some tips on that, they will be well received.

this shouldn’t be the main argument because people don’t really care about it now but it can be a nice secondary one

I do think that recommendation algorithms are a big culprit for the widespread scrolling addiction epidemic. Smart phones and social media platforms have positioned the population in readiness to consume ads and propaganda. So, I think this is definitely among the main arguments.

Plus note people were arguably repulsed when it was leaked that Facebook performed a sentiment analysis psychological experiment on them.