It’s not about me trusting these proprietary systems, it’s about me trusting mathematics, and basing my decisions off historical facts. Apple can’t just “magic” backdoors into their devices, and since a significant part of their business model has been in pioneering widespread commercial data privacy, it would literally go against their entire business interests. OS backdoors do compromise devices, which is why Apple pays > $1M for bug bounty hunters who find them first.

The problem with you, is that you have no foundational knowledge of how digital devices work, and that’s understandable given how widespread these technologies have become. But trust me when I say, cybersecurity isn’t a multi-billion dollar industry for no reason, individuals and large corporations pay a shit ton of money to guarantee they aren’t shooting in the dark with their systems security & privacy. If you wanna learn more about this stuff, I highly recommend watching Edward Snowden’s video interviews where he talks extensively about what he found in the leaks he made about the NSA, because he’s able to detail a lot about what intelligence agencies can and can’t do when it comes to this stuff.

Keep in mind though, that encryption has been a fundamental game changer which makes it impossible for the CIA even to create a giant search engine that indexes everyone’s data, that was only possible back then because everything was sent in plain text with practically zero wifi security. Now wifi security has become a cybersecurity speciality in and of itself.

You are not “giving the key to the cops” with Apple, I am so sick of seeing this bullshit misinformation online regarding user privacy. iCloud storage now provides the ability for users to store their encryption keys on their own devices locally, see ‘Advanced Data Protection’. On top of that, even Apple doesn’t have the ability to access user encrypted cloud data, because no one besides possibly state level agencies, has the capability to crack AES-256 encryption; hence why it is the industry standard. There was even the famous San Bernadino Legal Case case where Apple flat out denied the FBI a backdoor into a known terrorist’s phone because of the wide-scale security risks it would’ve introduced into their devices. In the end they had to buy a backdoor exploit from an Australian Cyber firm.

Has Apple been notorious for traditionally overspending on advertising, packaging, and hype campaigns to justify higher prices? Absolutely, but in ~2020 Apple realised this wasn’t sustainable (at least for their phones) and made a significant pivot towards more affordable iphones. They first test ran this in 2018 when they launched the iPhone XR for $749 alongside the $999 iPhone XS. Then in 2020 they made the actual pivot with the release of the iPhone SE (2nd Gen) for just $399, placing flagship processing power in an older chasis. Then in 2022 they decided to make the same pivot with their Laptops, and for the first time in modern history, Apple intentionally cultivated a tiered budget laptop strategy.. Then you have the release of the Macbook Neo as recently as last year, and now Apple is now starting to make budget competitive laptop models.

Anyways I sincerely apologise for these massive walls of text, I promise I am not an Apple shill, I have just been extremely passionate about computing hardware and cybersecurity ever since I began my unboxing video and Edward Snowden interview phase as a kid, so I have been following the evolution of the 2010s hardware and digital landscape era for the entirety of my childhood and adolescence; at a certain point, you get sick and tired of seeing people outright lie and spread misinformation that ends up causing people to make terrible misinformed decisions. What I hate more than anything however, is specifically those who end up demotivating people from exercising proper cyber hygiene (because of doomer propaganda), and making terrible product decisions (especially when it comes to Apple) because of historical misalignments with today’s current technology trends (see the .com bubble burst, death of netscape + internet explorer, death of widespread user forums and the corporatisation of the internet, the end of Google’s public perception of innocence, and the rise of ML and AI integration).

If you’re to take anything away from this rant it should be the awareness that the technological landscape is evolving so fast that you can never be certain you’re making an informed decision, without first verifying the validity of whatever beliefs are informing your choice. Something easy you can do, is get into the habit of always asking yourself “Are these beliefs based on current or past facts?”- this line of reasoning has never once failed me my entire life, and I should know considering I’ve been browsing the web for as long as I’ve known how to read.

Ayyy it is so awesome to see how much Australians are contributing to the cyber space, I have lost count of the amount of times I have seen Aussies being mentioned in just this past week

Just rewatched all the Austin Powers movies (decided to show my partner for the first time), and holy shit it is so much more relevant in 2026.

You’re absolutely right, he’s literally just their trigger happy hype man. He’s there to act as a motivational figurehead who’s willing to accept and promote whatever results in the most military action being taken at Trump’s request. Also “trigger happy hype man” - that would actually be a cool name for a song or album come to think of it…

The timeline where Americans collectively lose their minds and make shit loads of money uploading youtube videos about it.

Thank you for your service 07

I’m not surprised, companies are starting to realise that AI is only as useful as the data it’s trained on. If you blast it with all the internet slop we have completely unfiltered, it’s going to start fucking up all it’s responses. It’s not just about the volume of data, it’s about the quality of that data. Sites like Github, and academic journals, contain the exact data that companies need to create well rounded LLMs, that don’t go off on racist rants and declare themselves as “MechaHitler”. That makes data like Github’s pure gold.

The problem is that COVID paralysed a lot of the extroverts, especially the extroverted children and teens. For me personally I can attest that the COVID-19 lockdowns in Australia, destroyed my sociability. But I’m maturing now, and I’m realising that I need to find others like me, because if this is a widespread problem effecting billions of other people, that means there are people out there that are ready to start getting to work, they just need support from others like myself. I think the degree to which the lockdowns impacted people’s cognitive health, was severely overlooked. But we can get through this, and we can fight back, they wouldn’t be introducing hate speech laws and trying to ban social media around the world if they weren’t worried of a collective voice forming on the internet.

The owners of my family’s last house left us with solar panels, and as a struggling barely middle class family, it helped my parents afford all our expenses; from groceries to rent and even a vacation. It makes me so happy to see solarpunk become so popular, the good it can do is nothing short of awesome.

It’s unbelievable how much more powerful, livable, and culturally cohesive you could be as a country, if you had a government that wanted to actually solve systematic problems to make life better for all Americans. Imagine an alternate reality where the US gov actually worked to provide you with the essentials you need to survive? The US could’ve become objectively, the strongest cornerstone of western democracy, cemented in a history of moral altruism.

This website visualises the ultra wealthy to scale, with examples of issues that could’ve been solved using this money, such as:

• Chemotherapy for Every Cancer Patient: The site states that the annual cost of chemotherapy for all cancer patients is approximately $9 billion. It then points out that Jeff Bezos made that much money in just 40 days in 2018.
• Malaria Eradication: It highlights that a tiny fraction of the wealth of the 400 richest Americans could eradicate malaria globally.
• Ending Homelessness: The visualization includes the cost to house every homeless veteran in the United States.
• Clean Water: It estimates the cost of providing clean water and waste disposal to every human on earth.
• Testing for COVID-19: During the pandemic, the site was updated to show that **Bezos’s wealth could easily pay to test every single person in the U.S. for the virus. ** and the US would still easily be the richest country in the world. This is without even taking into account the sheer amount of wealth the US and it’s politicians possess as a whole country.

So in short, if the US gov actually wanted to help support their own population the US could have:

• Eradicated homelessness, malaria, chemotherapy costs, water scarcity + waste colonialism, and COVID-19 test costs.
• Provided universal free chemotherapy to every single cancer patient in the US
• The best and most affordable healthcare system in the world
• The best education system
• The most affordable housing system
• The best Transport
• Solved and you’d still have more than enough money to invest in your military, intelligence agencies, and crucial architecture that big business relies on.

Yes that means that every single problem that Americans suffer with, is optional. The only reason Americans don’t have all these things, is because the wealthiest people in the world have decided that instead of working in symbiosis with the rest of humanity, they would rather feed off of and suppress the 99%.

The top 1% wants ownership over the whole planet. It isn’t enough to live obscenely luxurious lives, they want total control over everyone’s values, beliefs, actions, and decisions. They want to own you, they want to own me, and they want to own everyone else. To them we’re the **equivalent of house squatters living off THEIR real-estate. ** So how exactly do they solve that problem? They can’t exactly go and evict 9 billion people without serious repercussions. Yet BlackRock bought Christmas Island and has invested so much in housing; along with billionaires like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos, even bought their own islands. So what do they do if they can’t evict us? They do the next best thing; ** destroy our autonomy, ** forcing us to rely entirely on them, through legal retribution. How? By criminalising ownership, and forcing everyone to pay subscription fees for everything.

First it was music and podcasts. Then movies and TV shows, digital and audio books, as well as social media. So what’s left? Well, the only thing not on that list are the essentials, and they’re already coming for those too. Think housing, water, food, cars (eventually public transport). If you thought communism, is bad, oligarchy is much worse, just look at Russia.

If you’re someone that thinks this will never happen to us, think again. Musk is already looking at implementing paid subscriptions to unlock features in Tesla cars

We can fight back. We can stop things from getting worse, and we can undo the damage that’s been done. But** only if we can overcome the social divisions they are purposely funding in order to keep everyone from organising against them**. We have to become active participants in our communities, if we want to ever live in a truly free world. That might look like something as small as spending time with your family and friends, or helping volunteer with clean up in your council. Whatever you do it is clear, the only way for humanity to survive the commercialized corporate hellscape Earth is becoming, is by coming together in spite of our differences, to fight for something bigger than all of us individually; a world whose freedoms are no longer held hostage by the top 1%.

Those are literally all the things I’m into (minus the fine art) but only because I suck at drawing. Don’t get me wrong, death metal is way too much for me, but I listen to heavy metal all the time.

Trans people specifically enjoy programming and Linux?? Time to make some new friends lmfao.

I disagree, > 40,000 protestors have been massacred (that’s just what we know of due to the nationwide internet blackout), and they are all begging for US/foreign intervention. I support regime change in Iran if it means Pahlavi can implement his transitional government. Since 1979 when the regime rose to power, the value of the rial has literally gone down by 190,000%. Yes you read that right, not 10,200,1000, 190,000%. This shit needs to end right the fuck now.

I think that tells you everything you need to know… It’s a big club and you ain’t in it! Time to form a new party for the working class.

This is the Mirror’s Edge type rebellion shit I would imagine myself doing when I was a kid as a future hacker. This is fucking sick as.

Oh wonderful, so basically just throwing a tantrum because Anthropic is hesitant about providing the CIA with backdoors into all their servers, how wonderful.