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Afghans are racing to erase their online lives

wired.co.uk

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Re: Afghans are racing to erase their online lives

#41

Post by est31 »

voldacar wrote: post #15
est31 wrote: post #2

Friendly reminder that when you delete your discord account, they don't delete your statements, just strip the account name from them, similar to how Github is doing it with their ghost account. For Github, I sort of understand it. For discord, it feels very dangerous to me.

I like that. If someone's sent me a message in the past, they shouldnt be able to retroactively reach into my computer and remove it.

It's not your computer. The cloud, and discord is a cloud service, is always someone else's computer. If you want it be stored locally on your computer, use the discord data export feature or some other feature like it.

Also, Discord might be a "nice" company right now, but maybe it gets bought by facebook in 5 years.

Re: Afghans are racing to erase their online lives

#43

Post by hef19898 »

trhway wrote: post #36
hef19898 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Who knows what they do after that. The Afghan war was a mess basically from day one, the retreat is in a different league al together so. Quite embarrassing for the most powerful military alliance on the planet, too.

>Quite embarrassing for the most powerful military alliance on the planet, too. Not really. There is a reason Afghanistan is called "Graveyard of Empires". https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/afghanistan/2001-11-... Judging by the history that i'm naturally close to and know well, i.e. Russia history, the drive to free your Motherland from foreign occupants is like 10-100x multiplier of force.

Sure, still the pictures of fleeing NATO troops and personal is quite powerful. It certainly doesn't project strength.

Re: Afghans are racing to erase their online lives

#44

Post by dirtyid »

kunagi7 wrote: post #17

Since the Taliban are now the government they probably have access to the previous military employment databases so even if they erase their online lives, clean up their phone... They might find who they are and punish them (torture, death) for working with the "enemy".

> probably have access

https://twitter.com/AmandaMilius/status/1427338941074710533

>Guest on msnbc just said the taliban have “our biometric database” of everyone who worked for US and are using it at checkpoints. When / how did that happen? Was that a massive story at the time or wtf? They used AF as a testing ground for biometrics and this is how it ends up?

Re: Afghans are racing to erase their online lives

#45

Post by sofixa »

choeger wrote: post #20
anonleb4 wrote: post #4

If there's one thing China got right it's the non-interference policy in internal affairs of other countries. Others should learn by example.

Yeah, China just defines a country as "not another country" when they want to interfere. See Hong Kong, Taiwan, or pretty much every other neighboring country and their territorial waters or exclusive economic zone. It is important to keep in mind that China is a startup empire. They are still trying to dominate their immediate neighborhood, whereas the US is an established empire, mostly concerned with global matter…

Hong Kong and Taiwan aren't countries. Both are historically Chinese territory and both are, as far as international law, the UN, and international recognition are concerned, Chinese land.

Hong Kong was supposed to be a separate administrative region according to the treaty with the UK, which has been violated by China, but it was never a country.

Chinese land -> colony -> autonomous Chinese region -> China

Taiwan, officially the Republic of China, is the party that lost the Chinese Civil war and ran away to an island which is considered a part of China ( Taiwan, Formosa before that) even if it was occupied by the Japanese after the first Sino-Japanese war. To this day, both PRC and ROC claim they are the sole China. Everyone agrees the PRC is the sole China.

Recently there has been a shift in Taiwan, with a new party in power, and generally people there seem to be more in favour of abandoning the ROC and China claims, and just being an independent country called Taiwan. Sadly that won't be accepted by the PRC, since, you know, they claim Taiwan is theirs ( and it legally still is considered to be).

For Americans, an analogy for Taiwan - the Confederacy lost the Civil war, but ran away to Hawai, assimilated the locals, calls itself the CSA and claims the whole of the US in its constitution.

Re: Afghans are racing to erase their online lives

#46

Post by sofixa »

neolog wrote: post #18
shashwatak wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did China drone strike civilians and hospitals in Hungary? Did the USA build any Universities in Afghanistan or Iraq?

China is threatening to attack Taiwan. https://www.rand.org/blog/2021/06/the-signal-and-the-noise-u...

Which they consider to be a rebellious province ( so an internal matter).

Re: Afghans are racing to erase their online lives

#47

Post by dirtyid »

choeger wrote: post #20
anonleb4 wrote: post #4

If there's one thing China got right it's the non-interference policy in internal affairs of other countries. Others should learn by example.

Yeah, China just defines a country as "not another country" when they want to interfere. See Hong Kong, Taiwan, or pretty much every other neighboring country and their territorial waters or exclusive economic zone. It is important to keep in mind that China is a startup empire. They are still trying to dominate their immediate neighborhood, whereas the US is an established empire, mostly concerned with global matter…

>Yeah, China just defines a country as "not another country" when they want to interfere. See Hong Kong, Taiwan, or pretty much every other neighboring country and their territorial waters or exclusive economic zone.

Yet those definitions of domestic issues were made by ROC, and acknowledged to some degree by most security council members post ww2, which PRC inherited, and have been largely consistent in enforcing. PRC isn't making up domestic interests for geopolitics, it's protecting domestic interests despite geopolitics, i.e. PRC maritime disputes predates UNCLOS which opponents are retroactively wielding to constrain PRC interests that predates it. It's not PRC changing definitions or rules or interests.

>China is a startup empire

And it's important to see how PRC is trying to build the new empire. Apart from brief phase where Mao was exporting revolution, in aggregate it has been predominantly peaceful. Unprecedentedly so, even more so as PRC grows, contrary to expectations. PRC military today is more powerful than it's ever been, yet PRC employment of force is near historical level of restraint, i.e. instead of thousand casualty boarder skirmishes with India when PRC was barely industrialized, recent sino-indian skirmishes ended with 10s of casualities. That's ridiculously reserved all things consider. There's quite literally not another ascending power who has reached pacing strength with the existing hegemon as fast and as peacefully as PRC in recent history. Current indictors show if PRC assumes role of global police, she would actually just focus on policing (with customary bias), versus current US trigger happy global policing that's a reflection on her domestic model. Which is probably a better example for future hegemons all things considered.

Re: Afghans are racing to erase their online lives

#48

Post by est31 »

SilverRed wrote: post #5
est31 wrote: post #2

Friendly reminder that when you delete your discord account, they don't delete your statements, just strip the account name from them, similar to how Github is doing it with their ghost account. For Github, I sort of understand it. For discord, it feels very dangerous to me.

No IM platform I am aware of does this. SMS doesn't do it, telegram doesn't do it, email doesn't do it. Most platforms do not even let you edit or delete messages at all.

For SMS, the logs are stored on the devices, not with the providers. So providers have to take an extra effort to listen in. With Discord, it's already in a database. E-Mail does keep logs around but many clients have features to delete mails older than N weeks/months/etc. In discord or telegram, you need to use third party tools for that.

Re: Afghans are racing to erase their online lives

#49

Post by silurian »

throwawaysea wrote: post #27
newyankee wrote: post #24

Unpopular opinion: You really cannot fight an ideology, the Taliban is so successful because it has some (if not most) support amongst the masses. If there wasn't any, people would've resisted. May be this is a beginning of a long civil war in the nation but I doubt ordinary people will have a voice, they are surely significantly outnumbered.

I don’t think this is an accurate take. The Taliban does not have support of most of the masses. Various surveys consistently show that public support for democracy is more widespread than support for an Islamic emirate (example https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/30/afghans-w... ). This makes sense - something like 2/3rds of Afghanis are under 25. They only know a relatively peaceful life without oppress…

from your own WaPo link:

> on average, Afghans did not care whether the Taliban had majority control over a post-peace government.

Re: Afghans are racing to erase their online lives

#50

Post by eitland »

guardian5x wrote: post #14
eitland wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Telegram you absolutely can delete messages from the UI at least and I've seen nothing to suggest anyone knows a way to get them back as if it was known someone surely had posted it here ;-) Just log press, delete and select "Delete for me and ". In Telegram, as an admin you can also select auto delete for a group.

You can also delete messages in Discord and much more.

I don't know and I don't have anything bad (or good) to say about Discord, I just wanted to point out that it was possible in Telegram.
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