Well, the problem with that is then you have to deal with the legalities of the USA. What you do instead is have the UK (and a couple other eyes, up to five or eighteen) do the spying on Americans, and in exchange, the Americans will spy on the UK. All perfectly extra-legal.

The end of Covid in China is interesting. Even the CCP, and their level of surveillance and control, were unable to maintain control of an entire population fed up with sheltering in place. If there aren't fair and open elections in 2028, it will no longer be the United States of America.

Everyone posting here is now on a list somewhere. Hopefully you're deanonymized sufficiently. Better hope we don't get caught up in something!

>Hopefully you're deanonymized sufficiently

What?

*you are sufficiently anonymous here

You think there's gonna be a next one? He's installed his own people in all the right places, and got his own Praetorian guard.

Why not just lie? The white lie is the most expedient thing to get the results you want, which is getting the app into the app store. It's not a slippery slope into a total moral decay of you as a human being. If a friend is hiding from an abusive partner, and that partner asks where your friend is, telling the truth would put your friend in danger, so lying is an important skill to have. The lie in this case gets past a pointless requirement.

Thank you Kant, but the world is never as black-and-white

Unless it's on a specific list of chemicals that the DEA has decided are bad and need to be monitored. Even toluene is on the list!

This is nonsense. "Monitored" is not the same as "unavailable", any chemistry lab worth its name has the means and procedures to acquire toluene in pretty much any quantity it wants. As long as you have the required licenses, keep careful administration and can produce said administration during inspections, there is nothing to worry about.

Does all that administration and licensing magically happen for free and take zero time? It's stupid extra overhead for something as fundamental as toluene that Chinese labs don't have to follow. You're right that it's not insurmountable, but it's still stupid extra work, and the threat of randomly being investigated for doing science is hardly "nothing too worry about". Just always have every one of your papers in order or else you go to jail is hardly a way to encourage people to want to go into science.

Or having to plead the fifth when asked about your work.

Or you know, just tell the truth? Doing legal things with controlled substances is not forbidden, provided you maintain the required documentation and safety measures. The point of the regulation is to prevent untrained randos from making TNT and synthesizing MDMA, not to prevent any toluene use at all.

I personally don't have any issue with explosive precursors being controlled more carefully, no. If it means we have to spend some more time and money organizing safe storage, that is a worthwhile price to deter the religious nut next door synthesizing TNT in their bathroom or having their own private fentanyl lab to poison the populace with.

The point of regulation is not to protect the producer, but to protect everyone else who has to live in the same society. If the Chinese make another tradeoff and sacrifice some of their citizens in the name of greater riches for the billionaire class, that is their problem.

Will we? Opiates leading to a homeless population not being productive, just looking to get high and be high all day and not do anything other than be a zombie, hits different compared to stimulants that makes people work harder and clean things.

For sex parties, GHB is where it's at. It's like molly but sexier.

There's apps for that these days. Not going to names them, but if you're still downloading a torrent file on a computer, you're behind the times. It's as easy as Netflix on an Android TV with a remote these days.

Don’t all those apps also expose you to VPN services using your connection as a gateway, or enrol you in a botnet, or exfiltrate your watch history to this weeks popular bad-actor, or expose everything on your local network to the internet?

No there are services that provide global cdn access to torrents. Your provider sees https traffic from your closest cdn edge. You don't share back at any point. These things are a couple of steps more to setup than getting a Netflix subscription and work almost an any device.

So all of these free (or paid apps? I don’t know, I don’t use any) that offer access to pirated content…

They’re all above board? Not doing anything nefarious?

That’s obviously not an argument anyone would intentionally make.

They are making money out of this. Subscription is like a month's Netflix for a year's access to everything. Multiple "providers" offering this which means there is money to be made.

So their business model is to profit off pirated content, and that’s why you trust them?

I don't think I said anything about trust. I was talking about content delivery. All the things you mentioned before are avoided using this method of delivery.

So you’ve audited the code of these apps, apps published by active criminals, and confirmed in a via reproducible build that none of these apps are a vector for VPN access, nor try to take advantage of vulnerabilities in any of the other software installed on that system.

I think you are either pretending that you don't understand or can't understand what I'm saying.

At which point did I mention apps?

Anyway this discussion is over.

Turn on Advanced Data protection, which encrypts it so Apple can give them the data, but they don't have the keys to decrypt it. Doesn't help if the other person you're talking to doesn't have it turned on though.