Best Posts in Thread: Speculation and opinion related to local events

I've spent 25+ years out of my 49 years living/working overseas; I honestly can't figure out why an expat would be overly concerned about things that you have no control over as it would relate to politics or any officials. It has always been my thing to never talk politics or religion, I do have my opinions and some are strong but for the most part I keep them to myself and don't put them out on a forum.

Obviously we can complain on a forum about things being out of stock or the frustrations with getting things accomplished. Sometimes it sucks but I've been in places that are much more difficult to deal with.

I've been a member of this forum for a decade now as it is a great format for sharing information and experiences. The expat community seems to be quite diverse and I think that really adds to things. Not to leave out locals as I believe there are quite a few that are part of the forum and their input on discussions is very important.

Shawn

 

Why go out of your way to attract heat from the government? Just the other day I saw that Dumaguete is installing 300+ cameras around the city. The global tech industry is building an AI surveillance machine. That tech will easily get exported and adopted by all nations willing to play that game (all of them.) China's social credit system will go into effect in some flavor everywhere. In that world, I would rather become as invisible as possible.

It's fun to bag on everything in the Philippines. But I feel these discussions have been going too far. Maybe this is just tin foil hat crazy.

 

We should be careful here. We don't have a vote here as guests in this country. To enter a position into the sphere of public opinion is to be adversarial to other positions. Actively agreeing with one position is actively disagreeing with another. That invites unwanted scrutiny for zero return. It's a risk with no upside and unlimited downside. It's a bad investment. We have already seen that the government will not bow to even the greatest pressures from abroad. We won't move the needle individually or even as a community. If we want to send a message, we can do so by moving elsewhere.

We have also how media (Rappler for example) has been held accountable for airing "news" which the government views as not helpful.

Personally, I would rather not be associated with these sorts of discussions even though I have participated in some of them. It's not worth it.

 

Too lazy to look right now, but I believe the server is in Singapore and it's a U.S. company. You would have to go through the Singapore system to get those records.

Xenforo logs the IP for certain things such as login. Your IP address would also go to the Apache server logs, but not sure how long those logs are kept around. I think the dev team sweeps them occasionally to open up drive space.

Nothing is ever fail safe, but you can get pretty d*mn good with Tor. You have to adjust the settings. The feds can get you if you have javascript enabled while visiting a compromised (by the feds) site. There's no known exploits of Tor itself, but some have traced Tor development as possibly at one time funded by the NSA and believe that the NSA might have an unknown exploit in their back pocket. However, they wouldn't use this for just any criminal behavior because they would be showing their hand. Tor users would pick up on the trick and the NSA would lose its tool (if it exists.) You can go even further by using "Tails" which is a Linux distribution setup with Tor. That would help ensure that you aren't going to be compromised by something else running on your system.

VPN's aren't good for security. They are meant for getting around country detection controls, among other things. If your IP address is traced to a VPN, then your IP address could be obtained from the provider just as they could with this site.

You're more likely to get outed by doing something stupid rather than getting caught through Tor. For example, the guy who was running one of the first drug sites on the dark web was busted through a history of asking questions related to the development of the site. The profiles of these questions led back to his real identity. The Google search force was strong with the people who figured that one out.