CSCasper

Anyone who thinks the WTC buildings falling is a conspiracy theory has apparently never heard of blacksmithing. Steel loses an absurd amount of its strength when heated up. That's literally the entire point of tossing the metal in a furnace.

VPNs are excellent at two things. Securing the pipeline from Point A to Point B and providing a false sense of security.

(Also, letting you browse videos available only in foreign countries. But that is only because the video providers do not care to stop you and just do the minimum to comply with the contract they signed with the video owner.)

VPNs don't stop web sites from seeing tons and tons of info on your computer. VPNs only secure the part of travel between your computer and their data center. This is legitimately handy if you use public badly secured WiFi like a coffee house or hotel WiFi, but that's only a tiny part of privacy. Here's a bit of the minimum info a web site can tell about you: https://www.deviceinfo.me/

Brave is a good start. Don't reuse passwords. Use Multi-Factor Authentication everywhere humanly possible even if it is annoying. Don't buy IoT or "smart" appliances unless you can securely segregate them. And backup all of your important info to at least two different places. But the most important part of privacy online is to not put sensitive info on electronic devices that touch the internet.

On the plus side, HTTPS is more common these days.

There is a strong perception these days that a large amount of journalism is to advance activism. In any direction, doesn't matter if it's MSNBC or Fox. That objective coverage is becoming less common and it is harder to trust journalists because of it.

Do you see journalism merging with political activism as a good thing, and the loss of either the perception of objectiveness or objectiveness itself to be an acceptable casualty if it means advancing one's political beliefs? Do you think the public is right or wrong to lose faith in journalism as a whole as this trend continues? You seem well placed for insights, as it appears you have an activist background and are providing content to news outlets.

I don't want to come off as attacking you. I'm a pretty middle of the road person, but it often seems the only decent middle of the road news service I can generally trust is Reuters. It is solely because they have a good track record and their coverage seems to be even handed. I have no way of knowing if any individuals in the news chain is influencing the content.

Thermite is made from iron dust and aluminum dust. Grind both, and mix, you have thermite. Much like you'd get from multi ton aluminum aircrafts running into an multi kiloton steel building. Steel typically is more than 90% iron.

You're surprised iron dust and aluminum dust got mixed together during the collapse?

You're ignoring the 90,000 liters of fuel per plane. All of the paper. Wood desks. Plastics. All of that adds up. Again, I use BBQ propane tank and I can forge for more than an entire day off that. When I'm bending normal rod stock, I can use a pinky to move it around while it is still warm.

Only one of them changed my opinion, I believe it was the Taser CEO. I wasn't remotely fond of them, both from hands on deep-dive research because my sister wanted to buy one for protection while carrying cash to a bank and from general LEO use. I still don't recommend them, but the CEO went out of his way to give honest and relatively open answers.

If you're technical, the BackBlaze AMA was excellent.