Kualk

Nuclear war outcome

All mega cities flattened. Hundreds of thousands of people next to nuke hits are blind and are fated to die as there is nobody to help them. Fires and destruction everywhere.

Toxic cloud rain the size of large city like New-York near insta-killing everything on its path as it moves with the wind. Hundreds if not thousands (one per each nuke) of toxic rain clouds at the same time and there is nowhere to hide from them. The only solution is to avoid them, but it is impossible due to destruction, debris, and loss of transportation due to EMP from nearby nuke. Mountains will not be safe largely due to toxic rains.

Loss of almost all food storage and drinking water to destruction and toxic contamination.

Even physically intact buildings and their contents may be unsafe after toxic cloud rains. People would not know of what is safe, since most don’t have means to measure radiation levels.

Inability to grow food for many years due to contamination.

Nuclear winter (there are some doubts on this topic as well as contamination).

Lack of food and drinking water. Deaths from starvation and dehydration. Deaths from taking contaminated water and food coming faster and more terrifying than from starvation.

Later on deaths from lower doses of contamination.

Survivors will envy the dead and follow the dead.

Only people in bunkers with years in supplies will have a chance.

Ask Japanese that.

They know they got nuked, but don’t know who did it.

Absurd, but that’s the reality.

Medvedev threatened use of nukes in most direct words possible.

I dare you to quote Putin as a proof. There’s simply no direct well defined threat from Putin on this topic.

There’s one from Medvedev, but he doesn’t represent Russian government and is not an official spokesperson for Russian government.

At this point it is more than just territorial control.

It is survival of the country as a whole. At higher level it is survival of the system on both sides.

The military operation has highlighted multiple issues in Russian system. While issues are significant, they are not critical and system currently manages to pretend like issues don’t exist.

The western system side is also experiencing problems. The problems are conceptually different, but the system is also in pretend mode like nothing is happening.

Side observer can’t really guess which system is going to crash first, if crash is coming. It is also possible that none will crash, and world will split into two or more centers of economic gravity.

I am not even looking at role China is playing in all of this. I can just say, that China gets sometimes inaccurate coverage in Western MSM, which results in faulty expectations.

That is a natural reaction of person that tracks only western MSM and doesn’t pay attention to gradual rise in western politician attitudes.

Russian nuclear doctrine change reflects changed attitude in western propaganda.

You must not be aware of the following developments. Poland is already primed to fight. Baltic states openly talk about preemptive strike on Russia. Western long range weapons are pretty much cleared to strike “old” Russian territory. Country on southern side of Russia is set to become 2nd Ukraine. NATO general claims that Russia will not use nukes under any circumstances and thus justifies any level of involvement.

In this environment expansion of nuclear deterrence is pretty much the only option from Russian point of view.

Please note that inside Russia there are calls to strike from Kiev to London due to crossing of previously announced red lines. Someone was right here. Putin is moderate if not outright inactive.

The above creates potentially unstable environment inside Russia and may give Russian government additional motivation to use nukes at location of regional importance.

There are some reasons for western side to provoke Russia, which nobody here wants to discuss or acknowledge.

It shall come as no surprise that NATO has larger military than Russia. Russia never made it a secret that the only way to balance out conventional strength difference is with nukes.

The calculation on Russian side is that they will destroy large amount of opposing side military and equipment. It should be enough to stop any meaningful ground action.

So, reality is very close to getting out of control.

All it takes is a small provocation on the border side that looks like invasion even if it is just a large scale disruption in communication on the border line and incursion of some military equipment.

The later happened already on Belorussian border in last 12 months. So the scenario was tested in part by Poland.

https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/ is a good summary about the issue

Good counter discussion about PGP security

https://www.reddit.com/r/cryptography/comments/10cfslk/exactly_how_strong_is_pgp/

I would argue that latacora could be an attempt to push users into the systems that provide 3rd party service, which by definition of 3rd party service is not secure: WhasApp, Signal.

Only true P2P can be safe. PGP provides ability to send encrypted message using any means necessary: FTP, HTTP, anonymous services, USB sticks, anything.

why encrypting mail in general is bad at https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypted

The point about email having leaking matadata is 100% spot on.

The argument why Signal is better is very short and not substantiated IMO.

Russia tries to keep Poland, Baltic states and other unfriendly bordering nations from getting involved in any military action against Russia by making it clear that response will be nuclear.

The desire to involve other nations against Russia goes up with Ukraine slowly loosing war against Russia. Tactical encirclement of 72nd Ukrainian battalion in Ugledar is the most recent example of losses on Ukrainian side.

Change to Nuclear weapons doctrine tries to stop opening of 2nd war front against Russia. The most likely location would be border between Belorussia and Poland.

Be aware, that trusted Certificate Authority (CA) configuration applies to ALL certificates issued by CA. Thus, if one elects to trust "actalis" CA, then they trust ALL actalis CA users.

If the process of obtaining certificate was extremely simple, easy and did not involve identity verification steps, then bad actors can take advantage of this process and create identities that your client application will trust.

By itself the bad actor identity is of little concern to anybody, but it can have a significant impact if trusted identity is used in spam filtering, exploits of email client bugs or other hack attempts. Trusted users may be given higher access privilege at the client application level, which may be just enough for hacker to gain required access. For example, client application may be configured to trust all trusted senders with MIME attachments. An unknown trusted user sends malicious Application as file attachment. Accidental double click lunches the application without "are you sure?" prompt. Congratulations, machine is pwned.

The problem is easily mitigated by not importing root CA for easy CAs.

What I take issue with actalis, is that they don’t just sign your private key but you actually get the private key from them. It then depends on how much you trust the issuer.

By definition, that key can no longer be considered “private”.

It is very important to emphasize that the key in this model is not "private" anymore. Thus, all the communication using this key is not secure anymore.

Private key is the one generated by hardware owned by the user and immediately secured with strong password. Ideally, private key does not leave the hardware that generated it. Thus, every device shall have its own private key.

In less restricted model, private key gets copied by the user to other hardware using media like USB stick or P2P communication model that does not use cloud services.