• 10 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • ⁸I don’t know what data they have at hand to work with, the following is mainly guesswork / how I would do it:

    As far as I know, US authorities have quite liberal access to data stored by US companies (due to the cloud act even if the data isn’t originally stored in the US), especially in case the data is about non-citizens where some of their protection laws don’t hold. Most social media accounts are tied to phone numbers and/or email addresses.

    If I was in their place, I’d have a relatively small database with all (or at least all non-US) phone numbers used for social media accounts, with the email addresses tied to those accounts. If a visa-applicant applies and I get their phone number (email address),

    1. I’d query a list of all accounts for that number (email) to get the associated emails (numbers).
    2. With those new emails (numbers) I’d repeat step 1

    If you call the office or enter your number in your application, they might get some accounts. If you associated an email address to that account, they might get additional different accounts by that email. If those different accounts have a different phone number associated to them, they use that new phone number to get more accounts. rinse, repeat.

    [Edit: This process would be completely automated, of course. Not manual.]

    The consequence of being caught lying might be to get your visa revoked / denied once you are already in the US at the airport, which would be highly inconvenient. Or, if they get suspicious, find something else, and get annoyed, maybe it could even be punished? I don’t know.

    You could maintain a separate phone with a separate phone number and separate email addresses for accounts you want to keep secret. Or maybe get a fresh phone number / email address just for the trip. But that’s quite a bit of effort to maintain consistently.








  • Controversial opinion of an atheist:

    Most religion is incitement to hate-crimes. While I think Sweden has probably bigger Christian societies and should probably rather burn bibles, the guy burning the Quran is an Iraqi, and therefore choosing the Quran is understandable. Afaik, he protested against his own former repression by Muslim religion whe still lived in Iraq.

    Religion is notoriously used to reduce other people’s freedom. Be it fundamental Christians e.g. in the US or Poland denying healthcare to pregnant women, be it the atrocities committed by the “moral police” in Iran, be it other religions killing people for their sexuality. I support the idea that religious law should be limited to followers of that religion, and no person should be forced in any way to follow or keeps following any religion. Those are fundamental human rights principles in my eyes.










  • They are trained to give answers which sound convincing on a first glance, for simple questions in most fields that strongly correlates with the correct answer. So, asking something simple on a topic I have no clue has a high likelihood to yield the answer I’m looking for.

    The problem is, if I have no clue, the only way to know if I exceeded the “really simple” ralm is by trying the answer and failing, because chatgpt has no concept of verifying it’s own answers or identifying its own limitations, or even to “learn” from it’s mistakes, as such.

    I do know some very similar humans, though: Very assertive, selling guesses and opinions as facts, overestimating themselves, never backing down. ChatGPT might replace tech-CEOs or politicians 😁