I am a sad and lonely, ukulele playing potato.

Things aren’t over quite yet: Both Georgia Senate races are headed to a January 2021 runoff that could decide Senate control.

This is where we are: Democrats (including the 2 independent senators Sanders and King) currently hold 48 seats. Republicans currently hold 50 seats.

If Democrats gain the 2 seats from the runoffs (Ossoff and Warnock) we will be able to TIE the Senate 50-50. In which case, Kamala Harris, the VP, will tie-break votes in favor of the Democrats, therefore giving us a “majority” in the Senate.

I cannot stress enough how important this is for Democrats. We need to get both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in, otherwise Biden will have a very difficult time getting anything done in office over the next 4 years.

FOR GEORGIA VOTERS:

MARK YOUR CALENDARS. The federal runoff election date (aka for the Senate seats) is JANUARY 5, 2021! (State and local runoffs are held December 1, 2020!)

Request an absentee ballot by NOVEMBER 18, 2020. THIS IS SO IMPORTANT FOR EVERYONE, EVEN IF YOU VOTED IN THE GENERAL ELECTION. For those who voted absentee in the General Election, you will NOT be automatically sent another absentee ballot for the runoff if you don’t make a separate request for one! Your prior absentee ballot request for the General Election does not apply to the runoff!

Register to vote for the runoff by DECEMBER 7, 2020.

Early voting for the runoff will begin on DECEMBER 14, 2020. (Please get your ballots in before the Jan. 5 deadline, and try to drop off your ballots instead of mailing them in when it gets very close. For info on in-person voting on election day, check here.)

Check your voting status, track your ballot, find polling locations, verify your mail-in application status, and more HERE.

Are you 17 years old but will be 18 by JANUARY 5, 2021? You are eligible to vote in the runoffs!

If you’re a college student coming from another state who is currently living on-campus or off-campus in Georgia, you can register to vote in the Georgia runoffs. (Go here, here and here for more info about this.)

Go here to find the contact info of your county’s board of registrar’s office. Contact them to discuss the voting options available to you!

Check the official Georgia website for more runoff election information. 

FOR NON-GEORGIA VOTERS WHO WANT TO HELP:

DONATING

For those who can’t vote in Georgia, but still want to help with the Senate runoffs somehow, please consider donating to the following and/or encouraging your friends and family to do so:

Stacey Abrams/Fair Fight - https://fairfight.com or https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fair-fight-1

Jon Ossoff - https://electjon.com or https://secure.actblue.com/donate/jon-ossoff-1

Raphael Warnock - https://warnockforgeorgia.com or https://secure.actblue.com/donate/warnock-for-georgia-1

The New Georgia Project - https://newgeorgiaproject.org/ or https://secure.actblue.com/donate/new-georgia-project-1

The amount of money the GOP is going to spend on this election will be staggering, so even a dollar helps. If you’re not able to donate, even just sharing this with others makes a big difference!

VOLUNTEERING

If you can donate your time instead of money, please consider volunteering.

Begin at this volunteer from home spreadsheet! This is continuously updated with the latest volunteering opportunities!

If you are in or near Georgia, help voters cure their ballots!

You can also start making calls for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff wherever you are!

Phone bank, text bank, and more with Fair Fight! (Georgia) (Nationally)

Help Georgians register with The New Georgia Project!

And you can write postcards from anywhere at any time! (More Here)

Letter writing starts soon too! Look here, here, or here to learn more!

Want to donate but you’re not in the US? Try an organization like Spread the Vote!

Email Fair Fight/Stacey Abrams at [email protected] and indicate your interest to volunteer for the Georgia Senate runoffs!

/r/VoteDEM is also a great resource! It is a subreddit dedicated to promoting and helping elect downballot Democratic candidates all across the US.

Share the infographic below!

More good sources of volunteering opportunities, including opportunities to volunteer directly with/for Ossoff’s and Warnock’s teams can be found at the Read More at the bottom of this post.

If anyone has more helpful info, please reblog and add it or contact me. Info in this post will be updated, so please check the notes and reblog the latest version of this post if possible.

Finally, if you can’t vote, donate, or volunteer, please reblog and share this via Facebook, Instagram, etc. Everything helps. Thank you!

We can do this. We can flip the Senate and take back the next 4 years.

will happen, happening, happened will happen, happening, happened and there we are, again and again cause you and i will always be back then

-time adventure, Rebecca Sugar

- 🖤🤍 -

well, here we are !! only one day left of Unus Annus. here’s my final piece for it all. thank you Unus Annus, you will be dearly missed. this was a fantastic adventure and i’m so glad to have been a part of it, even if i only joined halfway through. you were a very important part of this year for me and i’ll miss you a lot :’’))

memento mori memento vivere.

So I can personally weigh in on this. I reverse-engineered the app, and feel confident in stating that I have a very strong understanding for how the app operates (or at least operated as of a few months ago).

TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network. If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device… well, they’re using it.

Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)

Other apps you have installed (I’ve even seen some I’ve deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)

Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)

Whether or not you’re rooted/jailbroken

Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds - this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC

They set up a local proxy server on your device for “transcoding media”, but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication

The scariest part of all of this is that much of the logging they’re doing is remotely configurable, and unless you reverse every single one of their native libraries (have fun reading all of that assembly, assuming you can get past their customized fork of OLLVM!!!) and manually inspect every single obfuscated function. They have several different protections in place to prevent you from reversing or debugging the app as well. App behavior changes slightly if they know you’re trying to figure out what they’re doing. There’s also a few snippets of code on the Android version that allows for the downloading of a remote zip file, unzipping it, and executing said binary. There is zero reason a mobile app would need this functionality legitimately.

On top of all of the above, they weren’t even using HTTPS for the longest time. They leaked users’ email addresses in their HTTP REST API, as well as their secondary emails used for password resets. Don’t forget about users’ real names and birthdays, too. It was allllll publicly viewable a few months ago if you MITM’d the application.

They provide users with a taste of “virality” to entice them to stay on the platform. Your first TikTok post will likely garner quite a bit of likes, regardless of how good it is.. assuming you get past the initial moderation queue if thats still a thing. Most users end up chasing the dragon. Oh, there’s also a ton of creepy old men who have direct access to children on the app, and I’ve personally seen (and reported) some really suspect stuff. 40-50 year old men getting 8-10 year old girls to do “duets” with them with sexually suggestive songs. Those videos are posted publicly. TikTok has direct messaging functionality.

Here’s the thing though.. they don’t want you to know how much information they’re collecting on you, and the security implications of all of that data in one place, en masse, are fucking huge. They encrypt all of the analytics requests with an algorithm that changes with every update (at the very least the keys change) just so you can’t see what they’re doing. They also made it so you cannot use the app at all if you block communication to their analytics host off at the DNS-level.

For what it’s worth I’ve reversed the Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter apps. They don’t collect anywhere near the same amount of data that TikTok does, and they sure as hell aren’t outright trying to hide exactly whats being sent like TikTok is. It’s like comparing a cup of water to the ocean - they just don’t compare.

Featuring such moral quandaries as