Make sure to actually understand how those “non-profit” websites and services are functioning.

It costs money to power servers and to maintain them. Most of the fediverse instances like to claim they are run on donations and so forth. But… think about how angry people get at the idea of tipping for ANYTHING and then wonder how many of those are throwing significant cash at your favorite lemmy or mastodon instance per month.

Everyone is always shocked when they find out how social media or a “free” vpn or whatever is funded and where there information is going. But hey, I am sure it will be completely different this time.

Which is kind of the point.

Apple paid a shit ton of money over the years to get their devices into enough tv shows and movies and even students at universities to do that. They want to be the default so that you have that “Oh, wow. Gwart has a Dell?” moment. And they want the writers to know that so that… frigging Gwart has a Dell.

As for covering it up? The prop department doesn’t care about Apple’s image, they just do what the production team tells them. And the production team doesn’t care about Apple’s image, they just want to make Apple pay for it.

As for in real life? I know a lot of people who put stickers over anything that is an LED that lights up when you use it. And I’ve personally always put a sticker or two on my work and personal laptops just so that I can identify it at a glance. You haven’t lived until you have watched people have to check the lock screen to figure out which laptop is which.

Just to expand on the phone thing because it amuses me:

In a past life myself and a few others had access to cell tower records for a specific company. As a research project, we applied what we would now call AI/ML concepts to sanitized data (basically all customer IDs were mapped to a different ID set and then the mapping was thrown away).

For poops and giggles I checked the tower nearest the local happy ending massage place. And, lo and behold, we were able to immediately get a list of everyone who turned their phone off for 30-60 minutes.

Because the idea is to be one giant town hall/message board and to grow a social network based on who you follow.

If you don’t want people to see what porn stars you follow? Make a second account to get horny on.

The fundamental issue is still giving people a false sense of security. It is why it is INCREDIBLY important to be very very specific about what you do and don’t get from various actions. Otherwise you have the same problem as all those people in countries where being LGBTQ was criminalized who realized elon musk owned their DMs.

Also: Putting your phone in a farraday bag half a mile from a protest doesn’t take much effort to detect.

1. So how ai generated is wired these days?
2. NEVER trust any guide that is about “protecting yourself from government surveillance”. Anyone who has an idea of what risk mitigation is viable will NEVER phrase it that way for obvious reasons

From a quick skimming, it looks like their genius guides boil down to

• SIgnal: Signal is only as secure as every user in the chat. Yes, it is MUCH better than using something like imessage. But if they are beating your buddy with a baseball bat it doesn’t really matter if your message expired or not
• FDE: Yes, that is a good idea. But understand that “oh, I forgot my password” doesn’t work when you have been declared to have no civil rights because you look foreign.
• Get a NAS: A good idea, in general. But maybe understand that means you have a big ol’ box of incriminating info in your house that is available to whoever has a crowbar.
• Use Tor: HA! First, it is only a matter of time until Tor is attacked and likely large numbers of users are brought up on CSAM charges. But also? Understand what a compromised endpoint is and maybe look up what governments tend to be associated with those.
• Get a VPN and turn off your GPS: Yeah. it is a real good thing that our devices don’t all connect to cell towers where they can easily be tracked from.
• Get certain crypto but carry a lot of cash: Yeah… how AI generated was this article?

If you actually care about your vulnerability, look what ACTUAL journalists on the run from a government or megacorporation do (dedicated hardware that can’t even power up within a few city blocks of your other devices, for one). And understand that most of those boil down to “They know it is me and they are hunting me but I can live off the grid long enough to get this story out and then maybe they won’t kill me afterward”.

You should not be touching your mirrors or seat while driving. That is what you do before you leave the parking space (… or at a red light).

Good call on the windows and gear (although… there are arguments that you don’t need to in an automatic) though. Forgot we live in a world where teslas are street legal.

I think, in general, the shift to having MOST functions be on the touchscreen is a good one.

When driving? You should generally only be futzing with (off the top of my head):

• Windshield wipers
• Climate control
• Not the music but let’s be honest here
• Turn signals and headlights

And the rest make perfect sense to keep behind menus you deal with when you are parked. And with modern cars, climate control stops being about balancing the knobs and becomes about setting the preferred temperature and MAYBE tapping the defrost/circultaion button. Which actually also makes sense to not need direct button access.

But yeah. Still 100% need physical buttons and knobs for the rest.

I think it is Subaru who have the big display screen and then a small row of dedicated buttons below it?

It is similar to other countries getting rid of “no fault divorce” or abortion access.

By making the strict cutoff early, you have women who genuinely do want kids much more likely to do it with the nearest guy they can find and while their careers aren’t stable enough to really recover from a pregnancy. Which then traps them in the marriage and means they continue to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen for the rest of their lives.

I saw it play out in grad school far too many times. Women who wanted families would start early (and there are actually very strong health reasons to not wait until your mid-late 30s). And even with our advisor being very understanding… it is a massive derailment at a time where even a two month delay can be the difference between being cited for a foundational concept going forward and having to start over because someone else published. Same for getting internships that can lead to jobs and so forth. Which leads to “oh it is just too hectic right now. I’ll go back to school when my kids are old enough to not need me all day”

But even five or six years later? Both partners have a solid salary. So it is still a big hit to have diminished capacity for the third trimester and then maternity leave but that kid goes into preschool and things get back on track pretty quickly.

But… then you have one or two kids. Rather than the person who gave up on a career and is a stay at home mom (and no shade to people who DO want to do that) where it is “easier” to have more.

Keepassxc is great if you don’t need to synchronize passwords across too many locations and do not require anything where state matters (mostly related to stuff like yubikeys). It DOES have the vulnerability in that a bad actor has infinite time to crack it should they get a hold of the file whereas bitwarden still lives on a server.

But they are very different products with very different capabilities. Whether someone needs bitwarden over keepass is going to be a question of use cases.

Which gets back to volunteers going through and moderating it. And the ethical and moral question of whether people who upload it are reported.

And… honestly? if there is even a 20% chance that running a file sharing node (because I just love to give away both bandwidth and storage…) is being used to store CSAM? I ain’t doing that shit and most people will similarly run screaming and call the cops.

Nothing solves the problem of CSAM quite like… making everyone partially culpable in the storage and distribution of CSAM.

You can’t prove I was hosting child porn. Statistically, we all only had a 70% probability of having it on our computers

And moderation of this kind of content almost always sounds like torture when you hear about what facebook and the like are outsourcing.

Theoretically, this is a good problem for computer vision/machine learning. But there are a LOT of false positives (I think it was Aftermath who did an article on a study of when a nipple becomes female?). And… what ethical responsibility do you have to report on the fiftieth time that SheIsReallyAnEightThousandYearOldDragon_6969 uploaded CSAM? And how quick do you think people are going to lose faith in you and start wondering if you’ll also report on the rampant piracy?

And… there are also false negatives. At which point you find out you have been hosting something truly heinous for the past few months… possibly when local law enforcement tells you.

Like a lot of things: it sounds great. But nobody in their right mind is going to host this for free. And once you start accepting money you start opening yourself up to a LOT of regulations.

We totally need sustainable file hosting. Freedom!

Wait… the fuck did you just upload? Oh god. Oh god no. Do I have to call the cops on you? Oh no. Wait, does this count as possession? FUCK!!!

We need someone else to handle the totally sustainable file hosting. Freedom!

Yeah. This isn’t the first time the news app and the core nextcloud updates have fought each other in weird and mysterious ways (for me or others). I forget how I solved it last time (I think it was a similar case of needing to manually update to bleeding edge and then tweak things) but… I just don’t care anymore.

I don’t know who is right or wrong in how nextcloud is maintained (my instinct is the nextcloud devs because… have you seen nextcloud? but also, most apps don’t have this recurring problem). But at this point, the benefits I get out of it are largely gone. And when so many issues boil down to “We need more people and resources to maintain this”, it kind of feels like getting off the train BEFORE it crashes rather than after.

I’m on the alpha and it still won’t update any of my feeds. And going through the github issues it is basically summed up as “We will do another stable release once we have a frontend developer” which is basically never. So, at best, it will work until it doesn’t and then I have to fix it myself yet again and… yeah.

And if my choice is to run an older version of nextcloud to support one app? Hell no.

Yes. Which was not the topic being discussed.

The idea was that Google Chrome would lose a significant market share because of this. And, on the off chance that somehow happens, that is basically a death sentence for all the browsers dependent on Chromium.

So… basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree?

Because if there is not massive amounts of money and resources pumped into Chromium development? Vivaldi and Brave will be up a creek

If the chrome market share significantly degrades then google will stop pumping so much money into it.

And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree…

It’s almost like this behavior comes from the training data.