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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • You must be new here…

    On the one hand, I really like how often Proton’s shortcomings are highlighted. This SHOULD be a wake up call that you should never rely on a company to protect you and should instead focus on what you can do to ptorect yourself. And Proton… actually are pretty good in that regard. Connect from a burner/live image computer over public wifi using tor (or something similar) and their free accounts are STILL the gold standard for journalism and whistleblowers.

    But the problem is that people are stupid and lazy (and many outlets actively benefit from "Eww, proton is bad. If only they had paid for NordVPN to really protect them from the FBI! ~Note, NordVPN provides no guarantees of protection~ ". So we just get stupidity.






  • And welcome to software development. Every feature needs time (money), engineers (money), and testing (money). With most testing continuing in perpetuity because any pull request could break it.

    And when you add on that graphene is a nonprofit baked FOSS project… Well, if it is as simple as you think it is then get to making a pull request, I guess?


  • I also like having expanded storage. But if you actually care about privacy?

    You want the minimum amount of data on your phone at any given time. Your recent camera roll, any cached music and apps, and that is really it. Everything should be offloaded to your private storage ASAP

    Because for as shit as google and apple are? You can also remote wipe those devices. less effective if it is a government agent that has it, but it is a thing. And, depending on the storage setup, that sd card might be raw dogging it to begin with.



  • You can add as many compliance officers as you want to. Hell, you can grab ALL the cops who hang out at high schools and sexually harass/assault kids and make this their job.

    It won’t matter if they actively choose not to resist. Which is what almost always happens with stuff like this.

    I like Mamdani’s messaging a lot. Stuff like this… reminds me about how worried I am about his ability to act on that messaging. But, “fortunately”, the christofacists are more focused on attacking Minnesota and Illinois than New York so this might not have to meaningfully be tested.



  • Tor exit nodes are vulnerable to various levels of attacks.

    But it also doesn’t change the underlying problem. If you put ALL of your traffic through Tor? Cool. You have accomplished nothing (other than flagging yourself because of what exit nodes you are accessing from) because your cookies and even behavior are still being correlated.

    Like… it doesn’t take much to question why FightThePower_6969 looks at both /r/antifa101 AND /r/denver, for example. Ooh, and they also look at /r/warhammer40k and have a cookie from this website listing bus schedules and…

    I do agree that tor is an amazing (if problematic) tool and it is generally the gold standard for when you need to obfuscate traffic in a way that doesn’t involve giving mullivad your credit card number. But people still need to understand what traffic they are putting into each different port. And even realize that there are some truly nasty tracking methods out there that can do nasty stuff with even OS level DNS caching between browsers.


  • And why would you trust your own ISP more than reputable VPNs?

    1. Define “reputable VPN”? There is little to no meaningful third party auditing and mostly all we have to go on is if they are on the record for having “cooperated with law enforcement”
    2. The point is you need to actually understand what you are trusting who with. You want to watch AEW for cheap? Cool, whatever. You want to masturbate to porn without providing your ID? Maybe think about who is more likely to get a call from what orgs. And if you are doing something truly sensitive? That is when you need to learn a WHOLE lot more about what privacy and personal security actually are.

    The point is that people just say “linus rogan had a promo code and this solves all my problems”.


  • Heh.

    Our IT department is so incompetent that… let’s just say I have made it a point to leave a paper trail in my inbox of me highlighting issues and complaining because I can’t rule out a full investigation.

    Last year we had a “technical all hands” which basically means IT have fucked up to the point that engineering/platform are now responsible for untangling the mess from first principles. And we actually were allowed to look at the logs and were seeing “attacks” from all over Western Europe. I suspect IT would still be trying to call the FBI for help if one of our PSEs hadn’t sighed and said “how much of our staff are running VPNs?”. And then we had to explain what those are… to the people who actually manage the VPN we use to remote in.

    STILL not sure if I am more horrified that they didn’t understand that VPNs exist or that they had just not noticed that much mystery traffic until that day.


  • From what I can tell… that is actually what most people WANT in their VPN. They don’t care about privacy or anonymizing data. They just want to hide information from the LAN admin and/or appear to be in a different region for the purposes of content (used to be so they could watch European Netflix. Now it is so they can watch Colorado Pornhub…).

    I dunno. I’ve been in far too many Internet Arguments ™ with people over what they ACTUALLY think a VPN is. People watch ltt’s ads and figure they just pay for a VPN and leave it on 24/7 and that will solve all their problems. When the reality is that they are actively ignoring their actual cookie and activity based footprints and it just means that Google et al have a note that says “John Doe of 123 Fake Street in Bumfuck Wisconsin connects via an endpoint in Denmark”.

    And while I wouldn’t trust microsoft at all for… anything? Do y’all really think those black box companies paying youtubers to lie to you about what VPNs do aren’t collecting your data?


  • It also causes the problem that no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.

    Incorrect. While I find the search capabilities of Discord (and the Discord/Teams likes) to be… bad, it isn’t THAT much worse than a phpbb in a lot of ways.

    What you lose out on is the ability for search engines and, increasingly a concern, LLMs from being able to index it. I shouldn’t have to explain why that might be a “pro” as far as the folk actually doing support are concerned.

    As for delays? If it is a well supported bit of kit, a quick search and a skim of the FAQ (Discord is actually really nice for having a way to aggregate questions like that in an almost ticketing like system) is going to cover the major stuff. And my experience (on both sides) with Slack et al is that users are generally glad to help out.

    It does suck because, unless it is a super common issue, you need to actually ask a question and interact with a human. But it also tends to mean that people are a lot faster to have you run a few tests rather than respond once a day to a thread.

    For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to search for and solve their own problems.

    Tell me you’ve never provided support without telling me you’ve never provided support, heh.


  • There are layers to this.

    Persistent chat rooms are here to stay.

    As a user? I dislike this. I am sure you do too.

    As a developer who gives a shit about the users? The number of times I have had to spend sometimes upwards of a dozen back and forth emails trying to explain to someone that I am not lying to them and the answer they found on the forums are for a bug that was fixed 5 years ago… Let alone having to, politely, tell a greybeard to shut the fuck up because they keep telling people to search instead of ask for help…

    Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years. But, by and large, just checking the current FAQ and then asking in a chatroom results in a better experience for the users, the devs, and the community managers trying to bridge the gap. And… you should really try to avoid being dependent on said EOL software. Not always possible but… yeah.

    And that isn’t going to change. So they’ll either stick with discord or use something MUCH less stable… like Matrix.

    This is bad.


  • Eh, sort of.

    For a particularly meaningful chant? Yeah, they’ll halt things to let it breathe (and get the footage).

    But in this case? The referee (Bryce Remsburg) has openly stated he intentionally delayed the match to let the chant keep going. And the commentators stopped themselves mid conversation to also let it breathe.

    And “being anti-ice” is not really part of either wrestler’s gimmick. Nathan Blauvelt (Brody King) is a hardcore punk musician and came out in an “abolish ice” shirt once but not a big deal was made out of it. And MJF is one of the most obnoxious (and talented) heels in the history of wrestling who pretty regularly will break character on social media only to call out bigots.

    So, based on that info: The chant was likely a result of seeing Brody but is mostly just because ice are fucking monsters. MJF in particular seemed to want to mug it up and draw attention without any prompting. Bryce, the referee, may have been given instruction to let it breathe from the back (so Tony Khan and the rest of creative) or he did it of his own initiative. It is likely the announcers (Tony Schiavonne and Excalibur) were given guidance from creative to do so as well.

    Its also worth noting all of this happened AFTER the official end of Dynamite when they were in the (effectively planned for at this point) overrun. And while it gets messy as to how much TNT/TBS actually care, they are technically supposed to be wrapping it up by that point. And this was a double taping night so there is also the concern about keeping the audience up too late since there was a whole 'nother two hour show to tape basically within minutes of Dynamite ending.



  • Can we not pretend the problem is solely performance based? People keep doing this with generative AI and it keeps resulting in “oh shit, ghibli AI is so awesome”.

    Especially since… can you watch a twitch stream? Congrats, you can stream a desktop. Even back with Stadia it was very much viable to play games like AssCreed over streaming and have a very comparable experience to it being local. And stuff like Geforce Now actually work REALLY well.

    The issue shouldn’t be “can you make this perform well enough I want to use it”. It should be about ownership and the implication for… everything if all “personal computers” exist solely in a data center and all documents exist solely in The Cloud and so forth. Preservation of anything becomes nigh impossible and you suddenly have to pay a monthly fee to ever see your kid’s pictures again.


  • And that was one lady just like it is always one person. It is not cops and their fat white kid friends indiscriminately firing upon crowds of civilians like it is naptime for Miss Smart’s kindergarten class. Which is what we see during some of the more historic massacres.

    I know you’re scared. We all are. But if you are taking a gun to a protest you are not just putting your own life in danger but EVERY single life at that protest. That is why the more experienced organizers keep an eye out for that and will grab your ass and drag you into an alley if they realize you are packing (and not an undercover cop).

    I strongly encourage talking to those organizers. I am not going to discuss it on lemmy but rest assured that we are all aware of this.