Government workers say their out-of-office replies were forcibly changed to blame Democrats for shutdown
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You can set Mullvad's own DNS service in the browser, and being an ecosystem specialized in privacy, a much bigger company, and having curated lists instead of just shoving tons of public lists without checking for duplicates (NextDNS), correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Mullvad's DNS probably offers a more concise service.
Technically, the only issue with NextDNS is that it's unmanaged, and as for now there hasn't been any changes in who are providing the lists, it just works.
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Thank you. I’ll check out the other service. I’ve had NextDNS for several years now, I’ve never needed to contact them and I have seen a couple of new options show up in the interface in the odd time a year I log in.
I was tempted by ControlD a few times but NextDNS suits my needs fine.
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Oh yes that very much is a concern. I’ve divested myself off a few American services, especially those that bent the knee.
I’ll have a think over what’s best.
Does dns0 not have an account? Paid tier?
One thing I do like about NextDNS is I installed it via flu on my UniFi router, and it reports client names correctly, so I can see in my account what device has had whatever blocked. Good for identifying rogue devices or software.
Why is mullvad shilled so hard?
It looks like it's more expensive than other VPNs with no justifiable reason. It even has less features than some of the cheaper VPNs.
They never do any sponsorship deals, they haven't been in any controversies, they aren't based in the us, they don't use any marketing tricks to try and entice users into using it like discounts or insanely high prices unless you elect for a 12 or 24 month plan, the high price gives them less incentive to log user data.
There is no specific reason but all these things add up to make a trustworthy product.
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Again, none of that is special.
the high price gives them less incentive to log user data.
Do you people really believe this? Holy shit.
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Why do I need to? They already exist. I'm not complaining that there aren't alternatives.
You're just being a moron who can't tolerate criticism of what you've been suckered into buying.
Do you people really believe this? Holy shit.
I agree it's not a great reason but they pile up (the reasons).
As well as my previous reasons they also offer significantly more payment methods than many other options, including monero and even cash.
They are also not based inside the 5 eyes.
Oh and they offer completely anonymous account creation. I have not found a single VPN that does this, every other VPN at least requires a e-mail address.
If you think mullvad is nothing special then I challenge you to find another VPN that offers all of the reasons I have specified.
The fact that they do not store any customer data was put to the test in 2023, when the Swedish police raided their offices and left with nothing.
mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vp…
They also spend a lot of time and resources into researching and advancing technology around measured boot and running as much as possible in memory, without having to use disk storage.
Mullvad VPN was subject to a search warrant. Customer data not compromised
On April 18 at least six police officers from the National Operations Department (NOA) of the Swedish Police visited the Mullvad VPN office in Gothenburg with a search warrant.Mullvad VPN
Can I remove Pipewire-ALSA without removing Pipewire itself?
This kinda stems from this issue I asked about a while back, Pipewire an PulseAudio have caused me quite a bit of confusion lately as I recently started experiencing crackling/static sounds from my Bluetooth speaker when playing audio.
After days of digging and thinking that I’ve fixed the issue by editing /usr/share/piperwire.conf and /usr/share/pipewire-pulse.conf and following guides like this one (I know the link is for EndeavorOS) I have seem to come to the conclusion that Pipewire-ALSA is the issue to the crackling/static sounds I’m hearing.
I stumbled upon qpwgraph which appears to visualize the flow and when I disconnect Pipewire-ALSA from the flow the cracking sounds stop, now from my understanding Pipewire and PulseAudio cannot coexist which is causing my confusion because Pipewire-ALSA also appears to connect to a bunch of PulseAudio Volume Controllers.
Edit;
I failed to mention my distro or hardware:
-------------
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) x86_64
Kernel: Linux 6.12.48+deb13-amd64
Uptime: 2 hours, 19 mins
Packages: 4836 (dpkg), 50 (flatpak), 5 (snap)
Shell: bash 5.2.37
Display (VG249Q3A): 1920x1080 @ 165 Hz in 24" [External] *
Display (ASUS VG24V): 1920x1080 @ 120 Hz in 23" [External]
DE: KDE Plasma 6.3.6
WM: KWin (X11)
WM Theme: Nothing
Theme: Breeze (Nothing) [Qt], Breeze-Dark [GTK2], Breeze [GTK3]
Icons: breeze-dark [Qt], breeze-dark [GTK2/3/4]
Font: Noto Sans (10pt) [Qt], Noto Sans (10pt) [GTK2/3/4]
Cursor: WhiteSur (24px)
Terminal: konsole 25.4.2
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700 (12) @ 4.60 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti [Discrete]
Memory: 9.36 GiB / 15.54 GiB (60%)
Swap: 1.26 GiB / 6.91 GiB (18%)
Disk (/): 172.66 GiB / 232.24 GiB (74%) - ext4
Disk (/media/user/Barracuda): 1.58 TiB / 1.78 TiB (89%) - ext4
Local IP (enp4s0): 192.168.1.17/24
Locale: en_US.UTF-8[Pipewire Guide] audio crackling/popping and latency
Some people have issues with audio crackling or latency on Linux and that motivated me to write this guide as I’ve been doing some latency tests and came to very clear conclusions recently. Pipewire docs: https://gitlab.freedesktop.EndeavourOS
I've run into the crackling problem recently as well. I think the ALSA module is improperly requesting a very low quant value causing applications to have a tiny audio buffer which they fail to keep filled, resulting in crackling.
To see if this is what's happening, try running pw-top and see if the quant column is a small number (~200). This is a very short audio buffer, it'll be low latency but if the source application can't keep the buffer filled then you will get the crackling effect. You can increase this value by setting a global minimum with:
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum 2048It will set the audio buffer to 1024/48000 seconds (or .0434s, 43.4ms). It will introduce a bit of latency (you can decrease the quant to 512 for ~20ms if you need lower latency).
This will not persist past a reboot, you'd have to edit a config file for that (pipewire.conf, maybe?).
Pipewire-pulse provides compatibility to programs that may not directly support pipewire yet.
Pipewire was developed to be a total drop in replacement to the Pulse audio sound server. It has compatibility layers that allow other things to talk to it.
Edit: debian is not showing pipewire-alsa as a hard dependency of pipewire
packages.debian.org/trixie/pip…
Debian -- Details of package pipewire in trixie
audio and video processing engine multimedia serverpackages.debian.org
Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
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Head of the Signal app threatens to withdraw from Europe
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/50130760
Head of the Signal app threatens to withdraw from Europe
Signal app boss threatens to withdraw from Europe
The head of the Signal app has criticized plans in the EU to allow messengers to have backdoors to enable automatic searches for criminal content. Signal is considered one of the most secure messengers.blue News
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what prevents someone from downloading and installing the apk to their phone
google.
androidsage.com/2025/08/26/goo…
Finally Over: Google Blocks Sideloading of Android Apps
In a shocking betrayal of Android's foundational principles, Google has announced what can only be described as a death blow to the open ecosystem that made Android the world's most popular mobile platform.Sarang (Android Sage)
banned from EU app stores
What even is that? Aren't the 2 app official app stores American anyway?
Encryption isn't magically broken because a legislature says it is.
They have to apply teeth to a market they control. Not everything is within their control. Though, signal is.
Laws don't magically break encryption. I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
They're trying to force Signal to weaken the application, Signal says they won't do it.
They can ban Signal for not complying, but you know how difficult it is to ban a digital application? It might make it more popular since it'll be one of very few actually secure messaging apps out there.
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Google will require developer verification to install Android apps, including sideloading
Developer blocked: Package Installer Added in version 36.1 DEVELOPER_VERIFICATION_FAILED_REASON_DEVELOPER_BLOCKED public static final int DEVELOPER_VERIFICATION_FAILED_REASON_DEVELOPER_BLOCKED DEVELOPER_VERIFICATION_FAILED_REASON_NETWORK_UNAVAILA…F-Droid Forum
Canary coal mine kind of signal (pardon the pun)
Edit: they also obviously do not have a choice. If they legally must weaken their work and the core of their work is that it's not weak... then they have no work. So they can't accept it.
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For a future with privacy, not mass surveillance, Germany
must stand firmly against client-side scanning in the Chat
Control proposal [PDF - Statement from Meredith Whittaker, President, Signal Foundation]
We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/germany-c…
Fight Chat Control - Protect Digital Privacy in the EU
Learn about the EU Chat Control proposal and contact your representatives to protect digital privacy and encryption.fightchatcontrol.eu
Head of the Signal app threatens to withdraw from Europe
Signal app boss threatens to withdraw from Europe
The head of the Signal app has criticized plans in the EU to allow messengers to have backdoors to enable automatic searches for criminal content. Signal is considered one of the most secure messengers.blue News
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Technology reshared this.
Signal CEO Whittaker said that in the worst case scenario, they would work with partners and the community to see if they could find ways to circumvent these rules. Signal also did this when the app was blocked in Russia or Iran. "But ultimately, we would leave the market before we had to comply with dangerous laws like these."
This is why we need the ability to sideload apps.
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That means nothing when the servers stop taking EU traffic
I don’t use any of these apps, so I’m not quite sure how they work. But couldn’t you just make an app that keeps a local private and public key pair. Then when you send a message (say via regular sms) it includes under the hood your public key. Then the receiver when they reply uses your public key to encrypt the message before sending to you?
Unless the sms infrastructure is going to attempt to detect and reject encrypted content, this seems like it can be achieved without relying on a server backend.
That makes the assumption you want to use your phone number at all
Can't use Signal without a phone number.
That is how the signal protocol works, it's end to end encrypted with the keys only known between the two ends.
The issue is that servers are needed to relay the connections (they only hold public keys) because your phone doesn't have a static public IP that can reliably be communicated to. The servers are needed to communicate with people as they switch networks constantly throughout the day. And they can block traffic to the relay servers.
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SimpleX Chat: private and secure messenger without any user IDs (not even random)
SimpleX Chat - a private and encrypted messenger without any user IDs (not even random ones)! Make a private connection via link / QR code to send messages and make calls.simplex.chat
It is potentially doable:
A short message is 140 bytes of gsm7-bit packed characters (I.e. each character is translated to "ascii" format which only take up 7-bit space, which also is packed together forming unharmonic bytes), so we can probably get away with 160 characters per SMS.
According to crypto.stackexchange, a 2048-bit private key generates a base64 encoded public key of 392 characters.
That would mean 3 SMSs per person you send your public key to.
For a 4096-bit private key, this accounts to 5 SMSs.
As key exchange only has to be sent once per contact it sounds totally doable.
After you sent your public key around, you should now be able to receive encrypted short messages from your contacts.
The output length of a ciphertext depends on the key size according to crypto.stackexchange and rfc8017. This means we have 256 bytes of ciphertext for each 2048-bit key encrypted plaintext message, and 512 bytes for 4096-bit keys.
Translated into short messages, it would mean 2 or 4 SMSs for each text message respectively, a 1:2, or 1:4 ratio.
- NIST recommends abandoning 2048-bit keys by 2030 and use 3072-bit keys (probably a 1:3 ratio)
- average number of text messages sent per day and subscriber seems to be around 5-6 SMS globally, this excludes WhatsApp and Signal messages which seems to be more popular than SMS in many parts of the world [quotation needed, I just quickly googled it]
Hope you have a good SMS plan 😉
What is the public key length of RSA and Ed25519?
I have made some research but doesn't understand fully: In this link, it says ed25519 has a length of 64 characters. Questions: Is this base64 encoded characters? And does ed25519 limit to only 64Cryptography Stack Exchange
putting a bullet (double tap) in Chat Control,
Yes, please.
once and for all.
LOL, no. They'll come back again with some other bullshit to Save the Children!™, it's a never-ending whack-a-mole.
There are groups to support:
And in the UK:
Some political groups are better than others, but most politicians are clueless.
The key is to get muggles to understand we are living in Technofeudalism and why being digital serfs is bad. The problem is ineffective competition law and that monopolies are bad. That monopolies and standards are not the same thing. I have no idea how. Most people are just naturally compliant and unquestioning of something seemingly so abstract.
European Union
EFF has hundreds of donors and thousands of active supporters throughout Europe. We work with the many digital rights organizations across the continent and are members of EDRi, the international digital rights advocacy organization based in Brussels…Electronic Frontier Foundation
In the 80's (I'm that old), many home computers came with the programming manual, and the impetus was to learn to code and run your programs on your own device. Even with Android it's not especially hard (with LLM's even less so than it used to be) to download Android Studio, throw some shit onto the screen, hit build, and run your own helper app or whatever ~~sideloaded~~ installed via usb cable (or wirelessly) on your own device.
In certain cases (cars, health related hw etc.) I get why it's probably for the best if the user is not supposed to mod their device outside preinstalled sw's preferences/settings. But when it comes to computers (i.e. smartphones, laptops, tablets, tv boxes etc.) I fully agree with Cory here. Such a shame everything must go to shit.
About freedom, not freedom and various other things - might want to extend the common logic of gun laws to the remaining part of the human societies' dynamics.
Signal is scary in the sense that it's a system based on cryptography. Cryptography is a reinforcement, not a basis, if we are not discussing a file encryption tool. And it's centralized as a service and as a project. It's not a standard, it's an application.
It can be compared to a gun - being able to own one is more free, but in the real world that freedom affects different people differently, and makes some freer than the other.
Again, Signal is a system based on cryptography most people don't understand. Why would there not be a backdoor? Those things that its developers call a threat to rapid reaction to new vulnerabilities and practical threats - these things are to the same extent a threat against monoculture of implementations and algorithms, which allows backdoors in both.
It is a good tool for people whom its owners will never be interested to hurt - by using that backdoor in the open most people are not qualified to find, or by pushing a personalized update with a simpler backdoor, or by blocking their user account at the right moment in time.
It's a bad tool even for them, if we account for false sense of security of people, who run Signal on their iOS and Android phones, or PCs under popular OSes, and also I distinctly remember how Signal was one of the applications that motivated me to get an Android device. Among weird people who didn't have one then (around 2014) I might be even weirder, but if not, this seems to be a tool of soft pressure to turn to compromised suppliers.
Signal discourages alternative implementations, Signal doesn't have a modular standard, and Signal doesn't want federation. In my personal humble opinion this means that Signal has their own agenda which can only work in monoculture. Fuck that.
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Unironically yes, communications (information and roads) were historically as important. Lenin's call to "take post, telegraph, telephone stations, bridges and rail stations" kinda illustrates that.
What I meant is that abstractly having fully private and free communications is just as universally good as everyone having a drone army. In reality both have problems. The problems with weapons are obvious, the problems with communications in my analogy are not symmetric to that, but real still - it's that people can be deceived and backdoors and traps exist. Signal is one service, application and cryptographic system, it shouldn't be relied upon this easily.
It's sometimes hard to to express things based only on someone with good experience telling them to me, making it an appeal to anonymous authority, but a person who participated in a project for a state security service once told me that in those services cryptography is never the basis of a system. It can only be a secondary part.
Also, other than backdoors and traps, imbalance exists. Security systems are tools for specific purposes, none are universal. 20 years ago anonymity and resilience and globalism (all those plethora of Kademlia-based and overlay routing applications, most of which are dead now) were more in fashion, and now privacy and political weight against legal bans (non-technical thing, like, say, the title of the article) are. The balance between these in popular systems determines which sides and powers lose and benefit from those being used by many people. In case of Signal the balance is such that we supposedly have absolute privacy and convenience (many devices, history), but anonymity, resilience and globalism are reduced to proverbial red buttons on Meredith Whittaker's table.
Unfortunately, I don't get most of your refetences, but sure you can find similarities in wildy different things.
Signal being easy to rely on is its biggest benefit. No one will adopt something that's more complex, but I don't think extra complexity would offer better security for the average person. More complexity just means more things to go wrong.
People can be deceieved anywhere in their life, this isn't synonymous to an end to end encrypted chat.
Backdoors do exist and they are obviously bad, but Signal choosing to leave the market before implementing one sounds best to me.
state security service once told me that in those services cryptography is never the basis of a system. It can only be a secondary part.
Obviously I'm no smarter than this person, but without cryptography how is any "secure" project actually "secure". The only thing more important that I can imagine would be the physical location of a server (for example) being highly protected from bad actors.
In the end, I personally think having an easy to use platform that is secure gives everyone amazing power to recoup their free speech wherever is it eroded.
Signal being easy to rely on is its biggest benefit. No one will adopt something that’s more complex, but I don’t think extra complexity would offer better security for the average person. More complexity just means more things to go wrong.
My concerns on this are more that acceptable share in something in the internetworked world seems to be in percentages far smaller than the usual common sense percentages. Like - there are political systems with quotas, and there are anti-monopoly regulations, but with computers and the Internet every system is a meta-system. Allowing endless supply of monopolies and monocultures.
Signal is so easy to rely, that if you ask which applications with zero-knowledge cryptography and reliable groupchat encryption and so on people use, that are available without p2p (draining battery and connectivity requirements), with voice calls and file transfers, it'll be mostly Signal.
Doesn't matter it's only one IM application. In its dimension it's almost a monoculture. One group of developers, one company, one update channel. An update comes with a backdoor and it's done.
It's not specifically about Signal, rather about the amount of effort and publicity that goes into year 2002 schoolgirl's webpage is as much as any separate IM application should get, if we want to avoid dangers with the Internet which don't exist in other spheres. And they usually get more. The threshold where something becomes too big with computers is much smaller than with, I don't know, garden owner associations.
Even if there are already backdoors put by their developers in a few very "open", ideologically nice and friendly and "honorable" things like Signal, then such backdoors can exist and be used for many years before being found.
I mean, there are precedents IRL, and with computers you are hiding the needle in a much bigger hay stack.
Obviously I’m no smarter than this person
I'm bloody certain you are smarter than this person in everything not concerning things they were directly proficient in. And while being an idiot, they would stuck their nose into everything not their concern in very dangerous (for others, not for them) ways.
but without cryptography how is any “secure” project actually “secure”.
There are security schemes, security protocols, security models, and then there is cryptography as one kind of building blocks, with, just like in construction materials, its own traits and behavior.
In the end, I personally think having an easy to use platform that is secure gives everyone amazing power to recoup their free speech wherever is it eroded.
And I think the moment anything specific and controlled by one party becomes popular enough to be a platform, we're screwed and we're not secure.
Reminds of SG-1 and the Goauld (not good guys, I know) adjusting their spawn genome for different races.
Perhaps something like that should be made, a common DSL for describing application protocols and maybe even transport protocols, where we'd have many different services and applications, announcing themselves by a message in that DSL describing how to interact with them. (Also inspired by what Telegram creators have done with their MTProto thing, but even more general ; Telegram sometimes seems something that grew out of an attempt to do a very cool thing, I dunno if I was fair saying bad things about Durov on the Internet.)
A bit like in Star Wars Han Solo and Chewbacca speak to each other.
And a common data model, fundamentally extensible, say, posts as data blobs with any amount of tags of any length, it's up to any particular application to decide on limits. Even which tag is the ID and how it's connected to the data blob contents and others tags is up to any particular application. What matters is that posts can be indexed by tags and then replicated\shared\transferred\posted by various application protocols.
It should be a data-oriented system, so that one would, except for latency, use it as well by sharing post archives as they would by searching and fetching posts from online services, or even subscribing to posts of specific kind to be notified immediately. One can imagine many kinds of network services for this, relay services (like, say, IRC), notification services (like, say, SIP), FTP-like services, email-like services. The important thing would be that these are all transports, all variable and replaceable, and the data model is constant.
There can also be a DSL that describes some basics on how a certain way of interpreting posts and their tags works and which buttons, levers and text fields it presents, kinda similar to how we use the Web. It should be a layer above the DSL that would describe verification of checksums, identities, connections, trust, who has which privileges and so on.
Except all these DSLs should be concise and comprehensible, because otherwise they will turn into something like TG's protocol in complexity and ugliness.
OK, I have temperature and I think I've lost my thought.
I am starting to agree with the new point. I still think everyone should move to Signal for now because it works and works well, but I see your point that one authority can become dangerous if any one malicious party in power tried anything.
There are probably solutions that could exist because it's open source (eg a different trusted entity like f-droid managed builds from source for example so Signal themselves can't add extra code in their builds or just a way to verify that no extra code is present in signals build vs any build from source).
In the future, I would prefer we moved to something more decentralised like what the Matrix protocol is trying to achieve. This could come with further issues, but while those are fixed, Signal is my main go to.
With Matrix I believe we would end up with pretty much the common data models as you were mentioning. Anyone can build their own server and or client and interact with others, knowing at least their software is safe.
that's a lot of words to say you generally accuse any programm that isn't federated of having an agenda targeted at its userbase.
And lots of social woo-woo that doesn't extend much further than "people don't understand cryptography and think it's therefore scary".
A pretty weird post, and one which I don't support any statement from because I think you're wrong.
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that’s a lot of words to say you generally accuse any programm that isn’t federated of having an agenda targeted at its userbase
No, that's not what I'm saying. I used the word monoculture, it's pretty good.
And lots of social woo-woo that doesn’t extend much further than “people don’t understand cryptography and think it’s therefore scary”.
Not that. Rather "people don't understand cryptography, but still rely upon it when they shouldn't".
A pretty weird post, and one which I don’t support any statement from because I think you’re wrong.
I mean, you've misread those two you thought you understood.
Using mono ulture as a word doesn't change the meaning here. If anything, its a pathway for the foal you ascribe.
I do give you credit about the second part - it would be better to have your own private key in chat apps, which isn't handled by the app itself, at the very least to establish a shared key. I still think the existence of crypto is a massive boon to many, even in a "flawed" implementation with the "control" being on the side of corporations - tho if they are smart, they'd never store the keys themselves, not even hashes. Unless you're part of the signal project, I doubt you know the exact implementation and storage of data they do.
Still, thanks for summarising your lengthy post, even if I had to bait you into it. Sometimes, brevity is key.
Using mono ulture as a word doesn’t change the meaning here. If anything, its a pathway for the foal you ascribe.
Of course it does. Federation can be a monoculture too (as it is with plants). A bunch of centralized (technically federated in IRC's case, but united) services, like with IRC, can be not a monoculture.
Monoculture is important because one virus (of conspiratorial nature, like backdoors and architectures with planned life cycle, like what I suspect of the Internet, or of natural one, like Skype's downfall due to its P2P model not functioning in the world of mobile devices, or of political and organizational one, like with XMPP's standards chaos and sabotage by Google) can kill it. In the real world different organisms have sexual procreation, as one variant, recombining their genome parts into new combinations. That existed with e-mail when it worked over a few different networks and situations and protocols, and with Fidonet and Usenet, with gateways between these. That wasn't a monoculture.
Old Skype unfortunately was a monoculture. Its clients for Linux (QT) and Windows and mobile things were different implementations technically, but with the same creators and one network and set of protocols in practice.
I still think the existence of crypto is a massive boon to many
That's the problem, it's not. You should factor psychology in. People write things over encrypted channels that they wouldn't over plaintext channels. That means it's not just comparison of encrypted versus plain, other things equal.
even in a “flawed” implementation with the “control” being on the side of corporations - tho if they are smart, they’d never store the keys themselves, not even hashes.
And that's another problem, no. Crooks only steal your money, and they have adjusted for encryption anyway. They are also warning you of the danger, for that financial incentive. Like wolves killing sick animals. The state and the corporation - they don't steal your money, they are fine with just collecting everything there is and predicting your every step, and there will be only one moment with no warning then you will regret. That moment will be one and the same for many people.
Unless you’re part of the signal project, I doubt you know the exact implementation and storage of data they do.
What matters is that the core of their system is a complex thing that is magic for most people. You don't need to look any further.
Still, thanks for summarising your lengthy post, even if I had to bait you into it. Sometimes, brevity is key.
EDIT:
Still, thanks for summarising your lengthy post, even if I had to bait you into it. Sometimes, brevity is key.
Yeah, I just woke up with sore throat and really bad mood (dog bites, especially when the dog was very good, old and dying, hurt immunity and morale).
Haha! Do it if the EU does not give up on their Orwellian control!
Wait, I'm in the EU and I use Signal!
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Basically, but what you forget is that Signal is also the standard for every Politician for their group chats because it's secure, so the idea that they might lose their secure, leak-free* form of communication should worry MEPs and other politicians into taking action. Will it? I don't know, politicians are very stupid when it comes to tech it seems.
* Baring screenshots
Screenshots, or just adding a journalist to the group chat.
no software can prevent PEBKAC errors. It's like locking a door and then giving the key to a thief and being shocked when people steal your shit
Signal is considered one of the most secure messengers.
I mean lol, they require a phone number to sign up, which you can only get with an ID in many countries. You chat with a gestapo officer and they know where you life.
Signal IS GARBAGE. Fucking garbage article, gaslighting bullshit. Fuck this timeline. Honestly this article is fucking terrorism.
thehackernews.com/2024/02/sign…
Signal Introduces Usernames, Allowing Users to Keep Their Phone Numbers Private
Signal rolls out usernames, ditch those phone numbers for added security.The Hacker News
plans in the EU to allow messengers to have backdoors to enable automatic searches for criminal content
Obviously not. Think about supply and demand. Because a toxic product is being hailed as secure there isn't enough demand for an actually anonymous and private messenger. So calling signal "secure" is just helping state security.
If you actually want to message about revolutionary (illegal, "terrorist") activity and don't want to be traced immediately by an agent of state security or an informant, Signal offers nothing (unless you use criminal activity like identity theft). In such a case a warrant will obviously be granted and they can immediately find and arrest you.
Can you see the logic how Signal isn't secure at all for an actual dissident?
Supply and demand: There are seemingly new messenging services that pop up every day, so I'm not sure why you think Signal existing is stopping progress. It isn't.
Security: For 99.9% of people, the security and privacy granted through using Signal is amazing and it is worthy of being called secure. I mean it's secure enough for government officials to trust using. With how Signal is currently, an official data request from the government for Signal data returns pretty much nothing except the phone number used (and that they have signed up for signal ofc), which is great.
I think 'revolutionaries' (protestors) are already using Signal. I haven't heard of any cases where something has gone wrong for them, but again, there's no way for your messages to be read unless they get access to your phone (if you are smart you will make sure your messages auto delete and that you lockdown or shutdown your phone incase of arrest).
I can't see how Signal isn't safe for anyone.
Doesn't make any sense but ok (I would write an expanation, but somehow i feel like you still wouldn't get it based on your response).
If you really want me to, feel free to ask.
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They're not mutually exclusive.
Because you're not anonymous, you lose out on privacy.
Of course, you're just trying to fit in with other idiots on the internet so you are incapable of understanding this basic fact.
If there are any smart people reading this, Signal is a business and they have plenty of morons going to bat for them because of it.
If you want privacy and anonymity, use Matrix.
Separate airgapped device running an encryption app. Type text on it, it spits out a ciphertext, then, use internet connected device to scan the ciphertext, OCR*, then send to target receipient, they also use this same airgap encryption device and they OCR, then decrypt using their key.
*Instead of OCR, you could also use a QR code to have error correction
Tell me how they can ban this? Anyone using a raspberry pi with a battery and touch display attached into one compact thing, is a criminal?
What if we just start using One Time Pad? Can they ban that?
Steganography?
Like seriously, how do you even stop "criminals" using steganography?
So, to Big Gov, here's my question: Are you gonna ban talking to other people becuause criminals also talk to other people?
They don't care about your messages, they don't care about terrorists or pedophiles.
They do care about the general population, and wants to control it. That's what this is all about. The hard right wants to have effective tools to slam down on dissent when they get in power.
A game as old as humanity.
Shameless plug, because I'm trying to do my part ☺️ : Tenfingers sharing
If the law is implemented, I would selfhost my own chat server. I don't see this as Signal fault.
But everybody can`t selfhost. That is a problem I am struggling with.
I am now sure what I would do about email, I assume it is affected as well?
That's actually a smart idea!
Not more legal or something (if that stupid laws becomes reality) I guess but who cares ☺️.
I already self host my own matrix server. Everybody can't do that, but everybody can use someone's matrix server. They can't shut it down because it's decentralised and federated. It would theoretically be illegal to use but I don't see how they would be able to stop it.
Email with PGP would then also be illegal but impossible to effectively stop. That's why the whole discussion is so stupid. It only hurts the normies. Criminals and tech savvy people will find a way around it and still use encryption without mandated backdoors.
We wouldn't have a simple and secure way of communicating?
The apple/Facebook alternatives are not good at all.
Simplex, xmpp, deltachat, briar, matrix, even session.
Anything is better than signal that relies on a centralised proprietary server and requires a phone number.
Sure, but tell my family that...
Has any of those become like easy to install and use? To be fair I haven't checked in some time...
With DeltaChat you don't even need an email address anymore, they provide it for you on the fly. They just ask your name if you (optionally) want to put it.
Can't be simpler than that tbh.
If you want a better looking ui, check ArcaneChat for Android. It's 100% compatible with DeltaChat protocol
Simplex is really easy to install and use, unfortunately it's still kinda buggy, specially with public relays, I personally don't mind buggy, I'm willing to make sacrifices for the same of freedom and privacy.
I just keep a second chat app as a failback so I can send them a message saying "ur simplex broke again, pls restart"
Xmpp has been stable for decades, tho I guess otr/omemo is hard for family to install, also doesn't support e2ee calls (or rather, it does, but it's complicated). But I haven't used xmpp in a long time.
Desinformação climática explode nas redes e mira a COP30, em novembro
Desinformação climática explode nas redes e mira a COP30, em novembro - ((o))eco
Objetivos políticos incluem atrasar ações contra a crise global e melar a imagem da conferência, do Brasil e da capital paraenseAldem Bourscheit (((o))eco)
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Duke Energy backs off renewables after North Carolina cuts climate goal
Duke Energy backs off renewables after North Carolina cuts climate goal
The state repealed the utility’s 2030 emissions target in July. Duke’s response? A plan to slash solar and wind, double down on gas — and burn more coal.Canary Media
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Shame ... North Carolina was once called the "Rip Van Winkle" state because it was so far behind everyone else. And it woke up briefly and briefly gave us a great public university system as well as Red Hat Linux. Then around the turn of the century, every racist boomer with a small pension from Jersey and New York sold their assets and moved down and bought up all of the old farmland and turned it into cardboard McMansions everywhere and made it MAGA heaven. That combined with all of the Fort Liberty homesteaders who spread out from Fayettenam like a cancer with their perpetual war contracts completely changed the state overnight.
A few years ago we had the biggest solar lobby in the country ... the old families had turned the tobacco fields into solar farms and it was going well. But I guess even they have been crowded out of their own state. It's a violent place now where people can shoot up the power stations to protest books and go unpunished, and spec ops guys can shoot working immigrants 200 yards from their property in "self defense" and not even be arrested.
It's now just a stew of MAGA that keeps brewing to the point that the original flavor has been lost. It will only get saltier. The "University" system is now run by MAGAts. It takes generations to set up infrastructure like what was set up around the RTP area, and only a few years to undo it all.
Sorry North Carolina, I had to leave.
Square Kilometre Array datacenter needs two Faraday cages
Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks
IAC 2025: Stray signals are a no-no when you’re trying to tune into the starsSimon Sharwood (The Register)
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Zionist Zohran Mamdani condemns Hamas and calls October 7th a war crime
Zionist Zohran Mamdani condemns Hamas and calls October 7th a war crime
Zohran Mamdani: "I condemn Hamas, of course, I have called Oct. 7 what it was, which was a horrific war crime and, of course, my belief in a universality in international law is also the same set o...TankieTube
Apple has REMOVED the ICEBlock app from the App Store due to “objectionable content.”
Mueller, She Wrote (@muellershewrote.com)
BREAKING: Apple has REMOVED the ICEBlock app from the App Store due to “objectionable content.” More billionaires bending the knee.Bluesky Social
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Technology reshared this.
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And the open source movement is such a blind spot to the 'left' as well, even though technology freedom is critical if you want to be able to organise any type of resistance in the digital space.
Lemmy users largely get it, obviously, but centre left people will happily let themselves get locked into the Apple/Google walled gardens even though you're just giving that company a ridiculous amount of power over you.
Right? The collective dismissal of Mastodon from leftist influencers when the Muskening happened was eye opening.
Like, there's a collaborative, volunteer-based platform right over there. You want mutual aid? Open-source is as mutual-aid as it gets.
But it's nerd shit.
Because they are controlled opposition.
The only time something not controlled got popular was TikTok and you saw how quickly both parties went to ban it in 2024 after normal people started talking about Gaza genocide in every day conversation. The American Congress worked together to ban it even though they couldn't agree on anything else.
It went from an Asian platform where Asian people in the West connected with each other outside the mainstream blue pill/red pill false choice and shared culture as well as history that isn't taught, to "here's the truth about Jesus" and "the world is flat debate me" after that vote. Now it's full on MAGA.
Mastodon is harder to control because servers can pop up organically, but I guess Threads was a hedge against that threat.
The only time something not controlled got popular was TikTok
I'm not sure what you mean by controlled, but how I got to know it was as the malware that's recommended to everyone on the front page of the google play store, and then even factory preinstalled on a lot of them.
It wasn't doing anything that Facebook wasn't already doing, but it got banned. The CEO was brought in front of Congress and racially profiled, gave strong answers, and then got banned anyway.
Wonder why?
TikTok hate was a bot farm. The algorithm was always a reflection of the user.
Yeah. And to think, it's a fairly small amount of nuance - it's very basic and intuitive and information about it is literally everywhere. We are hopeless when it comes to far more complex and nuanced social issues we face like rehabilitation or ethnocentrism or trans athletes or the what have you.
People seem to think socialism and any progress is like "be nice to each other" or some stupid aestheticism about "empathy".
There's basically no way to have a conversation with them most of the time, they are so far gone and their fully formed thoughts seem more like inaccurate shorthands, it's like trying to explain astrodynamics to a dog when it's actively trying not to understand them.
Normies are the death of us all.
Recanted is the word I was thinking of.
We rapidly need to switch to Linux Mobile. PostmarketOS and Mobian are the two most promising projects, and I would highly recommend anyone reading this to donate to them if you have the means.
Both projects directly use your donations to hire developers to build and polish the critical essentials to get this alternative viable as a daily driver.
postmarketOS // real Linux distribution for phones
Aiming for a 10 year life-cycle for smartphonespostmarketOS
It doesn't necessarily need to achieve mass adoption, it just needs to get to a 'good enough' point to make it viable for those who are willing or desperate to get away from big tech.
Linux still has plenty of people giving reasons why they won't switch, but it's now finally viable for many, including myself. I just want mobile Linux to get to that point too, even if there's still rough edges.
how banking apps are mandatory.
This i don't get, i'd rather use home-banking from my home PC.
Yes but you can't motherfucker, don't you understand that? In most of the world you have to use the app, you CANNOT use online banking without the bank's app on your phone, you have no sign-in details apart from the email and the bank app, it is the only way to sign in and you sign in via 2FA inside their app and authorize transactions exclusively via that, and no you can't use Google authenticator or whatever, it's a "tap to allow sign on" type 2FA and the only kind supported.
There is no "home banking", and you are not even allowed to enter a physical bank location on the high street without being intercepted by a ghoul telling you to use the app or fuck off, you cannot call the bank because they have no public number, you do everything via the app or you cannot do anything at all.
That's why even people without access to drinking water have the latest fucking smartphones, they're a prerequisite and there are no alternatives.
Most of the time you don't even have a bank card, just the bank card details in the bank app on your phone that are automatically added to Google Pay, and you use that because near everything is cashless and NFC.
Soon across EU and UK your very ID will be stored on your phone.
I don't need to use an app to manage my bank account.
Sounds like you people have shitty banks. Maybe it's time to switch?
I am not American you weird internet man. In the rest of the world and specifically my part of it - Europe, all banks require their app, there is no way around it, and there is no way to use foreign bank accounts or not have a bank account at all etc etc.
I wrote about all this before, including ITT.
Why the fuck do I have to explain this over and over like you was born yesterday?
Stop assuming your country's experience is at all representative of the rest of the world, because evidently - it is not.
I love how you are getting downvoted for getting frustrated with people who can't see beyond their own nose.
I fully agree with you, these people just don't want to admit some of us don't have the privilege of choosing since all the options end up on forcing a banking app one way or another.
Because it is a fucking privilege at this point.
Yeah, people should have listened to the people warning of privacy concerns with online services. Now that your data is valuable, companies will do anything to extract it from you.
Stop using those products, de-Google, install Linux, use self-hosted solutions.
It will take some effort to switch. You get to decide how much effort you’re willing to expend in order to not sacrifice all of your privacy and control of your digital lives.
"Sideloading" is their term, invented to make it sound like something it is not. We should not use this word. The correct word is "installing".
You don't "sideload" on Windows when you install software outside of the Microsoft Store™️. There is no real difference or distinction with software on phones, so there is no need for a special word.
Windows 10 and Windows 11 in S mode FAQ - Microsoft Support
Get answers to common questions about Windows 11 and Windows 10 in S mode.support.microsoft.com
Microsoft has been trying this for years already. That eventually led to Valve incresing their efforts in the Linux gaming front and releasing the Steam Deck.
See this
Valve boss Gabe Newell calls Windows 8 a 'catastrophe'
Microsoft's system is going to be a catastrophe for everyone involved in the PC industry, says video game firm Valve's boss Gabe Newell.BBC News
I wonder if Valve would ever get into the Linux Phone market.
But for the platform itself to be open, I wonder how much would have to be recreated.
Does anybody actually enjoy gaming on the phone or just do it because there nothing better to do?
I would perhaps buy a valve phone but I wouldn't want to game on it which sounds weird.
Unless it was like a switch and had detachable joycons.
Oh same here. I'm hopeful that valve brings us a linux phone, not a gaming phone. I've never really gotten into gaming on mobile either.
However, if they DO make a linux phone, I'm sure it will be Steam branded and have all kinds of gaming-specific tweaks.
But again, to me that just sounds like it will have good hardware specs. So not a problem!
Not to defend it, but the first time I encountered the term was when BlackBerry released their Playbook tablet. It ran their bbos10 and they created an android emulator so you could run some android apps. The process of installing the apk into the emulator was called sideloading.
I miss BlackBerry is all I really wanted to say.
the term “sideloading” is pretty irrelevant.
No, it's not.
"Installing" is innocuous and easily understandable (by those tech-illiterate dumbfucks that get spoonfed FUD by lobbyists); whereas sideloading is eerily similar to sidestepping and is prone to being interpreted as "working around a safeguard".
Words are not irrelevant.
🙄
If people were more aware of how to make and install mobile web apps it would be less of a problem.
At least on the iPhone you can still add a site to your screen that can behave a lot like an app, including camera access, location services, and even gyro. And it’s just a website like most “apps” are.
Google is not killing sideloading. If the dev is willing to submit to Apple for verification, they'd probably not object to submitting it to Google.
E: downvotes for facts, I guess? 🤷
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“Not obsolete. Just… illegal.”
~Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
I’m surprised it stayed up as long as it did. I thought Apple would have taken it down within days.
Anyways I’ve seen this as a non app alternative: stopice.net/
Stop ICE Raids Alert Network
Receive or send immediate alerts about ICE raids in your local areawww.stopice.net
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Would I be paranoid to use a VPN while visiting this site? (And others like it) god only knows if IP's visiting the site could be uncovered...
Yeah, I'm probably being paranoid...
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Long? Fascism came about through Mussolini's, Hitler's ally, coining the term and rising to power in '22. Hitler came about in '33. So was 11 years a long time?
Not really. Obama left office in '17. Counting the nomination, we've had to listen to tRump for about as long.
If that's a short time then I'm sure the next 11 years of Trump will flash by.
(That's when he dies)
It's really sickening that every corporation has thrown in with the new fascist regime.
At least these assholes used to pretend to be "not absolutely awful". Now they're just mask-off oppressors.
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Line must go up.
It's such a stupid axiom but it explains everything perfectly
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Most apps are a packaged browser that makes proprietary API calls over https. However there is nothing proprietary or valuable in the app itself, except possibly some key material for authentication of the app with the back-end.
Then depending on the user making various requests a middle-ware program will interact with the backend database and retrieve the results back to the user. The database is the valuable part and other then the specific query the user is making, nothing else is can be retrieved by the user. Normally the middle ware isn't even downloadable either.
since apps do have much greater access to the parent device then a website
I'm not disagreeing at all that this should have had a website as a backup, but you yourself are making some really good points about how apps aren't the same thing as websites and the benefits to using an app in this situation. Leveraging user hardware without the intermediate layer of a brower's sandbox is good for performance and makes a site much more robust in the face of things like DDOS, and having locally-hosted resources with which the user can interact without requiring an active TCP connection (because for example: ICE has geoblocked connectivity at one of their "enforcement actions" - but you can still document what's happening and the app will automatically-and-without-user-interaction upload what you've given it once connectivity is restored) is an incredibly important feature.
Offline websites, while potentially able to exhibit similar behavior, rely on extremely hacky workarounds and cached data to be able to do it - and an app is a much less volatile way to store that data than relying on your browser's cache reintegration (which will often be dumped if you're hit with bad a DHCP config).
I think your spirit is in the right place, but you're missing enough of the technical nuance that it's really undermining your ability to convincingly make your point. And again, I 100% agree that not having alternative access to this service is a critical loss.
Alright you've convinced me. The ability to store video's within the app (for a non-technical user) is probably worth having an app. Of course a website could and should have the ability for a user to upload a video independent of an app, but I acknowledge that there are indeed some additional benefits that can only be realized with an app.
Of course I've never liked the wall-garden app store paradigm to begin with, and obviously if that wasn't the only source of apps, then my entire point is moot. If any user could download the app from the digital ocean hosted iceblock website, and install it before going on scouting missions, then the app would be much more valuable, and the service more robust.
Everything is objectionable.
Are we ready to admit that giving 3 companies the ability to decide what everyone can and can't execute on their devices is a massive international problem? This is probably the greatest threat to every country in the world, and the people of the US.
I do think it's comparable. All of this is about money. Americans are funding all of this crap with the, albeit controlled, choices we make with our money. Our taxes are funding genocides and coups and war and destruction; our purchasing habits are funding the decline of our planet and our social structures and our sanity.
You're right though, consumers will likely never change in large enough quantities to make a real difference. People are already resubbing to Hulu so...
Jimmy Kimmel made Disney a lot of money. They had to choose between pressure from the US government, and losing a popular source of revenue along with the vast amount of liberals who swore them off. Jimmy Kimmel was not a real institutional threat to the US government. So the US government did not have a very strong incentive to continuously push for him being taken down, and Disney had a lot of incentive to keep him around.
An app that targets fascists makes Apple no money. The US government faces the loss (or rendering ineffective) of their fascist police force. Both sides therefore face a huge amount of pressure to have the app taken down. It would have to be a gigantic part of their profit margin to warrant any pushback from Apple. I'd be very, very surprised to hear that this change is ever overturned through a boycott.
Americans are funding all of this crap with the, albeit controlled, choices we make with our money.
To an extent, yes, but the dollar has been decoupled from gold a long time ago, they can literally just print money in the billions and they do (although there days it's probably money++ on a mainframe), completely sidestepping tax money..
Yeah this is generally the take I hear the most. The smartphone is presented as a necessity and for a lot of people that may be true, but what it really is is a tool for capitalism. It spies on you, gives you fomo, serves you ads, gives access to all kinds of addictive content... oh and work apps!
It's like AI, shoved down our throats until people think it's needed. It's not.
I would say you’re missing some nuance in these arguments, though.
With a phone people no longer need laptops or full-sized computers and they also get a phone and camera to go along with it. They get a lot of power even just using fairly mundane apps like email, file storage, and a calendar. And then you have access to the internet and all the power that comes with that. I also don’t know why you think phones show ads.
AI, on the other hand, is hot fucking garbage at everything it does. Why anyone uses it I can’t say, it’s so bad and it’s known that it’s actively making people dumber. I don’t touch the stuff and my life has been going just fine.
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You can't do those things any other way, eh? That's crazy...
It's a privilege to say no, eh? Interesting take.
No, we cannot do those things any other way.
Yes, it's a privilege to be able to simply say no to having a bank account, for one you'd need to not be in paid employment and not on any financial assistance, so basically a NEET and/or like a foreign-born investor, for which you need to be pretty rich.
You do realize that countries outside the US exist, right? Because the answer is No. No, they do not do these things outside of United States of America - which is 1 country.
Yes, as weird as it seems to you - the world is not entirely in one country called United States and what applies to what you know of your country does not apply in the entire world.
Here in the UK even grandma does not mail in bill payments, nor do most places accept this, she does it via the app or the utility company website for Direct Debit, or she has someone do it for her via the app before she goes on to be racist on Facebook.
This is the same way for blue collar workers. They in-fact - must have debit cards because they must have bank accounts to even get paid via PAYE and IR35 and thus pay taxes. While there are jobs outside of that, the people who work those jobs will be paid into bank accounts, and cash in hand jobs mean via PayPal or Venmo or some such that all also require bank accounts and KYC.
Hell, you can't even rent a place without showing them your bank statements, or straight up letting the letting agency login to your bank account via some third party data harvesting / "income analysis" tool so they can "confirm" your income and employment status. I had this exact thing demanded when I was looking for a place up and down the country just over half a year ago by every letting agency under the sun, from small to big, south to north.
Yes there are people without bank accounts, but it's usually only because they've either:
a) Just arrived and have no permanent address which is required to set up a bank account, meaning they have to pay rent upfront for 6mo to a year to avoid checks to even get an address, which they can't get because they can't get a job which again - requires a bank account - trapping them in a cycle of poverty unless they have savings in a foreign bank account with which to pay upfront rent
Or:
b) Are destitute and homeless, again - without a permanent address, which is required for a bank account.
The same goes for smartphones. You're not realistically gonna get a job without a smartphone.
Credit cards yes - most people do not use them, and their dominance as a default and even commonplace household usage as 'deficit spending' on Temu is most commonly a US phenomenon.
That's because debit cards are the default in the rest of the world - credit cards are not. Since everyone has a bank account and smartphone, most people pay with Google Pay via NFC on their phone anyway IRL, and many people shop online, which is the use of a debit card - paying for things.
As opposed to credit cards, which are seen as borrowing. Not that many people are keen to borrow money or engage in any finance that could be seen as "gambling", definitely least so the wagies, with the exception of some horse betting or memestocks or in the case of 100% brain use - a savings account at a bank or building society, all of which almost universally already require a bank account meaning a minimum of 2 apps.
I personally do have one but I'm in the minority.
You saying this interaction is pointless is very self-reporting, because you are essentially stating that you will not change your mind regardless of how many times and how much you are corrected.
It is an admission that your bizarre insistence that your experience is universal - as if you not knowing how things are in the rest of the world is some sort of attack on you - is in fact, terminal. I'm sorry for you.
I don't claim to know how things work in America, I've heard American colleagues say crazy stuff about how everything is tied to your credit ratings, which isn't the case here nearly as much, but I also don't claim that everything i know about my country - the UK - applies to the rest of the world, because of course it doesn't, I'm claiming that what you're saying - what might be true in your country - the US - is a universal worldwide experience.
I'm not sure what you expected claiming this in this international discussion on this international community on this international website on this international internet.
Two phones.
One for everyday life.
The other for documentation of events, activism, direct action, this app mentioned in the post, and maybe even rebellions.
(actually if you are doing a rebellion, you better use meshtastic or some sort of radios, and remember: do not transmit from home)
A big problem is that people need smartphones for so much of modern life.
Do you though? They're convenient, for sure, but you can also use a dumbphone and a laptop.
How the fuck would I access my bank then? All banks literally require their apps to access the account or sometimes even open the account, nevermind actually pay for anything or get a debit or credit card.
>Inb4 some American downvotes because they forget the rest of the world exists
We get it, Americans use cash in America, and they use magnetic stripe cards and cheques and all these other technologies that were phased out in rest of the world before I was even born, but that's not really an argument to make on a global platform.
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Yes, as opposed to spending money at another capitalist institution that will inevitably do the same thing, which is somehow not a subservient take.
There are a lot of other ways to apply pressure besides boycotts. I dont think a boycott would ever work against Apple over this.
I'm not sure why you're taking such an aggressive / dismissive tone towards me. Did your comment really warrant a breakdown of possible forms of collective action? It never really seemed you were interested in a nuanced discussion in the first place.
I think collective action in this circumstance is better spent on directly obstructing ICE operations. The developers of the app would be better served by making their project accessible in browser, and self hosted so as to prevent further attempts to make it inaccessible. Group collective action should be focused on demonstration and obstruction of the root of the problem, ICE itself. How you go about the depends a lot on when/where but there are a lot of ways to obstruct their operations.
Ive never personally spent money on any kind of Apple device. I would certainly encourage others not to as well, a thing I was already doing. But I think focusing on Apple as the root problem here is a mistake in the first place.
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It makes literally not a single difference if all of us here boycotted them or not. It's meaningless.
Just lemmy users? Sure, but you don't stop with just lemmy users.
These billionaires are making more money than they ever have in human history
Honest to god do you think that money magically appears in their pocket. We can still claw it back. Unionize, boycott, collective action is our strongest pressure against them and IT DOES WORK.
collective action is our strongest pressure against them
Which is why governments fight so much to make it hard.
In my neck of the woods it's not cool to unionize and there's no home owners' association, people only rally for their favorite sports team but don't bother voting.
I guess we get what we deserve.
I agree that collective action is our strongest pressure against them and it does work.
I do not think a boycott itself is likely to reverse Apple's removal of the app. I also think it makes more sense for the app to become available from a web browser, or some other avenue that circumvents the need for Apple's approval in the first place.
I also believe that collective action in this circumstance is better spent on ICE itself, which would be more effective (its the reason the US government wants Apple to remove the app in the first place) and more direct to fascist power.
Between Apple walled garden and the new dev signature thing from Google, those big players sure do like control over what we can do as users.
I agree with you, PWA is the way but Apple has been slow walking integration for years now (see brainhub.eu/library/pwa-on-ios)
PWA on iOS - Current Status & Limitations for Users [2025]
PWAs are a thing, Apple can no longer ignore this fact. Did anything change in the latest OS? See what's new in PWA on iOS.brainhub.eu
Got a source for that?
I’m a dev and have a bunch of PWAs on my iPhone. You can install them right from the browser using that same old “add to Home Screen” behavior that has been in iOS for an eternity.
I’m posting this through voyager for Lemmy, installed from my browser, not the App Store.
Ahh. I thought you were talking about Apple charging for PWAs or something.
That said, I believe push works now.
It's the button to pin a PWA to the taskbar by reading the manifest.json
maketecheasier.com/enable-prog…
Firefox has always supported web-apps, because web-apps are just interactive websites
That's from August, when support was added back after the feature being dropped in 2020.
Mozilla has released Firefox 143.0. The update lets users pin web apps to the taskbar, but only on Windows.About a month [ago], I reported that progressive web apps (PWAs) are available via Firefox's Labs. Now, the feature is available for everyone on Windows.
This is for the September 16 update.
ghacks.net/2025/09/16/mozilla-…
Firefox Finally Brings Progressive Web Apps – How to Enable and Use Them Now - Make Tech Easier
Firefox brings back Progressive Web Apps with Taskbar Tabs, giving Windows users a smooth way to run websites like native apps.Karrar Haider (Make Tech Easier)
Progressive Web-apps are a particular kind of web-app. The person you replied to just referred to "webapps", not this special kind of web-app. Firefox has always supported web-apps.
The nature of progressive web-apps means that you can use them even if the browser doesn't explicitly support them. All that explicit support does is wrap the web-app in an icon and reduced browser window.
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Oh no, our precious Apple is really a shit company. Tim Cook, is just like every other Tech CEO, a Liberal POS (or just straight republican).
They don't care about LGBQT+ or the enviornment. They care about money and how much they can make from stupid people.
If you don't want to bother read a centuries year old classic of literature on human condition I don't think I want to bother clarifying.
Forgot my silly opinion, read the 2 pages story.
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Disclaimer: The app is closed source, so all we can go off is the developer's word, although the fact the government removed it is a strong indicator they don't have access to data from the app
The developer stated they do not even retain any identifying data, so the only data the government could get is public anyway. Through Apple they'd be able to see who downloaded it, and likely when it was used. Your defense would be easy enough though: "I just wanted to make sure the libs weren't harassing our ~~fascist~~ patriotic ICE agents near me"
It is impossible to send a (edit: true) push notification to a device without knowing which device it is going to. The developer may not know/have access to that information, but Apple/Google know which devices they are sending those pushes to. If it wasn't a true push notification, then they would not arrive in a timely manner and potentially only when the app was opened the next time.
He was using true push notifications, so the government could just subpoena that information.
He could maybe obfuscate who initiated the initial message, but its impossible to do that for the receivers.
Does anyone remember how the Devs from there didnt want to release for Android because ApPlE iS sOoOo mUcH mOoOrE sEcUrE
Get rekt.
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Based on most smartphones being very insecure. Of course, iPhones aren't extremely secure, but the competition is practically nonexistent. Pretty much the only secure Android phones are Pixels. Samsung is considered one of the more secure manufacturers too, but according to GrapheneOS devs it's still way behind Google.
Note that even police and government agencies sometimes have trouble getting into iPhones. They never have such troubles getting into Android smartphones, except Pixels.
This is by no means meant to advertise iPhones. It's just a simple observation that security in smartphones is heavily lacking.
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Both iPhones and Android phones can be configured to your desired security level. Both are used by various government agencies around the world for their most important secrets. Neither are secure out of the box. You have to harden them to your desired level of security
Arguing whether Android or iOS is more secure is a bit like arguing whether an SUV or pickup is safer. It doesn't matter which you pick when basic security steps are magnitudes more important: Wearing a safety belt, having a functioning air bag, driving a safe speed, not driving drunk, etc.
In regards to security, Apple does have three upsides, and only those:
- No sideloading and no unlocked bootloader means you can't sideload malware or install malware-preloaded ROMs. No root also means you can't just install malware that uses root access.
- Long OS support means fewer people run around with iPhones that are 5 OS versions behind.
- There's no tiny boutique iPhone manufacturers who sell phones that come pre-loaded with malware.
The solution for the first one is "don't sideload untrusted stuff" and the solution to the second and third one is "buy an Android phone from a trusted manufacturer that has long term OS support".
I'm not defending apple here. Short OS support (or none at all) is not a good thing, and it's something that's sadly still quite common if you buy the wrong Android brand.
Samsung is doing pretty well in that regard right now.
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So if you give me two options, first is updating my phone so it becomes laggy and unusable or keep current version, I will choose to stay on old OS.
It really depends on what your goal is. Usability, keeping a familiar interface, performance, all of that are things that make it reasonable to stay on an outdated OS, and none of these reasons are bad.
Security (which is the only thing we are really talking about here) does require updates.
If security is your most important concern, you need to update. If security is not your biggest concern and other topics are more important for you, it might be reasonable to stay on older versions.
But in the context of this post, which was purely about security, having long term security updates is important.
Most long supported os has bad intentions behind it as making old models inferior and unusable as in case with ios on iphone 5.
Your evidence is an iPhone that came out 13 years ago last month? Back in those days, the year over year improvements in the hardware were immense, and the software tried to take advantage of it. But people would complain, A Lot, if those features didn't come to their older device. Do you remember how much folks lost their mind when the iPhone 4 came out and iOS 4 allowed it and the 3GS to have a home screen wallpaper, but not the iPhone 3G? People were pissed and called it "planned obsolescence" that it didn't get the feature. So, when the iPhone 4 hit iOS 7, they included all the animations. And then people called it planned obsolescence that it stuttered.
No sideloading and no unlocked bootloader means you can’t sideload malware or install malware-preloaded ROMs
It's a simple configuration change to disable it and can be done with any corporate MDM system, making this a moot point. Not to mention too many people don't understand security, so Android is taking away sideloading anyway, FoR sEcUriTY
No root also means you can’t just install malware that uses root access
The vast majority of Android phones do not come with root access. For both, you generally have to elevate access yourself
Long OS support means fewer people run around with iPhones that are 5 OS versions behind
If you're running an out-of-date OS, clearly security is not a priority
There’s no tiny boutique iPhone manufacturers who sell phones that come pre-loaded with malware
Supply chain attacks absolutely can happen to iPhones as well. There are plenty of re-sellers
You missed the actual security benefit over iOS that Android cannot compete with: Apple controls the entire software chain from security patch to OTA update. This allows them to patch and release a fix for critical vulnerabilities far faster than any Android device possibly could. Apple does not need to get the approval of an OEM (such as Samsung), and, due to special deals, they do not need to get the approval of a carrier (like Verizon). Android devices typically need to get approvals from both before releasing updates (although Google flagship phones can bypass one, and can fast track the other)
The downside there is there are no checks on Apple. They could release a horribly vulnerable patch with no additional checks in-between
You don't seem to get my point and seem to think that I'm some apple fanboy that you need to convince or win against.
I use android, I've never used iOS. I enjoy the freedom of sideloading. Still it is a fact that the overwhelming majority of malware infections on Android happen due to side loading. The percentage of devices running corporate MDM is tiny, making this a moot point.
The vast majority of Android phones do not come with root access. For both, you generally have to elevate access yourself
And yet quite a few devices in the wild run rooted or custom ROMs.
If you're running an out-of-date OS, clearly security is not a priority
You seem to forget what this thread is about. It's not about personal security and whether one can run a safe android device, but about an app developer not providing an Android version, because the platform as a whole (meaning the average user) is less secure.
Personal preferences like paying for a new, non-outdated phone don't really matter for that big picture view.
Supply chain attacks absolutely can happen to iPhones as well. There are plenty of re-sellers
That's a strange argument. Getting malware that survives a factory reset onto an iPhone without apple's approval is close to impossible. Making an Android phone from scratch that contains malware right in the system image has been done over and over again. You are argueing a hypothetical versus something that happens every day.
Always funny watching apple users think they know something.
pinches cheek
In terms of security alone, iPhones easily beat most Android phones
That's not how security works in the modern tech landscape. No major OS is going to meet a high security standard out of the box. All of them have to be configured to the desired security level, then be added to ongoing security efforts. Every major OS can be secured to the highest security standards
The primary difference is how much effort each takes, but even then there isn't much of a difference. You'll find tooling and in-house expertise makes a much larger difference than the OS
The myth that some OS are inherently secure really needs to die off
Every major OS can be secured to the highest security standards
Has Android added E2EE to their cloud backups yet like Apple has?
Apple is no friend to any of us, but Google openly and shamelessly scrapes every piece of data you put on their phones. Apple is absolutely the lesser of these two evils with out of the box functionality. I say this as a lifelong Android fan and Apple hater that entered the cybersecurity space and am only interested in the most private option I can get out of the box.
Like an Android can be more secure and private than an IPhone, but afaik that involves owning a Pixel specifically and installing an entirely different OS on it, one that Google a
Is also out to get.
You do know that Apple privately scrapes every piece of data you put on their phones right? Go read the privacy and ad policies. Apple also gives access to a lot of their users private information (China has full access to its users iCloud), will remove apps like this (while Google still allows apps that block ad trackers like DuckDuckGo that block Google own trackers). And Google supports CSE.
We get it from your post, your a huge and blind Apple fan that wants to do anything you can to confuse others into believing falsely like you that Apple is somehow a great company and product. But the truth is, Apple doesn't care about your privacy, lies to your face about it, and makes you less secure and your information less private as these situations show. And if you were in cybersecurity, you'd know this.
I’m not much of an Apple fan, I just like to get my privacy where I can. And with over a decade of experience in cybersecurity I can confidently say that as much as you shouldn’t blindly trust Apple, they at least give you a number of tools to increase your privacy out of the box.
Android on the other hand is a nightmarish hellscape of data mining and user profiling. There is GrapheneOS which is as of today a great option to circumvent Google’s data mining, but now that its future is at stake I worry for the future of privacy on Android devices.
But we get it from your post, you’re a pro-Google shill bot that didn’t actually read my comment and is just regurgitating nonsense to muddy the waters.
I'll just back up what I said with real links and not "trust me bro".
apple.com/legal/privacy/data/e… Apple collects in real time info about you like "Your name, address, age, gender... your approximate location (when turned on, kinda needed for many functions so pretty much everyone does)" I could go on.
support.apple.com/en-us/111754 Apple explaining that yeah, they give the Chinese government full access to Chinese iCloud users. You know who actually cared about their users privacy and didn't do that, preventing them from selling in China? Google.
play.google.com/store/apps/det… Book ad tracking on Android from all apps. Notice that it's on the Play Store? Where is the equal to it on Apple's App Store?
support.google.com/a/answer/14… Gooe built in CSE.
Just because I was able to call you out and prove you wrong, doesn't mean I'm a shill. The fact you just doubled down on your mis-information does out you as the shill though.
DuckDuckGo Private Browser - Apps on Google Play
Private. Fast. Fewer Ads. DuckDuckGo never tracks you.play.google.com
I2P proxy
With the current political weather, you're going to want the client anonymity protection. All they need to do is run a handfull of proxies, and they'll narrow down your house/phone as ICE targets.
We're beyond the nahh nahh can't get me because i'm not sharing illegal files, you'll get trucked off like the immigrants.
If they can log you reporting ICE to a website, you're toast.
not probably; the doj forced apple to remove it and apple caved: 404media.co/iceblock-owner-aft…
ICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’
The developer of ICEBlock, an app that lets people crowdsource sightings of ICE officials, has said he is determined to fight back after Apple removed the app from its App Store on Thursday. The removal came after pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox which first reported the removal. Apple told 404 Media it has removed other similar apps too.“I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” Joshua Aaron told 404 Media. “ICEBlock is no different from crowd sourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple's own Maps app, implements as part of its core services. This is protected speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution.”
💡
Do you know anything else about this removal? Do you work at Apple or ICE? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.This post is for subscribers only
Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe nowICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’
Apple removed ICEBlock reportedly after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials. “I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” the developer said.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
This is why the web is way better than any app store, yes even with the problems of DNS (DIDs becoming more prevalent cant come fast enough though). Any future phones should have a first class web experience imo.
Edit: I wanna add that browser monopolies are a real threat too. Ladybird is legit on Charlie Kirk's side aka nonpolitical so not a fan of the outlook there. Would love to see KDE fork chromium/blink with valve money and recreate Konquerer and bring back KHTML (I like irony). Valve even has a fork of CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework, electron uses this as well) because of Steam and its ui being a big web app. KDE then has web apps and add them to Discovery, or you can build qt apps. Make it happen valve! And hire me to help lol
I’m only just learning about this, but don’t the encrypted DNS protocols solve the privacy problem?
Or do you mean more like not being able to trust a registrar or public DNS server?
Usually when people complain about DNS, they're talking about stability issues. In this case I think he's pointing out how centralized it is, and how a bad actor could cause significant issues
At a local level, the most common issue I know of is ISPs blocking sites at the DNS level by feeding in fake information that redirects you to one of the ISP's blocked/parked domains. Usually implemented to prevent customers going to piracy sites. It's not much of an issue to subvert currently, as you can simply use any public DNS provider
That being said, much of that has been consolidated into a dozen or so tech companies. In the current political climate, I could see a coordinated effort happening between those tech companies to block sites deemed non gratis. Obviously there's still ways to subvert it, but the vast majority of user's won't be able to
I had to look it up too
Apparently it stands for “decentralized identifiers”
From what I’m gathering it’s a client based web protocol That works in conjunction with DNS
Thats kinda what FreeNet does.
broadbandsearch.net/definition…
What Is Freenet? Architecture & Functions Explained (2025)
Explore FreeNet: An overview of its decentralized network, intricate architecture, and operational dynamics.Find Internet Providers - BroadbandSearch
Yeah, but are Apple users going to punish Apple for glazing Trump's tiny manhood by not buying Apple products?
Tim Apple certainly doesn't think so.
It’s really not that bad a compromise, as far as bribes go. Some cheap gaudy bauble as payment for not interfering with billions of dollars in business?
It’s still a bribe and it’s still encouraging mango mussolini, but very efficient tradeoff
This is cowardice from Apple, but ICEBlock was not a good app:
- Micah Lee: Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater
- Micah Lee: ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way
ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way
Last week, I wrote about how Joshua Aaron's ICEBlock app, which allows people to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5-mile radius, is – unfortunately, and despite apparent good intentions – activism theater.Micah Lee (micahflee)
When I had an iPhone 3GS I got in a hot tub with it in my pocket and it died. I let it dry out. Then I very carefully took it apart and found all the little white stickers inside that turn from white to pink when in contact with water. I used a razor blade to remove those stickers without damaging them. I then placed a drop of bleach on each which turned them back to white and let them dry out. I used very tiny amounts of super glue to re-apply them to the exact same positions within the phone and then very carefully reassembled the phone.
Took the phone into an Apple store. Guy disappeared into the back for about 10 minutes with it. Came back out and said it must have just up and died but he doesn't know how and gave me a new iPhone.
Only Apple product I've ever owned.
Fuck you Apple.
Google's sideloading restrictions seems almost like its perfectly timed... 👀
Anyways, Google can gargle my:
How to choose between this and GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, etc? I feel ready for the switch too.
Edit: Plus is it possible to get banking apps and Google Wallet to still work (easily) in these Android-based alternatives?
Mostly: Price
Are you willing to, either: (a) spend $500-$600 for a new Google Pixel? (the 9 that is, I don't think 10 is ready for GrapheneOS yet), or (b) willing to dig into the second hand market and potentially get not-unlockable phones? (those run rampant in the used market, note that Carrier Unlock does not equate to Bootloader Unlock, and Verizon ones are guaranteed to not allow bootloader unlocking, I'm unsure about other carriers)
(Also you are kinda supporting google if you get a new one btw.)
I personally don't wanna spend $500 since if it ever breaks, its hard to replace or even repair. And I hate dealing with the used market.
So for me, Graphene isn't an option.
I went for the cheapest new Moto that has custom ROM support, Moto G 5G 2024 for $140 (carrier variants do not unlock).
I'm basically still testing to see what wouldn't work, haven't really be using it as a "daily driver"
I've also come across the CMF Phone 1 which is OLED and supports e/OS its about $300
TLDR: Get Graphene if you can afford a pixel or willing to look for a used phone from a reputable source. I personally do not like used phones because I think there's too much risks IMO, you might assess the risks differently. Other options are Moto G 5G 2024 for $140 which runs both LineageOS and e/OS, or CMF (by Nothing) Phone 1 which runs e/OS and is an overall much better phone, but its more expensive, at $250 for 128 GB and $300 for the 256 GB.
Oh one last thing: Even "New" "Unlocked" cheap Pixels on sites like Amazon aren't guaranteed to unlock. I was looking at older pixels like the 6a, 7, 7a and checked the reviews and some comments indicate they are locked to Verizon because the reseller didn't unlock it for some reason, so I'm get the vibes that its unsold stock previously owned by carriers, so I don't know if they'll bootloader unlock, even if its SIM unlocked. Where as CMF never has carrier variants, so they all should unlock.
Edit: Also, the CMF phone needs the IMEI added in to carriers such as ATT and Verizon, since they use IMEI whitelisting, Tmobile is fine. For some countries like, Australia they also does nationwide whitelisting. Custom ROMs can break VoLTE, rendering it not work with cell service for csrriers that require VoLTE, Might wanna research about that.
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently gave Trump a 24 carat gold bribe.
usatoday.com/story/news/politi…
Tim Cook appeals to Trump’s love of gold with a 24-karat base for Apple plaque
President Trump hosted Apple CEO Tim Cook at the White House as they announced new US investments. Cook also gifted Trump a plaque with gold base., USA TODAY (USA TODAY)
Canadian PM Mark Carney’s Shift From Climate-Change Warrior to Fossil-Fuel Cheerleader
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The Shutdown Isn’t a Stalemate — It’s a Power Grab. And the Media Are Missing It.
The Shutdown Isn’t a Stalemate — It’s a Power Grab. And the Media Are Missing It.
While the media fixate on partisan blame, Russ Vought and a hard-right GOP faction are quietly using the shutdown to sidestep Congress and reshape government.Colby Hall (Mediaite)
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Have you considered emigrating from the US? If so, where to?
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Votação de vínculo entre motoristas e apps será em 30 dias, diz Fachin
Votação de vínculo entre motoristas e apps será em 30 dias, diz Fachin
Supremo Tribunal Federal julga recursos protocolados pelas plataformas Rappi e Uber, que contestam decisões da Justiça do Trabalho que reconhecem o vínculo empregatício.Agência Brasil
Family says Atlanta journalist Mario Guevara will be deported tomorrow
EPA Moves to Prioritize Review of New Chemicals for Data Centers
Hundreds of societies have been in crises like ours. An expert explains how they got out. | An analysis of historical crises over the past 2,000 years offers lessons for avoiding the end times.
the principles behind a successful exit from crisis remain relevant. While the specific policies will differ across societies, the overarching goal remains the same: to rebalance the distribution of wealth and power in a way that promotes long-term stability, not short-term elite enrichment.
Hundreds of societies have been in crises like ours. An expert explains how they got out.
No, we aren’t in “unprecedented times.” An analysis of 100 historical crises over two millennia has lessons for how society can avoid the end times.Peter Turchin (Vox)
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The Price of Unpredictability
How Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Ruining American Credibility
Keren Yarhi-Milo
October 2, 2025
For decades, U.S. foreign policy has depended on credibility: the belief that Washington would honor its commitments and that its past behavior signaled its future conduct. The United States, for instance, was able to develop a large network of allies because its partners trusted that, if attacked, Washington would defend them. It could strike free-trade deals with countries around the world and negotiate peace agreements because, generally speaking, it was seen as an honest broker. That is not to say the United States has never surprised, or that it never reneged on a promise. But for most of its modern history, it has been a trustworthy actor.But unlike any U.S. president before him, Donald Trump has abandoned all efforts to make Washington reliable or consistent. His predecessors had also, at times, made decisions that undermined American credibility. But Trump’s lack of consistency is of an entirely different magnitude—and appears to be part of a deliberate strategy. He proposes deals before backing down. He promises to end wars before expanding them. He berates U.S. allies and embraces adversaries. With Trump, the only pattern is the lack of one.
The Price of Unpredictability: How Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Ruining American Credibility
Trump’s foreign policy is ruining American credibility.Keren Yarhi-Milo (Foreign Affairs Magazine)
caffettistica truffa delle macchine universitarie (la macchinetta del caffè rotta mi ha rovinato la giornata)
Oggi, la giornata pareva aver incalzato un piede giusto (si può dire? boh!) — o, quantomeno, non marcio — sembrava che per una buona volta io potessi non soffrire — almeno, tolto il fattore meteo, che dalla sera alla sera stessa (letteralmente!) si è riconfigurato coi pinguini, e se adesso sono a casa senza un […]
Excel's AI: 20% of the time, it works every time
Excel's AI: 20% of the time, it works every time
A Microsoft blog post about "vibe working" broke me.Corbin Davenport (Spacebar)
Excel's AI: 20% of the time, it works every time
Excel's AI: 20% of the time, it works every time
A Microsoft blog post about "vibe working" broke me.Corbin Davenport (Spacebar)
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Accountants tally the numbers and hand you the totals. Twisting them is unethical and can lead to them losing their licenses.
Analysts manipulate the numbers to push a message. No ethics allowed.
Signed, an analyst raised by an accountant. Interacting with other analysts is infuriating.
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
How Much Is Trump Worth? Depends on How He Feels
Assessing Trump's wealth was like trying to bottle smoke. It went up and down based on his feelings.Timothy L. O'Brien (Newsweek)
Microsoft literally calls the feature "vibe working." Youre not far off the actual name.
They aren't even pretending to care anymore.
Vibe working: Introducing Agent Mode and Office Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot | Microsoft 365 Blog
Microsoft Copilot introduces Agent Mode in Office apps, enabling smarter document creation, analysis, and collaboration across Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.Sumit Chauhan (Microsoft 365 Blog)
It's really more about the overall flavor of the spreadsheet than how "right" any individual field is.
Just like the Xerox copier/scanners that helpfully kept scanned images small by reusing parts of the image elsewhere. Like, all these 6s on your scanned invoices can totally be replaced with 8s. There's just a tiny degradation in the overall image, it shouldn't be a problem!
Xerox should have just called it AI compression and people would have been throwing money at them.
Only when people use the wrong input, garbage in and garbage out.
In the same vein I can't think of any instance where excel had calculated things wrong unless there was a fault in the formula that I made.
That’s funny because I grew up with math teachers constantly telling us that we shouldn’t trust them.
Normal calculators that don’t have arbitrary precision have all the same problems you get when you use floating point types in a programming language. E.g. 0.1+0.2==0.3 evaluates to false in many languages. Or how adding very small numbers to very large numbers might result in the larger number as is.
If you’ve only used CAS calculators or similar you might not have seen these too since those often do arbitrary precision arithmetics, but the vast majority of calculators is not like that. They might have more precision than a 32 bit float though.
No, the user is wrong quite often, the calculator gives the answer to the question asked, not the answer to the question the user wanted to ask.
Garbage in, garbage out.
AI Agents having access to the functionality of Excel means that they won’t be wrong with the actual calculations though, since it doesn’t do 5x10 in the LLM but instead uses excels built in functions to do it.
AI and excel are a match made in heaven tbh. Same with AI and databases.
Did he just spend the first half of the article explaining why 'copilot in excel' (not agent mode) wasn't designed for calculation tasks, them finishes with complaining that on benchmarks it fails 80% of the time?
The 54% accuracy of agent mode should be called out, not the low accuracy of the thing that wasn't designed for it.
Everyone else who's anti-AI:
- What is that smell? It smells like a used diaper filled with Indian food!
- What is that?! It smells like a turd covered in burnt hair!
- It smells like Bigfoot's dick!
- What is that stench?! It smells like the inside of a fake leg!
Excel is the fucking backbone of Microsoft Office. It's solid and backwards compatible for a couple of decades. Excel is the one reason business sticks with Office. It never fails, everyone knows it, nothing can replace it. You cannot trust any other spreadsheet to perfectly translate if you move away from Excel. The world runs on Excel.
I never imagined Microsoft would fuck with Excel. Ever. There's a fairy tale about killing the golden goose, can't remember how it goes.
Just look what they're doing with their Xbox brand. One of the most well established brands in the most profitable entertainment sector and they are literally setting fire to it in every conceivable direction.
Microsoft must be taking business cues from GRRM... Kill all your main characters.
unless you're running one of the Enterprise/IoT SKUs....
That is the whole point. They're squeezing the users they don't give a shit about. But personal users almost never buy Windows licenses from Microsoft I'd bet. So what if they switch away? And how are they or their kids going to play Fortnite or League after switching?
The money for Windows non-Enterprise is made with OEM deals. They probably wouldn't even notice if nobody bought personal licenses anymore. Might as well make actual money from selling data about them.
Enterprise is a different story, once you squeeze too hard, companies will find ways to replace you; they are somewhat resilient to pain, but it does have limits.
I'm on Win11 and see almost none of the issues people like you are talking about. No doubt they exist! Maybe it's because I'm on a plain vanilla ISO and I stripped the crap out early on? Same SSD I had 4 computers ago on Win10, just get moving it over. Talk like yours makes me afraid of a fresh install!
If it's as bad as people say, I'll give up and go Debian. I was largely staying Windows so I could be familiar and support my coworkers. Unemployed now. Who cares?
They've since relaxed a bit on the forced hardware upgrade part; you can install Win11 on 'unsupported' hardware now, you'll just have click a prompt saying you'll get no support and you're on your own if you attempt that, where initially it wouldn't even let you do that.
The forced MS account login is very much an issue with the consumer SKUs and the Enterprise/IoT SKUs still let you use a local account. Similarly, LTSC in particular is barren on the bloat front, while the consumer SKUs and even the non-LTSC Enterprise and IoT SKUs aren't much better in this regard, come loaded with bloat.
You can operate without a local account - source, I‘m on Windows 11 and I‘ve never had a Microsoft account - but it‘s a massive PITA and takes a lot of playing around and disconnecting from the internet during install, and stuff like that.
You‘re right that 99% of people won‘t know/won‘t bother to go through the hassle and that Microsoft through the years have been making it harder and harder to have a local account, but at the moment it‘s still technically possible.
yep. it's the one tool that is incredibly versatile in the workplace and for which I do not have a replacement
are there better tools? quite often. would those tools be able to be used by anybody opening the files you are sharing with them? nope. and keeping things in the same format means it's very easy to move data across files and link things up.
forms, trackers, calculations, data logging, all easy to reference/transfer to one another and I can expect anybody on my team to be able to work with files I send them without having to teach them how to use a different program
Just because it doesn't offer features a database has doesn't mean people aren't trying to use it as one
I support your argument, but unfortunately there are some real monstrosities out there that have carried small businesses since decades
Costly and Deadly Wildfires Really Are on the Rise, New Research Finds | The past decade in particular has seen an uptick in devastating blazes linked to climate change, according to the study.
The paper is here
The chart in Vox is particularly revealing, though I haven't found a gift link to it yet.
The surging price tag of wildfires, in one chart
A new study reveals that increasing global temperatures are fueling the rising financial toll of wildfires, with costs surging dramatically over the past decade.Umair Irfan (Vox)
Amid special election to replace Rep. Mark Green in Tenn., one county explains purge of 80k voters from rolls
Amid special election to replace Rep. Mark Green in Tenn., one county explains purge of 80k voters from rolls
Early voting in the special election to replace Rep. Mark Green is underway as Davidson County election official explains purge of 80,000 voters from rolls.Ben Hall (News Channel 5 Nashville (WTVF))
Ex-CDC director talks about why she was fired
Exclusive: ex-CDC director talks about why she was fired
“I would never do that, as a scientist,” Susan Monarez says of being asked to approve changes to vaccine recommendations without knowing the details.Kozlov, Max
Lemmy doesn't federate across either NOSTR bridge
As you may know NOSTR (Notes and Other STuff via Relays) is another protocol for the fediverse like ActivityPub. In order to allow AP folks to communicate with NOSTR folks there are [at least] two "bridges" (mostr.pub & momostr.pink) created to allow certain level of server, client interaction between the two.
For some reason no lemmy communities nor users are ever found by either. It works just fine for mbin magazines and users. Do any of you have an idea why?
Perplexity’s Comet browser is now available to everyone for free
Shockingly, Perplexity says ‘the internet is better on Comet.’
Perplexity’s Comet browser is now available to everyone for free
Perplexity said its AI-powered web browser Comet and news service Comet Plus will be free to use globally.Robert Hart (The Verge)
Meta won’t allow users to opt out of targeted ads based on AI chats
US users stuck with AI ad targeting as EU users win more control over their feeds.
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How Much Energy Does It Take to Power Billions of AI Queries?
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More on this subject:
"We Went to the Town Elon Musk Is Poisoning"
"We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill"
“We Went to the Town Elon Musk Is Poisoning”
Wait, mobile gas turbines?
What a hack. No permits. And lying about it through gritted teeth.
And they are branded "Solar Turbines"? WTF?
These figures are too cherry picked for the shock value. You could go the opposite end and say that (these are all true, I've tried my best to research them):
8.5 Wh (average of all daily queries for a user) is also...
- Equivalent to running a 2000 W hair dryer or a kettle for 20 seconds
- Equivalent to idling a car during a traffic light and not turning off the engine
- A quarter of the energy required to reheat a ready meal in the microwave (roughly 45 Wh)
- The power usage of a Macbook screen over just 30 minutes.
850 MWh (whole consumption of all AI queries in the world) is also equivalent to...
- The power consumption of ONE single cruise ship for 12h (link)
- Charging 0.002% of the 75 million electric cars in the world
- The energy stored in the fuel tanks of 2000 petrol cars - a small stadium car park in Europe
- The amount of energy the largest solar plant in Spain or Germany generate... In a couple of hours.
So yes - AI bad... But for other reasons. This is a diversion. Datacentres powered by coal are bad. Cruise ships are worse.
The problem isn't that the whole world needs less than a solar farm's worth of energy for AI. The bigger problem is the social damage of AI - including the fact that this "expansion at all costs" is justifying getting that energy from non-renewable sources.
But seriously, one single cruise ship uses more energy than all of the AI in the world. They serve no useful purpose and there are hundreds of those.
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Cargo ships are getting way more efficient and less polluting. I work on container ships which have a capacity ranging from 14k to 20k teu.
Imagine transporting these many containers from 1 continent to another via trucks. The amount of pollution they would be emitting on land.
There are strict regulations in place regarding emission. Now with the introduction of dual-fuel ships, they are going to be more environmental friendly.
It's a concept of the past that cargo ships are pollution factories.
Yes my friend.
Also in recent years, huge push for renewable energy from EU, China, India etc. is a step in right direction. It may take time for the world to consume less coal and petroleum, but in the meantime production from renewable source will only increase.
Long way to go, but we are on right path. Maybe our children's get to see a good future.
Once this thing gets trained it’s not going to be free.
It feels similar to when I was first on the internet. Older people thought it was a fad. They made jokes about it on sitcoms. The bubble burst and everyone was like ahhh knew it the internet sucks! Then the smart phone hit 🚀
Datacentres powered by coal are bad. Cruise ships are worse.
Coal Vs Marine fuel. You've picked the kings of pollution.
Coal is worse for CO2. The free carbon it releases binds with oxygen in the atmosphere to produce more CO2 mass than the coal itself. It's crazy how much CO2 it generates.
Heavy fuel oil / bunker oil / marine fuel is cheap ass shit that contains masses of pollutants. So whilst it won't generate as much CO2, it will create a load of other stuff including Sulphur Dioxide. That creates acid rain.
Here's an idea. Let's do neither of them.
Sooner.
None of these AI applications are making money and unlike earlier IT companies (Amazon, Google search, social media site, etc ), the marginal cost of each additional user isn't near zero.
They are having to invest hundreds of billions to cope with demand for applications which lose money on each use.
It's a $50 billion dollar industry priced as a trillion dollar industry.
And there‘s still no compelling use-case for the average consumer. Coders and scientists? Can be. But most people don‘t really have a use for it in most situations, even in business contexts. It‘s mostly a solution in search of a problem, and even then it‘s so unreliable that even things trying to sell you it as a solution have to add the disclaimer that you shouldn‘t use it for anything that‘s remotely important.
So even if the costs were markedly less than they are, there‘s still no real path to profitability because there‘s no real call for it.
The only use I‘ve found as a consumer is using something like Perplexity as a search engine. And that‘s not a testament to how good Perplexity is, but instead a testament to how bad other search engines have become. Perplexity just avoids things like SEO and is mostly quite good at finding sources which aren‘t themselves AI-generated.
And…I really see a near future in which AI-SEO becomes a thing and Perplexity et. al. become just as useless as google.
Nvidia's 16-pin time bomb could be defused by this $95 gadget — Ampinel offers load balancing that Nvidia forgot to include
Ampinel could be the salvation for 16-pin power connectors.
Guinea and the Challenges for Social Democracy and the Left
cross-posted from: ibbit.at/post/70089
Demonstration on October 24, 2019, Conakry (Wikipedia Commons).
Following Guinea’s widely contested (and largely boycotted) constitutional referendum on September 21, 2025, Professor Mohamed Saliou Camara argues that the military junta has exploited the electoral process to establish authoritarian rule at the expense of social democracy.
In this exclusive interview for CounterPunch, Camara, Professor of History, Philosophy, and Journalism and Chair of the Department of African Studies at Howard University in Washington, DC, shares his analysis of Guinea’s political crisis. As an authority on Guinean political and social history, Dr. Camara is the author of several works such as, His Master’s Voice: Mass Communication and Single‑Party Politics in Guinea under Sékou Touré, Political History of Guinea since World War Two, and Health and Human Security in the Mano River Union. In his work, he also analyzes the country’s democratic transitions and derailments by the military junta under Colonel Mamady Doumbouya. Doumbouya promised a return to civilian rule but never delivered.
In this discussion, Camara delves into the junta’s suspension of oppositional political parties, independent electoral institutions, and the revision of the transition charter which basically amounts to allowing military figures to manipulate current and future elections. He summarizes the importance of civil society movements (youth-led) and heroic people like activists and journalists Foniké Mengué and Habib Marouane Camara. Their enforced disappearances in violation of international law symbolize the cost of resistance in today’s Guinean political climate.
Daniel Falcone: How do you explain the suspension of Guinea’s main opposition parties so close to the constitutional referendum and how does it compromise Guinean legitimacy?
Mohamed Saliou Camara: The only logical way the CNRD’s unilateral suspension of Guinea’s main opposition parties so close to the constitutional referendum can be explained is by considering it within the broader political climate of intimidation, cooptation, and exclusionary governance that the Doumbouya government has instituted with one thing in mind: having Mamady Doumbouya maintained in power through a highly undemocratic plebiscite.
In the past three years or so, Doumbouya and his CNRD have shown their true colors, turning the transition that they had pledged to lead in accordance with the will of the people and the common good of the country to a democratically elected leadership into a nationwide campaign of intimidation of democratic actors and civic leaders, many of whom have been silenced or forced into exile. Opposition leaders like Cellou Dalein Diallo of the UFDG, Sidya Touré of the UFR and, of course, former President Alpha Condé of the RPG are considered persona non grata while members of their parties are subjected to all kinds of political manipulation. Evidently, this unfolding climate of undemocratic governance does tarnish Guinea’s international image and, worse of all, it takes the country years back by undoing the political, economic, and sociocultural progress it has made against all odds.
The massive propaganda that the CNRD has been spreading notwithstanding, most Guineans are disappointed and worried, because when Doumbouya’s junta overthrew Alpha Condé and justified the coup by citing Condé’s falsification of the existing constitution to run for a third term, Guineans welcomed the change and were encouraged by Doumbouya’s pledge to return the country the constitutional order in a timely and democratic manner. Now, Guineans are disappointed by his betrayal of the people’s trust and expectations. Furthermore, they blame Alpha Condé for having made Doumbouya the powerful head of the newly created Special Forces and having provided him with the opportunity or excuse to orchestrate the September 2021 coup.
Daniel Falcone: What are the consequences of the newly created Directorate General of Elections (DGE) for “fairness and transparency” in the recent referendum? (This may impact the general elections upcoming in December).
Mohamed Saliou Camara: Just like the constitution being touted for a referendum, the DGE is customized to give legitimacy to Doumbouya’s desire and determination to stay in power against the pledge he made when he overthrew Alpha Condé. To be fair, though, the CENI (Independent Electoral National Commission) that it replaced also catered to the powers that be when it came to managing elections and tallying the results. For instance, the Guinean electorate is still baffled by the CENI’s decision to declare Condé winner of the second round of the 2010 presidential election over Cellou Dalein Diallo who had won the first round with 40% of the votes against Condé with only 18%. In fact, CENI’s bad reputation can be traced back to the Lansana Conté era.
Therefore, I would argue that keeping that agency or replacing it with a DGE makes little difference in the general context of what one may call Guinea’s non-democratic electoralism. We should not, however, lower the standards or our expectations, if for no other reason because two wrongs don’t make a right. Yet, we should point out that elections in Guinea have very rarely been transparent, free, and fair; regardless of what national officials or foreign observers say. We, who have experienced, witnessed, and been caught up in the whirlwind of Guinean politics, we know what it has been and why the current situation is a culmination of a long spiral.
Daniel Falcone: To what extent does the draft constitution impact the transition charter’s promise that junta leaders would not be eligible to run in future elections? It looks like political groundwork is being laid for Mamady Doumbouya to stay in power.
Mohamed Saliou Camara: The short answer to this question is that the draft constitution alters everything in the original transition Charter. In fact, and as indicated earlier, before the issuance of the Charter itself, Doumbouya had made a solemn pledge that neither he nor another member of his junta would be a candidate in the elections that will come at the end of the transition. Guineans, Africans, and the International Community gave that pledge the value and momentum that it should carry as the word of honor of a military officer to his nation. In the last three years, however, a massive campaign has been developed through comités de soutien that popped up across the country in highly corrupt circles to advocate for Doumbouya to be the candidate in the next presidential election.
Doumbouya’s CNRD has been distributing large amounts of money, cars, and similar gifts to people of all walks of life who are eager to create or adhere to such support committees and promote the “Oui” vote in the constitutional referendum. This is happening while Guinea’s Central Bank is running out of cash even to pay government employees. Where is that money and those cars coming from to fuel the rampant trend of political corruption? Many Guineans suspect that they are coming from the massive amounts of gold, bauxite, iron ore and similar mineral resources that foreign countries and industries are extracting from their country that remains impoverished despite its immense natural resources.
Daniel Falcone: What role are civil society actors and youth-led movements playing in the current moment and could you speak to the significance of figures like Foniké Mengué and Habib Marouane Camara in the pro-democracy struggle? I met organizers protesting by the UN that commented on the invisibility of their rights and human rights issues.
Mohamed Saliou Camara: Civil society actors, especially youth-led movements, rose against the CNRD’s campaign after it reneged its pledge to lead a legitimate transition and let the people choose democratically the country’s next leadership. They began to hold peaceful protests and town halls to mobilize, inform, sensitize, and guide civil society communities so they can decisively stand their ground and help preserve the legitimate rights and interests of the nation. This is exactly when the CNRD began showing its true colors by arresting, kidnapping, detaining, and killing leaders and members of these movements.
Such leaders as Fonikè Mengué and Habib Marouane Camara, whose fate remains unknown to this day, are henceforth heroes whose example many more are determined to follow, especially within the Guinean Diaspora. Despite what the protesters around the UN told you, Guinean Diaspora protests are more visible because the junta has unleashed a campaign of intolerance against anyone who challenges its intentions and dictatorial actions inside the country.
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Guinea’s suppression of protests stokes anger against military
Anti-government protests are gaining momentum in Guinea as frustrations with the interim military government increases.Al Jazeera
De-Globalization: Towards the Left or the Right?
cross-posted from: ibbit.at/post/70103
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
On Sept 23, 2025, the Foreign Policy Association and the Committee of 100 hosted a debate on the topic “Is Deglobalization Inevitable?,” with Walden Bello, co-chair of the Board of Focus on the Global South, and Edward Ashbee of the Copenhagen Business School, with Bello defending the affirmative side, after a fireside chat with Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The audience judged Bello’s position the more persuasive of the two sides.
In the 1990s, we were told that we were entering an era, known as globalization, that, owing to free trade and unobstructed capital flows in a borderless global economy, would lead to the best of all possible worlds. Most of the West’s economic, political, and intellectual elites bought into this vision. I still remember how the venerable Thomas Friedman of The New York Timeslampooned those of us who resisted this vision as “flat-earthers,” or believers in a flat earth. I still recall the equally venerable Economist magazine singling me out as coining the word “deglobalization,” not with the aim of hailing me as a prophet but as a fool preaching a return to a Jurassic past.
Thirty years on, this flat-earther takes no pride in having forecast the mess we are in, to which unfettered globalization has been a central contributor: the highest rates of inequality in decades, growing poverty in both the Global North and the Global South, deindustrialization in the United States and many other countries, massive indebtedness of consumers in the Global North and whole countries in the Global South, financial crisis after financial crisis, the rise of the far right, and intensifying geopolitical conflict.
Globalization did not lead to a new world order but to the Brave New World.
Snapshots of a Dreary Era
Let me present three snapshots of that era of globalization that we are now leaving:Snapshot No 1: Apple was one of the main beneficiaries of globalization. Apple led the escape away from the confines of the national economy to create global supply chains propped up by cheap labor. Let me just quote The New York Times in this regard:
Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.Apple, of course, was not alone in the drive to deindustrialize America. It was accompanied by fellow IT corporations Microsoft, Intel, and Invidia; automakers GM, Ford, and Tesla; pharmaceutical giants Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer; and other leaders in other industries and services, such as Procter and Gamble, Coca Cola, Walmart, and Amazon, to name just a few. The favorite destination was China, where wages were 3-5 percent of wages of workers in the United States. The “China Shock” is estimated, conservatively, to have led to the loss of 2.4 million U.S. jobs. Employment in manufacturing dropped to 11.7 million in October 2009, a loss of 5.5 million or 32 percent of all manufacturing jobs since October 2000. The last time fewer than 12 million people worked in the manufacturing sector was before World War II, in 1941.
Snapshot 2: The removal of the barriers to the free flow of capital globally led to the Third World Debt Crisis in the early 1980s, which almost brought down the Citibank and other U.S. financial institutions, and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, which brought down the so-called Asian miracle economies. Removing global capital controls was accompanied by the deregulation of the U.S. financial system, which led to the creation of massive profit-making scams through the so-called magic of financial engineering like the frenzied trading in sub-prime mortgages. Not only were millions bankrupted and lost their homes when the subprime securities were exposed as rotten, but the whole global system stood on the brink of collapse in 2008, and it was saved only by the bailout of U.S. banks, with U.S. taxpayers money, to the tune of over $1 trillion.
Snapshot 3 is the famous French economist Thomas Piketty’s summing up of the U.S. economic tragedy of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
[I] want to stress that the word “collapse” [in the case of the United States] is no exaggeration. The bottom 50 percent of the income distribution claimed around 20 percent of national income from 1950 to 1980; but that share has been divided almost in half, falling to just 12 per cent in 2010–2015. The top centile’s share has moved in the opposite direction, from barely 11 per cent to more than 20 percent.Accompanying this massive increase in inequality in the United States has been an increase in poverty. Globally, according to available data, since the financial crises of 2007-08, wealth inequality has risen, and now the top one percent owns half the world’s total household wealth.
Let me turn from this nostalgic recounting of the past, and once more, let me focus on our good friend Apple. It is now leading the so-called reshoring process. It has read the handwriting on the wall and, though this will negatively affect its bottom line and scramble its operations, to protect the remainder of its super profits, it is leading the reshoring of its supply chains, with a planned $600 billion investment in the manufacture within the United States of its iPhone, iPad, MacBook, as well as in the fabrication of semi-conductor chips. Boasting that Apple manufacturing plans will create 450,000 jobs in the United States, CEO Tim Cook admitted to being a hostage to Trump’s push to deglobalize the operations of American firms, saying, “The president has said he wants more in the United States…so we want more in the United States.” Where Apple goes, others follow, among them U.S. chipmakers Intel and Nvidia, automotive leader Tesla, and pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson.
But American firms are not the only hostages to politics. Among the foreign firms that have bowed to Trump’s ultra-protectionist push via unilateral tariff increases by regionalizing or nationalizing their supply lines are Hyundai Motors, Honda Motors, Samsung electronics, Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, and pharmaceutical firm Sanofi.
Although reshoring or relocation has proceeded by fits and starts over the last decade, under the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, it is likely to accelerate over the next few years, despite constraints and inefficiencies, as economic nationalism rises in the United States and the West. In 2023, an exhaustive study of North American firms showed that that more than 90 percent of manufacturing companies in the region had moved at least some of their production or supply chain in the past five years. Another study conducted at the same time showed that by 2026, 65 percent of surveyed companies would be buying most key items from regional suppliers, compared to just 38 percent in 2023. With Trump imposing unilateral tariffs on Mexico and Canada, companies are realizing that relocating to the NAFTA partners may not appease Trump; they will have to relocate to the United States itself, despite the disruption and chaos that might accompany that process, such as that which saw 300 workers vital to the Hyundai facility in Georgia arrested by ICE and deported to Korea.
Rage: Triggered by the Left, Expropriated by the Right
The tremendous global anger and resentment at the dystopia to which corporate-driven globalization has led us is perhaps the biggest reason why deglobalization will be the trend for a long, long while. That rage first came from the left, which inflicted a reversal from which corporate-driven globalization never recovered during the historic Battle of Seattle in December 1999. But it was Donald Trump and other forces of the far right that successfully rode that anger to political triumph in the United States and Europe in the coming decades.In other words, the politics of rage, not the economics of narrow efficiency in the service of corporate profitability is now in command. In the United States, globalization created two antagonistic communities, one that benefited from it due to their superior education and incomes, the other that suffered from it owing to their lack of both economic and educational advantages. The latter is the vast sector of the population that Hillary Clinton called the “deplorables,” but is better known as the “Make America Great Again” folks or MAGA base. That community will not easily forget either the sufferings brought about by the deindustrialization spearheaded by Apple and other well-known TNCs or the slights they endured from Hillary, whom they regard as being in the pocket of Wall Street.
A second reason for the strength of the deglobalization wave is that the multilateral order that served as the political canopy or system of governance for free trade and unobstructed capital flows is on the brink of collapse. The World Trade Organization, which was once described as the jewel in the crown of multilateralism, no longer functions as a system for governing world trade, partly owing to sabotage by the United States, when under Obama and later Trump and Biden, Washington could no longer rely on favorable rulings in trade disputes. The International Monetary Fund has not recovered from its reputation of promoting austerity in developing countries and its push for unfettered capital flows that brought down the Asian tiger economies. The World Bank also is discredited for its complicity in imposing austerity measures as well as for the wrong-headed policy of export-oriented industrialization for Global North markets that the Bank prescribed as the route to prosperity for developing countries—one that is now especially fatal for those who followed it given the ultra-protectionism sweeping the United States.
Third, national security, both economic security and military security, has displaced prosperity through trade and investment as the principal consideration in relations among countries. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have banned the transfer of advanced computer chips to China, and more such measures will follow. Reorganizing and regionalizing, if not nationalizing, access to and supply lines for key resources for advanced technologies like lithium, rare earth, copper, cobalt, and nickel is now an overriding concern, the aim being not only to monopolize these sensitive commodities but to prevent competitors from getting hold of them.
Two Routes to a Deglobalized World
The issue is not the inevitability of deglobalization but what form deglobalization will take. Deglobalization marked by ultra-protectionism in trade relations, unilateralism and isolationism in economic and military relations, and the creation of a domestic market geared principally towards the interests of the racial and ethnic majority is one way to deglobalize. That is indeed where Trump is leading the United States.But there is another way to deglobalize, the key elements of which I laid out in my book Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy 25 years ago.
One, we do not demand a withdrawal into autarky but continued participation in the international economy, but in a way that ensures that instead of swamping it, international market forces are harnessed to assist in building the capacity to sustain a vibrant domestic economy.
Two, we propose that via a judicious combination of equality-enhancing redistributive measures and reasonable tariffs and quotas, the internal market will again become the engine of a healthy economy instead of being an appendage of an export-oriented economy.
Third, we promote participation in a plurality of economic groupings–those that allow countries to maintain policy space for development, instead of imprisoning them in a single global body, the World Trade Organization, with a uniform set of rules, one that favors the interests of transnational corporations instead of the interests of their citizens.
Fourth, inspired by the work of Karl Polanyi, we advocate the re-embedding of the market in the community, so that instead of driving the latter, as in global capitalism, the market is subject to the values and rhythms of the community.
And finally, in contrast to the far right, we uphold the notion of community as one where membership is not determined by blood or ethnicity but by a shared belief in democratic values.
That is the alternative we offered a quarter of a century ago. This fluid system of international trade that allows especially the economies of the Global South the space to pursue sustainable development is not far from the flexible global trading system before the takeoff of globalization in the late eighties, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Twenty five years ago, we were promoting and we continue to promote a route of progressive deglobalization, one that avoids the extreme of the doctrinaire dystopia of corporate-driven globalization, on the one hand, and, on the other, savage unilateralism and protectionism. This route to deglobalization is not new, nor, some would claim, particularly radical. Keynes’ common sense advice, addressing the global situation in the 1930s, is very relevant to our times, “Let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.”
Had we taken this route, I dare say, the chances are great that we would not be in the terrible mess the world is in today, with the threat not only of trade war but of real war at its doorsteps. There is still time to take this route, but the window of opportunity is closing fast.
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Ea Sports Fc, Electronic Arts passa al fondo saudita: acquisizione da 55 miliardi guidata da PIF e Affinity Partners
Electronic Arts (EA) annuncia l’acquisizione da parte di un consorzio guidato dal Public Investment Fund (PIF) dell’Arabia Saudita e partecipato da Silver Lake e da Affinity Partners, la società d’investimento fondata da Jared Kushner. L’operazione valuta EA circa 55 miliardi di dollari e prevede il delisting dal Nasdaq a completamento del closing.
Electronic Arts passa a PIF: acquisizione da 55 miliardi
Electronic Arts (EA) sarà acquisita da un consorzio guidato da PIF. Acquisizione da 55 mld $. Nel deal Silver Lake e Affinity Partners.Redazione (Atom Heart Magazine)
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Meta is exploiting the 'illusion of privacy' to sell you ads based on chatbot conversations, top AI ethics expert says—and you can't opt out
Meta is about to make your chats with its AI assistant part of its advertising machine, the company announced Wednesday. Beginning December 16, conversations with Meta AI — the company’s chatbot embedded across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and even its new Ray-Ban Display smart glasses — will be used to determine which ads and recommendations show up in your feed.The company will start formally notifying users of the change on October 7. There’s no opt-out: If you don’t want your chatbot conversations influencing your ads, the only option is not to use Meta AI at all.
Meta is exploiting the ‘illusion of privacy’ to sell you ads based on chatbot conversations, top AI ethics expert says—and you can’t opt out
Linguist and AI critic Emily Bender says the shift could incentivize Meta to design its AI to prod users into even more conversations.Eva Roytburg (Fortune)
Anyone using a Linux Smarphone?
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I am also looking for a linux smart phone at the moment. I have not found many that don't seem to be sold out, or aren't quite there yet.
If I find anything promising I will edit.
eOS works great for me on my fairphone 5, I suspect the model 6 is similar. Just be VERY careful about the anti-rollback protection, read the install instructions carefully and follow them exactly. And don't use the easy installer, it can brick your phone.
doc.e.foundation/devices/FP6/i…
For everyone else, here are the supported devices:
Postmarket OS isn't? Oh whoa, I just checked for myself, I had no idea, thought it was aosp too!
Cool, thanks for the correction.
I wanted PinePhone to work decently so I could daily drive it but when I got it it was already far behind from my old phone hardware-wise. PostmarketOS had run roughly. It was kinda usable but I couldn't manage to use Signal on it (it was a desktop app that time). GPS wasn't working either. 2 most important things for me. Battery life was also abysmal.
This was years ago though, PostmarketOS is probably much much better now. I sold that PinePhone so I don't know its current state. I wouldn't expect more from what I tried.
If I'm gonna get a Linux phone now, I want to see a good Android app emulation. At least until we get real alternatives. I still need a couple apps from Aurora Store. F-Droid apps have a better chance to be ported to Linux from Google Play ones anyway.
Same boat here.
I still futz with my PinePhone but mostly as a portable music/video player.
Eagerly awaiting the rebirth of CalyxOS
Really sad about the Pinephone, because you know what Pine did SO WELL? The PineTime. That device is still incredible and has lasted me a long time.
It shows time, and it shows messages, even a decent heartrate monitor! Built like a tank, too. I wish more of their products could be this awesome.
I have a Xiaomi Mi A2 that I ran ubuntu touch on. The camera didn't work, and it was based on ubuntu 16.04. They've dropped support for it now. It was not ready to be a daily driver.
I should be getting a poco x3 nfc in the mail tomorrow. It should have excellent support on both postmarketos and ubuntu touch. I don't expect it to be a daily driver, but I can't get the idea out of my head. I don't like where iOS and Android are headed.
Yes, running OnePlus 6 with Mobile NixOS (actually mostly just NixOS with a couple modules from mobile NixOS). I will try to make the config public when I get it into a less rough state. It's... useable as a daily phone, but you have to be really into it to do it.
It's not like desktop Linux where if you're a tech enthusiast you can ignore a few rough edges and just use it like you would a more mainstream OS.
I had to flash a specific old version of OxygenOS, using almost undocumented tools, which could easily brick the phone if something went wrong, just for GPS to work. I have to recompile my kernel every time it updates. I had to write my own scripts for the hardware slider thing to work (which has a nice benefit of letting me use it for whatever I want; I want to make it switch between NORMAL and INSERT in my editor just as a laugh).
Foot Pedal Ups Vim Productivity, Brings Ergonomic Benefits
Vim is the greatest or the worst text editor of all time, depending on the tribe you’re in. Either way, members of both camps can appreciate this build from [Chris Price], which uses a foot p…Hackaday
I got a oneplus 6 to install nixos, but I'm currently using LineageOS as I kind of got stuck on the nixos install, and I needed a phone. I previously had nixos on a pinephone and it was cool but too slow to use seriously.
I have a second oneplus 6 with a wonky usb port, am going to try to fix that and maybe give nixos another go. Sounds like its even more hassly than I thought!
Honestly, it's mostly just trying shit out, breaking your install and fixing it, and having fun. In the grand scheme of things doing all that stuff is not that difficult, mostly tedious; my day job involves more complex and often interesting problems. It's just gluing together things which other people wrote, looking at what breaks, and either fixing it properly or just hacking it together with perl.
Finally, I can confide to you that I've spent half a day getting wireguard working on that very phone a couple months ago, only to find out it was because I didn't poke the right holes in the firewall 😀
It's accelerating now. I hang out on App subs and people say shit like 'it took me a whole month to develop this app', some even do it in 'days'.
I've just released and it took me three years. I'm sure their apps are Ai slop, but that's what I'm competing with.
Looks like BM818 in Librem5 supports VoLTE, but might have issues with some networks.
PinePhone's (and one of Mudita's phone's) EG25 modem technically supports VoLTE, but was very flaky for me (in a mid-low signal area)
FuriLabs (FLX1) seems to have VoLTE working.
Ubuntu Touch explicitly states that it does not support VoLTE.
I just fat-fingered myself into a need for a new phone. I'd really like to get away from Android, but I've yet to hear anyone say any smartphone running Linux is ready for daily driving.
😢
Sometimes, sentences come togeþer wiþ so many in a row I feel self-conscious. More rarely, I produce one, or none.
You become hyper-aware of how heavily English relies on "th" when you walk þis paþ.
I think you're making a joke I'm too oblivious to get, but in case I was wrong:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby…
(Not to be confused with a similarly titled book that definitely uses the letter 'e')
Camera app available at Sailfish OS GitHub
Hi all, Like we hinted in last week’s newsletter Camera app was close to be ready for open sourcing and indeed that what it is. It’s open now 🎉 🥳.Sailfish OS Forum
This, but Pixel 4a. Nearly identical phones, except one has more RAM.
I just bought like five of them. Best Pixel on the market, imho.
Ubuntu Touch • Linux Phone
Ubuntu Touch is the open source phone that has freedom and privacy in mind. Supported by dozens of devices, with installer for FOSS fanswww.ubuntu-touch.io
Better not to use Signal. It's intentionally made less secure by requiring a phone number.
Wire is better. Native Linux app. No phone number needed.
I daily drive a Librem 5. First thing to note is do not expect a well polished experience. Battery life is bad, only about 4 hours of light use, and 8 or so hours if left in suspend. It can do VoLTE, send SMS, use web apps and any apps coded with libadwaita or kirigami. Other desktop apps can be forced to scale on the display, but it won't be perfect.
I use Signal desktop as my main means of communication on the Librem 5. I have a spare normie phone for setup, but Waydroid is an option. I do use Waydroid for a few apps that have no web browser equivalent.
Idk, all I can say is, you have to really want it to live with it. I don't do gaming or heavy social media use or anything removed that, so it is just fine for me. But it's definitely not for everyone.
oneplus 6T and poco F1 on mobian and postmarketOS. SDM845 devices with 8 GB RAM and fast storage, about the peak of performance you can have nowadays for about $50 apiece. I'd encourage anyone to get a cheap device, fun to play around with and prepare for the day when it becomes viable. ubuntu touch is also possible, but since it's halium (like android + linux VM) it wants me to downgrade to Android 9 which is virtually impossible for me; the former two run full linux kernels and don't have that limitation - spotty hardware support, though.
performance is acceptable, the power to do almost anything you want, access whatever and whenever you want. I run it without broadband, just wifi. the cameras are unusable. since I keep the modem off, GPS doesn't work either. so it's a linux laptop with touch, basically. the apps are a shitshow, rarely will you find one that supports touch and adapts to the vertical zoomed-in screen.
but it's getting better, shit's way better now than it was only a year ago and eventually it'll get there.
as long as you're aware it's not an android alternative, you'll have a good time.
I wish... and I did try. You can see my post history but basically PinePhone and PinePhone Pro sitting neatly on the shelf.
They work. Sure, but between battery life or rather power management, lack of camera on the Pro, lack of MIPS on the base model to use Android apps via Waydroid, I had a lot of fun tinkering, but for me these are not daily drives.
For now I'm stuck with deGoogle Android thanks to /e/OS pre-installed by Murena on a CMF Nothing 1. It's neat thanks to F-Droid, Termux, KDE Connect, GadgetBridge, etc but overall I'd much rather be on Linux proper. If there is a path please do share.
Sony Xperia III with Sailfish OS flashed on it. Running Android emulation for a few apps like local public transport, K9 Mail. No Google.
Nice thing its easily programmable in Python / Guile / Rust. Plus has a FLOSS Linux app store.
I also have a Gemini PDA with a physical keyboard, which runs Sailfish as well. It's nice to use vim on it.
A bit late to the party here, but today I flashed Ubuntu Touch onto a Xiaomi Poco X3, and it's... well, it's rough.
All the base functionality seems to be there, calls should work (not sure because I didn't test them extensively), sms works, location/gps works, nfc is supported, camera is.. passable, battery life is certainly, and noticeably worse but that's a given - when on standby, the battery goes down roughly 8% every 5 hours, so approx. 27% per day on standby.
While I'm really glad to see how much Linux phone development sped up, they are still nowhere near daily driver status - even the phones built with Linux support in mind are not faring well from what I've seen. Even then, I'm keeping this Poco X3 because Android's days seem to be numbered.
I just ordered a pinephone, haven't received it yet. The pinephone is the best native option in the U.S right now but you can get some unlocked smartphones with better hardware and install Linux it's just a bit of a headache.
The general consensus is that it's pretty low power, being one of the only chipsets that has publicly available design docs for it. It's a mid tier 2015 era chipset. It a bit slow but works as a phone. You can probably emulate android apps in it.
I haven't received it yet but apparently not good. It's a $200 phone. I mostly want it because it runs Linux natively, has a regular unlocked bootloader that isn't designed to be frustrating like android phones, and can send display over USB-C so it's like a regular computer. You can run anything like emulating windows apps, you could install steam on it technically by putting it in an emulation container, but the chipset is very old at this point, and so you aren't going to be emulating anything remotely modern on it. It is just a PC in your pocket though. You have a package manager, you can install many different Linux distros on it. You can get a LoRa radio mesh case for it, a physical keyboard/battery case, which I will probably get eventually. I think it's worth the 200 dollars. I really want to get away from android. It's hard because everything from Arm CPUs to the modems are completely proprietary. The only reason this device exists is because the design docs got leaked.
It does have phone, sms, and your standard phone stuff. You can get several different desktop environments like plasma mobile or gnome mobile and several others. It has 3 GBs of ram, and the OS usually takes up around 500 MB. It has dip switches to disable the hardware like the camera, cell modem, wifi, bt, etc. It would be a great device for taking to defcon.
I went from Sailfish, to Ubuntu phone, back to Sailfish,
then bought a Pinephone due to the war,
not knowing if the Finnish company would survive
before going back to Sailfish.
Pinephone, despite it being the most linux of phones, used up too much battery power.
Ubuntu phones were already miles better.
davel
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