Elon Musk and X have settled with four former top executives at Twitter, including the former CEO, who accused the billionaire of failing to pay $128m in promised severance pay after he acquired the social media company in 2022 and fired them.
The former executives say that Musk falsely accused them of misconduct and forced them out of Twitter after they sued him for attempting to renege on his offer to buy the company. The plaintiffs are Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s former CEO; Ned Segal, Twitter’s former chief financial officer; Vijaya Gadde, its former chief legal officer; and Sean Edgett, its former general counsel. Musk and X have denied wrongdoing and said the executives were fired over their performance.
The deadlock over ending the US government shutdown deepened on Wednesday, with senators once again rejecting competing bills to restart funding as Democrats and Republicans remain dug in on their demands for reopening federal agencies.
The funding lapse has forced offices, national parks and other federal government operations to close or curtail operations, while employees have been furloughed. Signs of strain have mounted in recent days in the parts of the federal government that remained operational, with staffing shortages reported at airports across the US as well as air traffic control centers. Further disruptions may come next week, when US military personnel and other federal workers who remain on the job will not receive paychecks, unless the government reopens.
When the Senate met on Wednesday afternoon, it became clear that sentiment had not shifted in the eight days since the shutdown began. For the sixth time, Democratic and Republican proposals to restart funding both failed to receive enough support to advance, and no senators changed their votes from recent days.
I made a post on Showerthoughts saying if you are a guy and you are a virgin at 22 years old, you are fucked because most women in their 20s have sexual experience, so if you are a 22-year-old guy, a woman who’s 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, or 30 wouldn’t want to date you because they have sexual experience already.
However, I could be wrong, so do some women with sexual experience date a virgin? If so, why?
Being a virgin doesn’t matter to the vast majority of people. If a woman finds a person attractive, they’re not gonna care if they’re a virgin. If they do, they’re probably pretty judgmental and not worth the time. I’m now 28, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone mention virginity for at least 6 or 7 years.
L'evento dei Black Carpet Awards ci fa porre una domanda spinosa: celebrare la diversità in un evento a parte è un atto di inclusione o di separazione?
Ecco i punti chiave:
1. Il Paradosso della visibilità: da un lato, eventi dedicati sono fondamentali per dare luce e voce a chi, nel mainstream, fatica a emergere. Creano comunità e modelli di riferimento potenti.
2. Il Rischio della ghettizzazione: dall'altro, un evento "collaterale" rischia di confinare la diversità in una nicchia, implicitamente suggerendo che non sia ancora pronta per il palco principale dell'industria.
3. La meta finale: il vero traguardo non è avere palchi paralleli, ma un cambiamento strutturale. Camera Moda e le istituzioni devono integrare la diversità nel cuore degli eventi ufficiali, rendendola la norma e non l'eccezione.
In sintesi: I Black Carpet Awards sono un sintomo necessario di un'industria in transizione, ma ci ricordano che il viaggio verso l'inclusione è completo solo quando la diversità sarà il palcoscenico stesso.
Ok, so why do they utilize these tools and the left cries about it.
I've said this for a while. The hate of AI on lemmy was encouraged by Astro turfing methods. This way leftist who usually are at the cutting edge of things instead knee cap themselves on a technology that acts as a force multiplayer. They will use this and advance. We will bitch and moan. The end result will be that they gain more and we don't. So you can be upset and you can cry and hate this or me for pointing this out. That will never change the outcome. Your feelings don't matter. What matters is outcomes right now. It matters what will get people to vote when it's time. if you concede tools that help you reach eyes and ears of voters, be ready for consequences.
We gain by generating counter-slop? Wtf are you on about.
Anybody with a half a braincell can see the detrimental impact AI is having on social media & internet content generally. It's not astro turfing, it's just constantly dealing with generated nonsense that's causing the hate.
People who are more susceptible to manipulation, which unfortunately seems to be right-leaning folks, seem to fall victim into believing & spreading it the most. They rarely do any form of fact checking.
Everybody is susceptible to manipulation. Are you crazy. Who do you think you are. It's basic shit here. You need to push a singular message through repetition and people adopt it every time. The left are so ignorant to basics which is why everybody and their grandma knows about cat litter boxes rather than the arguments against it. This era of leftist are absolutely outclassed by a mile.
Yeah, this person's right! We should start making inflammatory AI videos, too! Dump that whole tanker ship in the fire, fuck it!
No. I am sorry, but no. The hate on Lemmy is not against AI as a technology, it is against how it is being used, how it is being peddled, how it is being shoved down everyone's throats, and how much damage it's doing to our environment (edit: and society, and art, and culture, and politics, and economy, and wellness, and overall desire to maintain a steady heartbeat!)
And, to your point about feelings not mattering, from what I've seen, most people (including myself) are exhausted! We are surrounded by people losing their shit left and right, bigotry, racism, hate in general are mainstream, Fascism is out, about, and in power, and it looks like we're all forgetting that the planet is literally burning up again.
We are tired. Most of us have already been through enough shit as it is, we would want nothing more than to see the end of this string of "once in a lifetime" disasters, yet we understand that the easy way out means we'll end up becoming exactly what's ruining our lives right now. This isn't just about winning, HOW we win is equally important, if not more so. Because that will set the tone for what would follow.
Oh, I said nothing about honour! There's being nice, and there's being fair. I'm more for being fair than being nice, and as I see it, it's fair to hit back. The difference is in the nuance of how I hit back. Why eliminate when immobilise would suffice, y'know?
Not to mention that the bullshit in AI videos made by the left would absolutely get called out in every propaganda outfit on the right. It would just give them more ammo (without the usual lies).
But even more important, it will grant legitimacy to everyone who responds to damning video evidence by claiming it was AI. We don't need to make shit up, the reality is already horrifying. All AI will do is make it harder for people to believe their own eyes.
It's absolutely exhausting knowing how much potential humans have to do great things, but having to watch humanity choose to destroy themselves instead.
In all ways imaginable, especially emotional. I've seen some sad shit in my life, but this overall bend toward mindless self-annihilation our species seems to have is by far the saddest...
I think it’s pretty obvious why people would be upset about a propaganda machine being used by a government to demonize its political enemies and voting base? The Iraq War started over less false pretenses, and look how that rolled out. The damage produced by this lying machine will be unimaginable.
Cool, it's super important to be aware how getting punched will affect you while getting punched. Just don't punch back because that isn't what we're about. In the end we win somehow. Maybe they'll break their first on our head I dunno.
Depends if you're in their labor camp or not. There's a time and place for everything. Why be concerned about the environment if creates an environment where the people who will outpace you will destroy it anyways. You're not saving anything by letting them seize power
They utilize these tools because they have no morals. They are willing to lie and cheat their way into whatever they want.
The left does not have that advantage. We don't want to lie, we don't want to cheat, we want the liars and cheaters to be removed from power. Lying harder isn't going to work for us because unlike the right, we will call out our own for it.
Right which is my point. But why does the left fall on their own sword. They have all the ability. If we truly believe the left have more people, that Gerry mandering is needed because most people lean left. Then it should be a no brainer than the left needs to activate a fire under each other to overwhelm spaces. But we do the opposite. We retreat. The only conclusions I can think of when I read between the lines is that we were targeted by right wing astro turfing as much as the right was. Or we're just not smart people as a whole and it's actually maybe a good thing we're being backed into our corners
I think part of the issue is that people on the left also tend to see nuances, which means more things to disagree over. Left falls out, right falls in line and all.
Nah, it wasn't astroturfed. Current gen AI is little more than automated theft ATM. A lot of artists had their work stolen with no compensation. And now have an even tougher time ahead, competing with the thieves than they already had before. A lot of the angst and hate has been knee-jerk and lacking nuance. Doing as much to alienate people from their cause as bring them to it. But it's real.
What's equally absurd however. Are those that naively think we could use AI against those already using it. They're building farms that consume more power than major cities. With more compute than even large groups of average individuals will ever be able to muster. It doesn't matter how much of a force multiplier it is. 10x return on a force of 10,000,000 is exponentially more return than a 500x increase on a force of 100.
Ai may just be a tool, but it's not going to turn the tide in favor of the left.
Yea of course, that's what all the headlines were shared kept trying us everyday multiple times a day. They told us they would take our jobs, they'd assault our women and children, they threatened our way of life. Familiar
Lemmy’s daily active user numbers are not big enough to be a worthwhile astroturfing target.
The real reason people shit on AI here is because it’s a platform with a bias toward people who are fairly tech savvy and or work in a technology field. Which is why every 3rd technology post here is a Linux circle jerk.
A lot of users here understand the technologies and are working in spaces where they’re being asking to “implement AI” by idiots who don’t understand the tech and aren’t trying to solve a user problem.
It 100% is perfect for astroturf. It's the perfect size for it. Large population need more money and effort to afford astroturf. Lemmy is the right amount then you let the Lemmy users generate more content for you.
We all saw this with Reddit. They always started with smaller city subs before moving to bigger ones. Always
I have seen this recently pretty often that people seem to believe Lemmy is an equal representation of the real world. It’s probably one of the more niche media platforms, though. I come here because I enjoy every third Linux post. I also know that I have to go out of my way to find someone who has even heard of Steam, let alone a Steam Deck in the real world.
Ya, I don't really get the hate either. It's just a fun new way to make memes. I feel like most are blowing things out of proportion because the media is telling them to.
As much as I hate to use this term because of the most prominent person associated with it:
This literally is an infowar, this is an actual psyop.
Targetted and fairly convincing mis and disinformation deployed at exactly the moment it would generate the most chaos and distrust in your own ability to evaluate reality?
If they can take something like "woke" and use it to mean something bad, we can take infowars and use it for something good (and correct/accurate). Make that usage of the word the default when people hear it, not the other thing.
Always have. Most of them have never met the people they've been taught to hate. Or believe for some reason that the few they know are some sort of exception. The token "good ones".
Right they hate these straw people. I mean, I;m not going to say my own cognitive projection of "conservative" is 100% accurate, but at least my nightmare scenarios are about actual bad things happening, and not like conservative nightmares of genetically inferior people getting to enjoy the gifts of civilization.
The difference between us and them is that we don't want to do things to hurt them. Far from it. We honestly want to do things to help them. When we do hate them, it's not for who they are, but who they choose to be. And that makes all the difference.
The sooner you realize that the call is coming from inside the house, the better. We're dealing with a revived KKK and a government that openly supports them. These people are very capable of running their own psyops.
I feel like AI generated videos of very active things like protests would be easy to debunk. Just look at the people in the background and point out the people disappearing after moving behind another person, or look for changing faces.
In the article they mention videos with literal AI watermarks being passed around as if they were real. The targets want to believe they are true and will ignore anyone debunking them.
If right wing people were smart they wouldn't be right wing. Of course they're going to believe and share AI slop video. They're emotional driven fools.
Even if the images were real, I see a woman using her first amendment right to speech and assembly being assaulted by someone who has sworn to uphold the constitution.
People have always been easy to manipulate. Especially in the type of social and ideological isolation the internet age has brought about. That’s why most city people are less right wing. Hard to villainize groups of people when you interact with them daily. Also hard to isolate into ideological containers when you interact with varied points of view contrary to your bubble.
The smartest move I ever made was dropping all mainstream social media. I don't get any of this BS. Meta, Twitter, and Reddit are a plague on society and I'll have no part in it.
What would prevent Lemmy from becoming another Reddit if it gains the same user count? Not promoting specific users only because they have a lot of Karma?
Nothing prevents it totally. It could 100% be just as bad as Facebook. But only those servers owned by those propaganda pushers. It is harder to take over the whole and push your agenda to all users, when they can simply block your instance and let you stew in your hate.
Best example for that: the tankies, which are mostly ignored or ridiculed outside their own safe spaces.
And while I do think there will always be nationalistic fuckwards, I think the big number now and in the past are only possible due to massive propaganda. If that is not possible, people steer more to "normal" stuff. Because most people are not majorally negatively affected by the status quo.
Yeah, after writing it I felt it was wrong. What I meant is: most people are not hurt by what is being pushed in the mass media as source of the problem. If that outside factor goes away, they will focus more on what is happening around them. That the status quo in our current world is hurting a lot of people is absolutely correct, sadly.
What would prevent Lemmy from becoming another Reddit
You'd need to convince every one hosting a Lemmy instance (and all possible future ones) to sell their platform for money or blackmail them into submission...
With Reddit, they only needed to convince Spez which is like convincing an alcoholic to have a free shot of his fav poison
If Lemmy, or any other fediverse social network, ever got that big, you would be guaranteed there would be plenty of splinters of de-federation in the network. There would be small networks totally isolated from the mainstream cluster, and others that only federate parts of it. You could choose to hang out in some counter-cultural bubble, or choose a curated connection to the biggest networks, if you didn't want to engage in them fully. The trick would be finding "your people," but the tech works.
Fair point. I was kinda confused when I first tried to join Lemmy and went for lemmy.world. Hopefully if shit hits the fan people will be less reluctant to switch over to other instances
reddit and all commercial social media make more money when they have more users, so they attract a lot of users with ragebait and clickbait.
we don't profit if we have more users, so we don't have an incentive to send clickbait and ragebait, and the absence of these toxins alone will probably drive up the quality a bit.
Agreed on the greed aspect, I'm wondering how would we defend against bots and incindiary propaganda differently from eg Reddit. My guess is that Lemmy is susceptible to that just the same
What's wild about this is that people predicted AI would be used for nefarious purposes, but generally in the form of like, showing your opponents doing crimes. But here it's being used to show their own side doing crimes while the other side is only made to look "cringy" or more like a stereotype.
It really speaks to the utter depravity of the US right that, given a machine that can generate any video of anything they could imagine, this is what they do. These people are utterly incompatible with any kind of free or even functional society, and I really don't know what could ever be done fix them or their culture.
If they instead made convincing AI generated videos of some imaginary leftists going first and starting a revolution, then it might not have the intended effect.
Anyone acting out violently should be culled from society. Not partisan issue. I definitely lean like way left and there is much to be done without murder. Work ‘em into a frenzy. Let them eat their own. Let them have their violence upon themselves. See, I didn’t do a goddamn thing. These fuckers are gonna off themselves quicker than Howard Dean can say woooo!
Some dumbass sumbitch eating this up. Unfortunately it’s like 50x that. So many dumb motherfuckers, not enough natural disasters to help the rest of us along.
The phrase “I voted for this” has become a common thing for far-right supporters of Trump to say when something particularly brutal has happened to their political opponents.
I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it, If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. -- Lyndon B. Johnson, attributed by Bill Moyers
I've met racists who love this quote, they just think that "convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man" is equivalent to "convince a colored man he’s as good as a white man" here. They really do.
Also there are plenty of people who don't consider themselves racist, yet think their (American, British, whatever) color hierarchy exists outside of English-speaking countries and people there have to take it into account.
The kind that "is not racist", but if someone is racist, it's only the way that they are on top. They can't conceive that a Vietnamese or a Chinese racist may have a racial hierarchy where they are near chimps. When facing evidence of such being possible, they lose their mind and behave, honestly, quite racist.
I remember as a kid growing up in a extended family just emerging from the worst kind of american poor. My fathers generation was the first to have decent living conditions but still faced hunger as children. They all could remember when they got electricity and running water. The older generation of aunts and uncles would often say things like 'We may be poor but at least were not N******s". That hasn't changed a lot in some circular family tree's.
Expect much more of this and soon enough it will be impossible to distinguish between Real and fake videos
We can fix a little with digitally.sigbed videos to at least show that a video came from a verified source but that still won't fix the issue with leaked videos. Basically, leaked videos and open mike videos / audio clips are over, we can't ever trust them anymore
With the way things spread on social media from user generated content it would be hard to get that done I'm sure. Like the video almost everyone saw of Charlie, the video was indeed real but the spread was so beyond control that ot broke almost every filter algorithm on social media. I can't imagine how much "suppression" talk would be mentioned if we had digitally sign the source even though it would be totally valid. [Viral > Truth]
I think the article really makes the point that it doesn't matter. The videos can LITERALLY have a watermark on them from the AI software, and people just dgaf. The battle is lost before it begins.
As with things like quotes and claims that could always be fake, it's back to the old journalistic practices of verifying sources with a second source. But that means being ignorant of things that were not being investigated by journalists, which creates a different filter bubble.
it’s back to the old journalistic practices of verifying sources with a second source.
that has as a necessary pre-requirement that people are actually interested enough in an objective truth that they're willing to pay some journalist to do the research.
is that really the case anymore? I can see it being useful in the 20th century when people were interested in new economic developments and stuff
This has to be what trump is seeing over on Truth Social that's got him thinking cities are burning from protests, or at least that could be what his advisors are showing
Fuuuuck, gaslighting the gaslighter in chief. This is how humanity ends. All bc reality has become trapped within an endless circle of AI generated gaslighting and fuckery thanks to these idiots.
Yet another reason they probably want to stir up violence. Not only does it tip us closer towards civil war, capturing public violence means more data to feed into AI and generate violent videos.
'No worries, we'll stop at our earliest convenience. Till then, please remain calm and stop struggling so much, it's off-putting for our other guests.'
I don't know. My entire life people have more or less told me the truth is stupid and worthless. Pretty sure were never were a truth society. It's just that now we have given up the pretense and pretext that it even exists and have decided bullshit is what really makes us happy.
I'm saying it again: We can't know what's true anymore. Whenever something happens more than a few miles away, chances are high that you know nobody who was involved there physically, so there's no reliable way of knowing what actually happened anymore.
I think we can only make reasonable choices about things that are close enough to ourselves; not about very far-away entities.
AI is coming along at the perfect times for these jackals, and as we got closer and closer, through deep fakes, etc., we all knew who would be the first side to abuse it for its political propaganda power. They even knew it, they could hardly wait for the tech to catch up to their nefarious requirements.
Yeah? Kinda the point. Like absolutely nothing was happening in Portland. Nothing at all. But trump sent troops anyway because Portland is such a hellhole. Now there’s protests, but they seem to be far more entertaining and mocking than anything else.
I'm convinced AI content generation was created with the sole intent of manufacturing outrage material for gullible idiots.
because the rate at which these technophobic illiterates have adopted AI, and expertly use it to generate bullshit, is too high to be otherwise plausible.
Yeah, no doubt. My mother got radicalised by Facebook over the years. It went from cute dog and cat things to "harmless" conspiracy theories (think bigfoot), culminating in fucking her with QAnon propaganda indoctrination. Last I checked up on her, there's machine generated rubbish all over her feed. She's beyond saving at this point. Suppose she was always primed for this kind of thing, being pro-homeopathy anti-vaccine person.
She doesn't question the machine generated content at all, and I saw that if someone points it out, which a scarce few have done, she just justifies it with "well it could be real, this kind of thing does happen."
At this point I don't think it matters if this technofascism was a knowing plan, or an unfortunate series of events that by themselves seemed justifiable to the people making the decisions, but it doesn't really matter. We're here now. They're not only trying, but succeeding in coercing governments and undermining democracy.
Brazil’s beef exports to China are on the rise as part of the Asian nation’s larger strategy to avoid agricultural goods from the United States amid their ongoing trade dispute.
Brazil’s beef exports to China rose 38.3 percent in September from a year earlier, reaching 187,340 tonnes, the industry group Abrafrigo said on Wednesday, helping push total monthly exports to a record high.
Global demand for beef has helped Brazil offset the impact of US tariffs on its exports, Abrafrigo said. In August, the administration of US President Donald Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on several Brazilian goods, including beef, which already had a 26.4 percent levy.
it's bizarre to me that the chinese were buying so much beef and soybeans from it's political enemy rather than buying it from it's fellow brics member in the first place; brics is literally a trade organization.
BRICS is a dictator's club. They hate each other and don't trust each other one wit. It's one of Donnie Poopypants' great "achievements" to actually bring them together.
i play a game named tropico and you have to balance trade deals with world powers in order to prevent them from invading your tiny caribbean island nation and i always do a 70-30% split to prevent the americans or the eu from invading.
it's funny to see the chinese doing the same thing. lol
Many experts are forecasting the end of a key provision of election law — enabling Republicans to shore up their advantage in the House, according to a new report.
Ahead of the court’s Oct. 15 rehearing of Louisiana v. Callais — a case that has major implications for the VRA — two voting rights groups are sounding the alarm, warning that eliminating Section 2, a provision that prohibits racial gerrymandering when it dilutes minority voting power, would let Republicans redraw up to 19 House seats to favor the party and crush minority representation in Congress.
Bye bye free and fair elections by the midterms! And people called me crazy for predicting this.
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.
i did Primerica out of desperation back in the 90's and they made us sit through presentations and videos like this and i resented it.
watching something like it again 30 years later was enjoyable, but only because it was a pleasant trip through memory lane re-seeing the aesthetics and home decor that i realized were prevalent in upper middle class homes back then when i had to travel to do Primerica.
also: i've had to work at a couple of diners during high-school/college and tandmen cooking has been the status quo atleast since the 80's; it's only high end restaurants/diners who don't do this and it's wild to learn that people are still unaware of it.
Nowadays, a majority of apps require you to sign up with your email or even worse your phone number. If you have a phone number attached to your name, meaning you went to a cell service/phone provider, and you gave them your ID, then no matter what app you use, no matter how private it says it is, it is not private. There is NO exception to this. Your identity is instantly tied to that account.
Signal is not private. I recommend Simplex or another peer to peer onion messaging app. They don't require email or phone number. So as long as you protect your IP you are anonymous
Signal is private, what you should differentiate is being anonymous or not. Using your usual phone number is NOT Anonymous but is PRIVATE, as in the content of your messages being only available to you and the person you're talking to
The way you get a phone number depends on you too, so you can be very much be Anonymous even if signal requires a phone number.
People who actually care about privacy: the quality or state of being apart from company or observation (definition), wouldn't want a company knowing their phone number and thus identity tied to their phone number. Maybe you believe in a lower level of privacy than I do. That's fine but my post was for people who never thought about it but will care and those who should care.
Signal stores the hash of the phone number. So you can query them for a specific phone number, but are unable to figure out phone numbers based on the hashes (outside of brute force - trying every 12-digit phone number).
And after doing that, you learn "this person uses/used Signal", with no information about particular messages whatsoever.
You are very naive if you think that a company located un the US can provide an encrypted messaging service that can be used by anyone including terrorists, druglords and US enemies without the government being able to access the messages. Lavabit was a famous case and had to shutdown because its founder rejected to comply with an order from the US government to grant access to information. If you are using centralized communication service located in the US forget about privacy.
”Lavabit is believed to be the first technology firm that has chosen to suspend or shut down its operation rather than comply with an order from the United States government to reveal information or grant access to information.[3] Silent Circle, an encrypted email, mobile video and voice service provider, followed the example of Lavabit by discontinuing its encrypted email services.[25] Citing the impossibility of being able to maintain the confidentiality of its customers' emails should it be served with government orders, Silent Circle permanently erased the encryption keys that allowed access to emails stored or transmitted by its service.[26]"
"Levison (founder) explained he was under a gag order and that he was legally unable to explain to the public why he ended the service.[21]"
Since when is encryption dependent on the service’s jurisdiction?
The US has a law that applies to any US company operating within its borders: it is illegal to tell your users that the US government has asked your company to spy on their behalf. This is called a key disclosure law, and the US's version of it, called National Security Letters, underwent an expansion with the PATRIOT act; by 2013, President Obama’s Intelligence Review Group reported issuing on average, nearly 60 NSLs every day.
Companies that don't comply with this law are forced to shut themselves down, or remain open, and grant access to user communications to the US government. The Signal foundation is a US domiciled company and must comply with this law without being able to disclose that they have been issued an NSL letter.
Luckily we don’t yet live in that world
Comply with the government order of granting access to messages or shut down implies that we are already in that world, long ago. What makes you think that what happened to Lavavit and Silent Circle would not happen to Signal? Only wishfull thinking can make you think that, evidence tells you otherwise.
Do you understand what encryption means? Genuine question.
If a company is compelled to spy on its users, it doesn't mean hack them. (although perhaps there are same edge cases where you have to wonder the exact definition of hacking)
Obviously you are missing the point. Even Gmail is private if you are going to do the job of encrypting your messages by yourself, but that's irrelevant with what we are discussing here.
What we are discussing here is that if you are a company offering a service of encrypted communications located in the US, the government has all the power to force you to shut down if you don't give them access to what they want. And that's not speculation, they're actively doint it because they are backed by the law.
Why people are so naive thinking that the government are not going to do something to get what they want when the law is on their side, when sometimes they don't hesitate to do it even when it's blatantly illegal?
The only way to avoid surveillance is with free, open source and descentralized software. If there is a company in charge of running the software that's a vulnerability and, like the cases already mentioned, those in power are going to exploit it shutting the service down if the company doesn't comply.
It doesn't matter how much you like or trust the service, there's simply no reason why they wouldn't do it again when they already dit it successfuly. Why some people who care about privacy can't see this obvious fact is beyond my understanding.
Alright I think I know what you mean, but I'm still not sure we're actually on the same page regarding encryption.
If a company is forced to do whatever ths government commands it to do, that's only valid within certain constraints.
For example, the company cannot be forced to grow wings snd fly to thr heavens. That's physically impossible.
Similarly, it also cannot provide the decrypted messages of its users because it (like Signal) does not have the KEYS that are absolutely 100% necessary for decrypting the encrypted messages of its users. So, again, it's physically impossible to hand over either the keys or the decrypted messages.
However, there is one remedy that Signal CAN do, if somehow forced. That's changing the Signal program. It certainly can push an update that sends Signal the keys for decryption.
However, at that point, the source code at github doesn't match the compiled binary of the program anymore, and very good chance people would notice, and thereby people would lose trust in Signal.
I'm not sure about the examples you gave about the government being successful in obtaining user details of a company. Were those details encrypted as well? Was the source code publically available? Was the program popular?
Signal is free and open-source. It cannot be denied that basically everything, including minor details like usernames, is end-to-end encrypted and kept secure. The Signal protocol has been proven to be secure by many independent experts and thus it is mathematically impossible for Signal to gain access to your sensitive information (except for your phone number, obviously).
Signal is not open source, its a centralized US service, and you have no idea what their server is running. They even went a full year without publishing server code updates at one point, until it caused enough of a backlash that they started doing it again. But publishing that is no guarantee of anything, because you have no access to their server.
mathematically impossible for Signal to gain access to your sensitive information (except for your phone number, obviously).
A phone number in most countries, including the US, means your real name and address.
Your phone number alone just doesn't give any real insight: you can derive that the person behind it prefers to communicate in private and that they're probably alive, but that's about it. Also, I don't think Signal can get your name without a government to look it up. That does happen sometimes, it's just that nothing importmant ever comes out of it.
Prove it, give me ssh access to their centralized server so I can verify that they're running the code they've published. Otherwise this is a "just trust me" claim.
Also, I don't think Signal can get your name without a government to look it up.
There are 10 websites that publicly publish phone number and identity info, right now. Not even a government, but a random stranger can convert your phone number to your real identity.
Since when is encryption dependent on the service's jurisdiction? When Signal has got subpoenaed it has always been incapable of providing data that involves the content of the conversation signal.org/bigbrother/
The app is also open source with reproducible builds (and you can use Molly instead, if you prefer) and when the clients of an end-to-end encrypted system are sound, that is all that matters to secure the content of the communication. Audits are also performed as listed here community.signalusers.org/t/ov…
I don't understand where this doomerism comes from tbh, (online) privacy will cease to exist when either maths does or it becomes globally illegal to use encryption and the government's intrusion is really so pervasive that they constantly know what you're doing. Luckily we don't yet live in that world, though the pressure is real and we are the first that have to fight for this basic human right
You can't protect against emails being received in plain text.
Don't know the technicalities of the specific case you are referencing, but I know that if the government wants to they can middleman any received email before the provider can encrypt it for storage on their servers (by forcing the provider to let them).
On the other hand, if you use an end to end encrypted chat app, you can't middleman any messages from the providers side by force because the messages are always encrypted on the users device before being sent.
the phone number drives me nut since mine changes every few months; everyone i know has my voip number that gets everything forwarded to each new number.
You can also get a phone number in a number of ways without it being connected to your identity. You can use voip services or buy a phone and a SIM in cash. I still think this is a good think to point out for all the people who use signal or other services with a phone number directly connected to their identity.
Depends where you live. I'm in Australia and phone companies aren't allowed to activate a number without tying it to an ID. So criminals just use stolen IDs and regular people don't get privacy. Also YMMV but virtually every service that needs phone verification won't accept VoIP numbers anymore
lol try signing up for an email account today without tying a phone number to it or another established email account. It's incredibly difficult.
You might be able to create an account, but then all "3rd party services" (e.g. creating accounts on absolutely fucking anything) will be blocked and your account will be either restricted or forced to submit a kind of verification that doxes you to lift said block, probably.
I found a single sketchy provider that would take verifications from proton mail that allowed me to then create more accounts, but I had to try over a dozen mail providers before I found the obscure one that did not require any pre-existing accounts, phone numbers or identification documents to just create an email to simply sign up for any web forum, service or basically do anything most people do with email. Everything ends up linked to each other at some point.
There's just no privacy anymore. The ones who think there is are probably not as private as they really think they are today.
Protonmail is highly accepted and tutamail didn't ask for my number or another email. You are in a group called privacy but you think there is no privacy?
I just stop using those accounts that force me to give up my number. It's called standards, YOU must have them and you will have more privacy than most.
This group function is to help increase privacy. That's what I'm doing by letting you know not to use your phone number. If you have a defeatist ideology. You lose.
Sure, requires 3rd party email or cell phone to work though.
tutamail didn’t ask for my number or another email
The last one, run by little over a dozen people as FOSS, and easily quashed by the long arm of the law or a pricey lawsuit. What happens then?
I just stop using those accounts that force me to give up my number. It’s called standards
You still need an email that is completely associated to you for official things like medical interactions, government interactions, and stuff like sports tickets if you care about going to a sports game in a town like Boston. Hell, when you send resumes I assume you have a professional inbox for that too.
So how do you do it? Do you live in two worlds with a burner phone / never checking your 'private' stuff outside of some kind of proxy/vpn scenario where you remote into whatever box is handling your actual private online presence?
Geez. You just don't get it. You don't need your identity tied to your email. Proton mail didn't ask me for a phone or email. But I've had it for years so maybe that changed. But you conceal your personal info when you sign up. Tutamail is used by many people. And you can email any other email provider with it
Proton mail didn’t ask me for a phone or email. But I’ve had it for years so maybe that changed.
It changed. I made one in the past week. You can create an account, you cannot get any account verification emails from ANY other provider, they block them and then restrict your account until you verify with someone else.
I don't know why you think I don't get it though. The amount of metadata accessible when visiting a website is crazy nowadays. They can track things people never even imagined, like the arc of how your hand moves across the screen with a mouse, the cadence of how you type, and then tie those to profiles with any other details they have managed to scrape. Combine that with hours of activity, browser versioning addons etc, resolution and any number of other bits of metadata and suddenly someone has a shadow profile linking you to your proxy IPs or whatever else.
Sure, i'm more paranoid but I don't believe anyone with a head on their shoulders would say privacy on the internet has ever gotten better.
Sure, i’m more paranoid but I don’t believe anyone with a head on their shoulders would say privacy on the internet has ever gotten better.
I mean things are dire but it's not as if nothing has improved. Even just 10-15 years ago most websites weren't using any encryption (or if they did it was only for login pages). Anything you read or sent could be seen by your ISP or someone snooping on the network. Encrypted messaging basically didn't exist or was very niche. VPNs weren't nearly as widespread either. Go back another decade and Tor Browser didn't yet exist (publicly) so there was no easy way to hide your location or stay anonymous online. Governments and companies have clamped down, yes, but our arsenal of privacy tools has never been bigger.
The amount of metadata accessible when visiting a website is crazy nowadays. They can track things people never even imagined, like the arc of how your hand moves across the screen with a mouse, the cadence of how you type, and then tie those to profiles with any other details they have managed to scrape
You can block a lot of this dynamic tracking with NoScript. This will break some websites but it's worth the inconvenience of a messed up page or needing to find an alternate site
Tutamail is the only service I know of that still doesn't need anything but I don't expect it to last. Email providers that don't make you verify anything end up being used for spam and then websites just start blocking their domain from being used for account creation
Signal needs a phone number. Why are we dismissing this as privacy versus anonymity when governments are blocking the registration SMS?
I really don’t get why so many people are turning this into a privacy versus anonymity debate when the real problem is censorship.
Yes, Signal needs a phone number to sign up, but replacing that with an email or username doesn’t make it anonymous. The real issue is that governments are blocking the registration SMS, so people can’t even sign up for the app in the first place.
Sure, there are workarounds, but most people aren’t going to jump through all those extra hoops just to use an app. If we want to spread privacy, how do we do that when Signal's phone number requirement is actively working against us?
Instead of arguing over privacy versus anonymity, shouldn’t we focus on making sure everyone can access Signal without issues? What do you think?
So, late to the party. Me Skuzi. This comment is more targeted towards your responses to user comments, but I would extend that to your entire thesis. So I decided to make an entirely new comment.
Honest questions/comments to follow:
Yes, the US govt can 'compel' a organization such as Signal to allow them to monitor/intercept encrypted messages, The government can even 'compel' a citizen to disclose their encryption key. The cost of non compliance varies from contempt of court to short term incarceration. United States v. Fricosu et al.
However, Signal would only shrug and hand them metadata. Even Signal can't decipher your messages. There are other services unrelated to Signal that operate thusly, such as VPNs, that absolutely do not keep logs and run in RAM only. Some of those VPNs have been raided and servers confiscated by multiple governments with nothing to show for their efforts. If I recall correctly mega.nz and other storage facilities operate along the same lines.
As to the requirement for a phone number, yes they do require a phone number. However, unless they've changed something recently, you can use a free or paid for, burner phone number for verification. The caveat is that if you ever have to recover your account or future verification, you may or may not have access to that number if you used a free service. So, that might be a consideration.
Also, some free services might not work while others will. If signing up for a paid account, burnerapp.com for instance, will allow you to sign up via their website, however you can't use a VPN. WiFi can be acquired at any coffee shop. If you prefer more private methods of payment for these services, there are those that accept crypto.
So, there are 'options.' You just might have to jump through a few hoops to get there.
Secondly, Signal is open source, no? The whole shebang including the protocol is open source. Where might 'they' be putting the backdoor to intercept encrypted messages? I can tell you this, the day the world finds out that the US govt has successfully cracked strong encryption ciphers, is the day you are going to see a lot of movement on this planet. From billion dollar corporations, private entities, governments, and even ne'er-do-wells on Signal.
I'm no 'fanboy', tho there is a lot to be a fan of. I'm not getting any kickbacks, compensation, or monetary advancements. If I need to be schooled, please do share.
Signal does plan to add a paid for service as well as their free service.
Well, I'm not trying to convince you of anything, however, you can convince me if you'd like. Do you have some substantiating evidence or documentation for such claims? I am aware of improvements to AES256 down through the years, and I am aware of side channel and timing attacks. Not to be discounted, but those are largely theoretical attacks. In addition, most modern computers have mitigated the possibilities of such attacks with hardware instructions for AES to protect against timing-related side-channel attacks.
The NSA reviewed all the AES finalists, including Rijndael, and reported that all of them were secure enough for U.S. Government non-classified data. However, in June 2003, the U.S. Government announced that AES could be used to protect classified information. Now you could conspiriaze that in 2003, the govt played dumb and said that AES was good enough for classified information when they knew they could blow through it like weak toilet paper, but then again, we (America) are not the only country on the planet despite what some people think, and I am quite certain that other governments have made certain their encryption techniques are 99.999% secure for classified documentation and data.
You make good points and I can't provide any documentation. But the documentation won't exist. It would be the closest guarded secret of all time. NSA only holds the upper hand if everyone thinks it's secure. If the secret was out that that they could crack it no one would use it and the advantage is lost.
So at the very least by using Signal the government can know everyone you communicated with, at what time and where. And still is considered a private messenger. Amazing.
As clients upgrade, messages will automatically be delivered using sealed sender whenever possible. Users can enable an optional status icon that will be displayed in the detailed information view for a message to indicate when this happens. These protocol changes are an incremental step, and we are continuing to work on improvements to Signal’s metadata resistance. In particular, additional resistance to traffic correlation via timing attacks and IP addresses are areas of ongoing development. signal.org/blog/sealed-sender
In reading about the Sealed Sender protocol, as I understand, it redacts whom you've contacted. However, the metadata does include timestamps. I have no dog in this hunt as 99% of my messages are whispered into someone's ear. Still, one must implicitly trust the receiver of such whispered messages. I honestly don't care what app you use. Those choices are ultimately yours and yours alone and hopefully dependent on who you entrust with your data. This is just an interesting dissection of Signal and privacy/anonymity for the muse.
In the end, we all trust some entity whether it be your ISP who has your bank account info and residential address and can tell when you're downloading 150 gigs of Linux distros overnight even with a VPN, a bank with every last transaction you authorize, the time/date, or government to which we pay income taxes who has pretty much all the info they would need to show up at your doorstep. If your threat model precludes all the above, I would recommend whispering and disconnecting from society. I honestly do not see any other way.
In addition to the end-to-end encryption that protects every Signal message, the Signal service is designed to minimize the data that is retained about Signal users.
Signal over the past few years has been exposed for having flaws in its security integrity. Even the president's current administration has had a leak issue by using the platform, Signal.
Once again, they ask for your phone number. Anything they ask for your phone number, if your phone number is tied to your identity, can easily be revealed to reveal who you are.
This is the core of the issue, and it's wild how many people don't get it.
Your phone number is metadata. And people who think metadata is "just" data or that cross-referencing is some kind of sci-fi nonsense, are fundamentally misunderstanding how modern surveillance works.
By requiring phone numbers, Signal, despite its good encryption, inherently builds a social graph. The server operators, or anyone who gets that data, can see a map of who is talking to whom. The content is secure, but the connections are not.
Being able to map out who talks to whom is incredibly valuable. A three-letter agency can take the map of connections and overlay it with all the other data they vacuum up from other sources, such as location data, purchase histories, social media activity. If you become a "person of interest" for any reason, they instantly have your entire social circle mapped out.
Worse, the act of seeking out encrypted communication is itself a red flag. It's a perfect filter: "Show me everyone paranoid enough to use crypto." You're basically raising your hand.
So, in a twisted way, Signal being a tool for private conversations, makes it a perfect machine for mapping associations and identifying targets. The fact that it operates using a centralized server located in the US should worry people far more than it seems to.
The kicker is that thanks to gag orders, companies are legally forbidden from telling you if the feds come knocking for this data. So even if Signal's intentions are pure, we'd never know how the data it collects is being used. The potential for abuse is baked right into the phone-number requirement.
The leak from the administration was because Pete Hegseth included a journalist in a discussion about sensitive war plans. Trying to blame that on Signal is deceptive on your part.
If you are saying that Signal does not offer anonymity then you are right. Anyone I message on there knows it's me. But Signal is still keeping my messages safe from monitoring and third-party surveillance, to the best of my knowledge.
Everyone you talk to and when you talked to them, with their real identities via phone numbers. Because signal is hosted in the US and subject to national security letters, you should assume the worst.
stores hashed phone numbers and first access / last access times and nothing else.
Even if this weren't false (otherwise they wouldn't be able to connect to your existing contacts), that's a "just trust us" claim. You give them your phone number, you should assume they have it and not "trust them" to hash it like its a password.
And the client does store these things, but also lets users delete messages and contacts. Your message deletions can propagate as well.
Not that its that important, but its yet another just trust us claim.
You literally don't understand how hashing works, got it. Please educate yourself on this topic. In short, "connecting your existing contacts" is ENTIRELY possible with hashed phone numbers; it's not even complicated or tricky. To claim otherwise, as you just did, is nothing but trumpeting your own ignorance.
As for deleting (and propagating deletion of) messages, this is most definitely NOT a matter of "just trust us". The client is open-source! We KNOW how it works. We KNOW that deletion propagates across devices when you tell it to. We KNOW that the service cannot see your unencrypted messages, and that the encrypted messages are made with AES so even quantum computers in the future can't decrypt them. This is incredibly far from "just trust us".
Who you are specifically (name etc) and the same amount of information on everyone you have talked to on signal and when you talked. Basically everything except for the actual content of the messages.
If it is tied to a phone number then any information connected to the phone account will be connected to the signal account identity. And any identifying information attached to the method used to pay for the phone account will be attached to the phone account and consequently the signal account.
Typically people pay using credit or debit cards, so the identifying information of those bank accounts become attached to your signal account.
Not only that, but self-hosting should be an option. It isn't with signal, which is based and hosted in the US, on amazon servers, and subject to national security letters .
You can use whatever app you like, but I think this adds confusion.
Signal is private because no one can see your messages except the people you are messaging. The government can't, Signal themselves can't.
Signal is not anonymous only in the sense that the government can check if you use Signal. That's it. They can tell if you use Signal. They can't link messages to your number in any way through data requests, etc.
Not forcing anyone to use Signal, but if you choose to, you can know it is private.
(So this post is confusing privacy with anonimity basically)
God damn. If you attach your phone number to it. It is not private in most users cases the identity it tied to the phone number. Signal knows the phone numbers and you better understand that they will reveal them if ever requested.
Yes, as I said, the government can tell if you use Signal or not by asking Signal (by providing Signal a phone number and asking if they have a record of it).
It's not anonymous in that sense, but it is still private because your messages cannot be revealed by such data requests.
No you all are SIMPs for signal. You all are promoting it like you work for them. All because you're too stupid (lack of having information) to understand they are a bad choice for privacy
They know who you're in contact with, who you communicate with the most due to the phone numbers being linked to your account. On their own website they say people can add you by searching your phone number in the search bar. If your phone number was not stored, this would not even be possible. A reference (like a phone but with your number on display) would have to be used in order to confirm that your account is the one that is being searched. The reference is the phone number. It is not private. I am not the one talking about anonymity over and over you are.
From the very beginning I have been speaking on privacy. If they know your number and know who your number is in communication with they now know what you're doing (talking to person x)
Evennif it is encrypted the damn app is a worst choice than SimpleX the thing I recommended. You chumps want to argue so bad you are missing the point. PRIVACY. Like the name of the damn group you're in. Why get compromised privacy when you can get comprehensive privacy (simplex)?
Answer you are a hypebeast promoing the most popular "privacy app"
They know who you’re in contact with, who you communicate with the most due to the phone numbers being linked to your account. On their own website they say people can add you by searching your phone number in the search bar. If your phone number was not stored, this would not even be possible. A reference (like a phone but with your number on display) would have to be used in order to confirm that your account is the one that is being searched. The reference is the phone number. It is not private. I am not the one talking about anonymity over and over you are.
I've already covered the phone number conundrum further in this thread.
Answer you are a hypebeast promoing the most popular “privacy app”
Quite laughable. Have fun storming the castle bro.
What data breach could there possibly be? Phone numbers are already public information and that's literally the only info Signal has. Oh no! My phone number that's publicly available already has been released in a "breach"!
It's already been mentioned numerous times but you're confusing privacy and anonymity.
Per Cambridge Dictionary:
Privacy: someone's right to keep their personal matters and relationships secret
Anonymity: the situation in which someone's name is not given or known:
Using Signal, even after giving them your phone number, fits the definition of privacy in that matters discussed through the app are secret to anyone outside of the sender and recipient. Even if Signal is told to hand over messages, they can't, there's nothing to access on their end. Private? Yes. Anonymous? No.
My neighbor knows who I am and where I live.....next door. He does not know what I do, other than observe that I ride a John Deer around in the fields and corn comes up shortly there after. Riding a John Deer in a field is observable by all public passers by. In public we are not guaranteed an expectation of privacy. He doesn't know tho, that I run a private sex dungeon and crack still in my basement.
I'm a haxor diddling some server somewhere to gain access. The server admin can see what I'm doing and indeed would have a record of what I was up to including any associated IP addresses, but wouldn't know me from Adam's house cat if I were truly conducting my activities in an anonymous manner.
He does not know what I do, other than observe that I ride a John Deer around in the fields and corn comes up shortly there after. Riding a John Deer in a field is observable by all public passers by.
So because he knows only a limited amount, that's the distinction between private and anonymous?
Signal is not your neighbor. Signal's DB stores phone numbers and knows who you are, and who you talked to, and when. Are the people you talk to considered "public", to a US-based corporation?
So because he knows only a limited amount, that’s the distinction between private and anonymous?
It is my distinction, yes. There are many other distinctions like it, but this one is mine based on my threat model. Now, if you'd supply your definition/distinction and threat model, then I can be pedantic about it as well. Or we can accept that, since we are talking about a wide swath of users, no one real definition suites all. If you'd like a similar exercise, hit Lemmy Self Host and pose the question, 'What is self hosting? Is hosting on a VPS considered self hosting or is a home lab considered self hosting'. Report back please.
Signal is not your neighbor. Signal’s DB stores phone numbers and knows who you are, and who you talked to, and when
You know the part in the Signal setup where it asks you for your phone number for verification purposes? You do know Signal does not prohibit the use of temp phone numbers. You can try as many as you like until you get one to work (if you're relying on free temp phone) One phone number not giving you any joy, tap 'Wrong number' and try again, or use a paid for burner phone service such as MobileSMS.io (which is specifically recommended for Signal), Burner, Quackr.io, Temp-Number.com, or there are reports of using Google Voice, if you dare tread those waters.
As clients upgrade, messages will automatically be delivered using sealed sender whenever possible. Users can enable an optional status icon that will be displayed in the detailed information view for a message to indicate when this happens. These protocol changes are an incremental step, and we are continuing to work on improvements to Signal’s metadata resistance. In particular, additional resistance to traffic correlation via timing attacks and IP addresses are areas of ongoing development. signal.org/blog/sealed-sender
As I understand the Sealed Sender protocol, it does redact or seeks to redact the metadata of 'whom you contact and who contacts you'. Since 2024, Signal has introduced usernames to reduce reliance on sharing phone numbers. You can set a username and hide your number from others, though it remains in the database for account purposes. Sooooooo....find you a temp burner phone number to use.
As I've said early on, I have no dog in this hunt. You can use Signal, Simplex, Smoke Signals, design a new enigma machine, whatever. My corn is going to grow regardless and my neighbor will still not know about my sex dungeon and crack still. LOL
In addition to the end-to-end encryption that protects every Signal message, the Signal service is designed to minimize the data that is retained about Signal users.
I don't consider it "private", if you were to know the real identities of everyone I was talking to, and when I talked to them. I'm not telling any US corporation like signal that especially.
Yes, we get it. You don't consider it "private" because you are using your own personal definition of the word, and getting all fucking bent out of joint because the definition you just fucking made up all on your own doesn't match what other people mean when they say the fucking word. WE FUCKING GET IT. END OF THREAD.
Dude, these are problems that people have been dealing with on the Internet for more than 30 years now. Not only do we have precise vocabulary that you have not bothered to educate yourself on, WE HAVE SOLUTIONS TO THESE FUCKING PROBLEMS. These are ANONYMITY issues, not PRIVACY issues. If you want an anonymous messaging platform, FUCKING USE AN ANONYMOUS MESSAGING PLATFORM. It's not fucking rocket science.
Please spare us the autism and read a fucking RFC.
You keep saying this. But you never offer any proof. Everyone keeps telling you why there is a distinction but you keep conflating the two, and here you are flat out bullshitting. It is in fact private.
What is your point? I am beginning to think YOU are propaganda. Or an idiot.
Started to write a long paragraph to explain the difference between privacy and anonymity but I now believe this new user is (no idea why) collecting engagement via rage bait. I won't participate in their posts anymore.
It might even come from a good place, namely trying to always do "better" and be "more private" but in practice it's just lead to confusion.
When this US service has your phone number (meaning your real name and address), then what is the point of making this distinction? Is them having my address private?
No one should have this info, regardless of how you every person differently defines "privacy" vs "anonymity"
No, it's a private and secure protocol (not corporation) thanks to end to end encryption. You can evaluate the protocol yourself with your own eyes, except clearly you cannot read, but modulo that.
Newsflash, chuckles: your IP address IS NOT ANONYMOUS. Any private protocol you use without going through Tor, i2p, or some similar anonymizing network IS NOT ANONYMOUS.
You're attacking a strawman. Neither Signal nor anyone else has claimed the protocol or the service are anonymous. Which, yes, is something that every user should know before trusting it. They should understand what it means and what the consequences are. I'm honestly not sure you're even there.
thanks to end to end encryption. You can evaluate the protocol yourself with your own eyes, except clearly you cannot read, but modulo that.
This means nothing when you have no idea what code the server is running, they even went a whole year without publishing their server code updates, until they got a lot of backlash over it. Real security doesn't require a "just trust us" claim.
Also, metadata is content. Even if they don't have the message text, Signal still has the real identities of everyone you talked to, and when. With that you can build social network graphs, which are far easier to harvest and more useful anyway than trying to read through message content and determine meaning.
simplex is shady af and literally run by some sus crypto rugpull bums. best to use xmpp and irc. they have been existing for many years and still standing strong.
If you wanted to, you could put full control of your messages even on your own server by using Simplex. Of course, this comment you're saying is a far cry from reality.
I'm ready to be called milquetoast, and while I see where this comes from, it comes off idealistic if we are to communicate with people in the present day in any practical way. Do not forget how much of an improvement it already is over the likes of proprietary messaging apps and how much effort it already is to move people to Signal. It is surprisingly difficult for common folk to grasp the concept of anything but a phone number when it comes to messaging apps.
Signal allows you to speak confidentially, therefore it is private. It is not, by default, anonymous. Yes, this plus the centralized server mean that potentially dangerous metadata, like relationship maps, can be collected. All indications are this isn't the case, but that's not something you can count on.
If you need anonymity, which you probably do at least a bit, use simplex. And yes, having more people using anonymous services like simplex is a good thing for the community as a whole. That said, I'm not going to try to convince all of my friends to use simplex. It's just too far from the mainstream, missing too many features. Signal is a sufficient compromise for most people, and it's sufficient for me for most purposes.
It is at best slightly obscured information. If your life depends on a phone number never being associated with you, and you frequently use that phone number, you're a dead person.
dw I don't. My phone number was leaked, I don't know how and it really sucks. It probably happened before I started caring about privacy. and all these phone number aliasing services either don't operate in my region or cost too much money.
This thread shows the success of Signal's PR campaigns, and how a shiny app can get people to overlook all the privacy concerns. They're just as successful as Apple at getting people to think that a US-based corporation hosted on Amazon's servers and subject to national security letters, whose privacy model is "just trust us with your phone number", is in any way secure.
Since the first national security letter (NSL) statute was passed in 1986 and then dramatically expanded under the USA PATRIOT Act, the FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of such letters seeking the private telecommunications and financial records …
precisely that's why it's become so popular and recommended and now these users are recommending it furthering the amount of people that will have their data exposed there was a leak I believe in 2022 and on signal a lot of customers had their phone numbers exposed if their phone numbers are not stored how did they get exposed? Clearly the answer is that they are stored.
Seems OP is discussing the loss of anonymity, but the below ARE privacy concerns: * Someone obtaining my number who does not absolutely need it * Someone knowing who I am, and knowing I do or do not use a service
Granted that it is difficult to completely obfuscate some aspects of your identity.
You misunderstand; regardless of what is shown to other users, the folks running the service know your number, and that you desire using encrypted chat.
Because it has become extremely popular, that's just how it goes. At one point, even Telegram was recommended for being super secure or private, but the privacy is mild on Telegram at best.
But by comparison to Instagram or Whatsapp, it's how the gram looks like Privacy Central, so it was recommended. Now, Signal is replacing that role.
Signal is more private than the sus apps like IG, Facebook, etc. Yes. But only because those apps are so bad.
No one should be recommending signal over matrix and simplex. It's probably more secure than whatsapp, but both have social network graphs of everyone you talked to, and when.
Matrix's encryption algorithm was broken for a while and when it was fixed it it took app devs years to migrate to the new requirements. It still might even be the case for a lot of them, I haven't looked in a while.
SimpleX should be secure AFAIK though, but I've heard that it may not be able to scale well to larger user bases. It seems everything has pros and cons.
2FA is an important security layer, if the service, after sending you the activating SMS with the code, delete your number (normal in serious services), it's also not an privacy problem. In big us corporations on the other hand, it is, eg.Google store tour number and also probably share it, there 2FA is not an option. Instead a number, some services also admit alternatively a second e-mail account to receive the activation code, there, if you have doubt, you can use an disposable mail, so there isn't any privacy problem.
2FA is important, but if you use your phone number for anything, you have no idea how long they retain it, how they directly use it, if they sell it, etc. A real phone number can be mapped back to you trivially.
It should be standard to offer TOTP codes that can be used via an authenticator app, hardware key, etc. Aome places do, many do not.
But at the end of the day, they typically don't ask for your phone number because they want to give you security, but rather as a proxy to ensure you have a unique identity. Most people will have only one phone number, and it will be more difficult / costly to get additional ones than burner emails, etc.
Yes, iy's always to use with a grain of salt. As said, it ads a security layer, but can be an privacy hole, despte that mail directions are easier to track as phone numbers, at least in the EU, you can't be mapped back to an user, this is only possible in crime investigations by the police with an court order. Mail adresses on the other hand are unique identifiers which are way easier th track, except you use an disposable mail or alias. Anyway, eg.in Vivaldi 2FA is safe and apart optional, as also the account itself, only needed when you want to use sync or the use of Vivaldimail, blog and other services it offers. In much other services it's also only an option.
2FA helps with security concerns, not privacy concerns. They still would have your number. Also about Google, they have one of the widest spread and utilized 2FA authentication applications out there.
what information is provided to an entity about whom.
"Content" and "Context"
Why is only message text considered "information / content / context" here. Signal has your real name and address via phone numbers, and has every other real person you talked to, and when. Why is "message text" considered context, but social networking graphs aren't?
All these definitions are highly subjective, and the above one clearly considers social networking graphs to not be "content". Basically they've re-defined privacy in a way that excludes highly sensitive information like everyone you talk to, and when.
Seriously. I'm getting really sick of OPs take, it is a fundamentally flawed and ignorant understanding of what privacy and anonymity are.
If I'm at work and I need to speak to someone in private, we can go in a room and close the door. That's a PRIVATE conversation. It doesn't mean that nobody heard me say "hey Bob, can I talk to you for a minute?" It doesn't mean nobody saw us go in there and shut the door. The conversation is still private.
It's NOT private if someone is listening up against the door, or if there's a recording device in the room (in our analogy most messenger services and protocols fit here).
Signal IS PRIVATE CONVERSATION. But there's metadata about who is talking to whom, and it's NOT anonymous for the reasons OP pointed out, even if OP is a rabble rousing idiot.
Signal is private, free, accessible, and has a good feature set. Their foundation is a nonprofit with ethical motives, and it's widely adopted worldwide because it fills a very real, very necessary niche.
Signal is NOT anonymous. If you want to be anonymous online you've got a lot, possibly an insurmountable amount, of work to do. Signal should not be a part of that because it's NOT anonymous.
Quit strawmanning a good thing because it's not what you're looking for.
That is a compromise of privacy. If those hackers used those phone number to access any account by using unique methods those users privacy would be utterly lost.
It is certainly a lack of security. I wanted to emphasize how it's also a problem for privacy. People in the thread are now having an imaginary argument about anonymity, even though this has never been something I've been confused about. However, it is something that one of the users pulled up, and now they all are harping on it over and over.
Since my phone number is one of my personal belongings, although abstract, if I hide it from you, it is private. If I reveal it to you, it is not. Since it is associated with me, revealing it to you lowers my privacy, as it is one more thing revealed that belongs to me.
These fools can't even comprehend this, literally.
New documents and court records obtained by EFF show that Texas deputies queried Flock Safety's surveillance data in an abortion investigation, contradicting the narrative promoted by the company and the Johnson County Sheriff that she was “being sea…
That sheriff has since been arrested and indicted on felony counts in an unrelated sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation case. He has also been charged with aggravated perjury for allegedly lying to a grand jury. EFF filed public records requests with Johnson County to obtain a more definitive account of events.
At least his side of the story has a happy ending.
The rest of the story is bonkers, though. The headline could not possibly do it justice. This is one you need to sit down and read with a cup of tea.
There are a range of medical procedures and medicines that label can be applied to. Is “abortion” still homicide when it is used to prevent illness, death, and suffering? How about when medicine is used to remove a non-viable pregnancy as mentioned in the article?
Imagine if a person broke into your home and you kicked them out, then they died of pneumonia. Their family sues you for killing them. But you didn't kill them, you just kicked them out.
The person at fault is the person who committed the trespass.
She wouldn't have to abort if the dick-haver kept it in his pants, would she?
We need an anti-flock campaign. A city government didn't give them permission to put their cameras up and when they did it anyway, the city covered them in garbage bags before they could get removed.
Like pleading with Hector not to fight Achilles, Cassandra has been warning about ALPRs for over a decade now, possibly two, that they were too intimate a search to allow law enforcement to use them without narrowly-defined warrants.
As with the Greek wooden horse Cassandra shouted was going to burn Troy to the ground, only too late we are seeing how such power can be used.
A Resonant‑Shell Cosmology: A Reflective–Dynamic Boundary as an Alternative to ΛCDM. resonant‑shell” cosmology in which the observable universe occupies a closed Friedmann–Robertson–Walker (FRW) region bounded by a thin, timelike, nearly reflective s…
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They have gotten money from Bill Gates foundation. Still its a pop sci YouTube and does a good job at it. Some say its spreading misinformation or that context is missing. I don't really see malicious intentions. Expecting more of a pop sci publication is kind of absurd; take a real class and study if you want more.
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While not wrong, this is now quite a bit dated. Kurzgesagt acknowledged being called out for it and addressed it via various channels. One of them here:
I feel like propping up the industry primarily responsible for one of the largest (if not the largest) crises in human history is an appropriate place to draw a line.
They've continually called for switching to renewables though, and put out a bunch of videos on how damaging climate change is and will continue to be...
It's definitely not only that. I and, from what I've seen discussed here and elsewhere online, many other people have stopped watching the channel because of many valid reasons completely unrelated to AI. I haven't watched a single one of their videos for years, something changed in their content and I just lost interest. Then there have been several controversial events throughout the years, both objective bad stuff and subjective things that made many loose interest and faith in their integrity. They definitely became one of the many channels that lost it's way because of how big it got. The animations became too "perfect" in a weird way, they lost their personality and they also got scared of having real opinions so they started doing this "all sides" shit and that's when I tapped out. I've tried to watch new videos from them about once every 6 months or so, but I can't even make it past a minute without completely loosing interest.
I mean, I didn’t watch this video because I lost interest when the channel started getting really dark around 2020. I just needed a laugh during the pandemic. I didn’t need 4 videos in a row about the end of the world, then a few about the end of the universe, followed by a future civil war. It was too much.
In that it's mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.
So I guess it's a good test for that sort of "just read the headline" response.
It's been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can't parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?
I may be done with this place at this point. It's just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.
Completely agree, their channel has changed a lot and seems to be producing videos on a conveyor belt now, while before they used to do one video or maximum two a month. Now it seems they produce a video a week, and interesting topics are more hard to come by.
When they said that they're "almost 70 full time people and a lot of freelancers on top" I almost did a spit take. I know there are big channels and operations on YT, but this seems such an unreasonable amount of employees for this type of channel and audience. No wonder it feels oversaturated and overdone, they probably feel the need to put more and more videos to keep their huge team and expences afloat.
Just find a sustainable pace and team size, don't go the corporate way of growth over all.
This whole video felt like an advertisement to me. I’d already seen it twice, was it necessary to crosspost it again? You could at least have waited a couple of weeks before reposting the same content.
Their quality going down is probably what’s killing their channel. Every video is a merch ad, and the occasional shilling for the fossil fuel industry probably doesn’t help any.
These things are to be expected when you get bought by private equity, but let’s not be dishonest and say it’s all AI slop that’s killing them.
They are owned by private equity? It's pretty common these days for the more popular YT channels. Veritasium, Astrum, Fireship, fern., and Hoog are some other examples. Basically, if it's a popular YT channel, it's either owned by PE, in negotiations to be acquired by PE, or pursued by a PE firm in the hopes that they can acquire it. Private equity is accelerating their acquisitions, actually, and they want to control everything that captures the attention of viewers.
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Anyone down voting this should be ashamed of themselves.
Like deeply and personally ashamed.
The type of shame that follows them for the rest their lives, because that's how scummy you'd have to be in order downvote someone shining a light on how private equity is buying out major YouTube channels.
Something that I was entirely unaware of, and appreciate your comment regarding.
I get it. They like the channel, and don't want to think that a channel they love could do something they don't love. Or maybe some of them don't see it as a bad thing in the first place.
Me, I'm the opposite. I want to know who owns the media I consume, because I want to know who might be influencing the things I see. It's always better to have the whole truth, even if that truth hurts. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy the channel still, it just means you're better prepared to understand the context of anything that that channel might say. Even cold hard facts with empirical evidence can be propaganda, depending on how it's presented.
I never made myself out to be virtuous, nor do I care about what you think of me. I'm an asshole, and that's fine because I love me exactly how I am and don't need random strangers on the internet for validation. and I certainly don't care about what you think of them making propaganda videos. I wouldn't even still be in this thread if you guys weren't still throwing a tantrum about somebody calling out your precious favorite YouTube channel for their less-than-stellar quality and tendency to pander to billionaires.
I posted my opinion, you got butthurt over it. that's as far as this conversation is ever going to go, because I don't care about you enough to bother arguing it extensively. now why don't you take your sci-fi antisemitic trope of a username and get out of my mentions.
Bringing this general issue up in a thread about Kurzgesagt, without also providing evidence that Kurzgesagt specifically is actually part of that issue, is at best irrelevant and at worst misleading though
I didn't single out any particular YouTube channel for individual scorn. My comment was in reference to that very well sourced video about private equity buying up / investing many YouTube channels, of which they provided sources for in the description of the video.
Look, I'm sorry you got invested in Youtube channels and now feel betrayed, but that's something everyone else already understood: don't blindly trust anyone or any organisation, they can be bought, and will when it's advantageous to do so.
In the meantime, don't shit on people's work without a good reason, or you're doing the work for those who mean to control you.
It's not a matter of betrayal, it was a video revealing another area of influence in society that is now controlled behind the scenes by private equity.
Whose work was I shitting on? I was shaming people who were down voting that very well sourced and informative video, that documented private equity's quiet takeover of major YouTube channels.
Maybe you should review the comment thread and see if you meant to respond to someone else, because that's the most charitable explanation I can come up with for your responses to me.
I mean, I would probably sell the channel myself. That's a lifechanging amount of money. I would buy some land deep in the backcountry, build a little walled village, and invite my family and friends to come live there. Grow our own food, set up some solar panels and wind turbines, buy up plenty of guns and ammo, and see if we couldn't hunker down and live out the ever more likely downfall of the American economy in relative peace.
So basically you would turn yourself in a mini-me version of Zuckenberg, Musk and Bezos. Given this consideration I would reassess my life priorities if I were you
the priority would be the lives of my friends and family. that is a priority that will not change as long as I draw breath, no matter what anyone thinks.
Well, if the societal structure falls there won't be anything left to provide for your friends and family and you'll be left to eat each other in your compound as will the billionaires using their fortunes to build survival bunkers. If that's the way you wanna go, with the leg of your mother as dinner, be my guest. If you, on the other hand, want to have a positive impact on the whole process helping stop this social decline there are much better ways to use your hypothetical money. It's up to you to decide, greed over cooperation or the other way around?
my family and I grow most of our food, and we're part of the local community garden where the small town we live in also grows food that is shared with everyone.
so out of the two of us, I'm pretty sure it'll be you who is starving.
And prayvtell, where do you find your seedlings and your fertilizer? And the tools to be used to work the fields? That's the problem of people like you, you can't see how intertwined it is our life with the rest of the world and you don't know how much it sucks to be living at a subsistence level. But go off with your fantasy, it does cost anything to dream.
Also, I forgot to ask how would you fare in a draught, a hailstorm or a long winter. But these are impossible conditions in your dreamworld I reckon
And prayvtell, where do you find your seedlings and your fertilizer?
well we use the stuff we grow for seeds, we don't buy into the capitalist propaganda that you can't replant things because It'S iLlEgAl. and compost is free and easy to make. also, I'm planning on getting chickens for fertilizer as well, once I build the infrastructure for them. they are great for dealing with insect pests too!
And the tools to be used to work the fields?
my next-door neighbor is a 40-year old dude that took up blacksmithing after he watched one too many YT videos. he made me a knife for last christmas out of a rusty steel cable.
Also, I forgot to ask how would you fare in a draught, a hailstorm or a long winter
I live in the midwest, we deal with those all the time.
dreamworld
a better world is possible, and it's not a dream. get up off your ass and make it with your friends. don't let legality or naysayers tell you something is impossible, that's capitalist propaganda meant to keep you down.
Yes of course, a utopia is waiting for those who are able to grow a crop using a field inside of an apartment.
Dude, you're projecting a reality which could be applied to a very narrow set of people in modern society and in the western world. Imagining a better future is possible and good, but we need to keep it aligned with the actual realities present at this time. Being a bad crop away from death and surviving in a close anarchist encampment can work in a movie like 38 years later, not in real life
it worked for humanity for thousands of years, you pessimistic doomer. you're going to be a wage slave forever, and die unhappy, because you're obviously too afraid to even consider that life could be at all different to the way it is now. you can't even imagine that solidarity and building mutual aid networks could improve your life. what a sad, depressing, incapable, pitiable thing you are. you've got Stockholm syndrome for the system that's going to murder you.
You speak of solidarity after having decided that a possible life changing sum of money would be used to benefit you and the people you decide are worthy of your benevolence. Let me tell you brother, you need to have a look into a vocabulary as soon as possible. And to what the tech overlords are doing with their money. You'll find to be more similar than you think to Bezos and Zuckerberg
Also,he conditions described in your posts are those we had to endure during the middle ages, when citie and villages were tiny nation states and in constant war with eachother to scrap the poor resources we had available at that time, when serfdom was a common occurrence and when people were lucky to live beyond 40 years of age. Not my best pick if I have to choose a future for the whole of humanity.
Lastly you still haven't time how should people living in cities and urban areas live in this futur of yours. Does your crop grow on asphalt and concrete or do you see the problem your "vision" would bring to a huge prt
You talk about,s solidarity afeter having decided that a life-changing sum of money would be used to benefit you and those you deem worthy of yourself. Please pick up a vocabulary and look at the definition of the words you use. Also look at what Bezos and Zuckerberg are doing with their money and how they're building their compounds and you'll find to be closer to them than to an anarchist.
Humanity already went through the conditions you described in your post: it was during the middle ages, when cities were tiny nation states at constant war with eachother to scrap the poor and few resources available, serfdom was pretty common and people were lucky to live past 40 years of age. Not exactly my first choice when it comes to decide how I would like to live my future life.
Lastly I despise the system we live in as much, if not more, than you. But, differently from you, I'm not used to throwing away the baby with the bath water and I prefer to safeguard those advancements wich are truly helpful to humanity such as vaccines, democracy and human rights to cite some of them.
I almost forgot, you still haven't explained how should people living in cities and urban areas survive in this future of yours. Does your crop grow on asphalt and concrete or do you see the problem your "vision" would bring to a huge part of any population?
Keep on dreaming of a 38 years later were you're the protagonist, I'm sure it will help you and everyone else ;)
You talk about,s solidarity afeter having decided that a life-changing sum of money would be used to benefit you and those you deem worthy of yourself.
anarchism is all about mutual association. so yes, anarchist communities would be made of people who agreed to be a community together. this is basic.
Humanity already went through the conditions you described in your post: it was during the middle ages, when cities were tiny nation states at constant war with eachother to scrap the poor and few resources available, serfdom was pretty common and people were lucky to live past 40 years of age. Not exactly my first choice when it comes to decide how I would like to live my future life.
what a first-world mindset. many places in the world still operate like this, you're just so comfortable in your way of life you don't even think about them. I would encourage you to break out of that mindset, and show a little interest in the wide world around you.
I almost forgot, you still haven’t explained how should people living in cities and urban areas survive in this future of yours. Does your crop grow on asphalt and concrete or do you see the problem your “vision” would bring to a huge part of any population?
yes, crops do grow in the cities. many cities are turning to urban farming in order to feed people. singapore is a leader in this, because they have a very large population with very little area for anything, let alone farming food. with not only private citizen-grown farms, but also the worlds first commercial rooftop farming company. and it's not just rooftops, farms are appearing indoors, sometimes taking up entire floors in some skyscrapers. in cities in china, such as chongqing and shenzhen, urban farms and gardens are very common, and shoved into whatever small areas they can be put into. i've seen them in alleys, dead space between buildings, on rooftops, hanging from the ceiling, and even on top of concrete walls in the form of potted crops.
but it's not just asia, places like new york city are also mandating green spaces on top of some skyscrapers as well. those can take the form of parks, or farms, depending on the preferences of the building owners, as long as they are natural plants. furthermore, many residential apartment buildings in places like new york, chicago, and other american cities are seeing rooftop farms appear. in reality, almost everyone can grow some food for themselves, even if all you have is a single small window sill.
you seem to be very ignorant of the world. I would also encourage you to seek out information on green initiatives, and how people in cities are dealing with the problems they face in an urban landscape. there is no doubt that you are speaking on a topic you are woefully unprepared for.
Keep on dreaming of a 38 years later were you’re the protagonist, I’m sure it will help you and everyone else ;)
if the best you can do to argue against me is bring up a fictional zombie apocalypse in which everyone was infected and died, then perhaps it is time to admit you already lost the argument. we're talking about reality here and what is happening right now all across the world, not your fantasy horror worlds.
anarchism is all about mutual association. so yes, anarchist communities would be made of people who agreed to be a community together. this is basic.
Being considered worthy of living in a space you so kindly have cut out of the external world is not association if you still haven't realised that.
what a first-world mindset. many places in the world still operate like this, you’re just so comfortable in your way of life you don’t even think about them. I would encourage you to break out of that mindset, and show a little interest in the wide world around you.
And still I wouldn't want to live like that. Our goal as a specie should be to elevate those living in hellish scenario like the one I described and that you so eagerly wish for all of us. Maybe this hasn't crossed your mind since you must be very young and fairly able bodied, but not everyone is capable of living in conditions where safe drinking water is unavailable and the best health care is relying on the phase of the moon to ingest the medicine cooked up by a wannabe shaman. It's not about being comfortable, it's about making everything better for everybody, for Christ' sake. You want to see millions of people die while you gloat about your helm and your ditch sorrounding it? Go for it, but at least don't call it "solidarity"; call it for what it is: egoism and main character syndrome.
yes, crops do grow in the cities. many cities are turning to urban farming in order to feed people. singapore is a leader in this, because they have a very large population with very little area for anything, let alone farming food. with not only private citizen-grown farms, but also the worlds first commercial rooftop farming company. and it’s not just rooftops, farms are appearing indoors, sometimes taking up entire floors in some skyscrapers. in cities in china, such as chongqing and shenzhen, urban farms and gardens are very common, and shoved into whatever small areas they can be put into. i’ve seen them in alleys, dead space between buildings, on rooftops, hanging from the ceiling, and even on top of concrete walls in the form of potted crops.
but it’s not just asia, places like new york city are also mandating green spaces on top of some skyscrapers as well. those can take the form of parks, or farms, depending on the preferences of the building owners, as long as they are natural plants. furthermore, many residential apartment buildings in places like new york, chicago, and other american cities are seeing rooftop farms appear. in reality, almost everyone can grow some food for themselves, even if all you have is a single small window sill.
you seem to be very ignorant of the world. I would also encourage you to seek out information on green initiatives, and how people in cities are dealing with the problems they face in an urban landscape. there is no doubt that you are speaking on a topic you are woefully unprepared for.
Good luck feeding a city of millions with the fruits of planted pottery. You're gonna need a lot of pottery. Jesus Christ, a proper lot of pottery.
if the best you can do to argue against me is bring up a fictional zombie apocalypse in which everyone was infected and died, then perhaps it is time to admit you already lost the argument. we’re talking about reality here and what is happening right now all across the world, not your fantasy horror worlds.
If the best you can do is responding to a snarky remark I left at the end of my comment thinking that it was the main point I was trying to make while imagining cities where millions of people live able to support themselves with only a couple of trees and tomato plants and completely misunderstanding the meaning of the anarchist mindset I'm afraid we're not having an argument at all, we are displaying the level of delusion you are willing to let yourself live in. Just like those asking for a civil war do not absolutely understand what they're asking for so do you with your call for an uncontrolled fall of the system.
Being considered worthy of living in a space you so kindly have cut out of the external world is not association if you still haven’t realised that.
that exactly is what mutual association is. I suggest you read the AFAQ, because you very clearly do not know anything about anarchism. the freedom of association requires the freedom to disassociate.
as for the rest of your comment, it takes a real special sort of person to look at examples I gave you of cities literally feeding thousands of people through urban farms and go "nah, I can't conceive of that being true, so it isn't". that's MAGA levels of denial. it doesn't matter your opinion or feelings on the matter. it's a real thing, it's happening now, and it's slowly being scaled upwards. snarky bullshit remarks aren't going to change that.
I will be blocking you now. you're not interested in accepting reality, and so our mutual association is no longer mutual, and I'm taking advantage my freedom to cut closed-minded useless people out of my life. live the rest of your sad little life as a slave to capitalism in whatever depressing, dystopian way seems best to you.
Keep on disassociating from someone who is trying to make you think about the result of your actions, that's exactly how grown up people act and that's gonna make associating so much wider when you'll find yourself alone in your fiery outrage. A perfect example of a pizza cutter kind of anarchist, all edge, no point.
You talk about agricultural projects which feed thousands in cities where MILLIONS of people live. You talk about cooperation but you don't consider those who are unable to cooperate due to age, health conditions or any ithe reason. You talk about changing the system but you offer nonviable alternative other than "break it all down and hope for the best". I'm sorry, I can't be bothered with auch juvenile ideas of revolution, they would only bring death and suffering for too many people to be considered viable. I hope you'll grow up sooner rather than later and realise that we can only hope to improve the situation when we will learn everything about the positives of the current system and how we can keep them while discarding everything else.
As for myself I'll be living in this hellish capitalist system as you will until it won't collapse on itself or until I'll die, it rest to be seen what happens first. But I'll be living in it with the clear objective of improving it without needing to kill hundreds of thousands of people during that process, thank you very much
if you wanna just have boards with rusty nails and maybe a baseball bat for defense when trump takes the mask completely off and his raving followers form pogroms to round up people who aren't loyal to him, then I will say something nice in your memory when the time comes.
oh, sorry, I misunderstood your question. Veritasium and Astrum are science channels, Fireship covers programming. fern. and Hoog do what I guess you could call deep dive videos on all sorts of topics. everything from how the North Korean king travels, to how that giant hotel aquarium broke several years ago. it's pretty random with them.
Astrum makes space stuff videos? I dunno, been a while.
Fireship makes videos about programming. Has series about "(Programming language/Framework) explained in 100 seconds", for example. I think people are complaining that the channel is slipping into AI dudebroery.
Hoog is a history/explainer type channel, I think.
Do you have actual evidence for Kurzgesagt being among PE-owned channels, or are you just extrapolating? Because the video you linked doesn't mention them, and a quick search didn't turn up anything about that.
if most of your money comes from billionaires and you admit to making propaganda videos for them, you're owned by private equity. it doesn't matter how much you or they argue about how that isn't technically true because it's not officially on paper.
Like it or not, words have meaning, and black and white thinking is comfortable, but doesn't help anyone. There is still a massive difference between the gates foundation having a 0.5% stake in Kurzgesagt and them being "owned" by PE, and pretending otherwise just means you're not actually interested in any kind of productive discussion.
When you sell your soul to the devil, it’s gone forever. And I never implied I was interested in “productive discussion”. I said what I said because I’ve seen what evidence there is and have made my own conclusions. I never said I was interested in debating.
No wonder veritasium has felt "off" for me for a good while as well. A few years ago I deliberately stopped watching that channel, seems there was a deeper reason behind my superficial reasons and gut feelings
They seem to use the "shotgun" future in Youtube for titles and Thumbnails. Having the a bunch of different titles and and thumbnails and eventually sticking with the combo that drives the most engagement.
Idk about fossil fuels specifically but they been directly being sponsored by big companies and in return making propoganda for them for a few years now.
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I watch that channel for years and i had no idea. I post his answer over the channels answer. Although that is 3 years old, i wonder what is now happening.
They accepted, and continue to accept a great amount of money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That foundation owns over $11 billion in investments in the fossil fuel industry, including coal-burning utility companies.
In return, there were quite a few videos that Kurzgesagt admits were funded directly by the Foundation, that exaggerate the positive influence corporations owned by the foundation have had. Videos which the CEO of Kurzgesagt has admitted they probably would not have made if the Foundation had not paid for them.
That’s really embarrassing that we as a community have chosen, of all possible creators, to deride Kurzgesagt for taking money from The Gates Foundation. It’s 0.05% of their holdings. ZERO POINT ZERO FIVE. Which, by the way, is down from 6% in the past after public concern — yes, a whopping 6%. Scourge of the earth, locked out of heaven: The Gates Foundation. Those computer nerds strike again. And we choose to punish a great content contributor for that. Shameful display of purity politics.
Yeah. It seems like a ridiculous accusation to make. Bro couldn't even answer the question about example of shilling so they had to pivot into the crime of taking money from a foundation to produce high quality educational content.
They accepted, and continue to accept a great amount of money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That foundation owns over $11 billion in investments in the fossil fuel industry, including coal-burning utility companies.
In return, there were quite a few videos that Kurzgesagt admits were funded directly by the Foundation, that exaggerate the positive influence corporations owned by the foundation have had. Videos which the CEO of Kurzgesagt has admitted they probably would not have made if the Foundation had not paid for them.
question answered. if you don't want to accept the CEO of Kurzgesagt word that they would not have made the videos if they hadn't been paid to, then that isn't my problem. I'm not here to convince you, and I don't mind if you don't believe him.
I said what I said to voice my own opinion on their channel, I didn't voice it as an indication that I was interested in debating the matter. I've already come to my own conclusions. read their website and their medium, or search up one of the deep dive videos on it if you're really interested. I'm not going to go too far out of my way to convince anyone, since it doesn't really harm me in any way if you believe me or not.
I also didn't say anywhere that you should stop watching their videos. you should, however, know who owns and funds every bit of media you consume, so that you can use that information to be healthily skeptical of things people are telling you, just as you are with me. I still watch fern., even though they are owned by PE, because their videos are high quality and mostly free of bias. but I keep in the back of my mind that they have corporate overlords that might want me to believe one thing or another.
I did a few searches and while I didn't find that quote from Kurzgesagt's CEO, I did find the contribution listed from a decade ago on the Gates foundation website. $570,000 paid out over four years. They also gave NPR $2,000,000 the next year.
Since I didn't find the CEOs quote you've mentioned, I can only question the context around it. Would those videos not have been made because the Gates foundation specifically tied the funding to those videos being created? Or would they not have been made because Kurzgesagt didn't have the money to do so otherwise?
Regardless, Kurzgesagt is a private company and if they wanted to conceal hidden agendas by corporate contributors, they would just keep quiet - not openly acknowledge that they made content with money given to them by some larger organisation.
If we're going to denounce any group of people that are connected via Bacon's Law to a disastrous corporate industry, the moral high ground will be unachievable for the entirety of our species.
The Hated One did a video some years ago on the matter, if you're curious then search it up because they list all their sources for everything including the quote from the CEO.
I never told anyone to be outraged by it. You just got outraged because I criticized a channel you presumably like. I've literally said several times in this thread alone that I watch channels owned by PE.
I don’t really do online fights anymore. I check in on Lemmy twice a week max for a maybe a few minutes tops. I’d suggest getting involved with your local community as a great way to channel your energy rather than reply 5m after I posted a new comment. Take care ✌🏻
the CEO of Kurzgesagt word that they would not have made the videos if they hadn’t been paid to
This on its own proves nothing bad. Some videos just require a bigger budget to make and can't be made on their otherwise limited budget. Or the topic is just lower priority due to writer interests. If they were forced into covering specific topics then that's a different story, but I haven't seen any evidence that was the case.
Does any of that matter in this situation, anyway? Exaggerating their content in exchange for money already places question on their reliability as an educational content creator.
Hint: the investment of $11 billion refers to investment of Gates Foundation in fossil fuels.
Well, considering these exact words were used:
That foundation owns over $11 billion in investments in the fossil fuel industry, including coal-burning utility companies.
What can I say but duh. If I misunderstood anything, it was the comment I replied to, which was unclear about the "0.05% down from 6%" detail, and seemed to be associating that with the $11 billion figure by context.
But hey, nice deflection, and super cool of you to be that rude about it, too.
yes, there is also some other sponsorships, including some from other bill gates owned groups/corporations. I don't think support from billionaires is necessarily good as long as it's diverse.
I'm trying to think of their 'fossil fuel shilling' video and only videos that come to mind are where they say we're too entrenched in the fossil fuel industry to make a switch to renewable overnight. It's just not realistic.
And other than fuel, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of products made from petroleum. Approximately 85% of petroleum is made into fuel. Rest is used to make things like pharma products, paint, pesticides, polymers etc.
even people who needs to use petrolatum(aka protroleum) comes from it, for thier dry skin, plus it used in many topical medications. topical ointment medication is more potent than the cream forms.
The problem is when the contributors influence what the videos say, in contradiction to data.
Kurzgesagt's video on +2° / +3° / +4° over the global mean isn't going to be so bad video was conspicuous to me, and is in fact, based on fossil-fuel industry rhetoric, rather than climatology estimations (which tell us over +1.5° is going to fuck us, and is).
It's allegedly a documentary, not fiction. It should make sense from beginning to end.
Sounds like you feel the need to defend Kurzgesagt for sentimental reasons, and since they're presenting themselves as a source for accurate information, that just won't do.
They link all their sources. So regardless of where their funding comes from I'd rather have a good source of information instead of a non-existent perfect source.
for context, our buddy null here got banned from c/leftymemes because he just kept spamming "ok tankie" to everyone. what he doesn't know is that I'm banned from .ML and Hexbear, and run an anti-tankie comm, so him saying this to me is very amusing and I'm thinking of adopting him.
It’s important to have a coalition of support and so I won’t single anyone out, hence I used the word “we”. I have to assume others share their opinion about Kurz. But the larger point is that this is classic left infighting and, ironically, it stalls actual progress. Before we can be good at something, we have to be bad at something.
I don't care if it's 80% or 0.8%. if you take money from billionaires to produce specific videos for them as propaganda, then that is shilling for them. there isn't any way you can spin that to make it not true, but I'm sure you'll do your very liberal best.
that's not how i read it at all. no misinformation here.
see, the fact they took money to publish critical misinformation about climate change is not a joke. it should take more than an "i'm sowwy" to fix their reputation.
I'm unsure we are talking about the same comment. The misinformation is the claim the Gates foundation is continuing to fund Kurzgesagt, when that clearly isn't the case. This incorrect information is veiled by beginning the statement with the truth of the 2015 grant.
Insofar as the reputational damage Kurzgesagt has incurred, I'm not sure there's much meat on that bone. Sure, you might believe they have fallen from grace or some such, but as I pointed out in another comment here, we can't just connect everything under the sun and say 'group A is bad because groups B through Y are all next to one another and with group Z doing all those injustices, group A is complicit in those crimes'.
To me, the question of whether Kurzgesagt is a Gates mouthpiece is pretty cut and dry. A few reasons for this, but the most glaring is simply that the money didn't keep coming, and it wasn't much money to begin with. I wouldn't be going out of my way to talk up my employer to clients if my last bonus was a decade ago and didn't even cover my rent for the month I got it.
Secondly, if you take money from billionaires to make propaganda videos for them, then you’re owned by them. You sell your soul to the devil, you can’t undo it later because you get called out for it.
The video gives an elaborate description on their evaluation of "AI" and it's influence on the Internet at large. And then they conclude with "we'll continue like before" directly contradicting the title.
Feels disingenuous. And ironic after they talked about their extensive investments into fact checking.
The channel hat always been disingenuous. It's not the first video they have where they develop a well written essay that has conclusions that make no sense with the information presented. It's the theater of research without any of the substance. The editors just do whatever they want, under the expectations that the writing team will support their preconceived notion.
They're an entertainment channel, not a science communication channel. They have said some awful, totally not fact supported stuff in the past.
Climate change whitewashing for corporations with awful conflicts of interest. Others have posted the links to the videos elsewhere in this comment section.
As far as science channels go, you've got SpaceTime for college students, Veritasium for high schoolers, and Kurzgesagt for newborn infants or maybe a smart dog. It's probably at about the right level if you want to explain science to an Australian Shepherd.
Yea, nah, it absolutely is. They often sneak in bad information and poorly interpreted data to fearmonger (see their nuclear power "educational" videos where they instill fear) and other such things. They're just like some other science channels. Like veritasium, which shilled out for Waymo. Just because the animations are very very nice doesn't mean you shouldn't confirm the information they present, and quite often it's wrong on purpose to butter up the right people. If you don't believe me, that's okay. They're not dangerous like pseudoscience channels. Most things they present are good. I just hate that they mix in BS.
You're using a lot of weasel words and zero sources for someone arguing we should all fact check things.
I'm not even saying your wrong, but your going to have to do a lot more than that to convince me that "they're known for" everything you just said, because that sounds like you have a very specific beef with them that overshadows everything else they've ever done (in your estimation) and your projecting that as a universal truth, when really it's not.
I respect your opinion, but there are certainly far more worse channels than there are better ones, and they're known for being one of the better ones.
That + entertainment over information quality. I'm not here to convince anybody, my goal was to make y'all think twice about just blindly trusting theor videos. They're the Linus Tech Tips of the science channel world.
Right so you say everyone should source all their work but then claim very specific things about the channel and then refuse to provide sources.
Interesting.
But I guess as long as you're not here to try and convince anyone that what you're saying is true it's okay for you to just say anything regardless of validity. That's very political of you, well done.
I literally never said everyone should source all their work. You're reading between the lines. What I said is that SOME science channels sneak in misinformation and shilling in their videos which are otherwise educational and most of the time very accurate.
The video gives an elaborate description on their evaluation of “AI” and it’s influence on the Internet at large. And then they conclude with “we’ll continue like before” directly contradicting the title.
You missed the entire point of the video.
The claims are simple:
in order to make this type of videos, they need to be able to reliable fact check
data on the internet is increasingly polluted by AI slop, making it harder to distinguish fact from slop
for now, they have no choice but to continue while being extra vigilant... but eventually, if things do not change, they will be unable to perform
It's the exact same situation about climate change... we need to act now, most of us will suffer otherwise but for now we continue on living while trying to adjust where we can (recycling, reusing, less/no meat, etc) even if we know that will not be enough long term.
Not the guy you're answering to, but I kind of agree with him, the point is fuzzy and the title is clickbaity. With sucha title I expected they would present numbers and figures.
well, it may be a matter of context and tolerance here but I find the concept they are presenting is axiomatic and as such would not require any further explanation:
They use the internet to research their videos... the internet is getting more and more polluted with false narratives... ergo, it is becoming harder to research for their videos. Without good source, there are no videos.
If I tell you plants need water to exist but each season brings less and less rain year after year... would you say a title such as "drought is killing the plants" clickbaity?
I assumed they don't do their research using random crap on "the internet", but reliable experts, peer reviewed papers and such. No specific claims about topics, funding, time or anything. And again, no numbers, so hard to argue objectively.
I assumed they don’t do their research using random crap on “the internet”, but reliable experts, peer reviewed papers and such
Yes, that is what they claim. But I am sure you have seen how hard it is now to find something even if you know exactly what you are looking for. It's not like there are 2 libraries online for anything you need, right? You start researching about topic A and read that Dr XYZ did a study on this so you look for that study... just to find out Dr XYZ does not and has never existed.
No specific claims about topics, funding, time or anything. And again, no numbers, so hard to argue objectively.
So you want a specific number as to how many bad sources they are now forcing to discard because they turned out to be AI slop?
Those metrics aren't any more trustworthy than their own subjective word anyway. If they wanted to say they took more time then they could delay at their whim anyway. If they said their production costs increased, then again, they could spend the money to fit the narrative. On those particular points objective evidence is so susceptible to being gamed that it isn't really more valuable than their subjective reporting.
Numbers of subscribers/views could be a bit more informative, but then people inclined to disbelieve would claim it's because of any number of other reasons not because of AI slop.
Killing in this case sounds like the content is becoming harder and harder to create, which they lay out the subjective case for, but that wouldn't be exactly something they could use figures to present, since it's so subjective.
The one point they might have been able to show with numbers would be the emergence of AI slop 'infotainment animations' diluting the audience, but that wasn't exactly the biggest point of the video and it might be a bit early to be able to demonstrate statistically credible evidence on that one.
Also, presuming they are sincere and put in all that effort, they are competing with other sources that have no such discipline and they are able to flood the field and grab eyeballs faster than they could.
Propagating feel-goodism about climate change while taking money from the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation and saying that eventually climate change will be solved by technology, whitewashing carbon capture technologies and overselling their potential, taking money from Templeton Foundation when making videos about consciousness, using the "Israel fighting Hamas" narrative in a 2025 video regarding wars...
I didn't say they have to like it, that would be silly.
I'm criticising them for making an incorrect statement, being corrected on it, then acting extremely proud of being ignorant of the facts, and committing to not informing themselves.
They have been doing this animation style since 2013.
Why do you think they use AI?
I think your AI senses are broken, you see AI everywhere where there is not. You're like the extreme opposite of AI Tech Bro. Like you have paranoid AI-phobia or something.
I watched this with my son last night. Quite enjoyed it. I find the cadences of the narrator's voice oddly soothing, although ironically it sounds very like an AI voice.
I mean there's been some controversy surrounding a number of their videos. Some were under fire for poor research or demonstrating a singular, not widely-held view on certain topics. And I think for one video they were accused of plagiarism iirc. This was when it was still somewhat early days for the channel, haven't followed them since so not sure what the state is now.
In the video you're literally commenting on they explain how they fact check their videos and how they work with professionals in the field at matter.
You can always complain that something wasn't as good as you personally wanted it to be but that may very well be bias. The people making the accusations may have a bias. All we can do is take the totality of their output and cast judgement on that.
The point was that they haven't always held themselves up to those standards and have sometimes only used professionals espousing a single viewpoint (where multiple exist).
I should mention this isn't bias, iirc the channel did release a video apologizing for some of the issues (though not all), so it wasn't even up to their own standards by their own admission.
Looking things up now, I see that the plagiarism case was slightly different: they had published a video on addiction, which was fairly explosive in its claims. Turns out it was citing basically just one fringe researcher who was also accused of plagiarism. The claims did not seem to hold up to scrutiny.
When another channel doing a series on how pop-sci influencers can sometimes spread misinformed ideas asked some questions to Kurzgesagt, they were immediately a bit apprehensive but agreed to do some interview questions, though with the caveat that they were busy with other things and needed a few weeks before it could take place. Then before the interview took place they suddenly put out their own apology video and took the addiction video down. At no point was it mentioned that another channel prompted this action, it was presented as some kind of inward reflection that they had come to themselves.
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You can't really call it slop just because you disagree with their views and representations of things.
Their stuff is carefully researched and sourced, human crafted and open to critique. Whether they're correct in their assessments or not is of course up for debate, but it's good craftsmanship and they show their work.
Eh, there's a lot of blending of conjecture, opinion and fact all presented as truth, and their handling of mistakes could be better - they've openly said if they consider a mistake to be minor then they don't even issue a correction or update.
I personally think that attitude towards production pushes it towards slop, as for things like entertainment one of the key defining things that separate slop from quality media is passion, but if you don't care about making accurate content then are you any better than just getting AI to write a script?
A huge blocklist of manually curated sites that contain AI generated imagery for uBlock Origin & uBlacklist. - laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
A huge blocklist of manually curated sites that contain AI generated imagery for uBlock Origin & uBlacklist. - laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
Then other day I was trying to find out how to get just one AD account not to sync through to Azure without disabling it. And the AI came up with this complicated instruction set that didn't work and was totally made up from nowhere. Now what on earth was the point in doing that?
At one point it told me I had to triple click on something. Because that's totally a thing.
It's so fun when it's so specific about some detail with casual confidence that is based on absolutely nothing at all. I know ultimately it's architecture is more akin to a predictive word generator, but it seems so much better.
Saw a clear demonstration and it is wild that the output is consistent, but at least in the model I saw being run, every word is generated without it having considered what the word after would be or what the general concept it is going for. For a human one has to already know the concept before he/she starts putting words to it, but at least the models I've seen explained with detail, it manages to assemble it word by word without knowing where it is trying to go in advance.
I get the frustration, but it does actually cost money to make content, especially high effort content like this.
Add on top of that the fact that the people involved need to be able to eat, have a home, provide for their families, have a life.
People would complain if they were sponsored by some shitty VPN provider or the like, and also complain about them trying to sell merch. I certainly wouldn't work for free, so I don't see why they should have to.
It's not really that hard to do a couple of key presses to skip ahead, either. It's what I do.
I dont think its AI Slop thats "killing the channel" if that statement is even remotely true its due to more and more of their videos being slop sci low information videos. The target audience must be stoners who want to watch something that is visually appealing and feels educational
terrible animations, and its worst than other "education science channels" the least they could do is use actual footage or pictures of the things hes discussing.
Honestly, it isn't the AI so much as it is the suspension that rules that apply to us should also apply to AI. They are barely legal companies getting away with murder due to the residual power of a corrupt empire in decline.
Much the same as blockchain - it could have been exciting and fun, but it was immediately put to work to exploit people, and in the end that's what the tools effectively were.
Yeah, and if it weren't for the techbro nonsense, it would be tossed onto the pile of mathematical curios that don't have nontrivial uses.
The thing is - we often do find uses for those curiosities years later.
In the mean time, I wouldn't mind if a decentralized video game came along where game assets were decentralized, distributed by bittorrent, and player assets were decentralized and tracked by blockchain.
You'd be surprised how valuable these technologies can be when they're not only being developed to create new financialized services to overcharge people for. Manufacturing and shipping has huge capital and logistic buffers created by information gaps, production shortfalls, fraud, etcetera, and cryptographic ledgers are excellent for ensuring accurate production and inventory information is relayed to clients in realtime. What's more, it has the potential to mediate international transactions without relying on Swift or global banking institutions that are an extension of US authority.
Notice how nothing I said was about fucking NFTs. The western financial system completely lost the plot doing super cocaine and became convinced they could just ask the rest of the world to stay slaves forever. They don't even care about its potential! They want TrumpCoin.
Kurzgesagt is annoyingly techno-solutionist but now that they are a big target of AI slop (their artistic style being heavily copied), they complain. That's good I guess.
If you actually watch the video that's not what they're talking about. They are talking about how it's difficult to fact check information in a world of AI misinformation.
I always find it's easier to know what a video is about if I actually watched the video. It's just this little life hack I've come up with.
Watch the video? Duh. Thanks I watched it, and I know they don’t talk about how AI steals their art style (even though it’s really happening). I just pointed out the irony. The video also says they are usually enthusiastic about new tech but not this time.
I know this channel well enough to have seen countless videos praising fake tech like carbon capture and that’s why I have a problem with them. Am I allowed to have an opinion?
You are allowed to have an opinion but when it's a stupid opinion expect to be ridiculed for it.
Carbon capture is an actual technology it's real and it works. There's not a lot of it about yet but there's also not a lot of fusion reactors yet but they're also real technology.
What is the problem with techno-solutionism? Is it just that under capitalism techno-solutionism often results in corruption? Is the development of lemmy not techno-solutionism (to the enshittification of reddit)?
Tangential, but thats what disgusted me about the Osaka world expo. The theme was sustainability so you had fossil fuel companies presenting wildly impractical "solutions" and art projects. The message was "things are under control, continue sleepwalking into oblivion"
There's nothing helpful about giving up though is there.
And we could stop climate change, it's entirely possible, presumably people don't want to die so they will take action but they probably not going to start to act until climate change becomes more apparent, that's depressing but that's human nature. Humans have a long history of making radical changes at the last minute, e.g the cold war.
We like to go right up to the cliff edge but we tend not to take the final step.
After all even China is cleaning up its act and they're the least likely to be cooperative so if even they're doing something about it there's hope.
“with effort, we can solve climate change, or minimise its effects.”
The issue is not the claim that with effort we maybe can minimise the effects, it's the techno-utopia angle. We will solve this by changing nothing about the underlying economic system driving climate change, but Bill Gates and other smart billionaires will make some fantastic technology that will save us!
We will not solve it, it's way too late for that. Still, every 0.01°C additional warming counts. People not born yet will suffer more from everything we don't do now. So, rolling on our backs and giving up is not helping at all. Going vegan is a easy first step to make a difference. Start blowing up pipelines after that. 😀
Large YouTube channels usually try different titles and thumbnails during the first few hours after upload, so the title OP posted was probably accurate at the time of posting.
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Definitely informative and depressing. Honestly kinda just confirming what a lot of people have suspected all along I think; everything's a monopoly, companies are good until they lock enough people into their platform and then they're too big to care. Lots of really good examples and depressing fun facts weaved into it lol. One thing that makes it so interesting to me is that over the last couple of decades we've all been watching the enshittification of everything in real time. This book makes sense of it. That said, idk what his solutions are 100% but I gotta believe he offers some kind of clarity or way forward by the time I finish it. I have a little ways to go still.
Enshittification will keep happening under capitalism, that's a feature of the system. You can try to regulate it with strong government, but that is a pipe-dream and not a permanent solution in the US. The cards are too stacked against reform at the moment. (Would need to abolish the Electoral College, equal voting rights, remove gerrymandering, implement strict campaign financing laws, remove lobbying, etc.)
That's awesome! I'm in Ohio and he's not coming anywhere near here on the tour lol but I did order the hardcover copy. I'm trying to hold off on the audiobook now so I can finish it as the actual book.
Adam Conover has the smarm of Alton Brown with the deep knowledge of James Corden. Truly the Joe Rogan of the Left. But he has had some good guests on his show lately.
I presume it’s a mix of things, there are near daily changes making services worse for consumers in one way or another, which fuels the relevancy of Doctorows writing on the one hand and the desire of people to be agreed with on the other.
La settima puntata di Matrimonio a Prima Vista 15 — in onda su Real Time mercoledì 15 ottobre 2025 in prima serata — riunisce per la prima volta le tre coppie. La reunion accende vecchie ruggini e nuovi equilibri: se Roberta Murano e Luca Merlo proseguono spediti, Dario Del Vecchio e Roberta Bordonaro sembrano arrivati al capolinea. Ma i momenti più duri sono, ancora una volta, quelli tra Melissa Cicciari e Matteo Conca.
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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.
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The micromirror arrays are the wildest of the bunch to me. That is just such a prima facie batshit insane idea and it's astonishing that it actually works.
"Yeah, we need to be able to individually display and shut off these pixels, so we're going to go ahead and design a chip with 6,220,800 tiny mirrors that physically tilt when you poke them with electricity. Rather than, I don't know, literally any other solution that presents itself."
It sounds insane, but the array that drives it is functionally not that different from the array that individually causes LCD crystals to shift.
I have DLP parts sitting around because they're cool.
Edit pics:
Edit2 explanation: A white light is focused onto the DLP mirror chip through a kind of kaleidoscopic lens, I'll spare you the details on that. The individual microscopic mirrors are aligned with charges to bounce light. The mirror array pulses synced frames through the spinning color wheel to create a composite image. It's a fucking insane idea that barely works... and people like me, with low persistence of vision, are not fooled very well and we see color banding and all kinds of weird artifacting lol
Woah that color wheel... You can see the cyan, magenta, yellow light reflecting but red, green, blue light passing through to the table, respectively. Such a great example of complementary primaries
There is no way that the pictures I've snapped can produce the colors accurately. When I look at that small section, it reflects forest green light back to my eye. The light that passes through seems to be muddy yellowish
I tried to find something on the internets. It says something about additional color spaces - in that regard the yellowish color makes sense. and reducing color flickering. 🤷♀️
My assumption was it had something to do with luminosity, but I'm at the end of my technical expertise for this implementation of insane technology lol
There was an idea I read about, sorta along the same crazy track, (might have been Popular Science or something like 25 years ago) where they came up with an idea for a jet that didn't use traditional control surfaces like ailerons, but rather line the wings and fuselage in thousands of tiny flaps that would all be precisely computer controlled. It would be able to basically mold and shape the airstream around itself to make precise movements.
RGB flashing sequentially is the wooooooorst. Most people can't see it but holy shit i can and it's like random colored strobes flashing everywhere. Bleh
The reason it works better with CRT is because of the phosphors. They continue to glow, long after the signal has passed over. Check out a CRT slow motion.
Everything to do with display technology involves tricking the eye and relying on persistence of vision which is innate.
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I still see it in even the most modern projectors, but I'm also able to see the flicker in phones that use pwm dimming which only a very small percent of people can see, so sucks to be me. My eyes seem to work at a much higher image capture rate than most people, which has no apparent benefits, only problems
Interestingly enough crts didn't seem to cause a problem, my guess is because the pixel phosphors don't actually flash off, they fade out. But that's just a guess
We had one in an auditorium where I work. Only problem is it was underneath an MRI scanner. Every time they'd open the door to the MRI, the magnetic field would knock the projector tubes out of alignment.
The technician who came out to work on it said it was hopeless. He told us he had a customer whose projector would get out of alignment if he moved a speaker in the room.
I was so happy when we finally replaced it with an LCD projector.
The safety warning about CRTs is no joke. My dad used to work appliance repair in the 80s. These guys were all well trained in that shop. They had a shelf of tvs with dates on them. No tv was to even be looked at until at least 3 days from dropoff, then they discharged the capacitors. They hated the tvs most, because they ran test after test before plugging them back in. I miss the free crap Dad would drag in due to missed payments or abandoned electronics. We had a 24 in industrial microwave that I miss to this day. I could be lazy and microwave anything in that damn thing, regardless of metal content, and could defrost a small turkey.
I was a kid, so don't remember everything as my Dad explained it, but it used a more powerful magnetron with a pulse system and used a fan to blow the heat. It also cooked hot pockets without leaving the outside cold and lava inside. Moreso than that, I don't remember as it was a tech geek dad talking to a 12yr old teenager that only cared to listen to the first half. I was a shit, and I regret ignoring the trove of knowledge that man had.
Also, most microwaves won't do much with silverware as is, this just kinda went a level higher. It was from a restaurant that never paid up, and the shop always sold the leftovers for cost of parts to make up the difference. Our vcrs, vacuums, audio receivers, and other things came from that shop (also scratch and dent from some store I can't remember the name of, it had a weird shopping procedure. They had display items and cards, and at checkout you handed the cards over and the items were brought down a conveyor belt from the storehouse in the attic. The broken things were sold cheaply in a room in the back)
Edit: looked it up, the name of the store was Service Merchandise
It might have had something that can shift its frequency.
What happens in most microwaves is you get a standing wave. The high and low parts of the wave are always at the same spot. You then get a hot spot at the peak (and trough) of the wave, and a cold spot when the wave is near the zero node.
By shifting the frequency, even just a little, you can shift the hot spots around and more evenly cook the food.
This is obviously more expensive, and these days you can get it in higher end residential microwaves. Way back when, though, it was only something you'd see in industrial models.
If I'm thinking about it correctly then either the standing wave is intentional or the oven is designed badly. You know the wavelength so you can make sure the oven is not an integer multiple of it and the hot spots move around on their own, no fancy frequency shifting required.
Metal is only a problem if it gets near the sides/top/bottom. There are even microwaves that come with a metal rack for the middle that's suspended by plastic tabs.
Bigger size makes it easier to stay away from the sides.
I repaired TV's in the 80's and 90's. I worked on many of them right after they came in. It was easy to discharge any caps without damaging the units. I respected the potential for getting shocked and the voltage a flyback transformer can produce so I never did get shocked by one.
I used to have one of these. Traded an electric guitar for it, then never set it up, while it sat like a beast in my basement taunting me. As cool as it was, I should've never traded that guitar. 🙁
Gallego confronted Johnson, demanding to know why Grijalva's swearing-in had been delayed, and if the delay was connected with the release of the Epstein files.
“This has nothing to do with Epstein," Johnson shot back, adding that Gallego was being "absurd."
Arizona Senate Democrats Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego clashed with Speaker Mike Johnson in the hallways of the Capitol on Wednesday, over the swearing-in of Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva.
The IRS is sending mass furlough notices to employees and shuttering most of its operations, now that a government shutdown has extended beyond its initial contingency plan.
The agency posted on its website Wednesday morning that, “due to the lapse in appropriations, most IRS operations are closed.”
The IRS, which is preparing for next year’s filing season, kept all its employees on the job for the first five business days of the shutdown. Its contingency plans, however, didn’t specify what would happen if a lapse in funding extended beyond Oct. 7.
According to the agency, an “IRS-wide furlough” began Wednesday, “for everyone except already-identified excepted and exempt employees.”
It’s not clear which employees will keep working at this point. The IRS hasn’t posted an updated contingency plan yet.
Another edition of LinuxDays took place in Prague last weekend – the country’s largest Linux event drawing more than 1200 attendees and as every yearm we had a Fedora booth there – this time we also representing CentOS.
I was really glad that Tomáš Hrčka helped me staff the booth. I’m focused on the desktop part of Fedora and don’t follow the rest of the project in such detail. As a member […]
that's for sure and especially so that the american gov't is now controlling who can and cannot join the linux kernel developer's group; it's easy to see them expend a tiny bit more energy to add people to the watch list
A group of conservative donors spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a rightwing version of late-night talkshows like the Tonight Show and the Late Show, leaked documents reveal, in a further indication of the right’s ongoing efforts to overhaul American culture.
News of the effort to pump conservative viewpoints into the mainstream comes as entertainment shows and the media at large are under severe threat in the US. In September, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was taken off the air, under pressure from the Trump administration, after Kimmel’s comments after the killing of Charlie Kirk, while Donald Trump has launched multiple lawsuits against TV networks and news organizations.
Four pilot episodes, each of which has been watched by the Guardian, were made of the rightwing chatshow. It was promoted by the Ziklag group, a secretive Christian nationalist organization, which aims to reshape culture to match its version of Christianity. In an email in 2022, Ziklag – which ProPublica reported spent $12m to elect Trump last year – urged its members to stump up money for the project, called the Talk Show With Eric Metaxas.
Republicans have been eager to challenge mail-in ballots, with Donald Trump centering it in his attacks on the electoral process. Mike Bost, a Republican representative from Illinois, filed the suit to argue that the Illinois law allowing ballots to be counted up to two weeks after election day if they are postmarked by the deadline unconstitutionally allows an extension of the election period.
Lower courts threw Bost’s suit out, ruling that the conservative congressman in his fifth term did not suffer an injury and had no standing to sue. The appeal argues that the cost of staffing a campaign past election day is a financial injury giving him sufficient standing to challenge the law.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been clear about her desire to shut down the agency she runs. She’s laid off half the staff and joked about padlocking the door.
She calls it “the final mission.”
But the department is not behaving like an agency that is simply winding down. Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The department’s actions and policies reflect a disdain for public schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of other options — private, Christian and virtual schools or homeschooling.
Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500 million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that often draws children from traditional public schools. They have repeatedly urged states to spend federal money for poor and at-risk students at private schools and businesses. And they have threatened penalties for public schools that offer programs to address historic inequities for Black or Hispanic students.
Under Trump, the Department of Education has been bringing in activists hostile to public schools. It could mean a new era of private and religious schools boosted by tax dollars — and the end of public schools as we know them.
The children’s names below appear on a list of victims of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, maintained by health authorities in the territory. As of the end of July it ran to 60,199 names, of whom 18,457 were under 18s. Far from comprehensive, the list does not include the thousands still buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings, as well as the war’s many indirect victims
Eswatini, the landlocked nation formerly known as Swaziland, is Africa’s last remaining absolute monarchy. It is the kind of place where King Mswati III—who took the throne as an 18-year-old four decades ago—can warn in a speech in 2023 that nobody should “complain if mercenaries kill” political activists. When one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers is murdered only hours later, the king’s representatives will suggest there is no connection. No one will be punished.
In other words, Eswatini is just the kind of country—small, untroubled by democracy, and presumably eager to avoid a superpower’s wrath—with which the Trump administration has been eager to do business.
In May, officials from the US and Eswatini signed a deal that allows the Trump administration to deport people from all over the world to the African nation. A copy of the arrangement I reviewed shows that the United States has agreed to pay Eswatini $5.1 million to take in up to 160 so-called “third country nationals”—immigrants who came to the US with no ties to the country to which they are being deported.
National Guard troops are positioned outside Chicago and could also be in Memphis by Friday, as President Donald Trump’s administration pushes ahead with an aggressive policy toward big-city crime — whether local leaders support it or not.
Troops’ presence at an Illinois Army Reserve center came despite a lawsuit and vigorous opposition from Democratic elected leaders. Their exact mission was not clear, but the Trump administration launched an aggressive immigration enforcement operation in the nation’s third-largest city last month and protestors have frequently rallied at an immigration building in nearby Broadview.
Alt text: humans worldwide looking up into the celestial vault of stars a million light years away, separated from Earth by the deadly cold and emptiness of space: I bet there are guys up there to form social bonds with
Mass mobilizations have been a feature of Claudia Sheinbaum’s first year presiding over Mexico, and to finish her first “accountability” tour of Mexico and mark one year of governance, she had her biggest yet. More than 400,000 people came out to watch her speak for nearly an hour on Sunday, October 5, reflecting on her and the party’s achievements in the first year of her term, and the continued “fourth transformation” of Mexico.
In recent weeks, Sheinbaum has visited all 31 states of Mexico, outlining her administration’s current projects, plans and results in each state.
The communication strategy of MORENA, the governing party, is very front-facing, with both Sheinbaum and her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador hosting daily press conferences from Monday to Friday, and then generally traveling to one or two parts of Mexico over the weekend. This has proven extremely effective in countering the narratives from the large press corporations that own and operate the majority of Mexican media outlets, as well as of course maintaining closer communication and accountability with the people of Mexico.
Sheinbaum has faced significant challenges in her first year, most notably due to relations with the administration of US President Donald Trump, with problems ranging from tariff threats even to members of his administration suggesting unilateral military intervention against Mexico. While Trump has threatened Mexico with tariffs at every turn, Sheinbaum’s firm but open stance has proved effective in negotiations with Trump and today the country has managed to achieve important exceptions to the aggressive tariff regime.
Sheinbaum arrives at one year in charge with historic levels of approval, depending on the poll you choose your approval rate is somewhere between 72% and 79%. While other countries around the world aren’t as comprehensive in approval polls as Mexico, this likely makes Sheinbaum the most popular leader in the world.
So, how did she get to that level of popularity and what are her challenges in maintaining or growing it? Here are some of the points mentioned by Sheinbaum in her speech and the highlights from her first year governing Mexico.
Reiterating economic achievements
Sheinbaum began by reiterating some of the economic achievements, both that MORENA has accomplished since 2018, and some of the present moment.Between 2018 and 2014, 13.5 million Mexican, Mexico is now the second least unequal country in the Americas, behind only Canada, and the income gap between the richest and poorest was reduced from 27 to 14 times over.Annual inflation has settled at 3.7% percent, unemployment is at 2.7%, a record level of foreign direct investment was reached and annual economic growth is expected at 1.2%.
Sheinbaum’s initiatives from her first 12 months.
Sheinbaum created three new social programs. One is Salud Casa por Casa, a door-to-door free healthcare system for the elderly, where healthcare professionals come into their home for regular check ups. Another is Pensión Mujeres Bienestar, which gives women their pension from 60 years of age, rather than 65, to recognize unpaid work in the home. The final is Beca “Rita Cetina”, which is a universal scholarship for all secondary students in public schools, this is a payment every two months of 1900 pesos (USD 103) to cover schooling costs.The constitutional recognition of several rights, such as the right for women to live lives free from violence, the right of access to the internet, the right of access to housing, the right to social programs and more.Mexico has served more than 86,000 deported Mexicans who have been deported from the US in special comprehensive care centers, under a program called ‘Mexico embraces you”. This includes registering them into Mexicans social security systems to assist them with access to housing, employment and transportation to their area of origin, as well as food and shelter in the meantime.Sheinbaum said the “4T is bringing back the trains”, with many rail projects underway, after they were previously privatized in the late 90s. These make up more than 3000kms of railway across the country, including two trains from Mexico City, to Pacucha and Queretaro respectively, and further expansion of the Interoceanic train, which is a key part of Mexico’s attempt to create an alternative trade corridor to the Panama Canal.Sheinbaum emphasized the administration’s goal to “promote equality and the recognition and just development of women in Mexico.” The current government has created The Secretariat for Women as an official government ministry, opened a national support line for women, has opened the first 678 free centers for women that focus on comprehensive care for women, but the administration is aiming to build 2,500 in total. The government is also aiming to build 1,000 early education and childcare centers, which will provide free childcare to children from 40 to 1,000 days old.Sheinbaum has also made access to water a key feature of her first year in charge. About four billion cubic meters of water have been de-privatized, a new agricultural irrigation technology program is being developed across 13 states, and there are 20 new strategic drinking water and sanitation projects.The Sheinbaum administration will build 1.7 million homes, 400,000 of those for Mexicans without social security, and the rest with accessible loan offers for those who earn less than two minimum wages.Another key feature of her first year in charge has been more scientific investment and projects, with funding for scientific research projects increasing by 193%. These include the production of an electric car, a project for Mexico to make its own semiconductors, the production of observation satellites and more.
Security
A challenge moving forward for Sheinbaum will be continuing to manage the security situations, although her early strategies have proved effective.
52% of Mexicans rank insecurity and drug trafficking as the most important issue affecting the country, and 63% of Mexicans living in urban areas consider it unsafe to live in their city. This figure rose from the previous year, but in fairness, levels were historically low before.
Sheinbaum and Omar Garcia Harfuch, her secretary of security, have taken a different approach to security than AMLO had. Sheinbaum and Garcia Harfuch also worked together when Sheinbaum was the mayor of Mexico City, and homicides dropped 50% in the six years they worked together.
The results have been swift, with Sheinbaum reporting a 32% reduction in homicides over her first year. Between September 2024 and July 2025, there was an average of 64.9 homicides per day. While these numbers are stark, it is a marked improvement from the 98.5 per day that Mexico was experiencing in 2018, when MORENA first came to power.
In 2007, before Felipe Calderon’s aggressive, US-backed security strategy, Mexico was experiencing 24.3 daily homicides.
Mexico also recently managed to get the United States to sign an agreement to attempt to limit the inflow of weapons from the US into Mexico. This is a huge point for Mexican security as even the US itself has recognized that 74% of weapons used by organized crime groups in Mexico arrive illegally from the United States.
However, Mexican political commentator and editor of Mexico Decoded, Viri Rios makes the point that this agreement focuses only on increased border surveillance and inspection, and misses the core problem of dangerous weapons being too easily acquired and severely unregulated in the US.
In theory, the US agreeing to this new policy will give them more accountability for the guns that continue to arrive in Mexico.
Early results are extremely promising, but Sheinbaum’s grapple with security and US relations will be critical moving forward.
Tallis Boerne Marcusis an Australian journalist currently based in Mexico City.
probably the best politician that this world has ever seen and i was surprised at how much american propaganda that i had unknowingly swallowed over the decades about mexican politics until i forced myself to learn about her.
the people of the united states could learn A LOT about mexico because it too was ruled by a two-party duopoly for almost century; just like the united states is right now; but the mexicans have managed to vote 3rd party and it's making their lives better meanwhile the americans can't get past the culture wars that keep the democrat-republican duopoly in charge.
you're behind the times; publications like the guardian and the new york times have labeled her efforts to overhaul the legal system to remove the united states' control over it as "authoritarian" almost a year ago.
Assuming good faith, I guess this is about the hypocrisy of everyone acting extremely morally righteous when it comes to the sexual exploitation of animals and then tolerating, accepting and celebrating all other forms of exploitation of animals. I really hope it is not going the other way around.
In dairy, cattle are sexually exploited. Cows must be preggers to give milk, so they wank a bull to get his semen, then a farmer will inject that semen into a cow while holding her cervix with his hand up her arse. Then when she gives birth, the calf will either become a milker like her mum, or become veal if he's a boy.
But we don't talk about that. It's only wrong if you stick your peepee into a cow.
Not true at all, they've been able to make cows produce milk with artificial hormones for decades now, which is also why veal isn't as widely available as it used to be
To be fair, I read it correctly the first time and didn't occur to me that it could be interpreted in any other way until I went into the comment section.
More than one hundred academics, lawyers, imams, journalists and campaigners have signed a statement condemning what they describe as an “escalating campaign of harassment” by British authorities against Fahad Ansari, an Irish Muslim solicitor known for his work on national security and human rights.
Ansari was detained on 6 August 2025 under the Schedule 7 powers of the Terrorism Act while returning from a family holiday in Ireland through Holyhead port. Police held him for nearly three hours, interrogated him about his religious practice, including how regularly he attends mosque, his views on Palestine, and seized his work phone, which contained legally privileged information. His family, including his wife and children, were made to wait in their car throughout the ordeal. The detention of Ansari is said to be the first known case in which Schedule 7 powers have been used against a solicitor in this manner.
Ansari is a senior solicitor known for his legal work on national security cases, including challenging government actions in the courts. Earlier this year, he persuaded the Supreme Court to rule that the UK government had acted unlawfully by denying citizenship to the child of a man whose own nationality had been stripped. In April, he submitted a formal application for the deprescription of Hamas, invoking Section 4 of the Terrorism Act 2000 — a legal provision allowing banned organisations to challenge their status.
It sounds... very odd, and I'm interested in knowing the reasons for apparently breaking the law, especially in what seems to be a clumsy and legally difficult way. What did they hope to achieve? I note from the Guardian's article that Ansari has already started legal proceedings against the home secretary and the chief constable of north Wales police.
More than one hundred academics, lawyers, imams, journalists and campaigners have signed a statement condemning what they describe as an “escalating campaign of harassment” by British authorities against Fahad Ansari, an Irish Muslim solicitor known for his work on national security and human rights.
Ansari was detained on 6 August 2025 under the Schedule 7 powers of the Terrorism Act while returning from a family holiday in Ireland through Holyhead port. Police held him for nearly three hours, interrogated him about his religious practice, including how regularly he attends mosque, his views on Palestine, and seized his work phone, which contained legally privileged information. His family, including his wife and children, were made to wait in their car throughout the ordeal. The detention of Ansari is said to be the first known case in which Schedule 7 powers have been used against a solicitor in this manner.
Ansari is a senior solicitor known for his legal work on national security cases, including challenging government actions in the courts. Earlier this year, he persuaded the Supreme Court to rule that the UK government had acted unlawfully by denying citizenship to the child of a man whose own nationality had been stripped. In April, he submitted a formal application for the deprescription of Hamas, invoking Section 4 of the Terrorism Act 2000 — a legal provision allowing banned organisations to challenge their status.
There's not a single news story on google news landing page or the front page of reddit. I don't think anyone who isn't directly impacted really gives a shit.
![alexei_1917 [mirror/your pronouns]](images/person-80.jpg)
phuntis
in reply to irelephant [he/him] • • •