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AnAmericanPotato

@ AnAmericanPotato @programming.dev

Posts
1
Comments
131
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Almost certainly, yes.

    People on Mastodon are not happy about those statements, and called Proton out on it relentlessly with every post Proton made. This is Proton running away with their tail between their legs, back to platforms where they have more control and/or are already full of right-wing nutjobs.

    If anyone's looking for secure email, look at tuta.com instead. The email service is very similar in terms of UX and offers better encryption. They don't offer the rest of Proton's suite, but...maybe that's a good thing? I mean, do you want to get locked into an ecosystem?

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    If mind uploading was successfully achieved, would the virtual "you" truly still be you?

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  • Lots of recent (meaning past 20 years or so) research shows that our gut bacteria play quite a large role in our mental functions, too.

    The concept of "the self" as a single, indivisible, unchanging thing is simply not compatible with observed reality. To be alive is to be in a constant state of flux.

    Is there such a thing as an eternal soul? Uh, maybe...but if there is, it's not going to be responsible for the things we typically associate with individual living people. It's not going to have your sense of humor, or your memories, or your opinions, or your math skills. We know enough about all of those things to confidently say they are not eternal.

  • If you have HTTPs everywhere on, how much harm can a malicious wifi network do?

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  • Generally true. You would want to use DNS-over-TLS (DoT) or DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) to be sure your DNS queries are encrypted in transit.

  • Is anyone else getting a bit of schadenfreude from the news each day?

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  • If someone was uninformed and misinformed enough to think voting for Trump was even remotely in their own self-interest in the first place, then there is almost no disaster Trump can cause that will not be instantly reframed as "just imagine how much worse it would be under Dems!"

    Dying of COVID? Well at least you're not dying from forced vaccination!

    Layoffs due to tariffs? LOL what's a tariff?

    Can't get benefits you need to survive? Well clearly the Welfare Queens left him no choice! It's their fault!

    It's no coincidence that Trump in particular and Republicans in general relentlessly attack education and free information. They've already brainwashed enough of the population to win elections, and they want to make sure the general population has no way out of that hole. This is why they're attacking Wikipedia and Internet Archive. This is why Project 2025's first order of business is to eliminate the Department of Education. This is why Musk bought fucking Twitter in the first place, most likely. This is why they're now trying to repeal Section 230 (with the help of some Judas Dems), so they can bully any web site into taking down any information they don't like.

    The information apocalypse is upon us.

  • Apple pulled end-to-end encrypted backups in the UK after request for backdoor

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  • Apple has three realistic options:

    1. Submit to the UK's demands and grant them a backdoor to encrypted backups.
    2. Disable encrypted backups in the UK.
    3. Leave the UK market entirely.

    They went with #2, which is probably the least user-hostile option available.

    From 1500GMT on Friday, any Apple user in the UK attempting to turn it on has been met with an error message.

    Existing users' access will be disabled at a later date.

    I am very interested in seeing what the UX around this will be. Ideally, they should give users direct notice well in advance, so they have time to plan a migration or mitigation. Of course, Apple makes it basically impossible to perform a full backup through any mechanism except iCloud, so......one more example of how vendor lock-in is inherently a security and privacy risk.

  • Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian

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  • Neat, I didn't know that. I currently use Joplin this way, synced across my devices with Syncthing. Joplin also supports directly syncing to Google Drive or Dropbox (with optional encryption).

  • Italy to require VPN and DNS providers to block pirated content

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  • I'm sure there will be workarounds.

    I think there are plenty of people who would be pirates if it were more convenient, but I suspect the point of diminishing returns for legislation has already been passed. If you're savvy and dedicated enough to use a VPN in the first place, then this probably won't stop you. Non-tech-savvy people are already turned off of torrents for half a dozen different reasons.

    DNS, though? That will block a lot of people from accessing things like Z-library, which is currently easy enough to access for anyone who knows how to use Google.

    China's measures have been largely successful, unfortunately. It's still possible to VPN out, but it's a risk a lot of people are unwilling to take since it could realistically get them in trouble. I've lost contact with some friends in China because we have no shared platforms and the increasing blocking measures over the past 10 years finally passed their tolerance threshold.

    I guess I could figure out how to use iMessage, which AFAIK is the only end-to-end encrypted messaging service that still works (or at least the only moderately popular one). Makes me wonder how secure it really is if China hasn't banned it...

  • What's your self-induced pain points fellow linux users

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  • I store a lot of things on external media.

    I also use a lot of Flatpaks.

    Kill me.

  • Is thinly-veiled political whinging really a question just because you used a question mark?

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  • Amazing, every word of what you just said was wrong

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  • Installing apps on Windows is insane though.

    Either it's a custom installer with a dozen pointless steps, or it's in the Microsoft Store which doesn't even fucking work without PowerShell workarounds half the time.

    Any decent Linux distro is going to be much simpler for simple use cases. Particularly the ones that lean into Flatpak.

  • people who drink, how long do your hangovers last?

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  • About half a day. If it's really bad, a full day.

    But I don't usually let it get that bad. Hydrating and eating properly before, during, and after a night of drinking will do wonders. Ideally, you should be hydrating all through the evening, not just chugging a liter or two at the end.

  • is your voice part of your threat model?

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  • I’m not (currently) in a position where others would find it desirable to do so. Potentially in the future?

    It's hard to imagine a scenario where this would happen and your voice would not otherwise be available. For example, if you went into politics, then you'd be a target, but you'd already be speaking in public all the time. It only takes a few seconds of a voice sample to do this nowadays and it'll only get easier from here.

    Maybe just make a point to educate your family and friends on the risk of voice cloning so they don't fall for phone scams.

  • Does Gmail have more spam now?

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  • I've noticed an uptick as well. This isn't the first time it's happened over the years, though. Spam is a cat-and-mouse game. Every now and then spammers learn how to break through, and it takes some time for Google to adapt.

    I've been surprised by the latest wave, because it's so obviously spam. Mostly phishing attempts full of misspellings and even numbers in place of letters, like F1del1ty instead of Fidelity. Should be pretty easy to filter.

  • Athletics Australia becomes Australian Athletics in 'bold new' rebrand

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  • The article keeps referring to "the sport", but never mentions any particular sport. I don't think I've ever seen "the sport" used to refer to sports in general before. Is this a regional language difference, like how Americans would say "go to the hospital" while Brits would say "go to hospital"?

  • Is there anything my girlfriend and I have to consider when traveling to America based on our skin differences?

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  • Racism in America is real. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably just living a charmed life and incapable of accepting that their personal experience is not universal.

    I don't have the time or energy to prove this exhaustively, but here's a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black

    In 2019, as reported by NBC, the Stanford Open Policing Project found that "police stopped and searched black and Latino drivers on the basis of less evidence than used in stopping white drivers, who are searched less often but are more likely to be found with illegal items."

    Please refer to the citations on that page for more details. Lots of studies in various states showing the same thing. The fact that the mere existence of racial profiling in America is still debated, when it has been consistently proven again and again for decades, is itself a clear indicator of a different kind of racism.

    Here's a little story that stuck in my memory, about how a white woman finally came to realize that racial harassment by police was a real thing. It's kind of hilarious, in a dark, face-palmy kind of way. https://franklywrite.com/2020/06/01/a-white-woman-racism-and-a-poodle/

  • Is there anything my girlfriend and I have to consider when traveling to America based on our skin differences?

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  • It’s explicitly forbidden for anyone to discriminate against you based on your race or ethnicity

    Ironically, it's very common to be asked for this information specifically because of anti-discrimination laws, so they can demonstrate statistically fair practices. I always see a box for this on medical forms, new-hire paperwork, etc. I believe the law requires it to be optional and only used for regulatory reports. So that's probably what OP heard about.

  • Stop Treating Phone Numbers As A Digital ID

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  • This assumes a legitimate need to prove who you are outside the context of that specific site, rather than just within it. Sometimes that need is real, sometimes it is not.

    When it's not, and you only need to prove you are the same person who created the account, then a simple username and password is sufficient. Use 2FA (via authenticator app or key, NOT via SMS or email) on top of that. This allows users to prove to a sufficient degree that they are the owner of that account.

    This is how most Lemmy instances work, for example. I can sign up by creating a username and password, with optional 2FA. They do not need my email. They do not need my phone number. They do not need my name, or my contacts, or anything else that is not related to my identity within their server.

    I realize that this is untenable at large scales for any communications platform. Spam (and worse) is a problem wherever there are easy and anonymous signups. I'm honestly not sure how Lemmy is as clean as it is. I guess it's just not popular enough to attract spammers.

  • If AI spits out stuff it's been trained on

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  • which would indicate that it’s somehow needed to generate AI-generated CSAM

    This is not strictly true in general. Generative AI is able to produce output that is not in the training data, by learning a broad range of concepts and applying them in novel ways. I can generate an image of a rollerskating astronaut even if there are no rollerskating astronauts in the training data.

    It is true that some training sets include CSAM, at least in the past. Back in 2023, researches found a few thousand such images in the LAION-5B dataset (roughly one per million images). 404 Media has an excellent article with details: https://www.404media.co/laion-datasets-removed-stanford-csam-child-abuse/

    On learning of this, LAION took down their database until it could properly cleaned. Source: https://laion.ai/notes/laion-maintenance/

    Those images were collected from the public web. LAION took steps to avoid linking to illicit content (details in the link above), but clearly it's an imperfect system. God only knows what closed companies (OpenAI, Google, etc.) are doing. With open data sets, at least any interested parties can review, verify, and report this stuff. With closed data sets, who knows?

  • New pipe, invidious, freetube , brave, ublock none of them are working for me. How can I access YouTube privately.

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  • I've noticed that Google is getting more and more aggressive with VPNs. It won't let me load anything on VPN without logging in. This applies to third-party tools like yt-dlp too.

    This probably depends on your VPN provider. Perhaps I can make a throwaway google account just to get it to stfu? I don't know how hard it is to make a semi-anonymous Google account nowadays.