It really baffles me how often I still see it talked about. Especially on Lemmy. I never liked it myself but now the musk owns it, I would’ve assumed there wouldn’t be much controversy here: it’s dead and gone, move on, people.
Ah yes politics, the thing that can be discussed in 140 characters or less. Twitter is definitely the prime place for this discourse.
I get what you’re saying, I really do, I just think its super fucked up that our politicians have collectively decided this is THE place to engage people when there is no political topic that could possibly be discussed properly this way. I’m pretty sure I already exceeded the limit just saying this.
i'm fairly sure the point (whether calculated, or more likely, mostly not) of having politics moved there is because there is no political topic that could be discussed properly there. it makes for good, distracting noise.
it makes for a lack of meaningful critique, or for that critique to be instantly buried in bad actors. noise is a shield. noise is easily dismissable.
monetized social media, in general, is made to be clickbait, to feed negative emotions because that's what gets people addicted to outrage, it steers people towards thinking less and reacting more. nuanced discussion and thoughtful spaces are drowned out and cast aside for the loudest and most obnoxious players. this is appealing for someone trying to uphold the status quo or push society towards hate.
i don't think it's a coincidence that politicians have moved there, that spaces have become so polarized and negatively charged, and that the most prime example of both of these happenings is xwitter. everything is connected in this big, terrible, and vaguely randomly evolved system. i do think evolution is the best word for it. what lives, survives to propagate. it doesn't matter how healthy it is. the result is this blind, meandering, gargantuan worm, following the scent of blood, feeding on the worst of it all.
xwitter is easy and, notably, if you're a powerful white man, you can build your base with no accountability. it exists in this space where it's the most serious news source that almost no one takes that seriously. of course it's appealing.
i’m fairly sure the point (whether calculated, or more likely, mostly not) of having politics moved there is because there is no political topic that could be discussed properly there. it makes for good, distracting noise.
It’s more stupid than that. The idea is that 140 characters is a lower barrier of entry for a reader, compared to reading a series of paragraphs that might be able to at least talk about something, or attempt to summarize an issue. It’s why accounts like wint can pop off, and become so prolific.
I mean I just don’t think it’s so much a calculated effort by the ruling class as kind of a natural evolution of the market taking hold of and exploiting the human mind to the nth possible degree, such as they have always done.
You're phrasing this as a rebuttal when these points were an explicitly acknowledged part of my original stance. It is a bit odd.
whether calculated, or more likely, mostly not
everything is connected in this big, terrible, and vaguely randomly evolved system. i do think evolution is the best word for it. what lives, survives to propagate. it doesn't matter how healthy it is.
Both quotes from my original posting, here. If you want to point out something that I had missed, it would be more time efficient to have picked something I had missed?
I'm bemused.
I’m gonna be honest most times when I write a response I’m taking a shit and not paying very much attention to the thread which it belongs beyond my vaguest recollection to what was said
the stinking corpses of all these corporations that don’t realize they’re already dead impact all of us, but they’re still dead, aren’t they? hnnngg die already!
I’ve found a fair amount of strong loyalty to the place from all sorts of people. I was never a twitter person, so I don’t understand it, but AFAICT, all sorts of people have a real emotional bond to the place, like for them it’s been their main internet experience in life or something.
I made accounts on Mastodon and Blue Sky but most people still use Twitter, so if there’s info you’re looking for, or if you want to share things, you’re forced to use what most people are using.
I deleted my 2007-era Twitter account in 2022 and not once have I felt like I was missing out on any “info” or felt like I wasn’t able to share things.
I’ve never had a Twitter account and never felt the need for one, also haven’t been missing out on that junk. I’ve read lots of tweets, on occasions when I was offered a twitter link for whatever, but just never felt like I needed to join up at all. Just seems like a waste of time to get on social media where all the posts are just small bits of opinionated content without much depth.
I just accepted I'm not getting the information now; but a whole bunch of small creators will basically only talk about their content and schedule on twitter. Like if something is going to be late, they are going on vacation or they are doing an extra stream or etc.
I’m not sure, but wanted to add another hot take: if you’re a journalist and you use Twitter as a primary source for your work, you’re not a journalist.
I hear you … most people are still there (I’ve claimed in the past that it will be the MS Windows of social media, that no one really openly talks about using but is actually everywhere).
But I feel it may be useful to distinguish FOMO and social media gossip from actual useful information. I’m not saying there’s nothing useful on Twitter (I don’t actually know). But we’re talking about microblogging and social media here.
Don’t do that it’s annoying. If someone doesn’t want to write out curse words, more power to them. It doesn’t inconvenience you in the slightest. It’s just a patronizing comment that has been made into a meme.
Can any late teen-early 20s armchair philosophers once-over this for me?
I have a theory. Never before on the internet (going on 30 years of it) have I seen so many curses used but not fully spelled out (‘f*ck’ for example).
I believe the change has to do with social media and specifically short-form video apps (Tiktok, IG Reels, Youtube Shorts) - not all of which I am familiar with, but I know at least YT and I believe TT does as well. When curse words or words like rape and murder are used in text (or ‘subtitle’ text on screen) the video reach can be penalized in some way. I assume it’s similar in comments.
So you have a ton of the younger generation consuming hours each day of censored curse words, and in their mind it becomes just what you’re supposed to do, socially. They end up doing it with each other over text, and consequently in comments. I have a younger co-worker who will gladly say “Fck that dude hes a btch” in group chat, and when I asked him why he doesn’t just say the words he’s using, he said “I just don’t like to curse.” Which makes no sense to me, as it’s the same word and intent.
I know some Lemmy instances will remove words, but generally only ‘bitch’ and derogatory slur words.
So I hypothesise it’s simply unexamined social conditioning, where they see their peers doing it so they do it too, never questioning why.
Makes sense. It’s the USAtion of the world. Their puritanism is spreading. Wouldn’t surprise me if people started censoring themselves when saying “moist”, but getting excited when talking about guns, wars, and bombing the middle east.
I’m sure that factors in, but people censoring their curse words online has been going on for decades, as has the refrain “you can curse on the Internet.“
I’ve never had the experience of seeing young people refrain from using curse words. It’s usually as people grow up they see it as an immature way to communicate. I personally use them a lot, but in formal settings I certainly don’t. Some people simply don’t turn the switch on and off and elect not to use them so much. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing even if it’s not how I operate. It’s up to each of us how we want to communicate, so frankly, I just don’t concern myself with it.
As for people self censoring online, I have seen that since my old messageboard days when I was a kid. “You can curse on the Internet“ is a pretty old meme. Literally decades.
People who see it as an immature way to communicate won’t use the words at all. People who are actually immature despite growing up will use the word and think it makes a difference if they put an asterisk in there instead of spelling it out.
There are other things that get self-censored due to filters. The two that I’m thinking of are “suicide” and “murder” (which a lot of people reword as “unalived” or “committing game over”).
Another one that I saw was a history summary channel I watch on YouTube couldn’t get monetized because they kept mentioning Hitler (in a video about the end of WW2) so they had to keep saying “the toothbrush moustache having Austrian man” to get around the censor.
[Grandpa Simpsons voice] Back in my day, we used to say “pr0n” instead of “porn” to avoid keyword spotters, and saying it that way just got to be a habit. Nowadays e.g. twitch comments auto-mods have block lists. I think kids just do the same thing.
What’s funny is when you’re watching something like an AI summary of a movie on youtube, it’ll use euphemisms like “self-delete” instead of “suicide” and “naughty place” instead of “brothel” to avoid the algorithm penalties you mention.
That’s true, there is the Scunthorpe problem. I guess we’re just doing another 20 year cycle like we have for all of civilization. If someone centuries in the future finds this comment chain, please name the solution to your 20 year repeating fractal math problem something like the CockSyn Solution. I want to be like Shadow from American Gods. Or more accurately like Pythagoras with his stealing murder cult.
Its happening with “killing” or “dead” being subbed for unalive too. I don’t inherently think its bad, just culture moving forward and changing how it always has. “Its simply unexamined social conditioning where they see their peers do it so they do it too never questioning why” Thats just society, friend. Why does anybody do anything?
I’m 36 and don’t understand plenty of young people’s shit now, but that doesn’t inherently make it scary or bad. I don’t really have a point here I guess, except that we should strive to not be the old men who yell at clouds about “those damn kids.” Life and time marches on, things change, and thats fine. 🤷
I was resistant to ending my use of reddit, but now they have nerfed the mobile site so bad I can’t even login anymore so I’ve stopped trying. I still peruse it on my PC at least once daily but I think that the moment RES finally stops working will spell the end of that.
As for Facebook. I mostly keep it around for an easy connection to family and friend and a few meme groups that amuse me. But again, only like once a day do I check in ion that site.
Edit: I should mention that I have never and will never use either of those website’s apps.
IIRC these are words from the man himself. In a documentary about him, he said he was not a hero, just an ordinary guy, and you should not need to be a hero to stand up and do the right thing.
That’s a very humble thing to say and I would argue makes him even more of a hero.
What is a hero? Someone who makes personal sacrifice for the good of others? Someone who risks enduring the worst possible scenario for no reason other than to expose blatant corruption of the highest order, to protect civil liberties of hundreds of millions? Not sure I could think of anyone more deserving of the title.
Beyond the point that others have made about Snowden not considering himself a hero, for me there’s two facts that I just can’t get past when it comes to Snowden:
He ended up in Russia somehow. Seems an odd place for a freedom fighter to end up going.
One of these could be a coincidence, but I’ve not seen a lot of double coincidences in my life. It’s funny because I agree that the surveillance program got out of control and needs more transparency, and unlike Tucker and Greenwald, Snowden sounds like someone who truly believes what he says rather than a sleazy liar working for someone else. Emotionally I want to believe in Snowden, but I’m also a strong believer in probabilities and Snowden not acting at Russia’s behest and for some sort of personal reward seems hard to believe at this point.
Well, this is what I thought too. Also, any other country under US influence would have handed him over to the US. See the saga that poor Assange has gone through. What worries me is that public opinion is rather silent to stories like those of Assange and Snowden. Whistle blowing should be seen as a right. If the organization I work for is ethically and morally misbehaving, I have the right to blow the whistle through the right internal channels to start with. If nobody listens, then you take it to the next level.
No, he was literally trapped there on a flight stopover trying to get from Hong-kong to Equador without passing airports in countires that would have arrested him. Russia was probably one of the countries he was least interested in staying.
This is Snowden’s claim and it’s not implausible, but it’s also quite a coincidence that he’d end up in the top country for spying on the US it’s also possible that he wanted to be in Russia and simply made up the part about it just being a stopover. If Snowden was looking for asylum, there are several other countries that don’t extradite to the US. I can see why he’d temporarily be stuck in Russia, but after several years he couldn’t find any other way out? There was apparently a privately-funded attempt to get him to Iceland, but the last update on it was that they were in contact with a “third party representing” Snowden…and then nothing.
A third fact (in addition to Russiabot Greenwald’s involvement) that makes it questionable is that he eventually applied for Russian citizenship in 2020. One explanation is that he could do this to get a Russian passport and fly somewhere else with no US extradition treaty, but he hasn’t chosen to do so yet.
Russia are the good guys, we are like comically evil. We couped ukraine in 2014orchestrated euromaidan and got them to shell russian civilians in the 2 independent republics. we built 13 CIA bases in ukraine (per wapo). loaded them with NATO weapons and training, including of neo nazi battallions like right sector, azov brigade and tornado batallion. fast forward to now, and 800,000+ ukranians are dead and the ukranian SBU which is 100% controlled by the CIA attempts weekly acts of terrorism against russia. on the grand scheme of things THE PLAN FAILED!! www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html
If you read any of his memoirs or interviews, you’d know that his intended destination was Ecuador, and he couldn’t fly out of Russia due to his passport being revoked. He lived in the Russian airport until he was granted asylum, so it’s not like he had much choice.
I didn’t see any sources that went against those claims except from WikiLeaks, so I don’t see much of a reason to discredit them.
Then rather than engaging in an emotional battle, read the content of his statements and judge their veracity as an idea separate from the man. If motive is impossible to discern from the data you have, you need more data, right? At least if you know what it is that he is accusing the govt of, specifically, will help to determine more of the motivations behind his choice, right?
I’m not saying read them and believe them, but rather cast your critical eye upon his focus, and then perhaps you can poke holes in his conclusions or discern what, if he’s lying, what those lies are meant to achieve
I think you need to take a break and get some perspective.
Besides, the Twitter link was already posted by the OP, why would it need to be posted again?
Posting exTwitter links without a screenshot in a privacy community feels like a kind of oxymoron to me, especially after exTwitter made API changes and what not which made third party apps and software like Nitter kind of useless.
X requires login to view tweets, and can only get away with this because they tricked users into believing they’d allow free access while they were growing as a platform. Let’s not do anything to help them.
I’ve noticed that the search results are getting less and less relevant to what I’m actually looking for. I guess one day the search bar will disappear like the headphone jack of the iPhone.
Just unplugged from work when I feel a buzz in my forehead and my neuralink pushes new order details straigt into my retinas.
It’s another deep dive job. Without hesitation I accept the job since I’m low on prime points. Head back to my office and plug myself back in. Get more details from the job file, seems to be some obscure shit again…
Turn on my cooled chair that prevents my body from overheating during a deep dive. I sit in the chair and start the process.
Thousands and thousands of mind numbing click bait videos speed past me as I weave through them in the metaverse. I’m multiple hours into the dive with no results, and I can feel my body start failing. I should pull out, but the prime points are too tempting, and I’m already so deep, it has to be around here somewhere.
My vision flashes red as my neuralinked dive chair is giving me warnings about my body failing, and just as im about to pass out… There it is, I gotcha… Grab the link and pull out as fast as I can.
Wake up a few hours later after my chair managed to get my heart going again. Scramble through my memories for the link, and there it was. I inform the customer that the matching video has been found and I am awaiting payment… The money is wired to me instantly and I sent them the LINK through neuramail.
Searching YouTube isn’t easy these days… But it pays good…
And then there are the recaps you get every now and then. People making these shows know that most viewers aren’t even really actively watching. It’s just background noise you put on while cooking or doing household chores. When you go to a movie, there are no recap, because the director expects to have your undivided attention at all times.
Depends on how they’re implemented. Signal and WhatsApp are e2e encrypted, but they track your phone number, your contacts and IP address. Maybe even metadata
Of course you shouldn’t but there is a categorical difference between the risk of a corporation exploiting you because of a power imbalance (you want to use Reddit, there aren’t alternatives in this hypothetical scenario) and the rando running your fediverse instance abandoning the project or being weird about your data.
The second category can definitely be problematic, but it just isn’t the same level of awfulness and systematic exploitation that corporations wield every day to extract a profit.
It sounds like a weird statement because we have been trained to think the average “other” we will encounter in society as dangerous, but if you actually think about the statistics then yes absolutely it makes way more sense to trust a random person or handful of people to run your instance than a corporation. Publicly traded corporations are legally required to be assholes in the pursuit of profit, on the other hand most of the time randos usually aren’t assholes, though to be safe you should always be cautious as you say.
Sure it could happen, but I don’t understand what relevance that has when you compare it to the fact that you KNOW without a shadow of a doubt corporations are going to sell your data to the maximal amount they can, even if it is illegal.
Besides this isn’t about our data being sold or not being sold really (our data will be mined and sold by somebody so long as it is publicly available on social networks), it is about who has the power and who doesn’t. Does a single corporation run by a billionaire fascist-baby have the power or an imperfect constellation of developers, instance maintainers and moderators?
I went the other route. I am very noisy online. I post and comment all over the place but I treat all of that as what it is, content I have given away freely and publicly. Now, when I need to do something privately, you are going to need serious mojo to be able to dig it out. Plus, who would assume that I do certain things privately when almost everything I do is out in the open.
Exactly. Do a search for my username and get flooded with shitposts. IP? MAC? Same, plus some porn watching and way too much YouTube. Everything I want to keep private is done with as many degrees of separation as possible.
I use disposable hardware (one time use) and unique, pre-configured remote access points from third party locations for my work. In other words, many little headless Raspberry Pis everywhere.
…and this is how “rational” people act more irrational than irrational people. Arguments that are reductionist tautological absurdities.
Open source culture is far more transparent and trustworthy than the 100 headed monster Hydra that is Western Big Tech companies, fully armed with neuro scientists and western capitalist media machinery. There are a few bad apples in FOSS culture, but they can be easy to spot for a few people, and that works as long as people actually listen to those few people.
All I’m saying is whatever the service, be careful what you post online. We assume the people hosting fediverse services have a code of ethics or that they have our best interests or privacy at heart. Or even that they have the time and know how to protect our data.
But we should still consider the opposite and take the necessary precautions.
I am good, it just sounded very absurd. There is no “both sides” in credibility of open source vs closed source ecosystems.
I think we can judge Lemmy instances dependingly, for example I trust the dev instance and Lemmygrad instance quite a lot and stick to them. I distrust instances like Lemmyworld, lemmy.one and some others. All instances that connect to the ones I use will be able to scrape my comment data, which is public and which is fine (well not but AHs gonna AH) because I teach and advise on OPSEC, stylometry and other stuff.
A much better way to spread the message is telling people how they can be mindful of firstly judging how “public” a space is, and then how and what you type/record and share.
You can trust that the service will persist. The fediverse is practically speaking unkillable since no one group holds all the strings. The trade off is that any data you post is shared freely with all. At least it’s clear from the start and no one is profiting off of it. Unlike Reddit, you know exactly what’s going on as soon as you sign up.
Hmmm, from a tech perspective there’s lots of VPS hosts that provide dashboards to deploy a CMS in one click (Ghost, WordPress, etc.), in that way it’s never been easier to get started. The hard part though is gaining visibility and publishing enough content to give people a reason to visit.
In my opinion, one of the main benefits of selfhosting ( aside from controlling your data,) is that you don’t have to pay for the VPS/CMS service, of course you pay for the infrastructure… As someone who HATES monthly subscriptions it’s one of the main reasons I don’t have an online presence yet
I tried to run Ubuntu server and slapped something on top of it ( CasaOS ), which i didn’t like, then I tried Ghost ( and failed miserably )…
It’s not easy and YouTubers are full of shit ( they skip so many details )
To each their own, that can be a benefit but youll still need to buy hardware, maintain the server software and maybe rent rack space (if you need bandwidth).
My tiny slice of the web hosts a private image gallery for my family to upload and share photos. Going into it I wasn’t really interested in administering yet another server. Instead I threw $6 at a VPS and had a publicly accessible, user friendly site with backups up and running in about 15 minutes… and I haven’t had to think about it again since. And Google/Meta isn’t training their AI on my niece’s birthday pictures. That monthly sub is worth it for reclaiming my time.
That monthly sub is worth it for reclaiming my time
Yeah definitely, it’s a small price for the benefit, but also to add to how I feel about subscriptions, I think their major flaw is they don’t consider poor parts of the world like Africa were I live, while 6 $ is reasonable or even cheap for some people, here it’s a lot of money ( x200 which means 1$ = 200 ), so it’s not accessible…
Only few, very few websites change their pricing based on my IP address, or send me to a different domain, but for the most part it’s not affordable
You might ask, does you ISPs have VPS plans ? Yes they do,
Tap for spoilerwaaaay more expensive than European VPSs combined … LoL…
There’s also politics and agenda involved but won’t get into it, it’s just bad news, and we have enough of that already
The currency situation makes sense and I apologize-- I realize now I had a very western-centric perspective while writing my thoughts. I can absolutely understand hosting on your own hardware, as the opportunity cost in that situation is hugely different. I think the next best option is a good server OS and the ghost docker container but you are right it is not as straight forward or easy. Best of luck friend, trust documentation not youtubers :)
In 2020 Google claimed it was supposed to be limited to a single region in partnership with a single carrier. And was never meant to be put up on Play Store.
A spokesperson from Google reached out to clarify some details about the Device Lock Controller app. To start with, Google says they launched this app in collaboration with a Kenyan carrier called Safaricom.
Google has confirmed that the Device Lock Controller app should not be listed on the Google Play Store for users in the U.S., and they will work to take down the listing.
Being Australian this is likely one to report to the ACCC, as Aussies at least have basic consumer protection, though that get murky with overseas tech entities.
Unfortunately the ACCC gives fewer fucks than you may expect. An airline once cancelled a flight on me and kept the cancellation fee, despite producing no evidence that any government had forced them to cancel the flight (this was during COVID).
ACCC did not care one bit
So while we do have some consumer protection (better than most) I would be surprised if they cared.
Check your installed apps (I left an edit in th post where to check). Just because it’s not listen in the Playstore for Australia, doesn’t mean it’s not installed.
I still would be very surprised if this were the case. Unfortunately it seems that OxygenOS does not have public repositories to actually check the source code (!), but there are apps that will actually show you all of your installed packages and I bet one of those would show that it’s installed.
So they region locked it from US, but it can still be pre-installed as a system app from AOSP. And it’s available in EU, while was meant to be in Kenya only.
It’s not just you, it’s phoning home for me too. Pixel 7, also Australia, bought outright from officeworks. I don’t log network reqs so I don’t know exacts, but it’s using 25kb every 3 days or so, so it’s doing something.
I’m surprised it would be on the play store since presumably if you were a carrier or creditor of some kind you want this installed in a pretty clandestine way and wouldn’t want to draw attention to it by having an app store listing.
Telegram’s server side software is closed source, owned and ran by them exclusively so they really have no room to talk. WhatsApp doesn’t even have OSS clients so they’re even worse in that regard
Aaah, the kind of transaction that most transactions are?
Operated by providers
Aah, so any business which accept crypto must KYC every one of their customers. This makes accepting crypto especially burdensome, which is half the point of this legislation in the first place.
So non-commercial transations are fine, as are crypto transactions to non-custodial wallets.
Unless you’re using the wallet to buy or sell something. You know, the thing people use money for.
Why does the government need to have every transaction reported to them? Crime is bad because it causes harm. If harm is being caused, that means a person or entity is causing that harm. That means there is evidence. Follow that.
Police have more surveillance and crime-detecting tools than at any point in human history. Nearly every category of crime, particularly violent crime, is on a decades-long downtrend. We all travel with GPS monitors in our pockets. We all use credit cards instead of cash. We all are recorded by CCTV 90% of the places we go. We don’t need to give them more financial surveillance because ‘crime’.
I’m not saying these rules are perfect, but it doesn’t help if you argue against rules that don’t exist.
Commercial transactions are not “all” tx, and above 3000€ are obviously not the most common tx.
I do think the crypto restriction with no lower limit is too much, and I don’t get why they focus on custodial wallets, but it’s again not “all” tx.
Why does the government …
Money laundering, tax evasion and corruption are real crimes with real consequences, and knowing about the flow of money is pretty much required to be able to detect them. It’s a trade-off with privacy, so imo setting some limit for anonymous payments is the right thing to do. Idk if 3000€ is perfect, but it does seem reasonable.
Police have more surveillance and crime-detecting tools …
We need some amount of oversight and surveillance, so imo it’s not good enough to just exaggerate every proposal to the extreme and reject it on those grounds. These rules are not a total crackdown on anonymous payments, but they might still be too restrictive. But you kill every discussion about that if you just make up different rules entirely, instead of arguing about the rules that were actually adopted.
so any business which accept crypto must KYC every one of their customers
No, any business must use a KYC custodian for their wallets. I don’t think they’ll need to KYC their customers, they’ll just need to account for those transactions in their accounting.
So if the company accepts Monero, the Monero wallet would need to be with a custodian, but you’d be free to use Monero to buy stuff and remain anonymous. At least that’s my read.
What the hell?!?!?! This is a server OS! It needs to be as light as possible and for the sake of server stability and security, admins carefully choose the installed apps. Microsoft can’t just install new applications on a whim.
People in this thread seem to be missing this point.
This is windows server, not windows 11. The consequences is not “I’ll have an annoying taskbar icon on my home computer”, this is enterprise level interference that could affect large systems and thousands of users.
Linux Mint isn’t an alternative to windows server.
Yep. I no longer have to administer Windows servers (everything I do is serverless these days) but I did for many years.
Adding anything to a server without vetting it against policies is a huge no no. Back when I was doing it, a big part of our monthly update deployment was updating the test environment first so we knew we weren’t about to break a bunch of shit for us and our customers. Not just “does this brick Windows server”, but “do our applications still function” (usually yes, but the answer was no on several occasions over shit smaller than this).
I don’t know what adding copilot does. Is it going to accidentally break some custom application by accident because it’s tied directly into the system? Is it going to report shit that I’ve already opted out of due to our data policies and possibly fuck up our audit compliance because of government regulations (defense, medical, and energy sectors have huge responsibilities in that area, just don’t ask how I know)? How does it interact with our in-house developed software?
Fuck, I dunno. That sounds like a nightmare for infrastructure and ops, several managers, government regulators, and a payday for legal.
For sure, if you need paid support (which if you aren’t a tech giant, a fledgling startup, or a system with no need for uptime metrics, you probally do) the you have:
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (aka SLES and only still Libre option in this category unfortunately)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Ubuntu are
if don’t need paid support then Debian, OpenSuse, Rocky, or Fedora are all good picks.
Almost any Unix can be an alternative for Windows Server. Never understood why it was used, other than tech illiteracy of lowly tech workers who only knew MS stack.
In addition, with all Microsoft’s faults they had a hell of a small business package for years. In a lot of small businesses, the current CIO came up during those times and dictates policy.
Plus there are a lot of VARs and MSPs who push MS due to favorable terms and kickbacks. Small and medium sized businesses who outsource IT go with whatever they’re told because they don’t have the expertise, time, or desire to explore alternatives.
Plus there’s a load of self hosted software for certain industries that only works on Windows servers.
Just sitting here waiting on the peeps who know more about stuff to chime in on this, cause it sounds awesome. But I’ve been burned before so I’m hesitant
Proton will still be a for-profit company that will be majority-controlled by a non-profit. The non-profit will not own all of the business either, so there will still be profits going to shareholders.
Any excess profits not reinvested are paid as dividends to share holders. However, if you’re reinvesting that money from dividends into buying more shares then there’s no difference between the two. Think of it like this. If I’m a company and I have a dollar, I can either invest it in the company and make my value go up by a dollar or give my share holders a dollar. Of course, in the inverse situation, the share.holder can just sell a dollar worth of stock and the situation is the same.
So there really isn’t too much of a difference between the two.
It doesn’t change a ton, but the point was basically them putting their money where their mouth is and saying “now we can’t sell out like everything else.”
If you liked them before, this is great. It means google or whoever literally can’t buy them out, it’s not about the money. If you were iffy already because they’re not FOSS or whatever other reason, this doesn’t change that, either, for better or worse
What is this buying out talked about something not escapable if not some legal reorganization is made? It has been being talked about other companies, too, and it sounds like if you have a form of a company, you can’t legally refuse monetary offers from someone to buy your company.
Is there such a legal mechanism that forces an owner to sell out if an offer is made, or is this more about proofing a company against CEO/shareholder personal sell out decision?
I think a publicly traded company works that way as they have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to make money, but the non-profit (controlling) part of proton has no such duty as their primary directive is their mission. They said I’m mostly talking out of my ass so I certainly could be wrong
A company with a public offering basically cannot refuse a large enough buyout because with a public offering comes a financial responsibility to the shareholders. Public stock is a contract saying give me money and I’ll do my best to make you money back, and it’s very legally binding.
You can avoid this by never going public, but that also means you basically don’t get big investors for expanding what you can offer. A public offering involves losing some of your rights as owner for cash.
When the legal goal becomes “money above all else”, it is hard to justify NOT selling all the data and violating the trust of your customers for money, customer loyalty has to be monetizable and also worth more.
Proton has given a majority share to a nonprofit with a legal requirement to uphold the current values, not make money. This means that the remaining ownership can be sold to whoever, the only way anything gets done is if this foundation agrees. It prevents everything associated with a legal financial responsibility to make money, but still allows the business to do business things and make money, which seems to be proton’s founder’s belief, that the software should be sold to be sustainable.
Thanks for the detailed explanation about publicly traded companies, but what I wonder is the privately owned ones being forced to sell out, if there is such a thing.
For example, lets say Proton is owned by a few shareholders or just one, and it is not openly traded unless the shareholders make personal agreements to sell out or anything like that. If Google came with a truckload of cash and told these shareholders to sell their shares to Google, can they simply refuse the offer no matter how big is the pile of cash or the benefits of the offer, or do they have to find a legal reason to keep their shares? I mean, even the question sounds stupid and the answer should be “yeah you can just keep your share and run the company however you like, as long as you don’t go public listing”, but with all the concerns about the buyouts talked all around this last few years, the premise looks like it is hard to hold out.
There are different types. The “financial duty” of corporations is generally overblown, however that is more or less what happened with Twitter. Elon made such a dumb offer that they had to put it to their shareholders. There’s some mechanism where shareholders can vote as a whole to sell, and if the vote passes then you don’t get a choice.
But generally corporations absolutely aren’t required to do whatever makes the most money. They’re allowed to put other values above pure profit, as long as they can justify it being in the shareholders’ interests. The shareholders may disagree and vote them out because of it, but as long as it was plausible, it’s legal. For instance, I believe the board of an Oil company could decide to shut down their wells and fully pivot to renewables, and I don’t think the courts would hold them accountable. Preventing climate change is easily arguable as in the shareholders’ interest, even at the cost of significant money. However that board would likely quickly be voted out. (And it’s unlikely they would have gotten there if they didn’t love oil money.)
If you own 51% of shares, public or not, you can’t be forced to sell afaik. And if you’re private, you’d have to do some pretty big illegal defamation or something to be forced to sell your property. Or you could die and your descendents could decide to sell.
One issue is that we’ve set up our tax system to encourage cashing out asap. For the most part in the US, you’re going to be taxed at 37% whether you sell now or whether you have the company pay you out for the next twenty years. So why not get out while the gettin’ is good? In the past, with a 90% top marginal rate at a higher income, it was often better to keep your money in the company and in the reputation, and just have it pay you out at a medium tax bracket for the next fifty years. All you really need to do as your job is make sure the company stays stable anyway. You can do that while spending four days on the golf course.
It’s a bit different because of the stated values though.
Raspberry pi’s foundation is focused on making computers available broadly, while this new organization is focused on making privacy widely accessible.
While both can be commercialized, the pi’s foundation has no fundamental problems with selling out privacy or focusing on money to achieve those goals. Proton would have a much harder time arguing that profiting from sale.of private data supports privacy.
This is relevant because it means even if the remaining shares end up on the stock market, the foundation can use its majority ownership to veto any privacy concerns.
Time will tell. I could also have missed something
Seems legit. Going towards a better business model. Don’t know if anything stops them going from non-profit to profit as OpenAI did buy at least their movinf the other way now with intent towards the opposite.
Ah yes, because what I want when I tell my computer to stop playing audio and video is for YouTube to play some audio and video of some random thing I didn’t ask for at like 3x the volume of the video I just paused. Thanks google. Such an innovative company!
Yeah, and I definitely never pause a video because I want to look more closely at the frame I paused it at. Obviously, covering it over with something different is exactly what I was hoping for!
Oh, and no youtuber would ever say anything like “pause the video here if you need more time to read the details” and nobody ever adds any single frame easter eggs in their videos either.
I assume those don’t have any sound but it’s still annoying af. Sometimes I just pause to see something. Hopefully adblocks will be able to handle this.
Pausing just brings up a sidebar with a static image ad. Maybe they change that to audio amd/or video in the future but right now you just seem uninformed and reflexively hostile. Maybe like, experience what they’re doing before judging? Or at least before commenting…
I already adblock. For a good reason. The ads only get worse. I’d be surprised if it didn’t turn into that after some time. It’s not an unreasonable assumption.
Why would you even assume? The info is in the linked article. Point being, if you’d read the article you wouldn’t need to make assumptions.
YouTube started testing pause ads last year, as reported by Adweek. These ads will pop up as banners around the video and can be removed by hitting the “dismiss” button. They’re going to be pretty similar to the pause ads that Hulu introduced back in 2019.
Idk, because it’s a joke and I’m not really that invested in the specifics of the latest ad garbage a tech company is pushing? Ads expand to fill all available space. If it can eventually become a video ad, it will. Just give it time. These things never go in the other direction.
…Except you knew it was sarcasm. Hence why you made your comment in the first place. Unless you thought I was earnestly praising Google for making new ads?
Welcome back! I'm sure you have a lot to catch up on after being in a coma or whatever. Number 1, an angry mob tried to kill the vice president and 12 million people think they were right to do it and it's a shame they didn't succeed.
Billionaires can only become billionaires by forced monopolies and lobbying. Remove the politicians who are being bribed and replace them with normal people. No more billionaires.
Are you aware what usually happens in countries where they start killing politicians? Like historically in actuality, not just the "how it plays out in the original plan" way?
You clearly don’t know the Christian Nationalists I know. Let me ask you something, only for true believers. If you really truly believed in your heart that God was calling you to kill in his name, would you do it?
Then do you have some context to understand what I’m asking? Because I know my share of Christians that either get uncomfortably quiet with that question or very confidently answer yes.
It’s mind boggling that there are people who think God couldn’t come up with a better solution than murder. I mean a micrometeorite could take anyone of us out at any point. Or he could wait for us to yawn and have a murder hornet fly into your mouth. Or y’know, being God and all and capable of doing anything, he could just have his giant disembodied hand come out of the wall, grab us and pull us to the other side, a la Legend of Zelda and that’s just if he insists on making it a spectacule and not just snap* aneurysm.
I actually havent tried if screensharing works but jitsi seems to work very well in there. Even the german government uses it so I suppose it might be able to do that.
Don’t get me wrong, I love matrix, but works like a charm is not how I would describe that. Element Just seems to make everything harder because you have to keep track of your session keys. That way if you have a new device and can’t use the previous device you don’t get locked out And then to top it off you have the export and import of end to end encrypted room keys which even for somebody like myself who is technical enough to manage it has managed to screw it up almost every time. I find something like session or SimpleX easier because you’re not having to manage keys like that. SimpleX has an actual database file export instead of key management and you need only remember the decryption key. Session of course uses session IDs with a neumonic seed phrase like crypto
Interesting concept! Element isnt my favorite client either but it has nothing to do with running or using matrix. Its like using an iphone and saying calling someone is very expensive.
I use fluffychat daily and it works well. The issue atm is that frequently changing devices, leaving and joining a lot of rooms can disrupt the experience. If you talk mostly on the same devices and in the same rooms there is no issue as far as I can tell.
As all FOSS software it needs work and people who want to put in that work. I wont help with element and synapse since the element folks want contributors to sign away their rights which I‘m not okay with.
Oh, I don’t blame you for that. I just feel like Matrix in general is rather complicated for normal people. I like simple x a lot because all the keys are just in a database and the database is encrypted instead of having to remember the keys and session obviously only needs the mnemonic seed for restoration. Like, I can manage a cryptocurrency wallet absolutely fine, but there are a number of different times that I have lost access to encrypted chats on Matrix due to not getting the key situation right.
Yeah, a lot of apps have interesting functions. Since matrix already has a lot of users and is somewhat integrated with the other services I‘ll stay with it.
Yeah, I still have a problem with signal. Maybe its because I dont understand how it works. I assume that your data is hosted somewhere since you need to be able to check in somewhere but maybe thats untrue. With matrix I know where my data is, I can look at it and delete it. Thats worth a lot to me.
Yeah, Session and SimpleX are better for that reason. Signal only hosts data (encrypted client side) until it can be delivered. They have only the registered phone number and last used date but thats it. SimpleX and session dont have phone number registration and so cant give that up either.
One of the interesting features about Matrix is that it supports some degree of interoperability. The Beeper phone app, for all the fuss about its ill-fated attempts to bridge to iMessage, can connect to Discord for basic no-frills text chat.
I refuse to install Discord on my phone but use Beeper for DMs and group texting.
I’m constantly looking for something that could replace discord for me, I need something like the discord screen/game streaming to consider changing apps.
I need something like the discord screen/gama streaming to consider changing apps.
I second this. It’s one of our most used features. Whether it’s streaming for team mates or for spectators there’s almost always 1 to 2 people streaming/watching.
I hate this recommendation because Matrix is just a terrible user experience. It has basically nothing of value over Discord other than being open source. Which is important but it’s not enough to counteract the amount of basic quality of life stuff that is just absolutely trash garbage on Matrix. Stuff that no normal user is going to put up with.
If Discord does end up completely eviscerating itself the replacement will just be some new upstart closed Source program that is shiny just like how Discord took over from Slack it will not be the rise of Open Source because open source developers have no concept of user experience.
I mean we don’t even need to start talking about how bad all the client options are and how half the features don’t work and all that. You can look no further than the login system. Average users do not like want or accept having multiple options for logging in. There’s a reason that irc, teamspeak, mumble despite in many ways being objectively Superior especially in the case of the voice chats ended up relegated to only nerds like us. Because no one else is willing to deal with keeping track of servers to connect with or how to cross join or add users.
Same reason that Lemmy is like 90% technical users that are already invested in something like Linux. The average user got frustrated by how fragmented everything is how many duplicate channels and content you would find between instances and how difficult it was to search instances in the first place. I am here because I can ultimately work around those emoians, but the average person? Is not willing to and they shouldn’t have to
I’d love to be able to disagree in any of your points, but I can’t.
The vast majority of users want something that simply works, is polished and intuitively usable. Reading docs, remembering anything other than the bare minimum, running into issues that don’t get magically resolved within 5 minutes will turn them away forever.
Even people with a technical background will at least partially compromise and migrate towards the services with the most users to not isolate themselfs.
Matrix is neat, Lemmy is neat, Nextcloud is neat (well, in theory), Immich is neat, so many other privacy friendly solutions are neat. But they’ll always be irrelevant in the global context.
I mean with next cloud and immich it doesn’t really matter if they are popular. Those are services that you host for yourself for you to use generally by yourself.
Immich I could see someone using if they’re already familiar with Google photos, so long as someone else handled the setup and maintenance of it of course
Selfhosted services like Nextcloud/Immich aren’t nearly as dependent on a critical user mass like Discord/Matrix, but the principle is the same.
If you host for family or friends, they may even use it if you convince them to switch. But when the setup, which doesn’t consist of redundant instances and isn’t maintained by a small army of SysAdmins 24/7, inevitably breaks for longer than a few minutes, most will switch back to the easy, reliable option.
It is often sketchy. The search function doesn’t work properly. Loading older messages often makes your client spaz out. There’s several glitchy commands. Spamming snowflakes can slow down your client to a crawl. A friend once crashed Element on my phone using a lot of nested quotes with muscle emojis. We had to spam other stuff so I could open Element again because the moment those messages started loading my client crashed again, preventing me from even changing the channel so I could open my app again.
I use Element and Matrix because it is the best privacy-respecting option, but it has a long way to go.
I am a big fan of Matrix and glad to see it getting some attention in this post. But it is definitely a bit rougher around the edges and esoteric compared to Discord. For more technically-inclined people, it’s fine. But it’s a bit much for some people.
I’m no fan of Apple (and don’t want to divert discussion here), but part of their winning formula is ease of use.
It’s not even just the technical barriers. Lemmy has technical barriers and still works fine. Matrix is soooooo fucking SSSSSSLLLLLLOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWW. A simple chat program that takes longer to load a channel than it takes for my aging PC to boot an AAA game is simply unusable. This is 2024, not 1994.
I just don’t get what you’re referring to when it comes to “not receiving messages while offline”. The only thing that comes to mind that does this by design is OTR, but that’s outdated anyway…
Weird, never got such issues. OMEMO is what I use in my DMs, and it was designed with offline messages in mind (and it does work for me). I know this sounds like “works on my machine”, but this is the first time I hear about this happening consistently.
Someone else mentioned Revolt.chat higher in the thread and it seems to be a promising FOSS replacement for Discord. It’s looking to fix some of Matrix’s issues like not having voice channels (voice calls on Matrix aren’t the same)
Most likely the module, if it is a separate module and not part of the SoC of the infotainment system or whatever, works over CAN bus and the car will throw errors when it doesn't detect its presence, or doesn't detect the SIM card. Might even refuse to start if that module is missing. Might be possible to remove the antenna so the car thinks it's just outside of the service area, but if it's built into the PCB and the PCB is cast into resin/silicone for waterproofing, even this might be extremely difficult. Probably the module is also serialized* so replacing it with a "dummy" module or a module from a junkyard won't spoof the system, either.
*Manufacturers have been serializing even airbags for years, making replacing a faulty one with one from a junkyard impossible.
Yeah, some aluminum foil on the inside of those shark fin antennas will probably stop all communication. Just have to use your phone for radio & navigation, which isn’t a big deal on CarPlay or whatever the androids use.
I’m sure it varies widely. In Toyota’s you can call in to disconnect (I did it while waiting for a tire pressure machine) but to do it physically you pull a single fuse and the trade off is losing the microphone.
Others have pulled the dash and disconnected antennae but it just reduces the range of the box since it’s a cellular radio like a phone.
Do you have any resources that I can use to learn more about about removing telemetry from a vehicle? Is there a good forum that could help me potentially do this to my car?
There’s no easy one-stop solution since it can vary widely.
I would look at subreddits (yuck, reddit!), or dedicated forums for your model if they exist, you’d probably be surprised what’s out there. (Example, there’s Piloteers (Honda Pilot), Kia-Forums (Kia), 4Runners and Toyota-4Runner, etc. But information may be scattered.
First objective is figuring out if it’s even on your vehicle or applicable. Older 3G radios are done since the networks that connected to them are gone now. My '16 Kia had no cellular radio. Maybe you have an SOS button or they advertise a phone app to control your vehicle remotely?
Edit: And if you can’t find specific model/year information for your vehicle, you can look for information for related vehicles and see if it’s relevant. Ex: Honda Passport, Pilot, Ridgeline sharing a lot of engineering.
in this case that’s Toyota specific and it means likely loss of phone calls on the go (but nothing else) even though the data can’t leave your vehicle anymore. It all depends on how they wire up the system. Maybe it’s easier, maybe it’s tied to something random.
I can't wait to see tuturials. I don't know much about cars and would love to see people disable these, or perhaps do something malicious. Not that I have a new enough car yet, but I know one day it's going to be unavoidable.
As long as you know where they are, a simple faraday cage should work perfectly. Basically, surround the module with an electrically conductive material to catch radio waves.
I was thinking something like free data plan till they disable the transmitter or at least an unplug. Never bought a new car, do you agree to terms and conditions or sign a contract specifically mentioning/consenting to the tracking?
In Toyota’s there’s a red sticker on the dash talking about it and how to opt-out. (or at least I’ve seen it in a rental and a new car - but it might also be yanked by dealer’s PDI)
If you’re using android auto or something like that this information is going to be transmitted on the same connection used for navigation and internet so you better learn the map of the city again if you want to scape the Spyware.
It will be cat and mouse, but I would imagine for the time being, disconnecting the cell antenna on the board would stop it. Who knows what kind of, if any bullshit extra errors and codes that will keep popped up but I’m guessing if it became a popular thing, they would start making cars that will create bullshit errors and codes. I wouldn’t do anything permanent until the warranty period is over.
The antennae only likely won’t reduce range enough. Check for an opt-out procedure prior to purchase since that’s easiest, then look for what fuse powers the connection (also easy), but worse case, lay eyes on the module itself and evaluate.
The DMCA makes it a felony to circumvent protections in services. If they wanted to push this and depending on the system disabling or using some hack to bypass could be illegal.
I don’t think that anyone would actually bring the case against an individual, but a company selling any sort of device or instructions to make it easier for people could be targeted.
If they make disabling spyware illegal, I’ll do it anyways because human rights. If they decide to charge me for it, I’ll just consider it a violation of my freedoms
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