Zak

Zak, 1 day ago

I’m not surprised they could. I’ve worked on things that send SMS messages and I’m aware that carriers filter for spam and scams (perhaps not as effectively as one might hope).

I’m surprised to hear of messages being blocked for mere profanity.

Anyway, SMS sucks, default to something else and fall back to SMS as a last resort. Gently encourage your contacts to use Signal.

Zak, 7 days ago

The article has a weirdly alarmist tone to it.

Yes, there are a bunch of people claiming to know loopholes in the law through which they don’t need a license to drive and the county sheriff (who will absolutely arrest them for driving without a license) is the supreme authority. A few of them will resist the police with violence. People unsuccessfully advancing crackpot legal theories and a few isolated incidents of fighting the police are not a threat to the rule of law.

Zak, 10 days ago

Major privacy issues that come to mind include:

• App store lock-in on iOS combined with terms incompatible with the GPL mean that some of the most privacy-respecting software cannot be distributed for Apple’s mobile devices.
• Apple proposed, but ultimately did not implement client-side scanning for end-to-end encrypted cloud storage. That such a thing even made it to the public proposal stage shows either incompetence (unlikely) or a lack of serious commitment to privacy (more likely). Apple’s proposal may have emboldened EU regulators who are trying to mandate client-side scanning for encrypted chat apps.
• Browser engine lock-in on iOS means hardened third-party browsers are unavailable.
• The popularity of Apple’s platform-exclusive iMessage service in the USA may be hindering adoption of cross-platform encrypted messaging. On the other hand, without it perhaps most of its current users would use SMS, which is obviously worse.

Zak, 10 days ago

Android doesn’t support iMessage

I think it’s the inverse: iMessage doesn’t support Android.

Those aren’t equivalent statements; the first implies that something about Android makes it impossible for Apple to produce an iMessage client for it when that is purely a business decision on Apple’s part.

Zak, 10 days ago

MMS does have size limits that can hurt image quality, but I have the impression iOS applies limits of its own that are considerably lower. I’m not sure why anybody in 2024 wouldn’t have at least a couple modern messaging apps, but it seems a lot of people don’t.

Zak, 10 days ago

It seems like an odd decision to me, as it would make the iPhone look like it has a substandard camera to someone receiving media from one by MMS.

Zak, 10 days ago

It seems unlikely to have that effect when the recipient presumably communicates with people who have other brands of phone, from whom they receive better looking media.

Zak, 10 days ago

Just doesn’t seem plausible to me. If Alice gets low-quality images from Bob and higher-quality images from Charlie, her most likely assumption if she’s not sophisticated enough to be aware of the cause is that Bob’s phone has a bad camera.

Zak, 9 days ago

Interest in RCS is recent - newer than iMessage, which launched in 2011. RCS with Google’s proprietary extensions is just another proprietary messaging app, and I am not particularly excited about it.

even so far as “patch” a fix that was created to make it possible for their customers to communicate securely with Android users.

There’s no shortage of options for doing that. What Apple wants is tight control over all of its walled gardens, which should be no surprise given the company’s history. They’re very good at making it appear as if decisions made to increase their profits are aligned with the interests of users. It’s probably even true that someone would have exploited the technique Beeper Mini was using to send spam if Apple hadn’t closed it.

Zak, 9 days ago

I have no doubt about the part where iPhone fans waste no opportunity to tell someone else they should get an iPhone. It’s the other side of the argument that falls flat: Alice receives video from Charlie that’s perfectly fine, but Bob’s iPhone sends a pixelated mess, and Bob says the iPhone is better?

Zak, 9 days ago

SMS fallback. A feature which you can use with any app on Android

SMS fallback is not a common feature of internet-based messaging apps on Android. Signal used to do it, but does not now. I don’t think WhatsApp or Telegram ever did.

Zak, 10 days ago

would the government be able to find out that I own the anonymous e-sim on it if my other sim in my phone is another provider not silent-link

Yes. They can almost certainly tie the hardware ID (IMEI) of your phone to your identity through your non-anonymous service provider, and probably do through mass surveillance programs. Whether that’s a security problem for you depends on what you’re doing with it; surely you aren’t using SMS, standard phone calls, or unencrypted messaging services for anything you really want to keep private.

If you want phone service that will resist targeted surveillance by local authorities, even routinely turning on the cellular modem where you live, work, or study is a risk. This article detailing one person’s approach to securing a phone was posted to Lemmy today and should give you a clue about the possible threat models.

Zak, 11 days ago

one with ads and the same vids without for premium user

If it worked that way, which others have already explained it doesn’t, that would break their business model of showing each person individually targeted ads.

Zak, 11 days ago

How democratic of them.

Zak, 14 days ago

The charges are absurd

Why? Lying on the gun purchase background check form is a felony. It says so right above the signature line on the form. The evidence he lied on the form looks pretty strong.

I do realize the crime is not prosecuted often, but that seems like a mistake. The Charleston church shooter, for example should have failed his background check and been prosecuted for the same crime.

Zak, 14 days ago

27 CFR § 478.11 addresses that. The court is not making new law here.

Such use is not limited to the use of drugs on a particular day, or within a matter of days or weeks before, but rather that the unlawful use has occurred recently enough to indicate that the individual is actively engaged in such conduct. A person may be an unlawful current user of a controlled substance even though the substance is not being used at the precise time the person seeks to acquire a firearm or receives or possesses a firearm.

Zak, 17 days ago

Not yet, but they’re actively developing ActivityPub support.

Zak, 23 days ago

I would LOVE feedback from folks if you get a chance to try it out!

I have feedback completely unrelated to the recommendation engine: please consider using CSS prefers-color-scheme instead of defaulting to light mode.

Zak, 27 days ago

Whatever you pick, please be thoughtful about your use of captchas and try to avoid subjecting people to them frequently.

Zak, 30 days ago (edited 30 days ago)

If you’re signed in to a Google account on an Android device with Google Play Services installed, a VPN will not hide your location from Google because the device has several ways to determine your location other than your IP address. You might be able to disable Google’s location services permissions on the device, and if you’re just going for a casual privacy upgrade, that should give you one.

If you really don’t want Google knowing where you are, you probably can’t use a phone with Google Play Services on it, as it integrates itself fairly deeply into the OS and can’t necessarily be trusted to follow the permissions model in the future, even if it can be shown to do so today. Avoiding that means installing a third-party Android build on your phone. Note that a lot of third-party apps rely on Google services, and while an open source substitute exists, it’s not always a smooth experience.

Zak, 1 month ago

I looked over the metrics in the article and none of them approximate what percentage of Americans are struggling to pay their bills. That number probably closely approximates the percentage who think the economy isn’t doing well. This is a different situation from people wrongly believing crime rates are high.

Zak, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

People are still using that shit because other people they want to interact with are still using that shit. Network effects are hard to break.

I occasionally use it to complain at corporations, mostly when their websites show me captchas but occasionally for other customer service issues.

Zak, 1 month ago

Yes, a code-oriented one meant to be very fast and responsive. It’s pre-alpha on Linux but compiles without any fuss for me. I haven’t spent much time with it, but the only bug I’ve seen so far is an uncommanded theme change when switching between files.

Zak, 1 month ago

Can we do Emacs vs. Vi next?

Zak, 2 months ago

I’ve found NPR to be pretty good at that. It’s particularly apparent when it comes to Trump’s lies about the 2020 election; they are consistent about pointing out when claims have been conclusively disproven, and often use the word “lie”.

That said, I agree with Berliner’s fundamental point; I’ve noticed an increasing slant in the stories NPR emphasizes. It’s not that their reporting is unfair, but their choice of what to cover aligns pretty closely with the positions of the progressive left.

Zak, 2 months ago

Have you read Berliner’s article yet? He gives three examples:

• NPR talked a lot about investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign while investigations were ongoing, but was “sparse” in its coverage of the Mueller report’s finding that there was no credible evidence of such collusion.
• Hunter Biden’s laptop, containing evidence of influence peddling was deemed non-newsworthy; Berliner believes it was newsworthy.
• NPR dismissed the SARS-CoV-2 lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory and failed to report on it seriously. While it is not the leading hypothesis, there’s credible evidence for it, and at some points in the past the evidence looked fairly compelling.

These examples are very different from ignoring someone who claims without evidence that strawberries cause cancer, that the 2020 election was rigged, or that wildfires in California were started by Israeli space lasers.

Zak, 2 months ago

Lemmy.world handles that particularly poorly, probably because they’re a nonprofit with a shoestring budget.

The most obvious improvement would be to accept comments when the account meets a certain age and activity threshold.

Zak, 3 months ago

Four years ago there were refrigerator trucks full of corpses and a mob was storming the capitol to overthrow the government on behalf of a would-be dictator.

Nothing resembling either of those things has happened yet this year, so I think in a lot of ways we’re all better off regardless of our individual circumstances. Only the second one has much to do with who’s president though.

Zak, 3 months ago

“Crime is down” isn’t a very engaging news story so it doesn’t get talked about enough.

Zak, 3 months ago

You seem to be asking for telephone calls and SMS messages to be end-to-end encrypted. The underlying technologies were not designed with encryption in mind, so the only way for it to work would be for all the participants in a conversation to use an additional software layer. That was the method used by TextSecure.

The authors of TextSecure eventually figured out that a purpose-built Internet-based messaging protocol would be a better transport layer for secure messaging. If you’re interested enough in secure messaging to be asking this question, you may be familiar with TextSecure’s successor.

As for why a carrier wouldn’t do this, I’ll ask the inverse: why would they put in the effort when anyone who cares about secure communication just uses an encrypted messaging app?

Zak, 3 months ago

Browsing most websites is E2EE. When it’s not, that isn’t something a phone carrier or ISP can fix because they don’t control the web server. The traffic will be in the clear between the ISP and the server.

For secure messaging without a third-party app, phone carriers in the USA seem to be pretty onboard with Google RCS, though I think I’d recommend anyone who’s serious about security use Signal instead.

Zak, 3 months ago

States that didn’t change their drug policies are also experiencing an opioid crisis.

Zak, 3 months ago

Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

• I have enough toilet paper
• There are no refrigerator trucks full of corpses
• Nobody has made a serious attempt to overthrow the government this year

Yes, I think I’m better off than I was four years ago.

Zak, 3 months ago

There are a number of commands an operating system can safely give to the charge controller. Examples include:

• Run the device from external power; do not charge the battery
• Limit/taper charge to X percent/voltage (assuming X is under the maximum)
• Limit the charge rate to (something under the maximum)

Lower-level control could potentially allow extremely dangerous operations like unbalancing the cells or overcharging the battery, which would be bad.

Zak, 3 months ago

You don’t have to pretend that the press actually believes that Biden’s age, memory or trustworthiness with classified documents are actual issues

Those things should be issues. There should be half a dozen serious primary challengers running against Biden. There should be more than two parties with a chance of winning, and an electoral system that lets people vote for them without increasing the risk of their worst possible outcome.

But we don’t have any of that. We have a Biden/Trump rematch, so I’ll vote for Biden and drink a lot of whisky afterward.

Zak, 3 months ago

why would they?

People use it for things like planning terrorism, child enticement, and sharing CSAM. Discord probably wants to ban those people, and maybe aid in their prosecution.

Of course if you’re sharing something that’s actually private, Discord is a poor choice. So is email or DMs on Lemmy where the server admin could read the content.

Zak, 4 months ago

I like Arch, but a first-time install of Arch for a beginner who doesn’t have a lot of patience for reading documentation and troubleshooting is not good advice.

Zak, 4 months ago

I mainly use Kwrite and Kate

Kate Snippets

Zak, 4 months ago

Emacs has several templating/snippet packages available, such as YASnippet.

Zak, 6 months ago

What are your favorite features of the Windows 10 file manager? Listing what you miss from other operating systems can help the Linux ecosystem to improve.