Considering how terrible the writing is on Starfield, I’m not sure Bethesda has it in them anymore. The quests are often incredibly boring, and the worldbuilding itself is a bit meh. Same with the books you find; they cheaped out and used public domain materials for the most part, and the books that do have in house content are… not great. What I liked about Oblivion and Skyrim was that the books you could find really helped to “fill out” the world, but in Starfield they’re just either uninteresting or plain bad – like those fucking cringy joke books
Yeah I’m in my 40’s, nonbinary but AMAB, but I didn’t really understand it until relatively recently. I’ve always known I didn’t fit into the male “mould”, but nobody knew what the fuck “nonbinary” was in the 80’s (let alone here in Finland, which is still really conservative compared to the saner Nordics) so naturally I just got beat up for being “gay” even though I was never attracted to boys or men. I even dressed in gender-conforming ways but I was never a “real” man for many boys and men, which naturally meant that they had to correct me with violence.
The conservative pieces of shit who insist that all these “new genders” and sexual orientations are just a recent invention and in the good old days men were men and women were women are the same ones who were beating us up and even killing us just a few decades ago (not that they’ve stopped doing that…)
I didn’t just suddenly decide to become an enby; I’ve always been one, but I didn’t even have the words for any of this until this stuff became more mainstream. And then they have the gall to act like this is all a choice, like I’d fucking choose to be something that means bigots will literally want to murder me for it. When I thought I was a man they insisted I wasn’t a real man, and after I went “yeah you’re right, I’m not a man” they insist I’m a man. Can’t fucking win with them, can we?
I’d suggest writing at least some level of documentation for the protocol. I’d assume a lot of the more security-minded folks – who your app seems to be targeting – won’t be too enthusiastic about using a chat service that promises security but doesn’t tell you how it plans on achieving it.
But yeah, after glancing through the links you provided, I’d agree that you’ll definitely need to pay someone for an audit / review, there are so many pitfalls and gotchas when it comes to encryption alone, and depending on the guarantees you want to be able to make you’ll find even more pitfalls and gotchas – especially if you want to make even relatively light guarantees about anonymity. The classic problem is that even with encrypted payloads the metadata / protocol itself leaks information, which might or might not be a problem depending on what your guarantees are.
I have a background in distributed systems and some background in security (I’m by no means a cryptography expert but I do know more about the subject than average developers), and I’d say that at this stage you shouldn’t worry too much about meeting all parts of some guideline or another; they’re often geared more towards bigger teams and slightly more established projects. What I think could benefit you would be first of all to have a clear idea of what exactly you want to accomplish (from a security standpoint, not necessarily so much from a functionality standpoint) if you don’t already have have one, ie. what sort of guarantees do you want to be able to make. Doesn’t have to even be a public document at first, just some notes and sketches for yourself. Then you’d want to find other projects with similar guarantees and aims and see how they did things, find research papers on the subjects and so on. Security guidelines can be useful, but generally it’s more useful to understand why something is in a guideline in the first place. For a project such as yourst I would personally really emphasize design documents and research over code at an early stage, because you need to have a clear goal in mind before you start cranking out code which might turn out to be worthless (at least to some degree) after you run into problems with your approach. Not saying that the documentation has to be public, just that you / the team know exactly what the goal is.
“Encrypted P2P chat” can mean vastly different kinds of projects, with very different aims. For example, do you want perfect forward secrecy? If so, you’d want to find out the challenges associated with it, especially in relation to interactivity since you’re building a P2P architecture, etc. etc. Same with anonymity / user “traceability” like I mentioned earlier; you need to have a clear picture of what kinds of guarantees do you want the users to have to be even able to say what kinds of best practices you’d have to follow.
Sorry, that turned into a bit of a ramble and might be completely obvious to you already, since I have no idea about your background and the level of research you’ve already done.
With “guarantees” I meant things like whether you want to have perfect forward secrecy, or whether you want to provide some degree of deniability, and so on, not so much what kinds of guarantees you’re relying on although they’re definitely also good to keep in mind.
“As secure as possible” is a very all-encompassing goal which doesn’t really say much – what I was trying to get at with my point about the guarantees you want to make is that you’ll want to have a clear idea of what you actually mean with “as secure as possible” so you’ll know what sort of eg. architectural decisions to make before you do a lot of work and paint yourself into a corner.
It’s a very ambitious project, but I can guarantee it’ll probably be very interesting to work on and you’ll learn a lot regardless of the outcome, and I’m definitely rooting for you.
The way I’ve understood the “defund the police” movement’s point is that they’re saying police funding is excessive because a lot of the things cops do should be handled before the cops have to get involved, eg. with higher funding for mental health and social services, housing for homeless people etc. So the point is that you wouldn’t need as many cops in the first place if things were handled more humanely “downstream” so to speak, instead of just letting problems fester until things go sideways
Honestly, just properly funding anything that is designed to do benevolent things for the community as a whole is a tough sell with way too many US community politicians
This seems to be a problem with at least conservative politicians everywhere. In Finland where I live we do still have the vestiges of a welfare state (and it really is vestigial at this point), but right wing politicians keep dismantling it and cutting taxes on the rich, and later on leftist politicians find it impossible to roll back any changes due to resistance from the right.
Whenever AI is mentioned lots of people in the Linux space immediately react negatively. Creators like TheLinuxExperiment on YouTube always feel the need to add a disclaimer that “some people think AI is problematic” or something along those lines if an AI topic is discussed. I get that AI has many problems but at the same...
we thought the values of this corporation were very clear in terms of access to information.
Well there’s your problem.
The values of any corporation are “make the stockholders and executives richer”. Whatever utter horseshit they spew in their “mission statements” and “values” documents are just that, utter horseshit.
discussing the difficulty of living “peacefully” with ideological opponents in the face of “fundamental” differences that “can’t be compromised.” He endorsed what his interlocutor described as a necessary fight to “return our country to a place of godliness.”
Proving once again that the end goal of conservatives is genocide. They simply can’t fathom coexisting with people who don’t think and look exactly like them, and given enough power they will start the mass-scale murder of “the enemy”.
This is also why they’re convinced genocide is what “liberals” want to do to them; they can’t understand peaceful coexistence without wanting to murder the Other so they assume everybody else is like this as well
It was only a matter of enough time passing from the horrors of WW II and the Holocaust. We’ll likely have to live through unspeakable atrocities again before things can get any better, and with current technology being what it is I’m not sure we’ll make it to “the other side” of those atrocities.
A high-profile British judge who resigned from Hong Kong’s highest court last week has warned the city is “slowly becoming a totalitarian state” and judges are being compromised by an “impossible political environment created by China”....
“One country, two systems” isn’t quite as “two systems” as was promised, much to the surprise of pretty much nobody. I wonder what the situation is in Macau?
Yep. The vast majority of liberal and conservative politicians are doing the absolute minimum to support Ukraine, if they’re doing anything at all in the first place. I can understand conservatives wanting Russia to win because they idolize Russia, but how everyone else seems to also be fine with the idea is just mystifying.
Just for your information, but Russia hasn’t been part of the USSR for over 30 years now.
No shit? Maybe you should tell that to “USSRboy”? Might want to inform Kreml too because they keep cosplaying as the USSR with their red stars everywhere and eg. reestablishing the Leningrad Military District – Leningrad hasn’t existed in 30 years either, it’s been St. Petersburg.
Also, Putin’s Russia is extremely different to the USSR, in that it is now ruled by far-right religious fanatics. I don’t think that would fit well into the USSR.
You have an extremely idealized picture of what the USSR was, which seems to be a common theme with people who didn’t either have to live in it (especially the non-Russian ones) or next to it. Russia was the one running the show, and nothing of substance has really changed about Russian political culture in hundreds of years – during the USSR their rhetoric was of course different, but the incredible brutality and complete disregard for the lives of non-Russians and even Russians was still there, as was the persecution of minorities
I’m from an Eastern European country that was USSR aligned and part of the Warsaw Pact.
Then you really haven’t been paying attention if you think the modern Russia isn’t up to essentially the same bullshit that they were during USSR times, just packaged up in different rhetoric.
The reason why people even brought up USSR is because, newsflash, the dude’s nickname is USSRboy. Can you deduce why somebody would sarcastically say that they got what they bargained for when they got arrested? I’ll give you 3 guesses.
Oh yeah true, I forgot about that! Although frankly it seems like it’s just a part of Russia’s USSR cosplay, just one that’s been going on for longer, where the Leningrad Military District was just re-established this year
So jailing and murdering political dissidents, agressive imperialism, extensive propaganda that paints a completely distorted view of what the state is doing, having a small and rich ruling class, russification of minorities etc. are completely different from what was going on during the USSR? Religion is the only new part here, and even that is surface-level only as it always is.
I really didn’t. Like I keep saying, “moderate” conservatives are mythical creatures, much like unicorns or ethical billionaires. I had a “fiscally conservative” and “moderate” acquaintance flat out tell me to my face that the world would be a better place if gender minorities didn’t exist and that we’re all pretending anyhow
I’d be willing to bet that the majority of child abusers are conservative; it’s an ideology centered around dominance and with a proven link to sadism and psychopathy
Yep, and then doctors and researchers go all surprised Pikachu face when it turns out that eg. some pain medication doesn’t work as well on women, but naturally this conclusion is only arrived at after decades of insisting that they should work and that you’re just being an irrational hysterical feeeeemale if you say they don’t
This is exactly why I didn’t even bother; you’re so Rational™ that you’re just assuming I’m a woman because I’m mocking you. I knew it’d be pointless to try to actually talk to you and I’m under no compulsion to waste time arguing with neckbeards
Clearly the problem is too much regulation! If we stop regulating companies completely, they’ll ✨magically✨ just start doing the right thing.
Shhhh don’t talk about historical precedent for that not working, libertarian brains can’t handle that sort of stuff. Just repeat after me: TAXATION IS THEFT, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, WAR IS PEACE
Estonia considers itself a front-line state, a Nato member where its border guards stare across the Narva River at the Russian fortress of Ivangorod....
At least being a NATO member, if/when they call for aid, they should expect an answer.
It’s already clear that Hungary and possibly Turkey can’t be counted on to help with Russia, and if far right parties win more elections in Europe and if Trump wins in the US (both of which seem probable), it’s unlikely they would actually step up against Russia considering that conservatives generally see them as an ally and not a threat. Russia may well test the limits of Art. 5 if Trump wins
Same here in Finland, although at a national level we already lost and now have an extremist right wing government which has a bit of a neo-Nazi problem (and I’m talking literal neo-Nazis). The ongoing EU Parliament elections fill me with dread
Massive change is afoot within Europe’s far right. Just as voters across 27 countries prepare to go to the polls in EU elections, a split over the German far right’s allegiance to the Third Reich is driving a realignment....
This is all just optics, or “tactical” as the article terms it. There is no real difference in policy or opinion between the “new” right and the “old” right, they want the same things, but the “new” right are the ones who are somewhat smarter about eg. voicing support for fascists out loud too much – which will certainly change once they have enough power. And this is not to say that they don’t support fascists even openly, just that they do it so that it doesn’t generally end up in headlines.
Moderate conservatives are mythological creatures, much like unicorns or ethical billionaires.
True, and it’s usually both at the same time – if they do it it’s good, but when they claim The Enemy (ie. anyone left of the Strasserites) does it it’s bad.
The Elder Scrolls 6 Teaser Is Now 6 Years Old — and Even Todd Howard Paused to Say, ‘Oh Wow That Has Been a While’ - IGN (www.ign.com)
EA execs earned $60 million in 2024 despite layoffs and office closures (www.gamedeveloper.com)
Alabama Anti-Abortion Advocate Charged With Sexual Abuse Of A Child (ca.movies.yahoo.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/16574177...
Why do we have Pride? (lemmy.world)
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f9387b2e-35d6-4c55-b7f3-b8d98747f826.jpeg...
Decentralized Encrypted P2P Chat (chat.positive-intentions.com)
The live app...
Cop busted for unauthorized use of Clearview AI facial recognition resigns (arstechnica.com)
"So the cop was tracking random people off social media using this incredibly invasive technology, on a pretty regular basis."...
The anti-AI sentiment in the free software communities is concerning. (lemmy.world)
Whenever AI is mentioned lots of people in the Linux space immediately react negatively. Creators like TheLinuxExperiment on YouTube always feel the need to add a disclaimer that “some people think AI is problematic” or something along those lines if an AI topic is discussed. I get that AI has many problems but at the same...
Firefox Browser Blocks Anti-Censorship Add-Ons at Russia’s Request (theintercept.com)
Mozilla, the maker of the popular web browser Firefox, said it received government demands to block add-ons that circumvent censorship....
Are you there, God? It's me, Justice Alito. Inside the movement to make the Supreme Court explicitly Christian. (www.motherjones.com)
'Becoming a totalitarian state': UK judge on why he quit Hong Kong court (www.bbc.com)
A high-profile British judge who resigned from Hong Kong’s highest court last week has warned the city is “slowly becoming a totalitarian state” and judges are being compromised by an “impossible political environment created by China”....
Sarcasm doesn't get you anywhere (lemmy.world)
‘We’re in 1938 now’: Putin’s war in Ukraine and lessons from history (www.theguardian.com)
Interesting article that talks about the similarities between now and 1938, and the sort of lessons we can learn from history.
Gay adult content creator USSRboy has been arrested in Russia (www.advocate.com)
'More in common with the Taliban': Outrage erupts over state GOP's anti-Pride vitriol (www.rawstory.com)
The Colorado Republican Party wants all Gay Pride rainbow flags to burn to ash, according to a new report.
Warnings meant to last 10,000 years (lemmy.world)
World-first tooth-regrowing drug will be given to humans in September (newatlas.com)
Libertarian Party nominates gay candidate for 2024 presidential election (www.washingtonblade.com)
Two far-right Israeli ministers threaten to topple the government if it accepts Biden peace plan (www.cnn.com)
Did everyone stick to yesterday's agenda? (lemmy.world)
Donald Trump suffers triple polling blow in 48 hours after guilty verdict (www.newsweek.com)
Ukraine war: We have no Plan B if Ukraine falls, Estonian PM says (www.bbc.com)
Estonia considers itself a front-line state, a Nato member where its border guards stare across the Narva River at the Russian fortress of Ivangorod....
The AfD’s obsession with the Third Reich is driving a realignment of Europe’s far right | Mariam Lau (www.theguardian.com)
Massive change is afoot within Europe’s far right. Just as voters across 27 countries prepare to go to the polls in EU elections, a split over the German far right’s allegiance to the Third Reich is driving a realignment....
Conservatives tried to force all schools in California to out trans kids. They just failed. (www.lgbtqnation.com)
Judge Cannon rejects request for gag order against Donald Trump in classified docs case | CNN Politics (www.cnn.com)