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bdibs

941 karma · joined July 3, 2017

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bdibs··on Ask HN: How to preserve privacy while using smartphones?
I recently switched from an iPhone to a Pixel with GrapheneOS and it's been great so far (a couple months now or so).

It's extremely usable, with only minor hiccups if you're trying to use any apps that require Google Play Services. GrapheneOS does allow you to install play services sandboxed without any special system access (just like any other app). I've replaced a couple of apps that required those to FOSS alternatives without much hassle at all.

Install via WebUSB[0] was very simple and went without a hitch, and at the end of the day is basically just a normal Android experience, just much more secure and private by default.

0: https://grapheneos.org/install/web

bdibs··on 4Privacy App
Smarter Every Day made a video today about something he's been a part of, here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMtrY6lbjcY
bdibs··on Women are nearly half of new gun buyers, study finds
The CDC[0] links to a report[1] mentioning estimates of anywhere from 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year. I’m not necessarily agreeing with the previous comment, just adding some context.

0: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.htm... 1: http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2013/Priorities...

bdibs··on Thoughts.page: hosting a small webpage for your thoughts
It’s certainly healthier I’d bet.
bdibs··on Unvaccinated Covid patients cost the U.S. health system billions of dollars
Triage exists for a reason, and it seems reasonable to apply that here. If you want to accept the risks of your “lifestyle choice”, you should be the one who faces the consequences by being lower in priority for healthcare. If I exercise and eat right, when I need an ICU bed I should be given priority over someone who accepted the risk of eating fast food three times a day, surely?
bdibs··on Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address
Wouldn't "any" include authority compelled logging?
bdibs··on Making a Scam Mmorpg – The Story of Dreamworld
Thought this was interesting since they’re actually a YC company: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/dreamworld
bdibs··on U.S. Covid death toll hits 1,500 a day amid delta scourge
Has something like this happened before in history? Where we have the tools to avoid deaths both caused by COVID and the indirect deaths caused by a lack of healthcare capacity, but the people refuse to use them?
bdibs··on Mozilla VPN Completes Independent Security Audit by Cure53
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/tag/audits/
bdibs··on Colorado county's voting machines banned after security breach
There's no number of audits they'll accept. Where they're currently "auditing" there have already been multiple audits already completed. The whole thing is a joke, it's endless by design for fundraising and that's it.
bdibs··on FB messenger silently censoring links, claims they were sent
Probably the flavor that leads to burning black churches and attempting to overthrow US democracy?
bdibs··on K/V Benchmark: PostgreSQL vs. Redis vs. Memcached
Well the site does seem to be some sort of PostgreSQL consultancy.
bdibs··on Jabs mostly fend off the Delta strain but breakthroughs are infectious
CDC has this[0] which is fairly recent, and just as a layman it appears the vaccines are doing well against delta.

0: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e1.htm

bdibs··on Taliban enter Kabul as Afghan government on brink of collapse
I would consider getting out of this boondoggle as soon as possible an example of competence.
bdibs··on R/NoNewNormal has been quarantined
Which policies in particular do they find 1984-esque?

Also I'm not sure where 99.97% is coming from, I'm getting ~98.3% from the CDC's Data Tracker page. Of course unreported cases could increase that, but it still seems significantly different from whatever source that's from.

bdibs··on WhatsApp lead and other tech experts fire back at Apple’s Child Safety plan
My (limited) understanding so far is that Calyx is a "looser" Graphene security wise to make it a bit more user friendly, I'm wanting to just jump in with both feet. I don't use a ton of apps anyways so I don't think I'll be missing anything.
bdibs··on WhatsApp lead and other tech experts fire back at Apple’s Child Safety plan
I’m considering a switch to GrapheneOS on a Pixel. I’m not sure if it’s an overreaction but I feel like I’ve lost what little trust I had remaining in Apple. It’s really unfortunate as they make quality products, but I guess everything sours eventually.
bdibs··on Expanded Protections for Children
I took that to mean further protections for children, not expanding the overall scanning. Also isn't it you not caring about their property rights? Should Apple be forced to host CSAM on their servers? Should all businesses be required to?
bdibs··on Expanded Protections for Children
Doesn’t this ease the worries from yesterday’s thread? They’ve taken steps to minimize false positives (one in a trillion accounts per year), and it’s not happening on private photos like rumored, only photos that are synced to iCloud (which is what they were doing server side already (?)). I don’t buy the slippery slope argument personally, if you want to get up in arms when they scan for politically motivated content, do so when they actually do that.
bdibs··on AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
How is that abusive? You pay for what you use and that’s it.
bdibs··on Astro: Ship Less JavaScript
It's sort of ironic that page loads 213kB of JavaScript from 8(!) separate scripts to show a large 0.
bdibs··on Companies excluding Coloradans from remote jobs to avoid sharing salary ranges
It looks like DigitalOcean changed their policies, I can’t find the same messaging on the linked job post.
bdibs··on Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19
Why would that incentivize the hospital though? Isn’t that who determines cause of death?
bdibs··on Covid: US backs waiver on vaccine intellectual property
Moderna themselves have pledged (temporarily) not to enforce their COVID-19 patents anyways, so I’m not sure who you’re defending.

If McDonalds gave out their hamburger recipe today, I don’t think they’d be on the brink of bankruptcy tomorrow.

I would imagine stopping a global pandemic is in the best interest of everyone, including the creators of any vaccine. They’ve made a killing so far and will continue to make plenty of money, patents or not.

bdibs··on Regulators urge safety recall of Peloton treadmill after child dies
As soon as the girl got off instead of continuing to drag the child under it, it would have stopped. It probably wouldn't have completely stopped it from happening but it certainly would have improved the outcome.
bdibs··on Regulators urge safety recall of Peloton treadmill after child dies
"Move fast and break things."

Edit: I didn’t mean to offend, or to be morbid. I was making a point about how that particular mindset often doesn’t lead to products that care about “boring” things like safety or long term reliability.

bdibs··on The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor
Between 7 and 9 hours of sleep has been recommended from every sleep research group I can find, long before that book came out.

Recent consensus statement: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4434546/

bdibs··on $28 Trillion of US Debt
John Oliver just did an episode dedicated to the national debt, it was a pretty interesting watch as a layperson.
bdibs··on Backblaze Privacy Update: Third-Party Tracking
I didn’t mean to imply that no companies actually care about privacy and security, I meant companies affected by a public incident like this.
bdibs··on Backblaze Privacy Update: Third-Party Tracking
> We take the privacy of our customers’ data and personal information very seriously

I wish companies would actually mean this and apply it proactively instead of just copy and pasting this in their apology after something like this happens.

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