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dmantis

1,118 karma · joined April 4, 2020

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dmantis··on Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
I haven't encountered such a thing on private trackers for a very long time. Like, for years.

They usually have a very decent moderation and if they say that an entry has some particular resolution/subs/audio then it has it.

Sure, you have to stay as a seeder for some ratio/period in such trackers and can't hit-and-run, but it gives a warm feeling of contributions anyway.

dmantis··on Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
On the other hand, privacy becomes a luxury. People love signaling their status and standing out from the crowd. Entire car and clothing brands exist solely because of that.

And if enough people stand out, it doesn't matter anymore.

dmantis··on Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
True. Though I have mixed feelings buying new pixel from Google after all these actions.
dmantis··on Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
The API behaves this way:

> To request a user's age range and sharing status, you call the Play Age Signals API (beta) from your app at runtime. The default age ranges the API returns are 0-12, 13-15, 16-17, and 18+, but you can receive custom age ranges.

https://developer.android.com/google/play/age-signals/use-ag...

But I don't find it any better. I don't see any viable reason to provide identification to my phone's OS. If a parent buys a phone for their child, they can already set up parental controls before handing it over.

I wish Motorola all the best with their GrapheneOS partnership.

dmantis··on Our position on open-weights models
Apparently, looking at Iraq and Vietnam, US citizens only believe in "personal freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the value of human life" when it comes to US citizens, not to humans in general.

Even on HN, I saw a lot, that when people discuss surveillance topics, they argue whether ie NSA can spy on Americans, not on everyone. Mostly, nobody even question the human rights of those inferior humans abroad.

That's a very long wiki page, I must say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes

So the question stays open.

dmantis··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
The point is not what they believe, but how to avoid both breaking the law and not giving up your data, isn't it?

As long as that's legal, what they believe doesn't matter.

You are not legally obliged to keep your data on your devices all the time.

dmantis··on A retrospective of my time on the internet
Well, adware and spyware just became a normal thing that people surrendered to and don't call a malware anymore due to heavy lobbying.

Google adds cloud AI spyware to the new android versions, feeds private email contents to it; meta tries to spy by any fingerprinting techniques it can find and sells data to thousands of "data brokers" and everything is framed like it's supposed to be this way.

Would be much better if each "data broker" executive, Palantir's/Meta managers, Celebrite/NSO mercenaries do jail time just like malware/botnet/data exfiltration actors from those times.

dmantis··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
Such a convenient time frame with all think-of-the-children bs wave to point fingers at the one of the best VPN services our there with spotless reputation and raise a hysteria with duplicated stream of posts, isn't it?

Surely just a coincidence.

dmantis··on Never Give Them Your Face
> Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against?

How? There are no forms on the website.

Wouldn't it actually be logical for a person advocating for privacy not disclosing his identity?

dmantis··on Danish privacy activist Lars Andersen raided by police
World is not black and white. Most people would probably prefer to live in a world with low-power petty-crime rings and ability to be free and safe apart from having their wallet stolen once in a while rather than with e.g. Russian-like state mafia country with enormous amount of power and ability to target everyone at every time for their families interests. When you have a destroyed social ladder and everything can be taken at any moment under few people control immediately because they just want it.

That's apart from the fact that in the palantir case you also invite foreign intelligence and CIA to your home.

dmantis··on VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'
The first law about building technical and legal infrastructure to enable website blocking in Russia in 2012 was passed under the name of children protection. Everything else is an addition.

People from duma (the russian parlament) also publicly stated it would never use it for anything but children protection.

dmantis··on Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users
>signed/sealed OS image

This way we will just have unremovable age verification, spyware, online accounts to use the os, name another bs from other vendors. What's the point of Linux then? The moment big corps and the state can seal spyware into your computer, they'll happily do it.

I'd rather have a separate burn device with whatever os for state services which lives in a faraday cage most of the time and have a proper OS I control on the main device than give somebody control over it.

dmantis··on Iroh 1.0
That only works for the infrastructure of one entity. It doesn't establish direct connection to my friend's device by a key pair if he is outside of the particular organisation tailscale VPN.

p2p apps need direct connections.

dmantis··on Claude Fable 5
Isn't that a good thing in a way? If everyone has the weapon and defense at the same time, we will fix security holes and live safer lifes instead of having some three letter agencies and military backdoors in everything.

Pandora box is open anyway. It's better now for everyone to have the same power rather than a few national states.

dmantis··on Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses
That's called NSA.
dmantis··on Squillions: How money laundering won
Studies say otherwise: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-40654-6_...

Cash is actually faster in many cases, the 'slowness' is the matter of perception and the need to make a cognitive operation of 1st grader counting, which is apparently a daunting prospect for many people.

And even if it were slower by 20-30 secs, the advantage it gives in control and privacy is such enormous that I don't understand people who use banks at all.

The last thing other people should know is how, where, and when a person spends their money. And due to the AML surveillance from the discussed article the banking privacy is practically dead.

dmantis··on Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
I don't feel that LLMs are replacing books for professionals.

The problem with LLM learning is not that they can't explain a concept, but you have to know what to ask in the first place. To get a deep proper answer from LLMs you need a deep precise prompt. When you learn the new topic, you don't know about the topic itself, so you need a properly structured interleaved material to grasp new concepts.

After you get the concepts from books, you can prompt the LLM for particular non-covered subjects you are interested in.

So even these days when I'm interested in some topic, I sometimes even ask the very same LLM to provide me top-10,top-20 books for the topic, with short overview for which type and level of readers and style they are, pick a few and read them.

LLM is a replacement for docs and simple questions on StackOverflow, not for the real organized knowledge that requires a few hours session of concentration to understand.

dmantis··on Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
> There will be businesses no human can comprehend or manage.

If nobody neither fully created nor manages the business, then we probably shouldn't assume any property rights on it by anyone, therefore all the profits must go to the public.

dmantis··on Oura says it gets government demands for user data
Law enforcement of another jurisdiction won't, but can try to snoop into the data.
dmantis··on Shunning AI is the human choice
Why would it?

It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it.

Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.

dmantis··on Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints
I hope regular people will stop using "national security" and "national interests" as euphemisms and framing, and will call these things a psychopathic fight for power.

Assuming that some humans are worse than others because of their flag picture and that they deserve less access to resources is barbarism. There is no security in limiting access to NSA-style entities; it's an absolute insecurity for everyone but them throughout the whole world. How is that in anyone's "interests"?

We see every day now how suspicious bugs that look exactly like backdoors (i.e., Microsoft BitLocker) get exposed. That's in humanity's interests (and those of particular nations as a subset) — not being subjugated by small rings of professional outlaws. We need these instruments to defend people, everywhere. We don't need to give a leverage to any state psycho. Let's make everyone of them weaker.

dmantis··on Mystery Microsoft bug leaker keeps the zero-days coming
Some anon hero cleans up backdoored garbage.

This year looks very refreshing for software. My guess is because of the AI-assitance in grinding an unlimited amount of code. While I feel sorry for maintainers and developers who have a new CVE everyday, society seems to be sweeping away 20 years of backdoor development by shady companies and spies, making computing actually safe and trusted for the first time in our lifetime.

dmantis··on I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
AGPLv3 does.
dmantis··on I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
> don't really care about open source.

Exactly. You can sell the products of your work all the way you want.

But pretending to share with the world and then push back when the world actually use it under these same open terms is a hypocrisy.

dmantis··on I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
> Amazon doesn’t contribute changes upstream

Are you sure that's the case with AGPL? Cause they can sue them and enforce the contribution. I doubt that's the case. And those who went with MIT/BSD openly allow distribution without contribution.

dmantis··on Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
> You just have to use a secure device.

No, you have to use government backdoored device. I.e. the most secure android rom (at least the only rom we know is not penetrable by state-sponsored celebrite based malware) is not covered by google's play protect, while bunch of outdated CVEd phones are.

Same will go with many hardened Linux machines, QubesOS, Whonix stations, you name it. I'd argue they are far more secure than any average windows/macos installation.

Hardware attestation has nothing to do with security, it's censorship.

dmantis··on EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing"
People who are actually interesting, are often aware of that fact and avoid surveillance at the moment. You can use tor/i2p, proper VPN setups, VMs, alternative mobile ROMs and other tech and cut most of the fingerprints, trackers and identification. Pretty sure the trash from state agencies doesn't like that.

But the current push from all sides to provide id for everything and remote attestation through Google and apple will make the alternatives very hard to use as it basically cuts such people from the economy altogether.

dmantis··on Irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs
Just curious, out of your class theory, do we need to have worker solidarity with low-level street drug dealers?

Or the worker must have an official contract?

dmantis··on Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th
I don't see how their measures will help. It might have helped a few years ago, but one can literally ask to recreate the full book contents 1-to-1 with any local uncensored LLM just from a video of changing pages. You don't even need to break a DRM in a classical way.

If I were them, I would rather respect my users than fight with windmills.

dmantis··on Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight
I hope AA will make an onion version in addition to the unstable domain switching.
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