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testific8

34 karma · joined May 7, 2021

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testific8··on YouTube’s rules are used to silence human rights activists
I doubt this. People are willing to reupload videos that they like, so why wouldn't they seed? for example this video has been reuploaded quite a few times because people like it so much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhu-EA1ruNk

The whole point of a video hosting service is to act as an easy directory for finding videos you like. The fact that the same service happens to host the videos in this case is inconsequential.

testific8··on Crypto Fund III
I agree with most of what you've said, but some cryptocurrencies use proof-of-work systems (like RandomX) that truly are ASIC/FPGA/GPU-proof by design.
testific8··on Crypto Fund III
Yes but so is any asset. Gold, property, etc.
testific8··on Crypto Fund III
Because (at least originially) the goal of cryptocurrencies were to combat the double spending problem, providing an alternative to fractional-reserve banking.
testific8··on Windows 10 to be retired in 2025, as new OS unveils
You could use a rolling-release distro, but it means you are still updating like every year or so (although in more of a ship-of-theseus fashion).
testific8··on You can legally get and run WordPerfect for free
the ultimate solution is to release the source code and compile it against the newer ABI.
testific8··on The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
I think the new GNOME is pretty comparable to the Windows and MacOSX interfaces. Is there something I'm overlooking?
testific8··on The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
pine64 and purism are lot smaller than qualcomm and the like. They don't have that type of leverage.
testific8··on The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
Speaking from experience with the pinephone, the browser situation is actually pretty good on postmarketOS because they have a custom firefox configuration for mobile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co6qnlw4hgE

I can also confirm that the camera interface is slow. It takes like 30 seconds to dump a single image and render it into a jpeg. The main camera app is called "Megapixels". I'm not sure, but i've heard there are some paralellism changes coming downstream that may improve performance somewhat now that they have updated to gtk4.

testific8··on The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
I disagree. Fuchsia will eliminate the need for the hardware vendor to supply open-source drivers. In this regard, it is a major step backwards in security and upgradability.
testific8··on The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
The pine64 position on binary drivers is not as hard as the purism one (perhaps they try to balance more with cost), but there are still projects to reverse-engineer and replace some non-free firmware, such as the modem firmware: https://github.com/Biktorgj/pinephone_modem_sdk.

I agree that Fuchsia will become a problem going forwards, even if Fuchsia drivers can be reverse-engineered. It's also possible that phone hardware is commodified enough that google will be unable to lock us out, or that google abandons or delays the Fuchsia project.

testific8··on The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
If you are interested in postmarketOS linux, I think there are some faster phones that have been bootstrapped: http://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
testific8··on The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
There are many standards on linux, but in my experience they are mostly inter-compatable. I have KDE/X11 programs running just fine in my GNOME/Wayland environment. I also have alsa, pulseaudio and pipewire playing nice on my laptop.

I've heard binary distribution is a problem, with many overcomplicated methods like Appimage, Snap, and Flatpack. But it doesn't matter because linux users will prefer installing from source code or a trusted repository anyways. And they should: This is the more secure way of doing things. Closed source programs need not apply.

testific8··on Apple admits it ranked its Files app ahead of competitor Dropbox
Quite a number of terminal emulators have this feature. Alacritty and xfce4 terminal as well.
testific8··on U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says
bitcoin and related systems are a solution to the double spending problem. Perhaps a flawed solution based on the information we know now, but it is a solution nonetheless. some related systems such as monero, zcash, and GNU taler make attempts at ensuring spender privacy, like cash.

but the computational power is nessisary for the network to function in a manner that is provable to new nodes. Because you can use a digital signature to confirm a transaction happened after some time, but not before some time.

I don't think cash is a solved problem within the context of computer networks. If I could transfer money using a program by using a digital signature, I would be satisfied, but anyone who can get access to my credit card numbers (and name, billing address and other open source info) can make purchases in my name. And you of course must rely on the fractional reserves of some central entity.

testific8··on The Apple M1 compiles Linux 30% faster than my Intel i9
Yes but you probably would make those optimizations in C code and not assembly. The amd64 compiler is basicially the same C code whether or not it's been bootstrapped on armv8 or amd64.
testific8··on Don't take on China alone, says ex-Australia PM Kevin Rudd
care to enlighten us?
testific8··on Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private
I didn't pay for the OS on my pinephone, but for some reason the vendors decide not to use that as an opportunity to create a mass surveilance campaign.
testific8··on An Asian Uber Driver Was Attacked by a Mob. Then YouTube Took Down His Video
Nothing in the article indicates that it was racially motivated... except the title.
testific8··on An Asian Uber Driver Was Attacked by a Mob. Then YouTube Took Down His Video
[flagged]
testific8··on Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing
You can argue that all you like, but it is a ridiculous point. It's not perfect, but most of the time democracy works. This much is self evident.

If you are comparing the difference between having a company in charge of public health and a democratic government, you might as well compare the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy. Customers are not stakeholders in the same way that citizens are stakeholders.

When the public is angry at the government, heads will roll. When the public is angry at corporations, heads will glide down in golden parachutes.

testific8··on Authorities are looking to close the gap on crypto unhosted wallets
it is regretable that the bitcoin network and related networks are so dependent on modern computer infrastructure which is controlled by a handfull of institutions. But perhaps it does not need to be this way
testific8··on Authorities are looking to close the gap on crypto unhosted wallets
regulating intellectual "property" will only become increasingly difficult to protect and regulate as the technology for recording, copying, and disseminating information improves. In order to regulate intellectual "property", you need to gimp information technology with DRM.

I don't deem the existence of intellectual "property" necessary, in fact I predict its existance will become infeasable to uphold.

testific8··on Authorities are looking to close the gap on crypto unhosted wallets
In any case, I think this is a good thing. If crypto-currencies are regulated against, the remaining crypto-currencies must succeed on their technical merits as a currency (privacy, security, byzantine fault tolerance, speed, etc.) in order to evade regulation. So this would shift the focus towards systems like Monero, Zcash, and maybe even systems like GNU Taler that work alongside existing taxation/banking institutions.
testific8··on San Francisco’s Shoplifting Surge
how is this any better than security cameras? It's not like it would even stop them from forcing their way in
testific8··on San Francisco’s Shoplifting Surge
Perhaps today you could have machines manage many clerical duties. Essentially like a giant vending machine.
testific8··on Relaunching verification and what’s next
How so?
testific8··on Relaunching verification and what’s next
2FA has historicially been broken because it is usually attached to a phone number, and phone service providers are suseptable to social engineering. What twitter (and other websites) should be using is PGP, where the user holds the secret key, and there are separate forms on messages to view PGP signatures, and forms on accounts to view their public keys.
testific8··on std::latch
I was looking to use this feature, alongside some other C++20, but I was dissapointed to see that it wasn't supported yet by my compiler. So hopefully that gets supported soon. Until then a condition variable and an atomic<bool> will do the job.

I am looking forward to c++23 and beyond. Hopefully they will eventuall add fixed-point arithmetic support.

testific8··on Amazon Sidewalk
>The internet isn't a "surveillance network". It's just a network.

I posit that the internet is a surveillance network. Not only because its surveillance is a now primary function, but because it was always designed to be susceptible to various forms of surveillance.

It should be clear to programmers that the flaws in the internet and related protocols are numerous and tied to it's fundamental structure. This webpage discusses a number of them: https://secushare.org/broken-internet .

Additionally, the economic incentives adjacent to the internet and related protocols encourage the use of fingerprinting, as they don't otherwise have a means of dis-incentivising unwanted messages (this manifests itself in spam, denial-of-service attacks, botting, etc.)

>Also, what on earth does email or internet traffic have to do with any of this?

That paragraph was to make fun of the parent comment (crazygringo's) statement: "Also, I'm not sure where people are getting that Amazon is bad at privacy". the parent commenter seemed to suggest that it would be a good idea to share a dangerous amount of information with an organization like amazon simply because they are trustworthy (or rather, simply because they have not been proven to be untrustworthy) despite the fact that they have no incentive or regulation to prevent them from abusing that information in the future.

I joked that if crazygringo was so eager to share his personal information with third parties, then he should share his information with a stranger like me, as I've not yet been exposed for abusing my (non-existent) client's information.

>They use secure protocols in the first place, and they all already rely on large companies like Google and ISP's. And Amazon sure already knows everything I've bought on Amazon.

The fact that you would make a comment like this is unsettling. Think about what you are stating. Email is secure? Secure for whom? How does TLS prevent your email provider from reading your emails? How does it prevent the government from reading your emails? How does TLS help if connections can be downgraded to insecure and broken protocols? How does end-to-end encryption prevent attackers to see what you're doing when they need only know what domains you access? How does public key infrastructure prevent MITM attacks (Hint: it doesn't, it just outsources the problem to certificate authorities)?

The exploitation of the internet and related protocols is not some theoretical tsunami. It is a global flood that is occuring right now a million times a second under authoritatian regimes around the world.

I agree that many of these protocols already rely on large companies such as service providers; The fact that a transaction of information between two parties on the internet requres such a great number of arbitrarily powerful third parties is why we must dismantle the existing infrastructure (and replace it) in order to free ourselves (and future generations).

The age of blind trust will end one way or another.

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