I mean, if you’re worried about Google doing something like that, they could just as easily manufacture statements by you with enough supporting evidence to screw you no matter what you say.
The owner of the lemmy instance you are on, can sign in as you and leave comments all over the place and hide them from your view and manufacture the logs to look like it was posted from your IP address.
When I went through the immigration process with my spouse we were asked to provide Bank statements, Affidavits from friends, coworkers, peers, and family, Photographs (including being interrogated about who was in the photos), Perform separated interviews where personal questions were asked and then cross verified (what side of the bed do you sleep on, what color is her toothbrush, what are some shows or movies you watch together, etc), We were notified that we may be surveilled, to verify that we spend time together (don’t know if it actually happened or not) My spouse had to have a full biometric physical performed and the result given to USCIS, Medical history, And about 100 pages of forms where you are required to disclose all affiliations with any groups you may have, political affiliations, etc.
Granted this is for permanent residency, not a visa, but the level of information you are required to divulge to USCIS is astronomical.
It’s been many years thankfully since I have had to do anything for USCIS, but it would not surprise me if they already ask you for social media information, and regardless of if they ask you, they are definitely finding everything they can about you.
The kicker is that everything is discretionary, so it doesn’t matter what they ask, since they can just say no if they feel like it anyway.
Amiunique is a good one that demonstrates how just with the specs of the device you are using (os, browser, screen size, browser version, user agent, color pallette, js engine, language, keyboard type, etc) you can create a totally unique fingerprint that can be used to track you without ever knowing your name, or who you are as a person.
But they didn’t implement rcs, which isn’t even new, android messaging has supported rcs for four years. Rcs as a whole is 15 years old.
If the plan was to implement rcs, they could have done that during the phase out of sms. But just removing one of the key features that helped people adopt signal (a feature which no other real messaging app did since the dissolution of Google hangouts), with no plan or consumer messaging about a replacement, and basically no real reasoning communicated to the end user is a pretty bad decision regardless of a ‘we know best’ mentality.
I didn’t know about alien, that is pretty cool.
However this bit from the readme is hilariously on brand for Linux:
"To use alien, you will need several other programs. Alien is a perl program, and requires perl version 5.004 or greater. If you use slackware, make sure you get perl 5.004, the perl 5.003 in slackware does not work with alien!
To convert packages to or from rpms, you need the Red Hat Package Manager; get it from Red Hat’s ftp site. If your distribution (eg, Red Hat) provides a rpm-build package, you will need it as well to generate rpms.
If you want to convert packages into debian packages, you will need the dpkg, dpkg-dev, and debhelper (version 3 or above) packages, which are available on http://packages.debian.org"