I think a lot of people might be sympathetic to the idea that in wartime, you need to be stricter because of the incredibly high stakes. That Ukraine is at war, so they need to find and deal with these sources of disinformation.
I think those same people need to realize that the policies never get rolled back to a more liberal state when the war is over.
It sucks that this is a systemic advantage for authoritarians. It really sucks. It feels bad. But it’s the handicap you have to accept to resist authoritarianism.
Preventing the collection of data by the state may be impossible, but they should be accountable for who has it, who it’s given to, and they should need to go through proper due process to use it against you in any kind of official proceeding.
It might be impossible to get everyone out of the databases, but we can at least force warrant requirements and the like.
Also, how can we be assured the privacy practices of their subscription/payment platform are at least better than the (likely blockable) trackers?
Forming a financial relationship with a website is, theoretically, infinitely more traceable to your personal identity than all the cookies in the world.
Apple innovates in new and exciting ways to not support devices. They invent new antirepair technologies and have pioneered locked-in walled-garden app stores that prohibit users from doing what they want or need to keep their devices working.
They don’t get to wear the white hat just because they do some shit well. They are the bad guy. And they could change posture pretty much immediately if they were at ALL serious about their devices having long-term support. They control basically their whole tech stack and could make it so their devices can continue to be maintained indefinitely even if they aren’t doing it. But control matters more to them than support.
I really don’t think anyone should be giving them credit here, not even as a backhanded compliment.
Why does it have to be a company?
Tons of old hardware continues to be useful to its owners just by virtue of being on open and maintainable platforms.
But Apple continues to push harder and harder for planned obsolescence while claiming they support their devices better than the competition.
Apple earns unique hate in this category because of how strenuously they fight against things like right to repair. Failing to support old products isn’t the end of the world but intentionally making it so that old products aren’t supportable is very bad and the Apple App Store is a major instrument for making sure old Apple devices stop being useful.
Man I wish Obsidian were open source. Or that someone would just fully knock them off. It’s the only notetaking app I’ve ever used that didn’t feel like it was constantly fighting with me. Joplin just doesn’t do it for me, especially with those jex files rather than just storing stuff in plain text.
Our of curiosity, which specific MS product is the one you see as most valuable / hardest to do without for IT security?
I can’t imagine it’s word or excel or anything document-centric. That’s what most people think of when they think of MS Office, but in this day and age there are plenty of totally servicable alternatives. This from someone who both freely admits MS Word is the best wysiwyg editor and still refuses to use it. The sharing/collaboration stuff is pretty tight with MS Office, but my experience is that most people don’t use it and just email around attachments even though it makes more savvy people want to pull their hair out.
I have to assume Outlook’s the big boy, right? Email & sync? And then, I assume, there’s lot of cloud services that typical end users don’t even know is there?
It’s most likely a cause and effect reversal, in my opinion.
The conversation was happening because of the ads, not the other way around. Advertising works. It manipulates us into changing behavior, even without us realizing.
A real conversation makes you think about the thing being advertised, leading to you notice what would otherwise be totally below-the-radar things. People don’t like to imagine they have been manipulated, so the conspiracy of the listening phone seems preferable.
Block all ads. All the time. They are bad for us.
maybe not a four-wheeler or golf cart, since I don’t think you can drive those on regular roads
Look up your local neighborhood / neighborhood electric vehicle / low-speed vehicle laws.
There are some places where they are allowed. There’s also a lot of places where the cops just don’t care enough to do anything about it, at least so long as you stay off arterial roads.
Though I cannot recommend a cargo ebike enough. Long-tail or bakfiets, though I personally prefer the long-tails as they ride more like bikes and the racks on the back tend to be extremely versatile for mounting weird stuff. The cheapest good ones are around $1,200 with near-0 cost of ownership. Incredibly useful vehicles.
Arguably more stuff is going to be collected and sent to more people if it’s turned off. But it will be in a more piecemeal though likely more personally identifiable way. At least that’s what Google would definitely argue
I genuinely don’t know if the counterfactual is worse than the actual here. Either way bad.
Nah bro, you are.
It’s ALSO possible to generate virtual phone numbers for a small cost.
Using a cryptographic PoW is a different small cost.
Either way, it only takes a small cost to prevent mass bot registration.
You’re treating processing power and time as if it is 100% free just because it can be done in a VM. But it doesn’t matter if it is a VM. It is still going to require at least some certain threshold of processor time, and that processor time has a real cost. For the kind of place that can just spin up thousands of VMs and use it to do massive bot registration… they could just be mining bitcoins instead.
It’s not just whether you can do this. It’s how much value it has vs what ELSE you could be doing with the time and energy. A Signal account is already worth vanishingly little as a spam tool, they just need to give it enough of a cost to make it not worthwhile.
I still cannot comprehend their logic for why having full SMS integration would be such a disaster. It just makes no sense and I wish they’d admit that it isn’t a security concern but is just that they don’t want to do it. They just don’t want to, and don’t care that this policy makes it harder for users to adopt and use their service.
I know that SMS is a US-specific thing. But at least in the US, most people regularly interact with SMS. Having a platform that supports SMS means you can basically live in that platform – this is a major part of the success of iMessage.
The idea that it would create huge security gaps… I just don’t believe. I think the kind of user who wants to be on Signal clearly understands that SMS is not secure. All they need to do is have a clear visual indication when you are texting instead of using Signal, which isn’t that complex.
Instead, people like me who might try using it as their primary platform just see no point. None of my friends use it. So why should I even have it installed? And none of my friends see a reason to install it because I and everyone else don’t have it installed. If I could use it as my SMS app I might have it installed and lived-in, which greatly lowers that barrier.
You’re talking about a device which is a full-color high-definition surveillance camera that works at night and can be viewed from literally anywhere in the world and can be configured to send you alerts based on seeing people/animals/packages/whatever. That only costs them an inflation adjusted $13.
I don’t really think the “they wouldn’t believe this shit” argument really applies with how rapidly tech has changed.
If the data were properly encrypted and could only be decrypted by the client on their own device
Yeah, but part of Wyze’s sales pitch is their AI image recognition features, and they’d lose all training data by doing that and would force it to be processed locally, both of which would be a dead end.
I realize these might not be features you want nor care about… but those are the features they want to offer.
Enshitification doesn’t really apply to GitHub because you aren’t really locked into GitHub. At least you aren’t so long as you consider the git part of it to be more important than the social media platform part of it. Repositories are totally interoperable with other services so the cost to jump platform is fairly low. At least so long as you aren’t relying on curling stuff directly from GitHub, which everyone knows is a terrible idea and very bad practice yet happens all the time anyway.
The template and framework of this idea requires social media platforms be finger traps, with way higher costs to leave than enter.
Doctrow himself is pretty clear about this. Interoperability is the way you fight back against enshitification.
Why? Conservatism is about preserving traditional values and traditional power structures not the economy.
If you actually care about the economy that means you care about progressing a more effective and efficient state for the benefit of the people. Afraid that makes you a progressive which the conservatives assure us they aren’t.
“Smart Features” in the Messages app have always been explicitly processed only on-device. This is a big change if it is different than that.
I’m betting they’ll make this opt-out, which is fucking shady as hell. And worse, I bet opting out your own messages doesn’t stop someone else that is opted in from unknowingly/unintentionally transmitting all your messages that they received. Ugh.
I mean, give it a try. Easiest way is to just open a new mpv window and drag from the url bar into it. There’s also a lua script that allows mpv to still make use of sponsorblock, but I haven’t ever tried it. Youtube-DL is part of a standard mpv install unless you disabled it.
You can also just mpv ‘youtubeurl’ from terminal.
Why is a private business inherently better than the government as an ISP, though?
Either way it has to follow all relevant local laws about how to behave. The ISPs will respond to law enforcement requests either way. But at least a public entity will also need to be accountable to the public and respond to things like FOIA, as opposed to a private entity which has all kinds of ways to resist transparency and is more accountable to the shareholders.
Either way it is a near natural monopoly because running redundant wires/fiber is a waste of resources. There won’t be much consumer choice.
The idea that the government would be inherently inefficient is one that presumes a private entity that is highly insulated from market force wouldn’t. Free markets create a lot of pressure to improve products, but there’s no free market happening in a utility like an ISP. Even in the most competitive markets, that’s still choosing one from maybe 4 providers that barely compete with each other at all. And you have to sign longterm contracts with all kinds of complex pricing to “test” the competition, and testing it requires pretty advanced knowledge beyond most users – if you have no freedom to easily change your ISP, there’s just not any competition.
If the sword is double-edged, one of those edges is safe enough for a renfair.
If you are trying to maintain privacy from the bad actors that most people should fear – that is, advertisers and marketers –
VPNs are very effective because they increase the cost of that kind of datasurvillenace of you enough to make it not worth it. At least for now.
If you are trying to maintain privacy against state actors, especially to hide criminal activity, they will not be particularly effective. But are still better than the ISPs who likely don’t even have a policy of vetting state requests before turning over info.
Literally illegal in much of the US. Rentseekers must be protected.
I mean, the answer to that is clearly they should structure their service to store the absolute least possible personal information needed to allow the service to function so that when a legitimate law enforcement agency comes knocking they can honestly say they don’t have much.
Which… appears to be pretty much what they do.
I agree with you. Losing the protection of a right – even one as fundamental as privacy – is by definition not a violation so long as that happens through due process. Now we can certainly talk a lot about what level of process is due, and I’m sure it will be basically unanimous that current standards around the world are FAR too accommodating to law enforcement, but at least in principle a warrant justifies the invasion of privacy. That’s what the warrant is for.
This story kind of makes me want to switch all my stuff to ProtonMail.
I think perhaps you don’t know what an IDE is.
Notepad isn’t “technically” not an IDE. It does not have any of the features that make an IDE an IDE. People using something for programming does not make that thing an IDE.
An IDE is an integrated environment for development. Notepad is not integrated with any environment. That’s what makes it good.
Notepad is definitionally not an IDE. It is not an integrated environment – and anyone who is intentionally using it over alternatives is almost certainly doing so precisely because they do not want their text editor to be an integrated environment.
I’m sure there’s some case where Notepad is PART of an integrated environment, but it would have to be with support of other tools – likely a terminal of some sort.
The reason other text editors like – like Notepad++ or Neovim – can be full IDEs is because they have plugins to generate that integrated experience.
This is the exception to prove the rule that the other interests are definitely illegitimate. This is the website telling you that they give away your data for illegitimate purposes.
It’s not a surprise. We knew this was true. But seeing it’s spelled out like this is a little galling.
Illegitimate: not authorized by the law; not in accordance with accepted standards or rules
The website is basically admitting that they’re using your data maliciously, intentionally, by having this distinction.