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Cake day: Jan 07, 2024

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Yes it’s called metadata. I don’t know why they want it.


I don’t know, are they? As far as we know they could only get unsent notifications, which are obviously still with Apple/Google because the target phone is offline and so they couldn’t be delivered yet. Which would explain why they only got thousands of them, not billions.


You are trying to read what isn’t there. Push notifications just don’t contain any messages, at all, in any form, whether you want to call it data or metadata. They are just telling the Signal app to wake up, and then it securely checks with the server what’s up.

The only think authorities are getting then, is the fact your Signal app was told to wake up at time X. Not whether you actually received a message, let alone any information about any messages.

It is confusing the system is called “push notifications”, because it has nothing to do with the actual notifications you are seeing on your phone. It’s just a mechanism to wake up sleeping apps so that they can check up with their server.


A push notification, from a technical standpoint, is just a way to wake up an app. It doesn’t have to contain any information.

So when you get a message, the messaging service sends a push notification through Apple/Google, which is a way of saying “Hey messaging app, wake up”. The app then starts running in the background on your phone, connects to it’s server, asks if there is anything new to know about, and the server tells it about a new message, if any. This can then generate a notification on your phone, but importantly what you are seeing in the notification did not come through Apple/Google, all that did was the “Hey messaging app, wake up!”.

If authorities then request this data from Apple/Google, all they can see is the times at which your messaging app was asked to wake up. Not whether any message was actually received, or what it contained, or from who. Because all that never touched Apple/Google’s systems, not even in an encrypted form.

That being said, some data can be sent directly through the Apple/Google system along with the wake up message, so it’s not impossible that some apps include some metadata there. In theory they shouldn’t. For example simple marketing notifications or ads often are just included with the push, because it’s simple to do.


Nothing about the app is secret, Google openly advertises it


It’s for E2E encryption in chat apps.


Let me try: Lmao. Uses a computer, still does stuff the slower way because learning new things is too difficult.

To be serious, I am looking for the best solutions for my use cases, not adequate ones. Yes dd works perfectly fine and as you noted doesn’t take long to use anyway. But just because it’s fine doesn’t mean other approaches aren’t better.

A GUI tool can offer or take a list of download URLs for common distros so downloading isn’t a separate step, it can check if the target device is a flash drive and not a hard drive by mistake, it can automatically choose the optimal block size for the device, it can verify the process by reading it back from the device, can show you the current filesystem, label, and usage of the target device to confirm, it can handle flashing to multiple devices at the same time with separate and total progress bars.

If I wanted to do all that on the command line it’d be quite a lot of commands or a sizeable script to write. Or I can use a simple dd command and lose out on all of the above. Either way it’s a worse option. I will only use dd when a GUI tool isn’t installed, or when I’m on a system without a DE.


It’s faster to drag and drop a downloaded ISO and choose the target from a dropdown, than do it on a command line. And get a progress bar. As much as command line is usually faster, it isn’t in this case.

Yes you can also get a progress bar on the command line but it’s more typing again, and realistically you need to look the option up every time if you use dd once every 3 months.


Oh? And you’re the authority on that?

Well yes, I am the authority on my opinions, just like anyone else is on theirs.

I do agree though that its not necessarily the same league as the others.

That’s what I mean, I don’t think it belongs next to Matrix or 12 Monkeys. It’s a run of the mill Tom Cruise action film. Very enjoyable, but it doesn’t break any new ground, in my opinion.


Oblivion? It was all right, and I recommend it, but I wouldn’t call it a mandatory watch, it didn’t have any special message


That’s the point. There is nothing strange or shady about the fact that things you type into DeepSeek.com are sent to DeepSeek.com. Obviously keystrokes you submit to a website are submitted to the website.


I’m not saying what’s “the correct play” or not, I’m refuting the claim all Chromium-based browsers are immediately affected, because I know of at least one that will keep V2 support.

But I will keep using Vivaldi. It will take me the same time to migrate to Firefox regardless if I do it today or a year from now when Vivaldi drops V2 support. I have nothing to gain by migrating sooner, but potentially much to gain by waiting.

  • Vivaldi might decide to keep support indefinitely,
  • Vivaldi might decide to update the built-in ad blocker to use UBlock Origin tech,
  • Google might backtrack the decision (hah!),
  • a whole different browser I want to try might come out in the meantime and I’d have to migrate twice,
  • Firefox might die after losing Google funding due to the monopoly ruling.
  • I will build a new PC in a year and it will be a good time for a software refresh,
  • Or, the most likely, none of this will happen, and I will migrate to Firefox then, if that’s the best move at the time.



I hope we will get to the bottom of this, because all the armchair experts with tons of different explanations for how this happened are annoying. There are so many people confidently explaining different conflicting theories.



Every so often someone posts something on Lemmy or somewhere else which contains a Twitter link that’s interesting or relevant, and so there is value in me visiting it. Just because I don’t “use” Twitter doesn’t mean I don’t end up reading a Twitter post every so often, because other people use it.


I used a fake name on Facebook and one day I similarly got suspended asking for government ID. So I photoshopped some fake ID with the fake name, printed it, put it in a plastic sleeve and took a photo of that, and they accepted it.


I didn’t look into it much other than trying it out for 15 min. Good to know lol.


some new upstart closed Source program that is shiny just like how Discord took over from Slack

Guilded already exists. It’s a Discord clone with more features, but no one uses it. I assume they are just waiting for Discord to fail one day.


The certs are sold by certificate authority companies, and Microsoft doesn’t get a share of that, though I’m not sure.

Yeah, software being signed says nothing about it not being malicious or insecure, but it does prove the author is what it says, and if it is malicious then the responsible party is clearly visible.

For non-commercial hobby/open-source software the certificate price is prohibitive, so the only 2 options are Microsoft Store or accepting that users will see the scary warnings, and of course complain to the developer about it.


You can pay a one time fee if $25 to get Microsoft to sign your app on the Microsoft store, or you can pay $400+ per year to buy your own certificate. So Microsoft Store is sadly the cheap way to release apps on Windows. (Without users getting scary warnings from Windows and AV about installing unsigned aoftware)


I’d assume they want to be able to update it and that’s why it needs a store listing.


anyone remember the time when google removed(!) their internal “don’t be evil” rule?

I remember when media falsely reported clickbait articles that they did and people bring that up to this day. They moved it from the introduction to the closing statement. Which you can argue makes it less prominent or whatever, but it was never removed.

Of course it makes no difference, it wasn’t followed either way, and definitely isn’t followed now. But no, it was never removed. You can see it yourself right here at the end: https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/


Yes. Which reinforced the need to not trust binary releases, like these Flathhub ones, as they don’t have such assurances.