It turns out that startup funding for Signal was from a US Government tied entity. Some people won’t like that. Here’s an interesting article: Signal Facing Collapse After CIA Cuts Funding

Someone already commented on the “nothing-burger” this article and line of reasoning actually is, so I won’t repeat it here.

$19m / 50 = $380,000 per year per employee!!!

This $19M figure includes more things. That’s why a blog post shouldn’t be read as an accounting report. Report summaries with salary figures are available btw, one search away.

The infrastructure was not designed to minimize the cost of operations, it was designed for another purpose, data collection by third parties:

The quoted text is not evidence for this. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Elon Musk also promotes Signal:

He promotes Linux too. Also, I bet he drinks water.

I see some valid concerns / questions, but it’s immersed in a muddy water of arguments that is hard to disentangle.

Bingus Duckus

tl;dr “Signal might be untrustworthy because the tech came from a State-sponsored project and the current chairman acknowledges that Wikipedia has a white and Western bias.”

just wait until they find out pretty much all tech we have can be traced back to government-funded research.

Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github.

Not true. Signal has a very similar client verification process to Telegram’s, described here. The lack of an iOS reproducible build is an Apple limitation / nuisance.

It’s very complicated, the 2nd jailbroken device is necessary because there’s no other way to download the .ipa, but even if you manage to do that and bit-for-bit reproduce the .ipa you downloaded from source, there’s no way to know if the App Store is sending every user the same .ipa or if your other, non-jailbroken iPhone downloaded a backdoored one.

Telegram docs even acknowledge these limitations.

Ultimately, this client verification is not the selling point Telegram’s founder makes it sound like, since most messages are not E2EE and the server code is closed.

exactly, they (Telegram) don’t need to put sketchy code in the clients when most messages are not E2E encrypted and they control the servers lol

Even being Google, it’s unlikely they collect biometric data. It probably uses the same SDK as other apps implementing biometric locking do, processing this data locally, as the biometric templates are also locally enrolled.

good time to switch to organic, gluten-free, vegan, open source, self-hosted and family-grown biomass fuel

just the US speedrunning a dystopic world

also, that’s windows only

Supported for devices with hardware support (the range is the same as Edge) on Windows only. Enabled by default in Nightly and can be enabled via the media.wmf.hevc.enabled pref in about:config. 10-bit or higher colors are not supported.

https://caniuse.com/hevc

royalties are really great, innit?

So that means if we ever have an open source NVIDIA driver that matches the proprietary I won’t be able to connect my 4K screen @ 120hz via HDMI (as the only option) because made up rules by an HDMI faction of TV manufacturers say so?

yup, we need brands making TVs with DisplayPort.

UPDATE

Even though AMD might not be able to add support for HDMI 2.1, nouveau certainly will as Nvidia’s open source driver also supports HDMI 2.1 so there is no reason to believe that at least some drivers can’t support HDMI 2.1. It’s quite backwards, but apparently having all the logic inside firmware (like Nvidia does) will probably help us implementing support for HDMI 2.1 🙃"

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Firmware-Blobs-HDMI-2.1

Google Gemini does a better job IMO by rejecting the premise of the obviously biased question in the first place.

I’m pretty sure since Microsoft Tay, conversational agents are incentivized to drop the subject if the chat becomes too combative / antagonistic.

My Firefox DNS over HTTPS settings are as they were before the upgrade. Maybe this is Flatpak-specific?

Well, they already made it very clear to everyone back in May that the content created by the community does not belong to the community. Anyone still using that dump deserves to be explored.

open-source keyboard for android, fork of OpenBoard.

is it making to F-droid soon?

imo it’s always better to trust a well reputable VPN over your ISP. I don’t know of any ISP that can be trusted. By not using them you’re essentially turning a “maybe private” into a “certainly not private”.

it’s like when they compute losses for pirated content, just assuming every download would be equivalent to a Golden Edition Purchase at the highest price charged in their history, when in reality they’d be lucky to convert 1% of those downloads into sales.

My thoughts exactly. I still remember when the reversed engineered codes for the classic GTAs were out (RE3), all GitHub forks were quickly taken down.

Same. I felt I couldn’t live without Nova, now I feel like I can’t live without KISS. I really like the “swipe and type” flow to open an app and touching an empty area to open the recent entries. All that depends on your settings ofc. It’s not the prettiest, but it’s by far the fastest launcher I’ve had.

“use this rotary phone to enter your year of birth”

In the worst case a privacy nightmare, and in the best case useless.

people make decisions, not businesses

wow, they are not completely beyond redemption, it seems

Looks smooth to me. In fact, as the only Android browser afaik that has support for ublock origin, Firefox is the only usable mobile option IMO.

I use Bitwarden, but what’s wrong with 1password?

actual link

What about it?

afaik (and I’m no lawyer nor have a legal background) companies operating/hosting physical servers somewhere are subject to local laws and regulations, so yes.

In my view that’s why a “no logging” policy followed by a third party auditing matters, but in the end the local regulations can still force companies to keep certain records to be allowed to operate there. Because of this I wouldn’t pick countries with a poor track of freedom of speech or high censorship as exit if available.

right, I’m asking about the DLC alone, I already have 2.0 without PL

To anyone who’s playing it: Is Phantom Liberty worth the $30?

In other words, it’s (basically) impossible for you to send the torrent data to someone else.

I don’t know how (in)accurate this description is, but I’ve been seeding hundreds of GB since Mullvad dropped port fwd. Same for the old times when I didn’t bother using a VPN, I never had to enable port forward in my router for it to work.

I’ve been downloading and seeding ever since too. People are dismissing / moving away from mullvad for nothing.

OP is receiving newsletters

That looks like a proper request to disable 2FA. Their problem is requiring login to unsubscribe from newsletter emails, which is total BS.

If support won’t take your email out of their list, just block the address / domain and move on, I guess.

I wouldn’t give them any extra personal info after what happened.

Despite username similarities, I’m not Legal Eagle, nor do I have a legal background. Though I would be very much surprised if authorities in the US could search anybody’s phone at will without consent, warrant, or reasonable suspicion.

I understand the phone owner is not covered by the fifth amendment to prevent authorities from unlocking a device using biometrics, but authorities still need a warrant or probable cause as it falls into search of private property.

unless there’s a way for non-root apps to bypass the Android API to access these sensors, I’d say it’s pretty solid.

right, I do have framework in my list of candidates for next laptop