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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • Oh yes for sure. Wasn’t saying otherwise. Was only pointing out the details because the way the program worked previously, it was kind of an all or nothing thing. And thus, Aqara joining could be taken as a sign that they are going to make everything completely open and interoperable and work perfectly directly with HA. I don’t think that’s the case.

    This is still a very important step. Open standards may be the most important part of home automation, but the second most important part might well be respect. Go back just a year or two and HA and open source in general were basically ignored in the market. Now things are changing.
    Every company that partners with HA further cements HA and open standards in general as a legitimate / major player in the automation market that manufacturers ignore at their own peril. The more that happens, the more products will be developed with open standards in mind.




  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.todaytoPrivacy@lemmy.mlIs TOR compromised?
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    19 days ago

    All the crypto in the world won’t help if you do stupid stuff and have crap OPSEC.

    A big part of that is stay under the radar. If I were NSA I’d be running a great many TOR nodes (both relay nodes and exit nodes) in the hope of generating some correlations. Remember, you don’t need to prove in order to raise suspicion.

    So for example if you have an exit node so you can see the request is CSAM related, and you run a bunch of intermediate nodes and your exit nodes will prefer routing traffic through your intermediate nodes (which also prefer routing traffic through your other intermediate nodes), you can guess that wherever the traffic goes after one or two relay hops through your nodes is whoever requested it.
    If you find a specific IP address frequently relaying CSAM traffic to the public Internet, that doesn’t actually prove anything but it does give you a suspicion ‘maybe the guy who owns that address likes kiddy porn, we should look into him’.

    Doing CSAM with AI tools on the public Internet is pretty stupid. Storing his stash on cell phones was even more stupid. Sharing any of it with anyone was monumentally stupid. All the hard crypto in the world won’t protect you if you do stupid stuff.


    So speaking to OP- First, I’d encourage you to consider moving to a country that has better free speech protections. Or advocate for change in your own country. It’s not always easy though, because sadly it’s the unpopular speech that needs protecting; if you don’t protect the unpopular stuff you jump down a very slippery slope. We figured that out in the USA but we seem to be forgetting it lately (always in the name of ‘protecting kids’ of course).

    That said, OP you should decide what exactly you want to accomplish. Chances are your nation’s shitty law is aimed at public participation type websites / social media. If it’s important for you to participate in those websites, you need to sort of pull an Ender’s Game type strategy (from the beginning of the book)- create an online-only persona, totally separate from your public identity. Only use it from devices you know are secure (and are protected with a lot of crypto). Only connect via TOR or similar privacy techniques (although for merely unpopular political speech, a VPN from a different country should suffice). NEVER use or allude to your real identity from the online persona. Create details about your persona that are different from your own- what city you’re in, what your age and gender are, what your background is, etc. NEVER use any of your real contact info or identity info.




  • Casey Neistat. Back when he was doing his daily vlog thing a lot of it was really interesting, covering him and his wife trying to make shit happen in the city as he was running and riding his powered skateboard around Manhattan. At some point his audience started drifting younger, way way younger, and I don’t know if it was him or me but I just kind of lost interest. It didn’t feel new anymore.

    That might be me to be honest. I actually don’t watch YouTube that much at all anymore, unless I’m looking for something specific. Their recommendation algorithm is garbage and it is so obviously going for raw time suck engagement that it leaves me with a bunch of unfulfilling clickbait / ragebait where I could watch it for an hour and then just want my hour back so I end up not returning. The whole platform used to be more full of interesting genuinely entertaining and educational videos, now it just feels like a giant time sink. And every other video is now some paid sponsorship or plug where the creator is basically just whoring out their own influence. Case in point, look up reviews of laser engravers. Every single one that I could find, especially of a couple major brands, the creator got the laser hardware for free. Some of them are just advertisements that reuse the manufacturer’s own stock footage, and some seem more like real reviews, but for one or two brands I literally could not find one video where the creator wasn’t sponsored by the laser manufacturer.


  • It’s a very simple answer Apple has guaranteed that your data will stay on your device and stay secure. This is generally trusted because Apple has a track record of keeping user data secure on the device or encrypted in the cloud even in ways Apple cannot access. Point is, when Apple says they are going to do this in a way that respects privacy, and they outline the technical details of how it will work, people trust that because there’s a track record.

    Microsoft has no such trust. They have a recent track record of being intrusive and using dark patterns to persuade users to give Microsoft their data, for example in Edge there have been new feature pop-ups that require data sharing with Microsoft and the two options are ‘got it’ and ‘settings’ so accepting requires one click and rejecting requires 4 going into the settings menu and changing a few things. Microsoft is also heavily pushing Copilot which is mostly cloud-based. Furthermore, Microsoft recently showed a system that would basically screenshot your computer at very regular intervals and store them in an insecure manner. Granted it was on the device, but the way they were going to be stored meant they could be stolen with two lines of code. And let’s not forget that Windows 11 cannot be set up without a Microsoft account, so to even use your computer you have to share your email address with Microsoft. In this and many other ways they just do not act like a company that respects privacy at all, they act like the typical big tech give us everything or we will make your life difficult type company that nobody trusts.



  • I’m strongly in favor of laws restricting how many 1-3 family homes a company can own. I think that limit should go up and down the chain of corporate ownership including parents and subsidiaries. There should be exceptions for things like worker housing, but single family homes should not be an investment opportunity for large corporations. All that does is drive up the prices and makes it harder for average people to own a home. There is no overall benefit to society.



  • I would agree with something like this, but focusing on residential properties. I also think there should be limits to how many residential properties a single company can own. I don’t mean like apartment buildings, I mean like single-family or two / three family houses.

    1 to 3 family homes are a resource that should be for the good of the American people. I’m not against somebody making money as part of that, but when the opportunity for investing starts pricing people out of the market then we need to have a hard think about whether the investing market is more important than the people or not. I don’t think it should be.


  • Where the hell are you getting that from? I didn’t say anything about immigrants.
    This has nothing to do with race or nationality or citizenship. I am saying if you have no rights to a building, as in you don’t own the building and you don’t have a lease there, then barging in and locking the door behind you should not automatically grant you any sort of special treatment. You are an illegal intruder, and the police should go in and arrest you. I think that should apply in situations like this and it should apply in situations even if the owner of the building hasn’t been around in a month.






  • This 100%>. It’s why Reddit is way more fun than Twitter. Twitter is like yelling into the void and sometimes the void yells back. It’s good for publishers and content creation, bad for real conversation. Reddit supports real threaded conversation with voting to highlight the good parts of the conversation.

    The other thing is interest following. Twitter you have to follow people, and a person may be posting on things you have interest in and other things you have no interest in. Reddit you follow subjects, and you see good content regardless of who posts it.

    Mastodon and Lemmy are just decentralized Twitter and Reddit.


  • What you see in movies is bullshit. Any explosion creates a huge fireball and people go flying in every direction. Actual munitions aren’t like that. Especially munitions that have to be carried on light little drones. That includes most hand grenades and air-dropped bombs.

    I’m concept, an explosion that creates that big fireball puts most of its energy into spreading burning fuel around to create that big fireball. It’s visually impressive, but not actually very destructive. In warfare you don’t care what it looks like, you want it to be destructive. And the best way to get bang for your buck so to speak with an explosive that has to be lightweight, is with shrapnel. An explosive wrapped in shrapnel is not visually impressive to watch, but it basically sends little bullets flying out in every direction and those bullets are what does the damage.

    So consider it this way. If I walk up to the jamming device and shoot it with a pistol, it’s not going to be visually impressive. Nothing is going to fly apart and explode in a shower of sparks and flames. The jammer device might not even move at all, it just now has a hole in it. But it is in fact quite thoroughly destroyed because the bullet from my pistol destroyed all of its internal workings.

    Same thing is true with the grenade. The hand grenade is designed to be light and effective, so a soldier can carry it without getting weighed down. Thus it is a small explosive wrapped in a lot of shrapnel. Soldier throws it at the enemy, enemy casualties come not from the explosion but from shrapnel wounds. Drop one of those grenades next to a piece of equipment that isn’t armored, and it may not even appear to move, but it has been quite thoroughly punctured by shrapnel and is thus destroyed.


  • the top end models of the good brands are just scams, they just look a bit nicer and have some shitty “AI powered” app you’ll never use.

    This is literally a scam.
    There was an article a while back which I can’t find right now, a few of those product designers were saying that past $100-$150 they really weren’t sure what benefits could be added so they just throw a bunch of useless whiz bang shit in that serves no useful purpose but they sell it for $300 or whatever and enough people buy it to make it worth building another SKU.

    In most cases the super top end one has the same motor as the midrange or low-midrange one, and takes the same brush heads, which means it does exactly the same thing. Buy that one for $85 and be done with it.