If you weren’t implying that people from those areas aren’t allowed to provide opinions because presumably in this context they’d be slanted against China, then your post had absolutely no relevance. So, why did you bother posting it?
This is kind of proving his point tbh.
I think this is true for all games that access the internet. However, it seems an especially large number of Chinese games that make it to the West require an internet connection to function. Sometimes it makes sense (multiplayer mechanics, gacha, etc.), sometimes it doesn’t at all (some relatively popular single-player RPGs with no online play require a connection just to make a save file, for example).
This is just to say I understand people being concerned if all they see are these Chinese online-required games everywhere when they can also find some random completely offline game made in America, Europe, Japan, etc. just as easily (or even a game with an optional online mode that can be disabled without the game breaking).
There’s a caveat that will apply in the future, but is completely meaningless right now, in that people born after some day in December 2025 need to have a “meaningful connection” to Canada or something, so like living in Canada for a certain amount of time. But for nearly everyone currently alive there’s no restrictions other than having a Canadian ancestor at some point in your direct line.
It’s literally as far back as possible, as long as you can prove the chain of descent through birth certificates and marriage records and so on.
The bill is C-3, since apparently the article didn’t mention it.
I listened to some of the “music.” I’m not sure wtf is going on in his head at this point, and I’m glad I don’t understand.
Matrix is fragmented too, but it’s generally less fragmented in my experience (if you use a relatively well developed client). Part of this is because most people just use Synapse for their server. With XMPP, server implementations support random combinations of XEPs, and specific servers often are missing random XEPs because they’re not enabled by default and so on (thinking about ejabberd for instance here, the default config probably isn’t what most people want). I also routinely have random compatibility problems between clients pop up with XMPP. As a basic example, retracting messages is very haphazard.
Anyway, yeah, if they standardize on server and client setup for all govt instances, it’d be fine either way probably. The clients may be somewhat janky, but they can probably fix those issues more easily when they’re only focused on one client (although unless it’s like FluffyChat and cross-platform, they may need to standardize multiple clients) and server.
I think there have been some attempts to do so, but they’re just not good enough (and/or end up dead after a while).
The biggest problem with XMPP is what various servers and clients implement is kind of all over the place. For instance, most clients support an older version of OMEMO, but some clients support newer versions, and the different versions are incompatible.
The other issue is some platforms (iOS in particular) have pretty shitty XMPP apps filled with bugs.
I still generally like XMPP more than Matrix since ATM Matrix clients are also filled with bugs/laggy, Synapse (the main server implementation) is very resource heavy, and message syncing is kind of shit if the client doesn’t implement sliding sync (like FluffyChat). I personally think the UI for both XMPP and Matrix clients generally kind of suck, which isn’t great for convincing non-techy people to use them.
Except it is still encrypted to the intended recipient. As the other commenter said, WhatsApp is just another “member” of the group that you can’t see. Basically all they’d have to do is have a server somewhere functioning as a WhatsApp client. Your client sends the message to your intended recipient. It also then sends the message to their “client.” The routing server for the messages can’t decrypt the messages. All the messages are still encrypted per-member of the group and can’t be decrypted until it hits the ends, but WhatsApp is basically a mole siphoning all your messages and storing them.
Obviously it’s deceptive. But if you individually encrypt the messages you’re sending, the one you send to the receiver still can’t be decrypted by Meta, only the copy sent directly to Meta can, so the copy sent to your intended receiver is still “E2EE.”
So, is it basically treating every message as a “group” message where it sends it to some system WhatsApp account and then also to your intended receiver? This is what I’m assuming based on them supposedly being able to see deleted messages. Also would let them say it’s technically still “E2EE” since it’s indeed E2EE to your receiver, but it’s also E2EE to them as well.
If this were true (which is nearly impossible since you said “all”), stuff like Anubis wouldn’t exist since you could just toss up a crowd-sourced robots.txt and be done with it.
This issue is largely manifesting through AI scraping right now. Additionally, many intentionally ignore robots.txt. Currently, LLM scrapers are basically just bad actors on the internet. Courts have also ruled in favor of a number of AI companies when sued in the US, so it’s unlikely anything will change. Effectively, if you don’t like the status quo, stuff like this is one of your few options.
This isn’t even mentioning of course whether we actually want these companies to improve their models before resolving the problems of energy consumption and potential displacement of human workers.
Corporations want the existing copyright system for their own products but simultaneously want to freely scrape data from everyone else.
I mean, they say earlier that music is actually well-preserved, but it’s disproportionately popular music. If the goal is then to preserve everything, I’d expect them to go for stuff that isn’t likely to be in some random audiophile’s collection or whatever then.
- Over-focus on the most popular artists. There is a long tail of music which only gets preserved when a single person cares enough to share it. And such files are often poorly seeded.
- We primarily used Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize tracks. View the top 10,000 most popular songs in this HTML file (13.8MB gzipped).
- For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).
- For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.
Perhaps I’m reading this wrong, but is this not a little backwards? Since unpopular music is poorly preserved, shouldn’t the focus be on getting the least popular music first?
I think fundamentally a lot of people do not understand that just because China and Russia (or a number of other countries) are in opposition to the US doesn’t inherently make them “good.” They’re pretty much all shitty too, just in different ways than the US, yet actual problems get brushed off as “the loss of making Winnie the Poo jokes,” as if not being able to make jokes on Weibo is the problem.
I will never understand the hypocritical surveillance state apologism when it comes to China or Russia on this site.
If China’s surveillance state was purely for the benefit of their citizens, they wouldn’t need such an extensive censorship apparatus that frequently censors minorities and minority beliefs (e.g. LGBT topics) as well as content that reflects particularly poorly on the government.
Tbh it’s linked to a ton of things (lots of cancers), so it’d be a pretty big deal in general if they’re able to scale it into something widely usable.