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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • There are 2 issues here that are being mixed.

    One is women not being allowed to positions of power. The other is with women being underrepresented in certain fields (e.g., stem).

    The second issue is what I am talking about and I don’t think at all that men “choose” not to try certain careers in the same way women don’t “choose” not to study stem and pursue stem careers. For both, social pressure and expectations, an existing field dominated by the other sex with all its implications are factors of discrimination. Strict gender roles are damaging for both men and women, and this is a perfect example.



  • Not OP, but positions like nurses or teachers are very female dominated. It’s not like males cannot reach those positions, but there are social obstacles to that. To make an example from my country, in Italy primary school teachers are > 90% female. I believe in kindergarten they reach 97 or 98%. This is also partially the result of strict gender roles than discriminate both men and women in terms of caring for children (I.e., women are de facto forced to do that, men are pushed away), which then reinforces the social practice of women doing all the caring jobs.

    This is IMHO a problem for both men and women, but probably it’s not from the same perspective as what OP meant…


  • Yes, the whole discussion is around antitrust, and he thinks republicans have a chance to do better than democrats there. There is nothing to “bro” about, it’s pretty clear from the context. If he said any of that before the election, I could vaguely read an endorsement for single-issue voters. Saying republicans are better than democrats in fighting antitrust after Democrats shat their pants about it, doesn’t sound an endorsement to me.

    The rest of this comment is out of topic. His focus (and his company focus) has always been on a specific political area. So there is no expectation that he would address the whole political scenario, when he was talking about that narrow area.

    But he went out of his way to demonize the democratic party and somehow hold the Republicans up as the defenders of small business

    So this is what bothers you? A completely legitimate critique of the democratic party? Well, I personally cannot care less, but you do you.

    I see the issue as very simple: Him and his company work in the privacy space. Tech monopolies are a problem because captured people. Improving in this space is a win for privacy. Which is not something that is beneficial “in a vacuum”, it’s beneficial to all those vulnerable people that will be attacked by this government, or the next. he expressed optimism about the fact that republicans can do better than democrats here. Period. Naive, wrong, whatever. A legitimate opinion based on his reading of the last few years’ trend.

    No endorsement, no “pledge loyalty”, nothing. Just a consideration. He also mentioned on his reddit account that ultimately actions will be what will count (as it is obvious). So to me this is legitimately a nothing burger. I cannot care less that people in US (and in many more places) live politics like a football game. I cannot care less that you or others got hurt because he criticized Democrats. They could and should do better, and then if the critique is unfair I will be there saying that he “goes out of his way” to criticize them. So far he clearly motivated his opinion with what Schumer did.



  • Republicans tech policy is motivated entirely by the fact that their racist and conspiratorial views were getting them banned on social media sites from 2015 - 2024

    And i should care because…? Why should I care why republicans wanted to break up tech monopolies, if breaking monopolies is anyway something that I consider a positive change?

    Breaking monopolies give people more choice. More choice (free) leads to hopefully people choosing more privacy conscious tools. More privacy means less data that can be handed over to doge, less data that ICE has to target minorities, etc.

    then you either whole-heartedly agree that a group of criminals and wannabe dictators should be able to destroy any business that publishes speech against them, or you are extremely gullible.

    Those are not the only 2 options. I am instead very happy that they will do the right thing for the wrong reason, and outside those monopolies more people will choose services that republicans have no power over. Moreover, your whole argument assumes someone is in US. I am sympathetic to the people in US, but tech monopolies are a global problem.


  • He didn’t endorse the republican party.

    The fact that you inflate the meaning of that tweet to make it more meaningful than it is, doesn’t mean he did anything of the sort. The tweet happened after the election but before the government, and it was an endorsement of the antitrust appointee. He also expressed his opinion that republicans were more likely than democrats to fight big tech monopolies in the antitrust space. This is far from an endorsement.

    It was also a completely unnecessary comment, in response to nothing.

    It was in response to Trump’s tweet about the antitrust appointee. I would say quite relevant context for a tweet about the antitrust appointee.

    It was unnecessary, true. Like every tweet. He expressed his unnecessary opinion, the same way we are doing now.




  • In 4 years I have never (and will never) used any service from /e/. There is no vendor lock whatsoever. That’s fully optional.

    Points 3, 4 and 5 in your list are moot IMHO.

    Also

    It takes a base level of understanding why you would buy a Fairphone

    It doesn’t really. “Phone is repairable and X can help me”, “they pay the makers fair wages” are not really complex value propositions that require some (technical) understanding.

    The point of /e/ and similar distributions is that you can buy a phone with it (average user will never reflash) and just have a phone that doesn’t use Google (it does, for the amount that doesn’t require you to do extra technical stuff and have a sane user experience at the same time).

    That said, calyx seems a great alternative and so are iode. I think the advantages of one over the other (for my brief search) are quite small.



  • So your argument is repeating a cliché? OK.

    I don’t need to convince you, but I explained my reasoning. Maybe make some practical examples, show some CVEs that - if left unpatched - severely impact the privacy (or the broader security) of the average users.

    Also, as anybody who works in security knows, security is not a binary, and securing often means paying a price (in usability, in Euro, in comfort, in performance, whatever). In my mom’s threat model there is no the APT leveraging a 0 day to breach her worthless phone, there are opportunistic scammers who send her emails. There is also google and the like harvesting her data to sell her shit (hence a deGoogled phone with bootloader unlocked is more important than a Google phone with bootloader locked, for example).

    In my threat model there might be some more resourceful attackers (because believe it or not, a financial org trusts me with securing their infra). However, as I also said, a much simpler and cheaper attack that recently has made the news is just to snatch the phone unlocked from my hands on the street, rather than exploiting an android CVE. This is why for example I have app pins for signal, email and everything that supports it, and I need to authenticate at every use. I also store all my TOTP on my yubikey, rather than keeping them on the phone (even with PIN), so my phone is not good as a 2FA device.

    What you call blasé is actually just a way I personally assessed the risks and decided to invest accordingly. People whose threat model involve the bots who spam emails do not have to invest in security like if the NSA is after them. Updating android a month later is not going to be even a “low” risk for most people, especially if they adopt the much more important practice (IMHO) of not installing every shitty app under the sun. If you think otherwise, make concrete examples perhaps. Using a cliché is not really building your credibility here.


  • I definitely wait more than a week to update for example. The marginal security risk is completely irrelevant for me compared to the operational risk of a buggy update. N-1 is a common practice for updating software in fact, unless there is absolutely a great reason to upgrade.

    Also, I want to be in your circle, because most people I know if the phone doesn’t update automatically they probably won’t even think of updating their phone (or their computer) at all.

    For me the reason is simple, I don’t care about the advanced threats that would be mitigated by GrapheneOS enough to buy a pixel and migrate. I already own a FP3 and that’s what I am going to use until it breaks.

    I might consider Graphene in the future, but having to buy a Google phone (even a used one) already pisses me off, compared to a FP (or similar). eOS also tries to be a “noob-friendly” distribution, that you can buy phones with and you never have to mess with the phones, which means people who don’t have the skills or don’t want to mess with their phones might trade the risk with ease of operation, and it might be the right choice for them.


  • Generally speaking privacy and security are related but not really linked to each other. Google services might be very secure, but a privacy nightmare for example. In this particular case, even more, because the chances that using a “googled” phone will mean data collection (I.e. privacy issues) are almost certain, while the risks we are talking about are much more niche and - as I elaborated on another comment - in my opinion not really in most people threat model.

    I would like to hear your perspective instead, because I am not really into using authority arguments, but as a security engineer I believe to at least understand well the issue with security updates, vulnerabilities and exploits. So yes, I do think to know what I am talking about.


  • I am not dismissing it, I am saying that is not as big as you make it to be. Most users lag behind in updates anyway, besides using minimal and trusted applications, the outside exposure to exploitation is relatively small, for a device without a public address. I am not the one APTs are going to use the SMS no-click 0-day against.

    Similarly for the bootloader issue. The kind of attacks mitigated by this are not in most people threat models. They just are not. As someone else wrote, it’s possible to relock the bootloader anyway with official builds (such as my FP3). But anyway, even for myself the chance that my phone gets modified by physical access without my knowledge is a fraction of a fraction compared to the chance that someone will snatch the phone in my hand while unlocked, for example (a recent pattern).

    If these two issues are what prompts you to call a “security dumpster fire”, I would say we at least have very different risk perceptions.