Not to discount the usefulness or complexity of curl in any way, but it’s not one of the larger codebases out there. It’s also pretty darned good. Firefox seems to have a very positive experience with Mythos, but they also had their own internal test harnesses from prior work, ready to utilize LLM analysis at scale. It was far more intensive than having a third party run something on their behalf and produce a report.

Clankers gonna clank

Autoclanking

My favorite option is that they don’t access the encrypted communications, they access messages before encryption takes place and send copies home for safe keeping. With a closed source client they can do anything they want to the plaintext even if they handle the ciphertext appropriately.

Political divisions tend to use rivers as borders because they’re naturally difficult to cross, but mountain ranges/watershed boundaries would make much more sense for self-sufficiency among the divisions without excessive squabbling. Although BC/Alberta did a good job in that regard!

So yes, it’s mostly Northern California that could join the Cascadia party. Hence my qualifier of “intact”. Unfortunately, NorCal is predominantly on the red team politically.

It wouldn’t be as devastating (or possible) to cut off the Pend Oreille or Spokane rivers from adding to the Columbia.

California can’t survive intact without the Colorado river, so you need to convince at least NV, AZ, UT, and probably CO to come too. If California left but Nevada was still part of Trumplandia one of the first things they would do is shut off all outflow from the Hoover Dam.

I didn’t see anything in there about forcing authoritative TLD DNS servers to censor SOA records of disfavored domains, and it’s quite easy to run your own recursive resolver at home. It’s trivial, for example, to configure pihole to use unbound to do recursive resolving locally, and of course that gives you a bunch of ad blocking as well (although not nearly as good as UBO).

I wonder if this ruling will lead to an uptick in French usage of pihole and similar projects. It would be funny to see a future lawsuit from an advertiser or their trade group arguing against the copyright folks.

I was using XMPP two decades ago when it was first introduced (before smartphones) and it was then a great step forward compared to the other IM clients of the time: AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc.

It was great that it was going to be interoperable by design, particularly exciting when Google jumped on the XMPP bandwagon with native support in whichever of their dozens of chat apps was current at the time. But like nearly everything that Google runs through Beta, it was eventually scrapped, and they returned to their walled garden.

XMPP has been flailing for a long time and it’s not in a position to grow. Signal is far and away the best balance available today among security, privacy, usability, and network effects meaning other people to communicate with.

I hope I’m wrong too. But I’m pretty pessimistic.

Even if the tools are not yet there, “they” want to know exactly who asks for code to things like a DIY radar station or autonomous drone control. We’re well into “first they came” territory.

Many password manager generators already do (use the “memorable” type).

If you’re deliberating between Apple Maps and Google Maps, the only advantage Apple ever had was the lack of ads. Apple’s data is worse, routing is worse, navigation UI is worse (which of the lanes should you be in right now for your next turn), etc. It’s astounding that Apple would enshittify this right now when they’re not even close to being a decent replacement for the primary competition.

This is a good time to refer back to a Forbes piece on Brian Acton from a few years back:

The Facebook-WhatsApp pairing had been a head-scratcher from the start. Facebook has one of the world’s biggest advertising networks; Koum and Acton hated ads. Facebook’s added value for advertisers is how much it knows about its users; WhatsApp’s founders were pro-privacy zealots who felt their vaunted encryption had been integral to their nearly unprecedented global growth.

This dissonance frustrated Zuckerberg. Facebook, Acton says, had decided to pursue two ways of making money from WhatsApp. First, by showing targeted ads in WhatsApp’s new Status feature, which Acton felt broke a social compact with its users. “Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy,” he says. His motto at WhatsApp had been “No ads, no games, no gimmicks”—a direct contrast with a parent company that derived 98% of its revenue from advertising. Another motto had been “Take the time to get it right,” a stark contrast to “Move fast and break things.”

Facebook also wanted to sell businesses tools to chat with WhatsApp users. Once businesses were on board, Facebook hoped to sell them analytics tools, too. The challenge was WhatsApp’s watertight end-to-end encryption, which stopped both WhatsApp and Facebook from reading messages. While Facebook didn’t plan to break the encryption, Acton says, its managers did question and “probe” ways to offer businesses analytical insights on WhatsApp users in an encrypted environment.

Long live Signal!

Lemmy is way better than Reddit on several fronts. Reddit is a profit-motivated corporation domiciled in a fascist country and their administrative actions reflect that.

“Don’t be dumb” can be interpreted in many ways.

You can accidentally dox yourself anywhere, especially as you build up a large comment history for a person (or LLM) to analyze. You can deduce my age to a pretty narrow range because I’ve written about growing up with modems calling local BBSes. I’ve tried not to write much about my location, but there are probably many clues out there. The totality of my comments may be very good at filtering down who I could possibly be. Similar for anyone else.

One nice thing about Lemmy is that you can make alt accounts on different instances and then limit your community participation accordingly, to choose your own self-doxxing exposure. One account could be great for location-divulging commentary, such as regional politics or the weather involved in your gardening. Another could be great for your porn habits, although lemmynsfw recently went dark.

Reddit has spent a lot of effort building internal tools to correlate your access habits and such so that they can group all of your alts together to try to prevent ban evasion. The Fediverse design makes that much more difficult unless you get colluding instance operators.

Instead of ads here (and their associated surveillance), we have occasional pleas from instance admins to kick in some donations. It’s too bad that we don’t have good anonymous micro transactions yet, but maybe a cryptobro will tell me how easy that is if I would just use their preferred tech. At least you can donate to an instance without disclosing your account (although lemmynsfw was obvious in its purpose).

Lemmy is better, but it’s still public. Don’t be dumb.

Even Reddit had third parties tracking everything, with some of them republishing data. There was a long era where sites like Removeddit let you read deleted and removed posts.

In Lemmy it’s structurally different, but there are still plenty of third parties doing similar stuff. For instance, LemVotes is tracking and republishing everyone’s votes (looks like you’ve recently been on a downvote tear, OP).

I have to assume that by now all of the major and aspiring LLM companies are quietly drinking the full firehose of posts and comments (and ignoring delete messages), and will use the data however they want, indefinitely. That probably includes at least one entity happy to give it to law enforcement.

In other words, it’s all public, deletes are only best effort, and the policies of your instance are mostly irrelevant with respect to other parties retaining your data. There are a few things that only your instance knows, such as your IP addresses, but that’s relatively little comfort.

Don’t be dumb.

Maybe we’ll see a resurgence of kite photography. Modern camera tech should make it especially light and awesome.

Some of her work mentioned in but not linked by the article.

Kermit, so fancy! I remember the excitement of discovering ZMODEM and how much better it was than the old standard of XMODEM.

Each alias has a configured delivery destination. Aliases that only point externally never reach the main account inbox.

You are limited to replying from the gmail unless you jump through more advanced hoops. Those include telling gmail in its settings that it can “Send mail as” something else, and also giving gmail authorization to send mail for your domain by adding them into your SPF and DKIM records. Those are more complicated than I want to describe here, and it will be complicated to merge both mailbox.org and gmail into them, so if you don’t already know about them, let’s just say yes, you can only reply as the gmail user.

I don’t know about mailbox.org, but with Fastmail I use a combination of explicit aliases and a catchall alias. The catchall and some individuals direct to me, but other individuals go to me and my spouse@gmail, while others go only to spouse@gmail. The per-user fee is about how many distinct mailboxes with different passwords exist in the service, so I’m only paying for one for me, and the aliases are configurable to resend incoming mail externally.