Slamming the "cute" button

Wild ass comment.

Unless you really really need portability between devices

Who doesn't??? What do you do, copy 20-char randomly generated passwords manually all the time? That's the whole point of password managers...

I use firefox's local, inbuilt manager

Browsers are NOT a secure storage for sensitive data, if you want a local password manager at least please use KeePassXC.

The thing that pisses me off the most is that they are disingenuous almost to the point of lying in interpreting that survey's results. They say that 75% of users are interested in GenAI, when actually what they asked is whether people have used any GenAI at all in the recent past. And that still doesn't mean they want GenAI in Proton. That's a pretty significant sleight of hand. The more relevant question would have been the first one on what service people want the most. In that case only 29% asked for a writing assistant, which is still not the same thing as a full LLM. The most likely answer to "how many Proton customers want an LLM in Proton Mail" seems to be "few".

This is old drama at this point. I'll repeat what's been said the previous times this was posted.

Proton did what they were legally required to do in the jurisdiction where they operate as a legitimate business. As an encrypted email provider they offer privacy but not necessarily anonymity, and they're open about that. They even have multiple blogposts about how to use their service more anonymously. If you thought that by using ProtonMail you were getting full anonymity that's your mistake.

In both the cases mentioned the users made OpSec mistakes: not using a VPN in one and linking their personal Apple email as a recovery email in the other. In the first case Proton wasn't even logging the user's IP until the police forced them to.

Thank you for the links, I had found a few of these but some are new. The basic idea is there, I'll see if any of these can work for us. I'm growing more convinced though that hosting a whole app for this super simple use case might not be worth it, I think we might pivot to just hosting a really basic static page for it.

This is way too overkill for what we need. I'm sorry, I've been intentionally vague about the context for this but I guess it's too unclear. We're an activist group planning a protest. We might have to get this set up literally tomorrow and every penny comes out of (mostly my) pocket. We're also all paranoid about opsec and anonymity, which is why the requirement about avoiding corporate services is there. Perhaps I should have posted this in a privacy focused comm instead, I apologize.

It's pretty overkill for what we need, and it would still fall under "corporate" for us. At that point I could just go for the static Notion page which I can get live in 5m for free.

We can set up all of those but again, that's kinda expensive for us rn. What's the benefit of using a CMS like Joomla versus wishthis, or even a basic Caddy/Nginx webserver with a static page?

I believe you need root to access those, plus a file manager that supports it (I use Mixplorer which does). Otherwise, as someone else suggested, you can access them from a computer over ADB or MTP.

They're insufferable commies who keep attacking other parts of the Fediverse by... uh... commenting on posts and... ehm... responding aggressively to bigoted content. They've got all these sick ass stickers that we don't and they keep flexing them in our replies which drives me crazy.

Their instance is an authoritarian distopia where queer people feel safe and they don't waste time debating the same wrong liberal talking points every time. Also you can just call someone a dumbass if you disagree with them: a totalitarian nightmare.

Worst of all they go around straight up bullying other Fediverse users: right now I'm locked in a bathroom stall that a Hexbear user shoved me into. I've been here for an hour missing my maths class, and I've had to drink the toilet water. My tummy is starting to hurt. Stay away from Hexbear users...

Nice! Kudos to Proton for not abandoning their promise to publish their sources... Hoping to see Calendar on there soon too.

This is such an amazing article, The Verge's staff is still capable of some excellent journalism.

Even if its configured correctly to totally obfuscate the data and the final endpoint of the traffic it's still blatantly obvious that a VPN is in use.

Which is why Chinese users don't use standard VPNs, they use obfuscated proxies with protocols like Shadowsocks and V2Ray, which mask the tunneled traffic as innocuous HTTPS traffic.

Support for this in core Lemmy has been discussed many times. There's an open issue for it that's been gathering dust for a while. Some apps already implement this on the client side I think, not jerboa though.

Other people in that thread have pointed out that it isn't showing posts being delivered to Threads despite the block. That should be testable with other instances, but not Threads since it's not receiving any content from Mastodon at the moment. The concerning thing there is the user still being able to view content from people they've blocked, but that seems to be a bug if it's reproducible.

In the EU companies can't scrape personally identifiable information without consent, even if it's already publicly available. IANAL, and there's probably ways they can sneak around the GDPR, but at least it's not a free for all. It's unclear though how it works for federation. It's definitely not the same legally though.

The reason for not directly federating content to Threads isn't so nobody there can ever see my amazing posts, it's so Meta can't easily profile me. Scraping public posts on a different platform would probably be illegal, at least in the EU, and reposts don't give them a lot of data about me. Federating content, however, would give them most of the same data that Mastodon has on me without even having to ask.

This post from Eugen Rochko mentions that blocking Threads at the user level "stops your posts from being delivered to or fetched by Threads". Basically, the user-level instance block is bidirectional.

Limited federation mode is a different feature, at the admin level. It doesn't really affect the delivery of posts in either direction, it just hides the blocked instance's content from the global feed. Defederation on the other hand is indeed bidirectional, but again it's on the admin level rather than users'.

Mastodon instance blocks are already bidirectional AFAIK: if you block an instance your content does not get federated with them. I was actually surprised that this does not seem to be the case for Lemmy. I don't think this break any core abstraction of AP...

Ah ok this I'm not sure about. I mean, Lemmy added instance blocks as well in the latest release (0.19), but it seems that, unlike Mastodon, this only hides the content from you and doesn't prevent your content from being sent to that instance. It does seem like a pretty big oversight, but I haven't found a discussion about this. There might be good reasons why it's this way.

I don't think Lemmy does either...? It pushes updates to subs that at least someone on the receiving instance subscribes to (at least that's how it worked last time I checked). That's why there are scripts going around for new instances to automatically follow a bunch of popular subs to populate the All feed.

I think Mastodon works in the same way with users, where it sends updates for accounts that someone on the receiving end follows. So if nobody follows you from Threads it wouldn't send any of your posts there.

a long form nuanced take

interesting, however have you considered pee pee poo poo

Truly a worthy contribution to the discourse, thank you...

ActivityPub doesn't just push everything on a server to every federated instance like a fire hose. In the first place, as Masimatutu@mander.xyz said, it only feeds your content to an instance if somebody on that instance follows you, which you can set to require your manual approval. Your posts could also get pushed if somebody else boosts your post and they have followers on the other instance.

However, if you set an instance block, none of your posts get sent to the instance, period. They would have to resort to scraping. In other words, if you don't want to give meta your data, just set an instance/domain block.

Oh yeah, you're right on that. If I'm looking for privacy from the subscription manager signing up with a service like this is a terrible choice, because it is fully a financial institution.

I wish they were all on the same day of the month...

Dates aren't a big concern though. What I was hoping for is something that would update automatically to some extent if (say) some amounts change, or a payment is missed. But I guess indeed that's basically impossible without access to my payment data.

Given that I have to update it manually though, I would at least like it to be synced remotely. So that I can, say, check it from my laptop on a webpage or desktop app without redoing all the manual data input.

I thought I heard they were rolling out some material you theming in beta a while ago. Did they revert it?

For my use case yes, that would defeat the purpose, but for what it's trying to do it kinda makes sense... At least, they have to do it to comply with payment regulations. And you're still only exposing your identity to one service with a decent reputation, rather than plenty of possibly shadier ones. It seems like a fair tradeoff if what you're looking for is privacy from services you want to pay for.

I'm not American, it seems to be available in the US only...

I guess you're right, yeah. I was hoping someone had figured out a different solution, perhaps integrating directly with the individual subscription providers. But I guess that's way too broad of a scope, integrating with countless individual services.

At least a cross-platform, cloud backed "spreadsheet" would be nice to have though.

I don't have the same phone and it's in general pretty difficult to fix a brick without being able to tinker with it. I can give you some pointers though...

First off, this guide is for a model A525F, but your title says your phone is an A526B. If that's correct there's a chance the files you tried to flash were for a different model number and that's what went wrong. Make sure you download the right files for your exact model number rather than trusting the ones your guide provides.

Secondly, to be honest, this guide does not seem very trustworthy. When doing this kind of thing every little step matters, a single misplaced reboot might screw up the whole process. Also, you're downloading and installing on your phone some files from some random website, that's a big risk. The thing is: you don't need a shitty guide for your exact model. For future reference, you're better off with a good, detailed guide for your general vendor (Samsung). XDA forums are usually the place to look. Always find the files you need by yourself, don't just flash whatever some random website makes you download. Go to the official download pages for Samsung stock OS or TWRP and get the files from there, making sure they match your exact model number.

If you're 100% sure that the firmware you're trying to flash is the correct one for your model, you can try avoiding Odin and use adb flash directly. There's plenty of guides on how to do that going around. You might not need TWRP either at that point. Getting familiar with adb is always useful.

Oh sure, didn't mean to imply that Chinese people weren't smart enough to think for themselves. I was just making the point that neither western media nor Chinese media is helping at all to create space or goodwill for critical exchange and debate across boundaries and firewalls (which, to be fair, is not surprising).

Glad to see there are actually Chinese netizens on Lemmy, by the way.

[...] I set up a cloud service where my VPN service would be located on Amazon’s web services, a reputable and widely trusted cloud provider. [...] After about an hour, I set up a VPN that worked flawlessly. The best part? Not only is it free to use [...]

Sorry, what? Last time I checked AWS VPSs were very much NOT free to use, and I'm pretty sure the lowest tier is still more expensive than your average VPN.

Also, this article seems to be arguing against its own points: "you probably don't need a VPN, but I have one anyway"...

This is just straight up true. Besides the belligerence and racism it pushes, it also makes it near impossible to have an actual, reasonable and critical comparative discussion of Chinese and Western societies. It closes any space that might exist for Chinese people to take part in any discussion of international affairs, since the attitude is so strongly against them. This pushes any open minded Chinese netizen back into the arms of their own government's propaganda, rather than inviting them into an open discussion of the good and bad sides of their and other societies.

Backed by who?

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with a recent history of questionable investments...

Bold of an English speaker to accuse any other language of unpredictable spelling...

Funnily, Italian is almost completely phonemic, meaning it's trivial to both spell and read words if you know the rules. English can only dream of that.

Funny that the map includes garum, a food that hasn't been popular in a couple millennia

God I hope this is a bit

Are these from a video game or Terry Pratchett's Night Watch books?

I'm aware they're not using a generic model, but that's not much better. Current custom-made models still fuck up significantly more than humans, and in less predictable ways.

Even if their custom model is slightly incorrect 1% of the time, that's still a major problem in critical systems like those.

Legacy COBOL code is largely used in critical systems like those of banks and airlines. What could go wrong with having that code rewritten by stochastic parrots who get programming answers wrong half of the time?