sqgl

joined 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

My point was about free apps going commercial (not about selling data).

Give FreeTube time to get bigger.

Open source cannot be commercialized.

Steam is commercial, Firefox received about a million dollars from Google to set it as the default search engine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Wikipedia, Whirlpool, GiHub are the only big sites I can think of which resisted going commercial. They may still be selling user data though.

Can you think of others?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (6 children)

Sorry, I didn't read the article. Thanks for picking me up on it.

I just use my Brave browser which avoids ads and doesn't require login but I see now that FreeTube offers a few customisation features and allows you to import your subscriptions.

And there are privacy benefits too. With Freetube your watch history is stored only on your computer, not YouTube’s servers

Really? I imagine it is free because FreeTube collect data on you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

Isn't this exactly like the original YouTube?

They get users to provide free content with the impression it is a genuine grassrots community then when the site becomes popular enough they cash in. imdb was like this too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Die? Hyperbolic much? Gazans weren't being killed in the weeks leading up to Oct 7.

I suggest Gazans could have used the aid money they were receiving for decades to build infrastructure rather than ripping up water pipes to build missiles.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Well yes. Israel always retaliates disproportionately. Yet Hamas keep repeating their attacks expecting Allah will magically produce a different result. Commonly known as the very definition of stupidity.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Are you implying they caused more injuries on October 7 than Hamas?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Telegram group chats are unencrypted

Not quite true. They are server-side encrypted, not end-to-end. Still bad and I had no idea until I looked it up just now (thanks to you).

I use Gboard keyboard on my phone which undermines my Signal privacy. I could use my laptop instance of Signal to prevent leakage.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

Telegram successfully fought against attempt of blocking in Russia in 2018 by providing regular updates and using different techniques to avoid blocking.

I too heard Russia claimed they could not block it. Could be deliberate theatre to bolster its reputation.

It seems Russia has a back door key into Telegram.

Edit: Russia is complaining about the arrest.

Pavel Durov has visited Russia more than 50 times since his "exile" in 2014

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Not necessarily. It might be because of the crimes in the public groups and channels in Telegram. That makes it no more immune from responsibility than Facebook or Twitter.

See this thread

Signal doesn't have those.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (5 children)

I think you and most people in this thread have been mislead by the article because of the closing remark.

Beyond terrorism, the most dangerous pedophiles communicate on Telegram to exchange content.

But it isn't the private stuff he is being prosecuted for though AFAIK (although it might have been reported by "traitors" within those chats).

Unlike Signal, there are public chat groups and channels and I presume these are the ones which got him into trouble for propagating illegal activity.

From another article...

terrorism, narcotic supply, fraud, money laundering, receiving stolen goods and others.... he allowed an incalculable number of offenses and crimes to be committed, which he did nothing to moderate

The platform has faced issues of misinformation and hate speech, especially antisemitic speech following October 7, 2023.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Can someone please paraphrase the following which I didn't understand?

Somebody raised to believe they have high IQ is more likely to fall for this than somebody raised to think less of their own intellectual capabilities. Subjective validation is a quirk of the human mind. We all fall for it.

But if you think you’re unlikely to be fooled, you will be tempted instead to apply your intelligence to “figure out” how it happened. This means you can end up using considerable creativity and intelligence to help the psychic fool you by coming up with rationalisations for their “ability”.

And because you think you can’t be fooled, you also bring your intelligence to bear to defend the psychic’s claim of their powers. Smart people (or, those who think of themselves as smart) can become the biggest, most lucrative marks.

 

Follow-up to last week's story:

https://lemmy.ml/post/16672524

EDIT1: Politicians expect to be be exempt.

EDIT2: Good news: Vote has been postponed due to disagreements.

 
1
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Alt text: Picture of Sigourney Weaver with a cat in her arms on the movie set. Caption reads...

"Alien is a movie where nobody listens to the smart woman, and then they all die except for the smart woman and her cat. Four stars."

 
 

[complete transcription so that you do not need to visit X]

A crazy experience — I lost my earbuds in a remote town in Chile, so tried buying a new pair at the airport before flying out. But the new wired, iPhone, lightning-cable headphones didn't work. Strange.

So I went back and swapped them for another pair, from a different brand. But those headphones didn't work either. We tried a third brand, which also didn't work.

By now the gift shop people and their manager and all the people in line behind me are super annoyed, until one of the girls says in Spanish, "You need to have bluetooth on." Oh yes, everyone else nods in agreement. Wired headphones for iPhones definitely need bluetooth.

What? That makes no sense. The entire point of wired headphones is to not need bluetooth.

So I turn Bluetooth on with the headphones plugged into the lightning port and sure enough my phone offers to "pair" my wired headphones. "See," they all say in Spanish, like I must be the dumbest person in the world.

With a little back and forth I realize that they don't even conceptually know what bluetooth is, while I have actually programmed for the bluetooth stack before. I was submitting low-level bugs to Ericsson back in the early 2000's! Yet somehow, I with my computer science degree, am wrong, and they, having no idea what bluetooth even is, are right.

My mind is boggled, I'm outnumbered, and my plane is boarding. I don't want wireless headphones. And especially not wired/wireless headphones or whatever the hell these things are. So I convince them, with my last ounce of sanity, to let me try one last thing, a full-proof solution:

I buy a normal wired, old-school pair of mini-stereo headphones and a lightning adapter. We plug it all in. It doesn't work.

"Bluetooth on", they tell me.

NO! By all that is sacred my wired lightning adapter cannot require Bluetooth. "It does," they assure me.

So I turn my Bluetooth on and sure enough my phone offers to pair my new wired, lightning adapter with my phone.

Unbelievable.

I return it all, run to catch my plane, and spend half the flight wondering what planet I'm on. Until finally back home, I do some research and figure out what's going on:

A scourge of cheap "lightning" headphones and lightning accessories is flooding certain markets, unleashed by unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers who have discovered an unholy recipe:

True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make. So instead of conforming to the Apple standard, these companies have made headphones that receive audio via bluetooth — avoiding the Apple specification — while powering the bluetooth chip via a wired cable, thereby avoiding any need for a battery.

They have even made lightning adapters using the same recipe: plug-in power a fake lightning dongle that uses bluetooth to transmit the audio signal literally 1.5 inches from the phone to the other end of the adapter.

In these remote markets, these manufacturers have no qualms with slapping a Lightning / iPhone logo on the box while never mentioning bluetooth, knowing that Apple will never do anything.

From a moral or even engineering perspective, this strikes me as a kind of evil. These companies have made the cheapest iPhone earbuds known to humankind, while still charging $12 or $15 per set, pocketing the profits, while preying on the technical ignorance of people in remote towns.

Perhaps worst of all, there are now thousands or even millions of people in the world who simply believe that wired iPhone headphones use bluetooth (whatever that is), leaving them with an utterly incoherent understanding of the technologies involved.

I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this. And I wish humanity would use its engineering prowess for good, and not opportunistic deception.

 

Cartoon by Tom Gauld

 
 
 
 

ALT TEXT: Cartoon of two women in the backyard looking at clothes drying on the traditional washing line. One of them jokes: "It dries the washing using the very latest technology — a combination of solar and wind power"

1
Feckless Chivalry (beehaw.org)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

ALT TEXT: Knight is on his mobile phone while the lady is running from a fire breathing dragon and says: "fear not, my lady, I am signing another online petition"

view more: next ›