Simple Mobile started down the sus path when they launched a “Simple Mobile Phone” that was clearly a Chinese white label device (Umidigi A9 Pro IIRC) used by plenty of other lazy groups in the past, including Rob Braxman’s BraX2 phone.
The phone’s big selling point was that it was Degoogled … But really, it was jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, running an OS made by a company you’ve never heard of, who is also claiming to develop a different OS you’ve also never heard of.
I wonder who could be behind this weird Good Phone company. I’ll just click on the Leadership page and oh god it’s Rob Braxman again.
If possible, could you suggest some polite and optically effective ways to push back against this BS? Obviously, if a bunch of people create GitHub accounts and dogpile the linked suggestion with a bunch of annoyed comments, that will probably cause more harm than good.
I’m eyeing the emoji responses, which make a point without taking up extra space.
Regardless, screw anybody who wants to limit allowable emails to only include domains that can probably link your email address to your social security number upon request (and a few of them that are so deep in bed with the NSA that they probably already are.)
Update: GalacticHypernova, the person who made the request, is making an ass of themselves. Don’t interrupt your enemy while they are self sabotaging.
This comment by Ghost is constructive criticism that suggests separating the private email services from the disposable email ones. (10👍)
GalacticHypernova is yelling , 7c, here. Let him yell.
I’m happy to use these addresses as permanently as possible. For me, they aren’t burners, they are unique identifiers that prevent multiple data breaches from correlating me across multiple servers.
My first thought, before tracking down that article, was the “call and response” stuff that happens on platforms like YouTube and Reddit, where multiple people will start discussing a topic in a really suspicious way.
Person 1: I want to start investing money, but I don’t know how to begin.
Person 2: I have worked with Richard Simmons before, and his investment advice is incredible.
Person 3: I also invest with Richard Simmons and I have made $10,000 over the past 30 minutes.
Person 1: how do I contact this Richard Simmons?
Person 2: download WhatsApp and…
The downside of Lemmy is It’s not smart enough to find stuff you’re interested in. The upside of Lemmy is you have a ton more control over what you get to see and how you see it. if you’re fresh out of Reddit, or worse, switching straight from Twitter to an empty mastodon account, the difference can be more than daunting.
Yes, globally the entirety of the banking industry consumes a lot of power, and a non-trivial portion of that is waste that could be better allocated. But it’s also the global banking industry for seven billion people, and not the hobby horse of a few hundred thousand gambling addicts.
So just to head all this off at the pass, Bitcoin and proof-of-work cryptocurrency aren’t incentivizing a move to green energy sources, like solar and wind, they are offsetting it. Because **electrical consumption, electrical waste, is the value that underpins Bitcoin.**Miners spend X dollars in electricity to mine a Bitcoin, they expect to be able to sell that coin for at least X plus profit. When new power sources come online and the price of electricity goes down, they don’t let X go down, they build a bigger machine.
Cruptocurrency evangelists use this whataboutism the same way fossil fuel evangelists say “cars produce carbon monoxide, but so do cows!” as if they’ve proven or debunked anything
Bitcoin’s outlandish energy waste is the point, and it’s the point of a whole category of cryptocurrency that dominates the market charts.
If you’re trying to convince people not to be distrustful of cryptocurrency, don’t downplay what’s actually being used. Otherwise, they’ll be (rightfully) distrustful of you too.
I don’t want to accuse cryptocurrency promoters of being unimaginative, but surely you can think of something better this renewable energy could be doing, than creating more wealth for the select few whales who can afford to put solar panels on farms?
And you leave out the fact that these people using solar panels is just inventivizing all the elites who don’t use solar panels to burn more energy to keep up.
Oh, right. Like the way the government totally interfered with Nestle when they were taking the drinking water of the local population in Michigan…
Spoiler: they didn’t. The elite get to screw over the poor, because the elite get first dibs on how to use drinkable water, for sales or mining Bitcoin.
In the past couple months, Google Chrome usage has ticked down by 2% and Firefox usage has increased… By 0.2%. (Google c/o Microsoft’s Edge has increased by 2%, so it’s unclear how particularly useful this metric is.)
Firefox usage breaking into the double digits would be a huge win.
Well no kidding, they were going to do this. The writing was on the wall back when they removed the ability to download and apply ad blocking rules. The only way to update the rules would be to update the extensions, and Google is the gatekeeper for extension updates.
Google Chrome forks can wax poetic about how they’re going to be the good browser, that they aren’t going to destroy manifest V3, but most extension developers aren’t going to pay attention to the browsers with a tiny fraction of the market share. Most extension developers don’t pay attention to Pale Moon, either.
Brave Corp browser got caught installing a VPN profile on people’s computers without permission. Now that’s what I call crapware. Firefox is leagues better than that. But if you want even better, there’s also LibreWolf
Oh yeah, that one list maintained by an employee of the Brave company. The one with like two dozen bullet points that are basically “is a moderately good ad blocker functioning”.
Yeah, that’s the reason Librewolf looks so good on it. And I like Librewolf. But it seems like cheating, thanks to how rigged the website maintainer made it.
A U.K. woman was photographed standing in a mirror where her reflections didn't match, but not because of a glitch in the Matrix. Instead, it's a simple iPhone computational photography mistake.
I’m conflicted, because sometimes AI is able to enhance a picture in a way that it better represents how you see something versus how the camera actually takes the photo. For example, detecting whether you are indoors or outdoors will cause a very rudimentary tone shift to occur, making colors more accurate to whatever the sensors otherwise take in.
It’s stuff like the fake moon detail that really starts to weird me out.
Privacy has always been a luxury; the more privacy you want, the more time, money, and effort you need to put in.
In this case, you aren’t even getting privacy… Your data is still being bought and sold behind your back, without your understanding and barely with your consent, it’s just not being used to display ads.
Might as well throw on an ad block for free, and you will most likely gain back more privacy in the process. To paraphrase Rossman, never pay for something that is worse than the free version
If you take a massive step back from the world of commercial advertising, it seems almost bizarre how readily people let advertisements proliferate. If an alien species popped over to Earth and took a look at our interaction with advertisements, what were they think about it? By their very functionality, words alone are enough to hijack our thoughts (“Don’t think of an elephant”), let alone words chosen by well paid committees.
But you’re right, if I must be exposed to ads, I prefer the ones that I look at, and not the other way around
Another article, much better and presents in more detail that Olvid was audited on an older version and chosen because it was French and they applied for it (French) numerama.com/…/1575168-pourquoi-les-ministres-von…...
tl;dr download Element (or just visit their website on a desktop) and try it out. Unless you have a particular use case, even the default server should be fine. Element is to Discord* what Lemmy is to Reddit.
it’s the best analogy I could come up with; other comparisons include IRC, Slack, etc.
• Firefox for Android is reintroducing an open ecosystem of extensions, set to be available on December 14, with a dedicated extension page for easy discovery. • Mozilla has released a preview of the upcoming extensions, including popular ones like Bitwarden’s password manager and AdGuard’s ad blocker. • Firefox aims...
That’s an extremely generous interpretation, especially coupled with the fact that the abysmal privacy practices outlined by the TOS have not changed under Mozilla’s ownership.
When you wear rose tinted glasses, red flags just look like flags.
Now that people can install extensions on their own, surely Mozilla will backpedal and let people decide whether they want the extension themselves… Right?
The metadata itself is pretty valuable. In this case, the metadata exposes who, where, when, and how often the conversations take place. And that metadata is valuable.
Generally speaking, it is inadvisable for privacy to keep data (even in an encrypted form) on a server post delivery.
When you send a message on signal, it gets delivered and then purged from all servers. Does Deltachat do this by default, and if not, can one user request the other user’s side delete messages on their servers?
Email also runs into a “server copy” problem that is not necessarily built into instant messaging, especially privacy oriented services: A server/servers will store separate copies of messages for all people in a conversation, making it twice as difficult to delete even if all sides of the conversation wish to delete it from the server.
Android app maker Simple Mobile Tools acquired by ZipoApps (liliputing.com)
ProtonMail and SimpleLogin emails will be blocked from registering on websites (github.com)
This makes me 😭
PSA: If you're tired of political posts in Technology, block user L4s
First of all, L4s (sorry misspelled in titel) is not a real user, so no harm done here....
Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages (www.tomshardware.com)
Soon, Google has even more leverage against adblockers (www.ghacks.net)
Chrome’s next weapon in the War on Ad Blockers: Slower extension updates (arstechnica.com)
Walmart says it is not advertising on social platform X (www.reuters.com)
A bride to be discovers a reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography (appleinsider.com)
A U.K. woman was photographed standing in a mirror where her reflections didn't match, but not because of a glitch in the Matrix. Instead, it's a simple iPhone computational photography mistake.
Meta’s “overpriced” ad-free subscriptions make privacy a “luxury good”: EU suit (arstechnica.com)
Meta sues FTC, hoping to block ban on monetizing kids’ Facebook data (arstechnica.com)
Why is Bluetooth so slow?
Hey,...
Threads may finally launch in Europe in December (www.engadget.com)
Linda Yaccarino’s Very Unmerry X Mess (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
The French government doesn't consider WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram secure enough, replaced by Olvid (Google translate link in post text) (www.lepoint.fr)
Another article, much better and presents in more detail that Olvid was audited on an older version and chosen because it was French and they applied for it (French) numerama.com/…/1575168-pourquoi-les-ministres-von…...
Matrix 1.9 just came out! (matrix.org)
Robert De Niro accuses Apple of censoring awards speech (www.theverge.com)
Firefox is giving Android users a sneak peek at its open extensions (www.androidpolice.com)
• Firefox for Android is reintroducing an open ecosystem of extensions, set to be available on December 14, with a dedicated extension page for easy discovery. • Mozilla has released a preview of the upcoming extensions, including popular ones like Bitwarden’s password manager and AdGuard’s ad blocker. • Firefox aims...
Delta Chat: The e-mail messenger (delta.chat)
I don’t understand why it took us 50 years to figure out how to do encrypted messaging-over-email. Anyone wanna swap email addresses?