Yeah, honestly that’s the primary, convincing argument against Brave, I feel: they’re helping Google monopolize the browser market, and, consequently, enabling Google to further dictate how the internet operates.
The article skipped over that entirely, and the author had never heard of LibreWolf, the current zeitgeist in privacy-focused browsers, so I question the motives for writing the article and question that the author has the technical chops to be able to speak to this issue with authority. Seems like he mainly doesn’t like that the founder of Brave donated $1000 to Prop 8, which, while fair, is hardly the main reason to not use Brave.
The really really concerning thing he actually mentioned was that Brave was at one point adding affiliate links to URLs without the users’ permission, but that was buried lower in the article under comments on Eich’s admittedly cringe politics and weirdly angry blurbs about Brave’s crypto token, which he never mentions requires a voluntary opt-in (probably because he didn’t know).
He’s not wrong, but he’s right for the wrong reasons.
Which is really sad, because I like Vivaldi and I like the team behind it and I like their post denouncing WEI, but at the end of the day Vivaldi is also a chromium skin. They're Brave without the personal baggage, but they still carry the much heavier technical baggage of being downstream from Google.
Christo-fascism is coming for you too. Premarital sex, masturbation, gay sex/relationships. They'll use the internet to hunt down anyone they can. As soon as they finish dismantling democracy.
Since these people act in aggressive defiance of "Christ's" teaching, I refer to them X-tians - or Xto-fascists. They don't deserve to be associated with someone that openly opposed religious and conservative leaders for hypocrisy, gatekeeping, and oppression.
As far as they are concerned, he is a brown working-class liberal anarchist Middle-Eastern Jew who hates the rich, consorts with the poor, and should be crucified. Should he become popular post-mortem, then they'll simply appropriate his name and carry on as usual.
There's an irony in the British government going on about this all the time, while at the same time fighting in court to prevent their WhatsApp messages being turned over to the Covind inquiry because of privacy concerns.
More generally, I think it's a symptom of governments not being at all as tech savvy as they like to think they are.
The UK also has RIPA, under which it can compel a user to hand over passwords to encrypted material. For those of us in the US, that's prohibited by the Fifth Amendment.
There's a penalty specified by RIPA. Depending upon the specifics of what they believe to be at stake, up to between 2-5 years in prison for failing to provide access.
As far as the US goes, that's incorrect. The issue is a 1A issue, not a 5A issue.
tl;dr - you are required to provide keys, combinations, fingerprints, etc. when there's a warrant. You might not be required to provide passwords.
Let's say cops have a search warrant for your house, and you have a safe in your house that they think the evidence of the crime they're investigating is hidden in. But it's locked. You are obligated to unlock that safe for them, whether it's a physical key, a combination, or a fingerprint. If you refuse, you can be compelled, and can be held in contempt of court and held in jail until you comply. (Or course, in the case of a physical safe, refusing the provide the key would mean that they'd hire a security expert to destroy the safe in order to retrieve the contents. But that's not possible with encrypted data.)
The problem is that a password is both a key and speech. I can be compelled to provide a key, but I can't be compelled to engage in certain speech. So far, courts have been divided on what a password is, and I don't believe that the question has been addressed by SCOTUS yet. (Although, knowing SCOTUS, I wouldn't expect them to be tech-savvy enough to make a good ruling.) In some cases, people that have been under court orders to provide passwords have been held in jail on contempt charges until they've divulged the password, even when they say that they've forgotten the password in question.
Keep in mind that the people that this is often applied to are not usually people you'd want to be friends with; most of that cases I've seen in the news involve people that are accused of having child pornography, either uploading or downloading it, or terrorism. But obvs. revoking rights to deal with exceptionally scummy people also means that those rights get revoked for everyone else...
(Although, knowing SCOTUS, I wouldn't expect them to be tech-savvy enough to make a good ruling.)
Honestly the current SCOTUS has largely been finding in line with those things explicitly and literally within the US Constitution. I could see them considering being required to provide a password being required to provide evidence against yourself, which is a Fifth Amendment violation, or compelling speech in violation of the First, like you said. It's not impossible it violates both, and I'd expect to see that argument made in the decision.
If we extend this thought experiment to a physical key, then that argument falls apart. A physical key is 'real or physical evidence', while a password (and apparently combinations?) ends up being considered 'testimonial', despite both serving the same function. While I may not be required to provide testimony against myself, I can be compelled to provide real of physical evidence. If, for instance, I have committed tax fraud, and my accountant has already told the IRS as much, but I have the only copies of the tax documents encrypted, I can be compelled to decrypt them, because the 'testimonial' value of the password is negligible since the gov't already knows that I have the fraudulent documents. But if they can't already demonstrate that they know what--roughly--the real evidence that's encrypted is, then no password for cops.
This seems inconsistent to me, since a password and a physical key serve the same function.
As far as the US goes, that's incorrect. The issue is a 1A issue, not a 5A issue.
No, it's a Fifth Amendment issue. The Wikipedia article I linked to discusses it. Being compelled to provide a password runs into some of the same problems that compelling self-incriminating testimony does.
search
You're confusing the Fourth Amendment -- which deals with searches -- and the Fifth Amendment. You're right that it's not an issue of protection against illegal searches, which is what one might assume to be the case, but not correct as to the actual rationale that it runs into.
Im glad decentralized social media is picking up steam. No more of these major communication platform rug poolings for everyone. Now at worst individual instances can implode and everyone just has to move to a different instance or self-host, and still access communities on every other instance.
So first thing, Twitter is different than the rest. Elmo purchased it and he is doing some things to it that looks crazy.
Reddit CEO admitted that his API changes are inspired by Elmo's Twitter changes, he likely wouldn't double down if that didn't happen to Twitter as well.
Anyway, to show inflation the government increased interest rates. Which made investors thinking, "why should I put my money in this risky business that doesn't even generate money, when I could purchase government bonds and add long as government doesn't default I will get 5%?
This actually put pressure on trash startups that don't generate profits.
Ironically it is more like how much interest have been historically. It's just that after we had recession it was lowered to not turn it into depression. Then it was kept at nearly 0% until now.
Side note: if your bank still offers still nearly 0% interest rate in your savings account, they are making killing on your money and they are counting you won't notice, because people got used to those low interest rates.
For sure... Non-decentralized social media has value created by the immense number of connections and content created.
It also has the risk of abusing those connections and making the network less valuable by a centralized decision to clog it with paid content... Which alienates users and makes the experience less efficient.
Facebook did it, reddit is doing it, Twitter is trying to do it. The move is almost inevitable.
Decentralize it and it takes almost all potential greed out of the equation so the network stays most valuable to users.
This makes me wonder whether decentralized social media is actually immune to enshittification, or will it just take a different form we can't even imagine at this moment in time.
The costs of the servers will crush a lot of instances. I can't imagine the hosting costs the main kbin and lemmy instances have right now, and it'll only go up as people join in. I think we'll see server managers start asking for donations to cover the costs sooner and frequently. And when people don't donate, they'll have to resort to ads. And if an instance is really popular but barely afloat, some big fish comes along and offers to buy it from them for a decent price. Classic strategy.
Meta may say it wants to start its own instance, but just wait until they see how most instances have refused to federate with them and they'll be sniffing around one of the popular instances trying to buy or offering a nice package to federate. By then, users will be established and not leave immediately.
Decentralized social media needs the users to understand the importance of keeping it free from corporate interests.
This fediverse is a version of the commons, and it's up to each of us to acknowledge this in order to keep it that way.
I think it's orchestrated. I think it's intentional. I think the internet is under attack in the capacity that we know it as. I know it makes me sound conspiratorial but ever since Musk overtook Twitter every big social CEO has praised is approach. Musk fucked the internet up as we know it and Rupert Murdock showed media moguls that they can push trash and make heaps of money. There's no incentive to run quality content online and Musk started the downturn of that realization. I think we're in for some troubling times.
That seems to be the case. Ditch IG and let them come to Fedi instead. There's room for sex positive people, positively.
EDIT
Yet this is also another casualty of shittification, so what would we expect? Meta is all over the place with their moderation. I still have a FB account and occasionally I'll receive warnings for posts I made 5-10 years ago. No link to the post, no arguments, no real recourse. While I kind of don't care, a part of me does. I wonder what innocuous thing someone at FB didn't like on my friends only visible account (which probably really isn't that way because FB sucks).
I know at least two people who had their FB accounts stolen by scammers. The scammers used the accounts to try and scam their friends. Many people reported them but nah that’s all acceptable behavior to Facebook and both people just had to create new accounts and let the scammers keep on scamming under their names.
I‘m the type of determined contrarian who even pays for AdBlockers to support them in this arms race, so if they want that sweet subscription cash to keep coming they‘ll defeat whatever bullshit Youtube comes up with. Worth every cent, for a less ad infested world.
@AnonymousLlama
The Steam Deck and other handheld PCs also rocks for emulation, not only for light indie games.
Here is a part of the article which bugs me a byte:
By nearly all objective measures, the ROG Ally is better than the Steam Deck. It has solid battery life, a nicer screen, more power, and Windows 11
Having Windows 11 on the device is not an objective measure to be better. If anything, this is a subjective matter. In my opinion Windows is far worse as an operating system for a handheld PC (or any PC at all). Sure you have more games to play with, but the usability and customization sucks, plus Microsoft is spying on you.
Seriously - especially since MS will keep trying to extract more money from the OS, which will affect your handheld too. It’s much less likely for Valve to do that kind of stuff (and if they do, the community will create alternatives).
I like Linux, I don't care for Windows, but none of that changes the fact that Linux is simply better right now for handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck.
Some of that is due to the open nature of the system allowing manufacturers like Valve to have much finer control of the system (see gamescope or Valve's Linux kernel patches for just 2 quick examples). Some of it is due to the work that Valve put in to make the Steam Deck polished, like making sure the thing had proper suspended/resume. And some of that has to do with the existing Linux ecosystem of well-managed repositories, various desktops, Wine, and so on.
In contrast, Windows has only ever been truly designed for a "desktop" experience and it is neither flexible nor low level enough to allow for the type of tweaks necessary to make a Deck-like experience. Valve could not have made the Deck what it is using Windows as a base.
@derpo I was referring to the original article that this is subjective and not objective. And I am not just hating here, there are reasons to believe what I wrote. Windows was never designed for handheld PCs, while SteamOS is specifically designed for that purpose. So expressing my opinion does not make me a hater. Although, I do not like Windows, but that is not the point of my message. When you say I am just a hater, then you discount my opinion.
Ok, it was just a meme. But memes are often used to say something in a funny or sarcastic way. So let's start a war now. ;-) wink, wink
The dumbest thing about that statement is that nothing stops them from installing Windows on the Deck. I would never want to, but if someone felt that Windows was truly better for the device they certainly have the option of using it.
Christ they're dumb. Here is a golden opportunity to protect your business and build great PR.
As everyone else is pushing people back to the office, be the champion we're all looking for, run the studies, offer incentives, anything to prove that working remotely is a viable alternative in a modern world.
Then, expand the use cases, it's not just WFH, but working on-site (for companies with manufacturing in different locations), working on the move for managers, emergency preparedness, and, of course, webinar/training.
Context didn’t help you, I also presumed you supported X. Just use tone indicators to avoid any confusion. it’s two characters for “/s”. Little cringe todo initially but it helps ppl and avoids confusion.
While I agree, no one should be behind this shit company, it’s quite a standard thing to do.
Literally every social media platform has the ability to reset a users username so they can free it up. It happens all the time.
Are you famous enough? Cool, contact any company about taking over the username “Jake” and they’ll give you it. Doesn’t matter that the other dudes name is Jake. Doesn’t matter they had it first. Doesn’t matter that it isn’t a trademarked name.
It's not really that shitty in context with Musk's everyday doings. I'm honestly not surprised at all.
If this was the worst of him, I'd be able to handle it (even though it indeed is a shitty thing to do and devalues Twitter handles [which is imo actually a good thing]).
Speaking of his everyday doings. Has anyone investigated all those underage illegal migrant children he has in his bathroom shower? Or was that just a rumor started on “the app formerly known as twitter”?
My phone's predictive text says-- Hang on, let me check what dumbass thing it's going to say this time-- Apparently that I'm going to "pick up the kids for my husband" except I don't have kids and I'm not married. Predictive text is, at it's heart, the same AI working in chatGPT bots right now. Just with access to a lot more data so it doesn't make rookie mistakes like your phone's predictive text, assuming that because a lot of humans write that sentence that it must be universally true-- That everyone picks up their kids for their husbands. That's all AI it is: Predictive text on a massive scale. It predicts the most likely word that goes next, based on the words that have come before, and the structure of sentences it has studied. ChatGPT (and similar bots) are very, very good at predicting what a human would say. But that's just it: A computer program that puts the most likely word after each successive word, so the end result closely resembles human speech.
It cannot make promises because it has no concept of promises. It just knows that when the phrase "Do you promise..." comes up in a block of text, the next block of text is likely going to contain an affirmation of that promise <Yes,>, then a repeat of that promise <of course I promise!>, and then a statement of trustworthiness<I would never break a promise, not to you.>. The robot isn't promising anything, it's just simulation of a promise.
If you ask it to keep a secret, ask it to make a very simple promise, it will immediately blab that secret the moment you ask it to tell you the secret, assuming it's the kind of chatbot that "remembers" your inputs.
Please stop asking AI to weigh in on great existential questions until we have some sort of back-end working that's capable of actual cognition instead of just a word simulator for fooling your very social brain into believing that you've encountered cognition.
Basically yeah, predictive text is an extremely simple AI built using Markov chains to predict the next word based on probability. What happens next depends only on now, it doesn't have a memory to speak of. ChatGPT is built using artificial neural networks that can take an input and process it in ways that assign weight/value to different bits of data and store that information and reference it later to learn more and teach itself, drawing more conclusions from previous data and in turn storing that data to make even more conclusions!
I agree we're not at the singularity yet and I'm not sure that's even a real thing. It's all still just fancy programming for now but machine learning and AI right is very exciting and who knows what kind advancements could be right around the corner.
What if everyone is making the wrong assumption about why he bought twitter? I'm convinced he didn't do it to make money. He bought it for the power, to control one of the world's largest microphones. He doesn't care about advertisers who will dictate content rules.
At SpaceX, Tesla, and other companies he hired industry experts. He's running this one completely differently and I believe his focus is politics and power instead of money.
Whether he's in it for the money or the influence doesn't really matter... either way, he's doing it wrong, and he's inconveniencing (or outright harming) people in the process.
That tracks with what I’ve heard from people in the industry. For Musk and now Huffman, it’s some sort of ideological or philosophical thing in terms of how they’ve dramatically shifted the focus and operation of these previously (mostly) stable companies.
At SpaceX, Tesla, and other companies he hired industry experts.
And proceeded to overrule them with idiotic ideas like "scrap all sensors etc, our self driving cars will drive with image recognition only". And now most companies with self driving cars in development are miles ahead of Tesla despite starting later.
Did they start later? Where Tesla had an advance was integrating major parts of a self-driving system into actual customer cars and collecting tons of real-world data. The internal research on autonomous cars probably started on most automakers long before Tesla was founded.
That's not accurate. At least not entirely. I work with a few ex-Tesla managers who tell me the opposite. He would put his hands on any random detail at any time and override people.
I think both claims can be accurate. What I've gathered is that Tesla and especially SpaceX have people dedicated to preventing or fixing whatever odd ideas he comes up with. So, your friends could be 100% right, but maybe aren't as aware of other people following behind to try and clean up the mess? Or maybe sometimes the Musk Disaster Team doesn't get deployed in time, but they could still exist in general.
Pretty easy, honestly. You tell him what he wants to hear, you don't tell him what he doesn't want to hear, and you make decisions that are best for your people. If everyone that reports to him behaves like that, he will have very little influence on the company.
Musk is a raging narcissist. He just wants to be told that he's the smartest, funniest person alive.
He bought it because he got caught red handed trying to commit securities fraud and if he didn't make good on his offer, the SEC would've at the very least kicked him out of the markets, if not put in prison.
He is now trying to destroy it faster than it will destroy him. Social media is too expensive to run without a carousel of new investors. He can't get any since he took it private. He can't pull the plug on it or his existing investors will crucify him, they're just biding their time on a lawsuit already.
He over played his hand and he is suffering consequences for it. This doesn't make him smart, mind you. He's just scrambling to cover his ass from a blatantly poor and criminal decision.
He's just scrambling to cover his ass from a blatantly poor and criminal decision.
While at the same time still performing a never-ending stream of the same fidgety, impulsive, entitled behavior and decisions that put him into this mess in the first place.
his existing investors will crucify him, they're just biding their time on a lawsuit already.
One wonders how big of a chunk of Tesla and/or SpaceX they've got their sights on, after they really get their knives out and go to Attorney Town on this narcissistic imbecile.
Yeah, people tend to forget how this all started. He just wanted to see under the hood and he was told that the only way he could do that was if he bought the company.
He saw a big opportunity to both get what he wanted and to manipulate the stock market in a big way. So he made a credible offer thinking that he was smart enough to create a loophole that would give him a way out. His loophole didn't pan out although the stock market manipulation arguably did.
He got too far along in the process to back out and the SEC doesn't fuck around. There was no option other than to actually make good on his offer to buy the company. I don't think he ever truly wanted to own Twitter, but I never thought he would set the company ablaze in such a spectacular fashion.
Unchecked corporate greed and no regards for users or communities that were built on these platforms. Hopefully the centralized ones will die from too many ads and user abandonment and the decentralized ones will rise and thrive.
Exactly this. The money tap has dried up post pandemic and they are seeking new revenue streams while also slashing costs. The hunger for perpetual growth to sate the investor class and their matyroshka nesting yachts is driving these decisions.
Yeah, someone else said that the other day on another discussion - we're seeing the bubble bursting for social media. The VC money is drying up, so these websites with massive bloat and overhead suddenly need to come up with new ways to generate cash. So they turn to what they "think" works - charge the visitors for the privilege to use their website without ever considering that maybe people will simply migrate and go elsewhere, as they always have.
Just like when most people left Myspace, then left digg, then left twitter, and left facebook, and left reddit. There's always stragglers that will keep the sites afloat. But they are a shell of the sites they once were.
Look at Facebook - back in 2005 it was an amazing site where all your friends were socially active and engaged. Now it's a ghost town - out of hundreds of friends and family, I only see a few posts from friends/family and a ton of ads and posts from groups I follow.
This is the corporate ethos now. The company I currently work for requires a minimum of 10% growth annually or we are failing. 9% and we are facing layoffs. Doesn’t help that we have a fixed customer base and new installations are a year long affair with RFPs and million dollar bids. I believe perpetual growth is a myth that will eventually catch up to all these corporations, but what do I know since I don’t have an MBA or a three letter title starting with C.
In all likelihood, the fediverse will not take off like people think it will. It's just slightly too complicated for the average person to instantly give a chance. I don't see any real reason to bring it up in an article like this.
This is my thinking as well. I’m here from reddit after shutting Apollo down but even now I’m still wondering what the hell is going on.
Lemmy seems to be in all the feeds but seems a one way street.
I’ve added magazines but I’m still lost. Maybe a few months I’ve figured it but I could easily see people says nah not for me.
The day YouTube stops me from watching videos with an ad blocker on is the day I start ripping every single godsdamned video I wanna watch on youtube with yt-dlp and watching them the mother-fuck-offline lol.
this is actually a good idea for preservation efforts. leaving such a huge library of videos that has been around since the modern internets founding with no backups feels dangerous because it is at the mercy of a for profit company which at any time can choose to just nuke their archives.
see what is currently happening with reddit many users are overwriting their comments which (good fuck reddit fir trying to make money from user provided free content then going around and charging the people that maintain the platform) but its also sad to see because now this huge repository of solutions or anecdotes of real issues that affect or have effected people will soon be gone.
!datahoarder and other similar communities might be of interest, they do archiving projects like this.
I saw a complete archive of everything posted to Reddit on one of the datahoarder communities as well, it'll have copies of all those deleted and overwritten comments tucked away in there for future recovery.
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