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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • S410@kbin.socialtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlAndroid Microphone Snooping
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    7 months ago

    Android is sending a ton of data, though, even if you’re not doing anything internet related. It, also, kinda reacts to “okay, google”, which wouldn’t really be possible if it wasn’t listening.

    Now, it obviously doesn’t keep a continuous, lossless audio stream from the phone to some google server. But, it could be sending text parsed from audio locally, or just snippets of audio when the thing detects speech. Relatively normal stuff to collect for analytics purposes, actually.

    Now, data like that could “easily” get “misplaced”, of course, and end up in the ad-shoveling machine… Not necessary at Google’s hands: could be any app, really. Facebook, TickTok, random free to play Candy Crush clone, etc. But if that data gets into the interwoven clusterfuck of advertisement might, it will likely end up having an effect on the ads shown to the user.



  • Simply disabling registration of new accounts using Tor/VPN should be sufficient and won’t affect existing users.

    Although, requiring verification of accounts made via those would be a better approach. Require captchas to prevent automated posting. Automatically mark posts made from new accounts and/or via Tor or a VPN for moderation review.

    There are way to mitigate spam that aren’t as blunt and overreaching as blanket banning entire IP ranges. This approach is the dumbest, least competent way of ensuring any kind of security, and, honestly, awfully close to being needlessly discriminating. Fuck everyone from countries with draconian internet censorship, I guess?


  • Meanwhile Discord misses half the features Matrix has. It’s almost as if they’re different projects with similar, but different goals.

    One tries to be a flexible, interoperable, and secure protocol for communication, that’s free for anyone to implement and use…

    The other is a for-profit company that cherishes its centralized nature and far reaching control, allowing them to sell you random bells and whistles, collect your data unobstructed, and lure in investors and advertisers.



  • I merely pointed out that in the context, his statement was, most likely, not trying to claim that CSAM is a victimless crime, but that his alleged possession of it is.

    Substitute CSAM for something like murder, for example: It’s one thing to have a video of someone committing murder and a very different thing to commit murder yourself and record it. One is, obviously, a violent crime; the other, not so much. It’s a similar argument here.

    He might be 100% guilty, he might not be. I don’t know for sure. What I do know for sure, is that CIA and other alphabet agencies have a history of being… less than honest and moral. So, I exercise caution and take their statements with a fair bit of skepticism. Pardon me of that doesn’t come off as I intend it to.


  • The sentence previous to the one you’re quoting, the one you’ve omitted, changes the context quite a lot.

    When he heard that the government was pushing to keep him detained pending trial, his stomach dropped. “The crime I am charged with is in fact a non-violent, victimless crime,”

    In the US a person pending trial can be either released or kept detained. (18 U.S. Code § 3142 - Release or detention of a defendant pending trial) In cases when the defendant is being charged with non-violent crimes, it’s fairly common for them to be released until their trial. Possibly on bond.

    The wording of his statement is… questionable. But in this context, it could be re-worded to something like “you’re are accusing me of possession of illegal material, which is not a violent crime. I was not involved in creation of said material, therefore there are no victims of mine”.

    Anyway, even if he did have the material in question, the fact that they report finding some on a jail computer is awful weird. Those aren’t, exactly, known for having unrestricted and unmonitored access to the internet. I, also, would be surprised if those computers are less locked down than school or library computers, which tend to restrict users’ permissions to the bare minimum, often as far as prohibiting creation of files.





  • You pull up. Get out. Put the nozzle in. Then you go inside. There, you wait in line for 5 minutes, because the dick from another pump decided to buy a fucking coffee and a sandwich, and the only employee is busy making those for him, instead of operating the pumps. Then you actually pay and get the gas flowing. By the time you’re back at the car, it’s already finished pumping.

    So, there can be a time gap of several minutes with multiple actions and distractions during it. Is it really that surprising people forget to pull the thing out, occasionally?




  • You’re linking a post… From 2010. AMD replaced radeon with their open source drivers (AMDgpu) in 2015. That’s what pretty much any AMD GPU that came out in the last 10 years uses now.

    Furthermore, the AMDgpu drivers are in-tree drivers, and AMD actively collaborate with the kernel maintainers and developers of other graphics related projects.

    As for Nvidia: their kernel modules are better than nothing, but they don’t contain a whole lot in terms of actual implementation. If before we had a solid black box, now, with those modules, we know that this black box has around 900 holes and what comes in and out of those.

    Furthermore, if you look at the page you’ve linked, you’ll see that “the GitHub repository will function mostly as a snapshot of each driver release”. While the possibility of contributing is mentioned… Well, it’s Nvidia. It took them several years to finally give up trying to force EGLStreams and implement GBM, which was already adopted as the de-facto standard by literally everybody else.

    The modules are not useless. Nvidia tend to not publish any documentation whatsoever, so it’s probably better than nothing and probably of some use for the nouveau driver developers… But it’s not like Nvidea came out and offered to work on nouveau to make up to par and comparable to their proprietary drivers.


  • k, so for the least used hardware, linux works fine.

    Yeah, basically. Which raises a question: how companies with much smaller market share can justify providing support, but Nvidia, a company that dominates the GPU market, can’t?

    The popular distros are what counts.

    Debian supports several DEs with only Gnome defaulting to Wayland. Everything else uses X11 by default.

    Some other popular distros that ship with Gnome or KDE still default to X11 too. Pop!_OS, for example. Zorin. SteamOS too, technically. EndeavorOS and Manjaro are similar to Debian, since they support several DEs.

    Either way, none of those are Wayland exclusive and changing to X11 takes exactly 2 clicks on the login screen. Which isn’t necessary for anyone using AMD or Intel, and wouldn’t be necessary for Nvidia users, if Nvidia actually bothered to support their hardware properly. But I digress.

    Worked well enough for me to run into the dozen of other issues that Linux has

    Oh, it’s no way perfect. Never claimed it is.

    I like most people want a usable environment. Linux doesn’t provide that out of the box.

    This both depends on the disto you use and on what you consider a “usable environment”.

    If you extensively use Office 365, OneDrive, need ActiveDirectory, have portable storage encrypted with BitLocker, etc. then, sure, you won’t have a good experience with any distro out there. Or even if you don’t, but you grab a geek oriented distro (e.g. Arch or Gentoo) or a barebones one (e.g. Debian) you, again, won’t have the best experience.

    A lot of people, however, don’t really do a whole lot on their devices. The most widely used OS in the world, at this point in time, is Android, of all things.

    If all you need to do is use the web and, maybe, edit some documents or pictures now and then, Linux is perfectly capable of that.

    Real life example: I’ve switched my parents onto Linux. They’re very much not computer savvy and Gnome with it’s minimalistic mobile device-like UI and very visual app-store-like program manager is significantly easier for them to grasp. The number of issues they ask me to deal with has dropped by… A lot. Actually, every single issue this year was the printer failing to connect to the Wifi, so, I don’t suppose that counts as a technical issue with the computer, does it?

    wacom tablets

    I use Gnome (Wayland) with an AMD GPU. My tablet is plug and play… Unlike on Windows. Go figure.