Seems the most likely explanation. They fucked around and found out, and this gives them a way to save face.

Watched the vido now. Seems these gravity battery facilities might not be as efficient (80% to pumped hydro’s 90%), but you can construct them anywhere, and don’t need a mountainous land area nearby. Nice.

Pumped water storage is kinda a gravity battery, and it’s currently the largest stored energy source for most countries.

Damn… its gotta be rough living that far out.

I’ve def met a few people like this. They have a few terrible dates on these sites, and it just stresses them out too much to even try again. Its really sad.

There’s a few star trek episodes where they deal with characters who become addicted to either holodecks/holosuites, or games, but I guess it being a space-socialist-utopia of sorts, they give people enough 3rd spaces and community gatherings, so that its rare to find people who completely retreat from real life, and usually a sign of some mental affliction or trauma.

At least right now, I don’t see the US recovering from this… 3rd spaces might pop up here and there, but they’ll be increasingly rare, and against the trend of overall social isolation.

I sometimes wonder if its even possible to have any healthy online social network. We can try to build in things to make social media less addictive, and try to use less of the psychologically damaging things capitalist software companies build in… but at the end of the day an online group of friends can never sub for a real one.

If neighbors means “near the parents home”, then it makes sense. Many go to colleges in different cities, then don’t stay, and lose touch with their college social circles, but the families near your parents home keep a consistent connection.

Kamala Harris’s history

It might work this time on repeat for every new generation of goldfish-brained liberals.

Signal’s server is open-source

Prove it, give me ssh access to their centralized server so I can verify that they’re running the code they’ve published. Otherwise this is a “just trust me” claim.

Also, I don’t think Signal can get your name without a government to look it up.

There are 10 websites that publicly publish phone number and identity info, right now. Not even a government, but a random stranger can convert your phone number to your real identity.

Viewing upvotes / downvotes will be in lemmy 1.0 : https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5616

There will also be the ability to view the vote totals you’ve given to a person: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5786

what information is provided to an entity about whom.

“Content” and “Context”

Why is only message text considered “information / content / context” here. Signal has your real name and address via phone numbers, and has every other real person you talked to, and when. Why is “message text” considered context, but social networking graphs aren’t?

All these definitions are highly subjective, and the above one clearly considers social networking graphs to not be “content”. Basically they’ve re-defined privacy in a way that excludes highly sensitive information like everyone you talk to, and when.

thanks to end to end encryption. You can evaluate the protocol yourself with your own eyes, except clearly you cannot read, but modulo that.

This means nothing when you have no idea what code the server is running, they even went a whole year without publishing their server code updates, until they got a lot of backlash over it. Real security doesn’t require a “just trust us” claim.

Also, metadata is content. Even if they don’t have the message text, Signal still has the real identities of everyone you talked to, and when. With that you can build social network graphs, which are far easier to harvest and more useful anyway than trying to read through message content and determine meaning.

Signal is not open source, its a centralized US service, and you have no idea what their server is running. They even went a full year without publishing server code updates at one point, until it caused enough of a backlash that they started doing it again. But publishing that is no guarantee of anything, because you have no access to their server.

mathematically impossible for Signal to gain access to your sensitive information (except for your phone number, obviously).

A phone number in most countries, including the US, means your real name and address.

No one should be recommending signal over matrix and simplex. It’s probably more secure than whatsapp, but both have social network graphs of everyone you talked to, and when.

mean you know what’s going on in my house

Signal knows the real identities of everyone you talk to, and when. Is that not “knowing what’s going on in your house?”

So its a “private” and “secure” US corporation that knows everyone I talk to and when? I’ve heard this one before.

I don’t consider it “private”, if you were to know the real identities of everyone I was talking to, and when I talked to them. I’m not telling any US corporation like signal that especially.

This thread shows the success of Signal’s PR campaigns, and how a shiny app can get people to overlook all the privacy concerns. They’re just as successful as Apple at getting people to think that a US-based corporation hosted on Amazon’s servers and subject to national security letters, whose privacy model is “just trust us with your phone number”, is in any way secure.