Consumerism! AHHHHH!!!

Stoat and it’s been mostly fine, but they’re already implementing age verification.

Can you elaborate on this? I can’t find anything about it online

What white paper?

>inkjet

LED printers have been around for fucking ever, and the average person doesn’t need the graphic fidelity that only an overpriced pigment soup, which goes bad in a month, can supply.

Oh, and literally every part of a toner-based printer is easier to replace/repair… so why would a printer designed around repairability and upgradability use ink???

Edit’ And I almost forgot: toner is cheaper per page than ink! Whyyy???

Mildly Infuriating

Nope, that’s just full-on despicable and the people that wrote that should get serious therapy and not something unspeakable done to them

The controversial opinions come in the form of “GUI is better than CLI” or vice-versa. I prefer the efficiency of keyboard-only navigation/usage, but I think GUIs are cool af and a great way to be noob-friendly

Because privacy is a spectrum, and it makes a good stepping off point for the people that still use text messages and social media chat clients to stay in touch. I can’t convince half of my nerd friends to leave Discord for literally anything less shit, but I can convince even my tech-averse mother to use Signal instead of FaceTime.

A few answers say “they aren’t private by design,” but don’t really go into the “why.” There’s the obvious “it’s an electronic tracking device, duh” reason, but there’s also a more nuanced reason:

Airtags are able to be picked up almost anywhere because they connect to the nearest bluetooth-enabled Apple device, and then send location info across the internet to you. Without this functionality (the ability of any and every Apple device to locate it), they wouldn’t have any way to send their location back to the owner.

Your best “privacy respecting” alternatives are something that uses meshtastic (and hoping there’s enough repeaters near you), something that uses cellular data and GPS (which is about as privacy-respecting as Airtags are), or just a key finder/beeper (which only works within a small radius)

This article was more constructive (suggesting alternatives) than destructive (leveraging critiques), but it did link to several critiques/vulnerabilities with OpenPGP.

Unfortunately, half are about implementation issues (granted, it’s made more difficult to implement something correctly when it’s as convoluted and all-encompassing as PGP)—which are hopefully not applicable to Delta due to their 3rd party, applied cryptography audit—and the rest are obsolesced by the 2024 updates to the standard—RFC 9580, the so-called “crypto-refresh.”

Do you have any critiques that address the current state of the PGP protocol’s security?

Oh, for sure. All it takes is me looking at an Awk one-liner to make my headspin. Give me a simple “for each line in $FILE, reformat MM/dd/yyyy as dd/MM/yyyy” instead of… whatever that looks like in Awk.

The hardware of a computer is not designed to handle natural language parsing. Techbros with just enough knowledge to be dangerous will say it’s a matter of complex-enough software, but it’s more that human brains are not Von Neumann machines

rtorrent!

I didn’t know where he was from, nor had I heard about him until the outrage machine hyped him up. I just assumed he was an immigrant based on the outrage, but I guess that’s asking too much of the racist who can be fooled into liking Kid Rock.

The worse the product is, the more desperate they get to shove it in your face. Good products don’t need to pay others to pretend it’s good, you just find out via word-of-mouth or free trials

Reputable news source “GLOBAL FACTZ”

I couldn’t find any criticiques of OpenPGP aside from LibrePGP’s. Do you have sources I could look into?

Linux From Scratch or be doomed to be an eternal noob.

Then it’s writing your own kernel. Then your own bootloader. Then your own UEFI.

I agree with your main point, but I do want to criticize

I think he was a bit off the rails and a leftist hater.

This is an understatement. He was an ecofascist in all except name. In Industrial Society and Its Future, his critiques of the right basically boil down to “they’re bad at optics” and his critiques of the left basically boil down to “they care about animals, [slurs], and women.” He was the archetype of “claim to be centrist because I know how unpopular my actual opinions are.”

That being said, I also want to shed light on a little glimmer of hope hidden inside the surveillance state:

if there were to be a socialist revolution in a 1st world country any time soon, just how much of an advantage the state has over the people due to it’s surveillance network.

A few counterpoints to this:

1. A point I learned from a movie of all places, no less poignant that it was a movie about resisting the surveillance state (Enemy of the State): one of the primary principles of Guerilla Warfare is to use your opponents biggest strength and turn it into their weakness. This leads me into my next point:

2. There is way too much data. A major part of the push for AI is because it can emulate human decision making while parsing orders of magnitude more data. Trying to find a person in Petabytes worth of video and imagery and metadata is like finding a needle in a hay-planet. Sure, they may have all that surveillance, but most of the signal gets lost in the billions of times more noise.

3. The government is not a monolith. The 50-agencies-in-a-trench-coat may try to pass themselves off as a unified entity, but when push comes to shove, they’re a bunch of organizations that all have their own agenda, and each organization is just a bunch of people that all have their own agenda. Push hard enough, and you’ll start to see the cracks form. Talk to any government employee and you’ll soon realize their org is just as susceptible to all the internal bullshit squabbles that any private company is.

4. Piggybacking off of 2 and 3: they need manpower that they don’t have. When we talk about “the state” or “the government,” we can lose sight of the fact that these organizations aren’t composed of countless, faceless people. Instead of 10% of all civilians, it’s less than 1%. This number may still be huge compared to the size of local leftist org chapters and lemmy communities, but it’s only like 1.3% of the working class.

5. Combining 3 and 4: the large majority of those government employees are also part of the proletariat. Their loyalty to the government only extends as far as their paycheck, and if any kind of class revolution were to kick into full swing, there would be a mass exodus of labor. There would also be hundreds of thousands of workers who are sympathetic to the cause on the inside, throwing wrenches in all kinds of cogs.

So yes, things are pretty bleak with the state of privacy in this day and age. No, there is no magical solution where an authoritarian government just willfully cedes its power to control its populace. No, there won’t be any way to altogether avoid revolutionaries being incarcerated or worse. No, it won’t fix itself, nor will somebody else take the reigns while we can comfortably be bystanders.

But it’s not already a lost cause.