Mikina @ Mikina @programming.dev

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482

Joined

2 yr. ago

That is true, but can't they (a company that wants to, not the goverment) do that already if they want to, under ChatControl 1.0? And I wouldn't say that whether a service is E2EE or not makes any difference here - scanning private user messages shouldn't be allowed, whether they are encrypted or not. IMO if ChatControl 2.0 passed and was made mantadory for everyone, the fact that it is mostly noticable on E2EE apps is only a side-effect of blanket surveilance, and not the main issue with the proposition.

What's the point of them agreeing that they will let the 1% of users of E2EE services keep their privacy, while they already scan 90% of communication (I mean, just GMail + FB/IG + iCloud, that is already being scanned, makes for most of the worlds communication) for the past year or so?

Now I'm curious whether Facebook/Instagram, who does offer encrypted chats and also scans all your content under ChatControl 1.0 voluntarily, also scans the encrypted chats or not. I'd vager they do, but that's just a speculation.

But they did briefly mention that they will begin "phasing out" chatcontrol 1.0. I wonder what does that means, and how long will it take.

I think the headline is missleading, if I understand it correctly.

ChatControl is already possible, and implemented for major communication service providers that most of the people use. It's just not mantadory.

Currently a regulation is in place allowing providers to scan communications voluntarily (so-called “Chat Control 1.0”). So far only some unencrypted US communications services such as GMail, Facebook/Instagram Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, iCloud email and X-Box apply chat control voluntarily (more details here). source

The article states that they decided that they will not blanketly require it, but I don't think it says anything about rolling back the first version of ChatControl that's already in effect.

EDIT: I was wrong, the article actually does mention it, even though on pretty vague terms:

The current voluntary chat control of private messages (not social networks) by US internet companies is being phased out. Targeted telecommunication surveillance and searches will only be permitted with a judicial warrant and only limited to persons or groups of persons suspected of being linked to child sexual abuse material."

I've been recently introduced to Logseq, a journal/notes/knowledge management app that is based on networked knowledge (links,references and tags), instead of hierarchical (folder structure) knowledge management type, and it has been a gamechanger.

It has a pretty basic TODO features, but the way linking and references work is really smooth to work with. You get a dated journal page for each day, and can just randomly add blocks of notes that reference pages, topics or tags, and it gets automatically linked to the page you referenced. So if I open the page for a project, it contains content of every block that mentioned it, along with context, so you quickly get an overview.

The best feature is that you can also write queries, that fill the block with data you want, so I can for example create a block for a meeting, tag it with project, and write a query that lists notes from every other meeting tagged with the same project. Or I can have a query for every TODO item tagged with a project, to see them at one place.

The node graph feature is also nice, which visualises links between pages, so you can get an overview about related things, and it also has a Whiteboards and Flashcard features, just as it can do basic time trackings for blocks tagged as TODO.

It's pretty intuitive to use, and so far it's one of the first note-taking and knowledge management app that has managed to stick with me for longer than a week.

And a quick tip - if you decide to use it, check out how to setup an automatic git syncing, so you can sync your notes between devices without paying for the cloud sync feature.

Get GrapheneOS, your mobile phone will be one of the best sources of data about you, and if you're on Googled Android or IOS, there's nothing you can do to stop google apps stalking you, which they have already had several lawsuits about doing it even when you disable it. GrapheneOS takes care of it by sandboxing google apps, so they can't do almost anything, along with really fine-grained permissiion control, i.e giving messenger access to only selected photo you want to upload, and nothing more.

As far as browser goes, I recommend Mullvad, and bundle it with their VPN. Not only can it be payed for by Crypto, it also means that almost every other VPN user will have the same browser fingerprint as you - fingerprint of the Mullvad browser, which is based on Tor browser and designed to be as unfingerprintable as possible, so it will be really hard to distinguish you using secondary fingerpriting, such as extensions or minor browser details.

Don't use Gmail or GDrive, ideally get your own NAS for file sharing and switch to something like Protonmail, which now also offers Drive. Get a domain that is vaguely company-sounding. Something like @techcorplimited.com, and create a catch-all email address, so any email sent to that domain will end up in your inbox. You can now use randomname.randomsurename@techcorplimited.com as your throwaway email address, and just randomly generate them for all services you use, while also making it believable to confuse even AIs.

Even when using VPN, don't sign into your accounts. You don't need to sign in to Youtube to tell it that it was you all the time, just remember your favorite youtubers and look for them by hand every time.

If you're really serious, look into https://www.qubes-os.org/

I was working on a pretty well known game, porting it to consoles.

On PS4 we started getting OOM crashes after you've played a few levels, because PS4 doesn't have that much memory. I was mostly new on the project and didn't know it very well, so I started profiling.

It turned out that all the levels are saved in a pretty descriptive JSON files. And all of them are in Unity's Scriptable Objects, so even if you are not playing that level, they all get loaded into memory, since once something references a SO, it gets loaded immediately. It was 1.7Gb of JSON strings loaded into memory once the game started, that stays there for the whole gameplay.

I wrote a build script that compresses the JSON strings using gzip, and then uncompresses it when loading the actual level.

It reduced the memory of all the levels to 46Mb down from 1.7Gb, while also reduced the game load by around 5 seconds.

This is my experience as well. I've always tried to be privacy-conscious, and stick to self-hosted alternatives or FOSS, but I was also lazy and didn't really tried too hard. With the recent enshittification problems for almost every product that has a corporation behind it, it's a lot more in my face that it's shit and I should be dealing with it.

It made me finally get a VPN and switch to Mullvad browser. Get rid of Reddit completely. I finally got a Pixel with GrapheneOS and got a NAS running.

It's also doing wonders for my digital addiction. The companies are grossly mistaken in assuming that my addiction to their service is greater than my immense hatred for forced monetization, fingerpriting and dark patterns. It's turning out it's not, and I've dropped so many services in the last few months I never was able to really stop using, most of them thanks to popups like "You have to log in to view this content" or "This content is available only in app", or "You are using an adblocker...". Well, fuck you. I didn't want to be here anyway.

I've been mostly working in C# for the past few years (and most of my life), and the only C++ experience I have is from college, so it's getting some using to. And that's what I was getting at - thanks to college, where I was forced to really learn (or at least, understand and be able to use) a wide range of drastically different languages, from Lisp through Bash, Pharo, Prolog, to Java and C#, that when I have to write something in a language I don't know, it's usually similar to at least one of them and I always could figure it out intuitively.

With Rust, even though it has an amazing compiler, I'm struggling - probably because of the borrowing and overly careful error handling being concepts I've never had to deal with to get a MVP code working. Sure, that probably means that the code wasn't error-proof, which is exactly what Rust forces you to do and which is amazing, but it makes it a lot harder to just write a single script without prior knowledge when you have to.

I hope they are teaching Rust at universities now, we definitely didn't have it 8 years ago, which is a shame.

I was just thinking about something similar in regards to gamedev.

For the past few years since college, we've been working on a 2D game in our spare time, running on Unity. And for the past few months I've been mostly working on performace, and it's still mind-boggling to me how is it possible that we're having troubles with performance. It's a 2D game, and we're not even doing that much with it. That said, I know it's mostly my fault, being the lead programmer, and since most of the core system were written when I wasn't really an experienced programmer, it shows, but still. It shouldn't be that hard.

Is the engine overkill for what we need? Probably. Especially since it's 2D, writing our own would probably be better - we don't use most of the features anyway. The only problem would be tooling for scene building, but that's also something that shouldn't be that hard.

The blog post is inspiring, just yesterday I was looking into what would I need to get a basic rendering done in Rust, I may actually give it a try and see if I can make a basic 2D engine from scratch, it would definitely be an amazing learning experience. And I don't really need that many features, right? Rendering, audio, sprite animation, collisions and scene editor should be sufficient, and I have a vague idea about how would I write each of those features in 2D.

Hmm. I wonder what would be the performance difference if I got an MVP working.

Nigel Stanford has some amazing videoclips. I love Robots vs. Music the most (especially since the tune and the whole Automatica album is amazing), but Science vs. Music is also great.

And he also did a few making of videos. While I'm sure most of the final result is CGI anyway, it's still a nice touch.

I've just started learning Rust, mostly by experimenting with winapi since that what's I'm mostly going to use it for anyway, but this finally explains why I had so much trouble with trying to intuitively winging it. I've skimmed through the Rust book once, but judging by this article it's no wonder I was mostly wrestling the compiler.

Looks like I have to go back to the drawing board. I understand why is Rust doing it, and I'm sure that once I finally get used to it, it's going to be a way smoother experience, but maan, this is the first language I couldn't just figure out in an hour. It's a frustrating learning experience, but I also see why it's neccessary and love it for that.

I work part-time as a game developer, and part time as a pentester, so I do search for technical questions quite a lot.

Hmm, now I wonder whether I'm just used to it. I haven't used any other search engine in more than a year. I'll have to compare the results more, but as far as I remember every time I couldn't find what I needed on DDG and resorted to !g, the Google results were even worse.

I've just switched to it literally yesterday, and while you will probably not avoid Play Services, being able to install it into a different profile that's only limited to the few apps that need it is nice.

Also, just the fact that on Graphene Play Services do not have the special privileges as on any android phone, and are subjected to the same limitations as any other app (which are even stricter on Graphene) helps a lot. It also means that even if you end up just running the play services at all times, they can't do as much as they can on other android phones, and the data they can access without your explicit permission is really limited. So, even that helps by a lot.

While I don't believe you can degoogle that quickly, because some of their services take quite some time to properly switch, such as email, in the end it's not too hard, but just takes time and some work.

Changing email is easy, if you don't mind it being a slow process. Just forward your google email, and start slowly replacing any service you notice in the following months/years to your new address.

Google Drive is harder to replace, I went for just running a NAS with Nextcloud, which takes care of most of Google Drive/Docs/Calendar stuff. If self-hosting isn't your cup of tea, Proton is slowly setting up usable google alternatives - they have Drive and Calendar IIRC.

Now for phone, that's the hardest task. You wouldn't help yourself by getting an IPhone. While it would de-google you, there's basically no point in switching google for apple. Getting android to be usable for stuff like banking, MFA and other bullshit you need your phone for while being degoogled is hard, due to the bullshit Google Services. The only solution I found is to either just go with dumb phone with an obscure OS, or just get a Google Pixel and run GrapheneOS.

Maps are another issue, but thankfully we have a local https://mapy.cz/ , which is a pretty OK alternative to Google maps for our country, and I guess they even work worldwide. I don't drive a car, so I don't really need it that often.

The only remaining Google service I use is GCloud VPS, because I have some websites running there on the free instances that I'm too lazy to move. But I'm slowly migrating it to Amazon. Not that it would help much, anyway. And also Youtube, but I'm trying to go through the alternative front-ends as much as possible.

And for browser, I'm using https://mullvad.net/en/browser. Fuck chromium.

If you have a Pixel, why not go all in with https://grapheneos.org/?

I've switched to DDG almost a year ago, and I never had issues with my search results. Quite the contrary, every time I tried using !g because I simply wasn't finding an answer, the Google was ad-ridden bullshit full of promoted pages without relevance to what I was looking for.

I guess I'm just used to DDG quality of results, but I never felt like it's as bad as you say.

This is how I did it. Set up a Protonmail account with my own domain, and set all my Gmail emails to forward there. I set up a special folder for all forwarded mail, to remind myslef that I should change my email on that service, and every time I logged somwhere or received an email from an important service I use, I made sure to change my address there.

It has already been several years, but I think I've managed to replace it everywhere within a few months. I haven't seen a forwarded email in months, so I think I'm finally done.

It depends on what kind of services you are hosting, but for general my general use (having a NAS accessible for rare file-sharing, Nextcloud, Home Assistant and git), Cloudflare Tunnel is amazing. The only drawback is that their ToS does not allow file streaming or larger ongoing data transfers, so technically even my usage is against it due to file-sharing, but I only need to share like one small file every month tops, so I haven't run into issues yet.

It's also nice that you can set up traffic filtering to be pretty restricted, so your servers can be both publicly accessible, and also safe - i.e I just geoblock traffic from outside my country, since I never need to use it from there (and can easily change it when I do). And it's also pretty quick to set up!

This finally explains it. I was about to write something similar as the comment you are replying to, because it did felt like a totally unnecessary PR stunt of another corporation that only exploits the issue for publicity, and I really hate that.

But if the mod description was as bad as you say, then removing it was the right move.

I disagree. I've been/am working on several pretty large projects in Unity (some of them sold hundreds of thousands copies), and especially once you start porting to consoles, the experience goes to shit. Their support is vague, documentation is plainly wrong in some places - I've once spent few days figuring out how to use a documented and explained feature, only to find out later that there's a closed few years old bug on their issue tracker that it's actually not supported, and the documentation only does not explains it very well. (The feature was multiple hits per single Raycast in jobs, here are the docs. According to the bug resolution, only one hit per ray is supported, and the docs only don't explain it very well. The docs are still the same.)

You also inevitably run into issues that you simply don't have in other engines - it's closed source. You have no idea how is something implemented, or whether something isn't working because you are doing it wrong, or if it's Unity bug/fault. In Unreal, if something doesn't work, you can always just check the engine code, and either fix it yourself, or better understand why it's not working. If you need to slightly modify some engine behavior, you're out of luck with Unity - you have to resort to ugly hacks that sometimes work, but usually at a cost. In Unreal, you just modify the engine code and be done with it.

Trusting Unity with any feature is also a gamble. Have you started developing a multiplayer game on Unet? Tough, we don't want to support that anymore. But, we will create a better multiplayer system, just wait for it! Then they removed Unet, and the new networking relacement is widely regarded as pretty much unusable - or at lest it was last time I checked. Thankfully, there are a few amazing open source networking addons.

In general, while Unity is an ok-ish game engine for smaller hobby projects (but for that, Godot is better), it's really an awful and frustrating experience once your project size grows and you need to build bigger games, or if you start porting your games to consoles.

And it's also really apparent from the way they communicate and threat you company that they don't give a fuck and only want your money.