cjf @ cjf @feddit.uk

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2 yr. ago

Facebook might know who you’re messaging but that’s also true for Signal.

Signal’s sealed sender does a good job at knowing you’re sending a message, but not who to. All it’ll know on the receiving end is that a message was sent to it.

Of course people have found other methods of identifying this but sealed sender does cover most of the low hanging fruit.

Signal does also purposefully attempt to find ways to not collect any metadata, whilst also making it more difficult for anyone attacking to the servers to find anything. (e.g. ORAM for Secure Enclave operations)

My understanding is that meta used E2EE on your messages themselves, but everything else is up for grabs.

This would only be true in the US. What about the rest of the world?

What was you doing?

Other than enabling proton for all games in the settings, you shouldn’t have to do anything else to get steam games working.

Well, unless the game itself uses anti-cheat and the developer hasn’t enabled support for Linux, anyway.

As others have mentioned, the main caveat here is that anti cheat games can work if the developers enable the support.

I’ve been playing dead by daylight very happily for a good few months now on Linux. Apex legends has also got official support for Linux as well.

Nothings stopping you. It achieves the same thing. Some people might just prefer this since it’s easier and gets logged in the systemd journal? The Arch wiki lists some nice benefits of using systemd timers as a replacement to cron jobs.

The way I understand it, it’s an automated job that sends the “trim” command to SSDs to discard all the blocks that have been marked as unused by the filesystem. My knowledge is a little patchy so I’m probably missing some important details…

When you go to delete something on an SSD, it’s simply just marked as being deleted. The file still technically occupies space on the SSD and the SSD will never simply overwrite space that has a deleted file on it.

So… by enabling the service, systemd will automatically send the trim command that tells the SSD to empty out all the space occupied by files marked as deleted which allows the SSD to reuse said space.

Pulseaudio has been replaced by PipeWire for quite some time in fedora. Since Fedora 34, released in April 2021, apparently.

According to the wiki page, PipeWire originally came about trying to improve video handling on Linux, the same way that pulseaudio improved audio handling.

They then wanted to try and handle audio streams, with the idea of converging use cases for both consumer and professional audio users. Namely, they wanted a single audio system that supported both pulseaudio and JACK, whilst remaining as low latency as possible.

On top of this, because it was a modern reimplementation of audio and video handling in Linux, they designed it to work with Flatpak, and to provide secure methods for screenshotting and screencasting in wayland via the compositors.

(All my info here I just took from the wiki)

It’ll be used by a lot of Linux distributions.

It’s a drop-in replacement to the Pulseaudio and JACK audio systems, with the hopes of making audio handling decent within Linux with as low latency as they can.

Eh, WSL is still enough like Linux that it could be the best option for a lot of people. No risk to the computer being unable to boot whilst still giving you the ability to play with Linux tooling.

And credit where credit’s due: Microsoft details how to do a bare metal install, which is the most likely option to wipe Windows from your machine in the first place.

It wouldn’t surprise me if WhatsApp’s model on this is what the UK government were thinking of with the Online Safety Bill when they tried to enforce a back door in encrypted messengers.

It’s incredible just how much more interesting metadata can be than the actual message contents.

Explaining this to people when they ask why I don’t use WhatsApp is pretty difficult though.

I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I found out that what I thought was just a casual walk down the street mindlessly chatting with a friend turned out to also involve a third party neither of us were aware of tracking all of our movements.

I’ve not seen this before. This is really neat! Thanks for sharing ❤️

I believe this is down to what they define as being end to end encrypted.

It’s no secret that WhatsApp adopted Signal’s encryption protocol just before Meta acquired them, but since it’s all closed source we don’t know if they’ve changed anything since the announcement in 2016 that all forms of communications on WhatsApp are now encrypted and rolled out.

Within WhatsApp’s privacy policy, it’s important to note that they only mention end to end encryption when it comes to your messages. Everything else is apparently “fair game” for collection. Of note, the Usage and Log information point details all the metadata they collect on you automatically, including how you use the service; how long you use the service; your profile info; the groups you’re in; whether you’re online; and the last time you were online, to name a few things.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that technically they are end to end encrypted by definition, and whilst they’ve gone ahead and implemented things such as encrypted backups (that you must enable) to make it harder for them to read your message contents, they can still collect a lot of metadata on every user.

The thing about Twitter/X is that the algorithm has always been tailored to get the most interactions, which very typically leads it to feed you things that get you angry. I can’t imagine what it’s like post-musk ownership.

Facebook & Reddit are the same. I’ve never really used Instagram or TikTok so can’t really vouch for either of those.

I’ve seen people I’ve known since childhood whom I always thought were really lovely post really xenophobic content. I’ve watched others fall into the traps of “real social dynamics” and the likes of whatever crap Jordan Peterson was spewing at the time. Heck, I’ve even seen people whom have always been quite chill “go with the flow” types try to start arguments on these platforms.

I realised that a lot of things are posted very deliberately to enrage you. Depending on who posted it, they could also be attempting to control the way you think, too. Getting people angry is the best way to coerce them into compliance.

If you find yourself getting angry at something you’ve seen on social media, think about why that might have posted in the first place. I generally find that the angrier people are in the comments the more likely it was posted to influence how you think about the subject.

Maybe they didn’t expect the towers to actually fall?

Copying one of my favourite (and last saved) comments from Reddit:

The most precious commodity we have is our time on this planet, and we have far less of it than we realise. The time we choose to spend together is a gift we give to each other.

Appreciate the gift of their precious commodity that they give you, don’t expect more than they are willing to give, but don’t squander your precious resource with someone who doesn’t appreciate your gift.

I guess this game just doesn’t exist, but remember that tweet of the guy who had a dream about an open world pirate exploration game with Waluigi in it?

That game.

It’s an email alias service that generates a gibberish albeit unique email which then forwards on any received emails to your specified email inbox.

As far as I can tell there’s no way to link the two together unless you can see where the emails are being forwarded to.

DuckDuckGo offers a similar service (but free), also Proton (simple login) and addy.io (formerly AnonAddy).

Unsure about firefox relay specifically, but I’ve used DuckDuckGo and simple login (after it was acquired by proton) and both have to process the email first before it forwards it onto you. In the case of DDG, they also helpfully strip out any trackers in the email they pick up too.

I haven’t used it myself, but try boatswain? It looks a little more fully featured.

It’s on flathub, I know that much!

That’s more point in time location sharing rather than real time.

I see “real time” I think it updates where I am on a map for as long as I’ve specified, similar to what WhatsApp and telegram do.

It’s a feature I’d really like in signal, though.

The one anti-spam module in the server code and… what else is proprietary?

FCM? The thing they need to give android users (with Google play services installed) notifications?