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1,112
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • It looks like you are more of an xmpp advocate than a free software advocate. If you want to join a matrix room and it's too burdensome to do so through your xmpp client, then use a matrix client for that. Without some much better reasons for doing so, setting up a competing xmpp room is not a reasonable alternative.

  • ... not that I especially trust Monero much; not even as much as Tor. What I object to is the tendency to be too quick to go ahead with the assumption that it probably has been broken even in the total absence (such as in this thread so far) of any evidence to demonstrate that.

    It's the same misguided instinct that leads people to believe that all encryption is futile, that the NSA already knows all the keys no matter what we do. It's not really true. It is true they can easily compromise the security and privacy of any one of us normal people they choose to single out, but for those of us who don't practise unreasonably strict op-sec the point of choosing secure and private modes of communication (including monero if your sense of morality allows for the use of a proof-of-work cryptocurrency) is not to protect one target against all possible threat models. And it's not only to protect against lesser threats. Much of the time the most important thing is to contribute to the effort to make it impossible for anyone to systematically spy on the whole world all at once. Nobody should have that power.

  • Well then, what specific research do you have suggesting that monero has been broken? After all it is not in any way a "black box". The algorithm is well known.

  • I too don't know much about monero specifically, however:

    Parallel construction is still a thing, yes. But so is spreading the false idea that everything is already compromised so there's no point trying to defend yourself.

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  • ... I hope so anyway, because the obvious alternative of the chatbots remaining under the control of an elite few while everyone falls into the habit of believing whatever they say seems substantially worse.

    I guess the optimistic view would be to hope that a crowd of very persuasive bots participating in all kinds of media, presenting opinions that are just as misguided as the average human but much more charismatic and convincing, will all argue for different conflicting things leading to a golden age full of people who've learned that it's necessary to think critically about whatever they see on the screen.

  • I still have a laptop with Windows on it. Dual boot works for me. I only need Windows once in a blue moon, don't want it using up any of my attention or the computer's resources the rest of the time.

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  • I find myself suspecting that chatbots getting really good at talking people into believing whatever their operators want people to believe is going to start a lot more conspiracy theories than it ends.

  • Is it a good article? I don't know. There's some truth in there, but I'm pretty sure there are a hell of a lot more suburban Trump voters than there are rural Trump voters. And in my experience of it the people who live in small towns, medium-sized cities, suburbs, edge city, and even actual rural areas are in general not nearly as monolithic and politically unified as they're portrayed there. Even if it's always clear which party is going to get the majority of votes, they most often don't get all the votes. Perhaps like the writer of that article many of them like to romanticize the idea of being "rural" because they mow their own lawn and could drive to a farm in half an hour if they wanted to, but although there's some truth in there I think it's mostly foolish rationalizations. Big cities are alien to me too, that's not a real reason to buy into all that cheap right-wing mythology that gets used to explain why we should vote against our own interests.

  • Do they have the slightest idea how much damage it would do to the international reputation of Europe if they were to make e.g. Signal illegal? I suppose some of them do, which is why it hasn't passed before.

  • Government isn't about industrial policy any more, the leaders are all too busy with the latest all-purpose political strategy: Flood the zone with useless bullshit, hope something good happens that you can take credit for.

  • There's way more than enough wealth in this country to go around, if it were evenly distributed.

  • Sylpheed is the best. I thought everyone knew this.

  • Everyone who is aware of the facts agrees that the big terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were the result of a conspiracy. That the American president was in on it seems unlikely. Some of your "reasonable" questions seem ridiculous, such as the idea that a person having "limited flight time" makes any difference at all. The invasion of Iraq was the result of another conspiracy, one which was ongoing at the time and ready to use any convenient excuse to get started.

  • I checked the local classified ads and their prices don't seem too far out of line with what people are asking. I guess there's still demand even though 2020 seems like a long time ago in computer years. Not from me though, I think the PS3 will be my last. There's no need for a newer console now that games can run on linux.

  • I don't know much about Doug Ford, but this sounds a lot like one of those "every accusation is a confession" situations.

  • The Great Shopping Mall of Alexandria

  • 37% of them went so far as to get a mastodon account and mention it in their twitter profile, and then maybe one third of those put some substantial effort into making it work. That's ~90% who didn't bother. In the one small-ish academic field where I followed some of the new arrivals on mastodon when they got there, it very much appeared to me that the failure had nothing to do with the decentralized nature of the platform. It was simply that the small number who made the transition did not add up to enough to form a critical mass and get the discussion going. Some few of them did give it a good try.

  • Depends on the argument I guess. Don't bring a sweet roll to the kind where you need a war axe.

  • It has been falsely claimed that the measure undertaken by MCMC is a draconian measure

    While it may be unclear exactly what kind of Internet traffic laws Draco would've written, allowing only the major landowners to run DNS servers does seem to be in keeping with the spirit of "aiding and legitimizing the political power of the aristocracy and allowing them to consolidate their control of the land and poor" as his laws are said to have done.

  • I've used them both in the past, but prefer Xfce now. So I'm probably not too biased either way on Gnome v. KDE. I'd say they're both extremely well-supported, popular, respectable, and safe choices. They're quite different in style though, so odds are you might find you have a preference for one or the other. Go with whichever you like best.