As a parent, I was surprised at the amount of stuff kids need to be taught. Stuff that I assumed was obvious isn't - it's learned behaviour. And you don't realize that it's learned until you see your kid struggling with some trivial task.
In theory the biometric data lives in a special part of the phone hardware that the software can't (generally) access. It's one of the big deals about phone biometrics - it should be really hard to leak.
AFAIU, the fingerprint stored on the phone is incredibly low quality, so I'm not sure how much value it would have.
Could they mess with that? Yes. Is there profit in getting a really low quality hash of every user's fingerprint? Probably not worth the hassle.
Will people start caring for their privacy if most of the links posted were tracking free?
No. Most people won't notice, and the sites they're visiting have other tracking mechanisms.
I advocated for getting news from tracking free websites/ non-profits, people don't seem to change.
Yes. Those sites fill a need/role. Non profits typically don't have the same content factories that for-profit orgs do.
Will people on the long-term change or is it a lost cause?
Legislative change is the only way forward. You have a threat model that involves privacy, but most people don't. Instead of trying to change everybody, focus on legislation that would improve privacy regulations for all.
The developers building Lemmy are very different from the folks building bots. I've got a half-assed repost bot working, but there's no way I have the time or inclination to work on Lemmy itself.
Generally speaking, a bot needs to meet a much lower quality/reliability bar than the server does.
I think I'm one of the few users that enjoyed Reddit's random bots. Seeing the Accidental Haiku bot restructure a comment as haiku, or the Consecutive Number bot point out a number progression was fun.
As long as they're polite, and respect community boundaries, I think they're fun.
People can post from anywhere, but need to be physically present to show up to a parade. And it's easy for a single person to post multiple times. FWIW apparently the weather sucked too.
Weirdly, I haven't seen news outlets provide estimates of the number of attendees. The closest I've seen is
attendance appeared to fall far short of early predictions that as many as 200,000 people would attend
from CBC. It sounds like it was low turnout, but I'm not clear how low.
Assuming the photos are legit, the No Kings protests clearly got a lot of people out.
It sounds like you're asking about algorithms, which are (sort of) language-agnostic.
You'll find some neat stuff if you search for bubble sort, Dijkstra's algorithm, tree sort, hashing, complexity theory, and number theory. The last two are more theoretical.
To my knowledge, Introduction to Algorithms is the standard textbook used to teach university students about them. When I was in uni, it seemed to be the standard. Some people find it accessible. I did not.
Hanlon's Razor is all well and good as a heuristic, but tends to lead to people discounting malice much too often.
There's definitely scenarios where that is the case.
Also, I really didn't say we were "under attack"
I would describe a massive influx of spambots as an attack on a social media platform. It's my characterization. I didn't mean to imply that you said it.
Lemmy is a federated system and these stats are self-reported by user maintained systems. Rather than a sudden influx of users (bots or otherwise), a misconfigured system or hiccup in stats collection seems more likely.
Generally, Hanlon's Razor, add applied to computing: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidityuser error.
There's a lot of malicious systems out there, but there is little corroborating evidence indicating that we're under attack.
only the linter gives a hoot - the interpreter will happily leave that footgun for later