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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • A VPN future? Haha. Not if they don’t want to. There are many ways to prevent VPN from operating when you’re a government.

    You can just plain ban encryption, which sounds really crazy, but yeah, they’re trying to.

    You can just say “it’s illegal to use a VPN”. It’ll technically still work, but if there’s a trace of trafic from your house to a known VPN endpoint, you’re it! Great!

    They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices. Sounds equally crazy as the thing above, right? But rest assured they’re ALSO trying to do that. Multiple times, even. And in some places… they did. Of course, nothing forces you to have such software on your device. Especially if your devices are not supported; it also turns into a “you have to buy this or that big name device, everything else’s de-facto illegal! Fuck you, we’re the government!”. And if you get caught for whatever, and your phone, PC, or anything isn’t “compliant”? Bam. Guilty.

    Plenty of option. All of them completely stupid and would weaken both privacy, individuals, and governments at large. It never stopped legislation from being pushed forward.







  • Accessibility, usability, scalability at very, very large scale, actual searchability, and actual return on investment, because some people actually get money from youtube?

    Actually, peertube, depending on the instance and the popularity of the content, can be incredibly frustrating for a viewer. And it can be frustrating to the content creator. Some people are quick to dismiss minor (and less minor) annoyances, are able to look for fixes, and so on, but for almost everyone? The experience is nightmareish, with incertain returns (or no returns at all, as it stands).

    Once you fix all that, you might have a chance to convince larger entities to move to peertube. Well, more realistically, to host their own instance. Well, more realistically, to host multiple instances, because really some people would hammer the platform down with each video. See the issue yet?




  • In general if people are genuinely hurt by the use of some words, I’m not sadistic so I’ll avoid using them

    That’s a sane position. Only issue is that this have nothing to do with the question, and the people that were the most vocal about this issue had no business talking about it in the first place.

    Ultimately, git is flexible; beyond some potential local and shared automation, anyone can call their local branches however they want, regardless of other and servers. Personally, changing years of habits and tooling (that probably should not have hardcoded some names in the first place) is not worth following a change proposed by misled people.



  • So-called “social” networks can have three main issues: technical (they have to work), leadership (they have to not be dickhead), and users (they also have to not be dickheads).

    The first point can be handled with competent people, consensus, open source contributors, etc. (assuming no dictatorial management).

    The second point can probably be handled by having a handful of decent people, transparency, accountability.

    The third point, which is basically the thing that makes the content on the service… is still people. If people were obnoxious on twitter, they’ll be obnoxious on bluesky, mastodon, and whatever else shows up. It’s almost inevitable.

    It’s also why decent moderations tools are needed, which brings the question of how to do decent moderations tools that are not too extremet but still remains useful. This is not an easy task (and to my knowledge, there’s no general solution to that).

    Bots showing up is just the icing on the top. Without a pretty aggressive vetting system for accounts, there’s not much that can be done from the service itself.

    Given the general ambiance, I guess smaller community and services tailored for them might come back, the way we had tons of different forums back in the days. It might be a good solution; some form of SSO across many services to make people reachable, but no general, shared stream of messages as we have now.

    tl;dr: it’s not a technical problem, it’s a people problem. So it won’t be solved by technical solutions.




  • I’m worried about anything that can be controlled through a third-party online service. The amazon doorbell thing is a prime example of what can go wrong, but it can be more subtle, too. And I’m not even talking about obsolescence. Frankly, I’d still be worried if it was a self-hosted, properly configured system where I’m the only one with a legit access.

    I understand the convenience of all this. I also have to deal with the risk balance of security vs convenience, which causes me to not tolerate that “too tired to go across the room” justifies “a third party have full control over my doors, lights, heating, ovens, etc.” (not shooting fire at you, see this as a generic example).

    The bare minimum would be a fully self-hosted solution, which is possible, although difficult because hardware manufacturers don’t always play nice. And even then, proper, secure setup and maintenance is not for everyone. In the meantime, yeah, I’ll have to move myself when I want to turn on my dishwasher.

    Though I’ll admit, I have some lights that are controlled wirelessly… my old phone have an IR port, and they have IR remotes… Technically, an attacker could probably turn them on/off/change colors from behind a window :D


  • I’m warry of electronic, wireless, and sometimes third-party cloud dependent services, having a say in how I lock my doors or control heating.

    I’m a bit old fashioned, but also have to work with solutions where considering the consequences of a compromised entry point is vital. I’d be ok with a way to check that the door is locked, but something that can lock (and, so, unlock) my door remotely? Not a chance. At least, not for a place a value.