I do kind of relish the images, though. Picture’s worth a thousand words and all. But it’s great to have that choice.

Yes and no. Sometimes a company or organization can serve as a force for good. That said, absolutely a double edged sword. It’s not fair to expect private businesses and organizations to be held hostage by scummy legislators. At the end of the day, no one is entitled to a business’s or organization’s services, so… Don’t want to chase businesses and organizations away? Don’t pass shitty legislation.

Port forwarding is trivial in the desktop client. I haven’t dipped my toe in the self hosting waters (yet), so I can’t speak to that area.

They have port forwarding, though.

Excerpt from the article:

The researchers… call their approach “WhoFi”, as described in a preprint paper titled, “WhoFi: Deep Person Re-Identification via Wi-Fi Channel Signal Encoding.”

Who are you, really?

Re-identification, the researchers explain, is a common challenge in video surveillance. It’s not always clear when a subject captured on video is the same person recorded at another time and/or place.

Re-identification doesn’t necessarily reveal a person’s identity. Instead, it is just an assertion that the same surveilled subject appears in different settings. In video surveillance, this might be done by matching the subject’s clothes or other distinct features in different recordings. But that’s not always possible.

The author asserts that re-identification doesn’t necessarily reveal a person’s identity, although I suppose this is similar to how a single fingerprint or DNA sample doesn’t necessarily reveal a person’s identity, right up until somebody can connect your fingerprint to your identity, say, by correlating your location with other tracking methods or something.

There are tools for enabling one to save a bunch of ISOs on a single USB thumb drive so that you don’t need a whole fleet of thumb drives. One such tool is called Ventoy, and there’s another one out there, although its name escapes me atm.

Profit

At the Hyundai Motor Group’s new Metaplant just outside of Savannah, Georgia, workers assemble the Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 9 electric crossovers without ear protection because the factory was designed to be so quiet.

The comment that you replied to does not imply the phone number can be used to decrypt messages. All they are saying is that because Signal accounts are tied to phone numbers, a potential adversary already has one piece of the puzzle (who is talking to whom). If somehow, some way, the encryption were ever compromised, then the adversary would have both pieces—in other words, they would know not only who is talking to whom but also what they are saying.

Any surprises you wish you knew about beforehand that you’d care to share? Any bullshit around financial stuff, filing taxes while abroad, etc?

Obligatory “you do what’s right for you,” but just sayin’, be very careful with this strategy. I know people who panic sold in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic out of fear and then missed out on the recovery. Sold low, bought high. Set them back 20 years.

RemindMe! 10 years

Lol, this is the best comment I’ve read all week. Seriously, read this comment in the Arrested Development narrator’s voice. Perfect.

Thank you for giving me a good laugh, I needed it!

Thanks for chiming in. I’ve confirmed creating the file in the file browser under “Home > .config > MangoHud” places the file in /var/home/curious_dolphin/.config/MangoHud, so I’m still scratching my head as to why I’m unable to edit the document after the initial save. As a workaround, I’ve placed the config file in my top level home folder (aka /var/home/curious_dolphin) w/ a link to it from /var/home/curious_dolphin/.config/MangoHud where the app expects, and this seems to be working as desired.

Thanks for the tip to create a link to the file that is elsewhere. This works for me. I’m now able to configure MangoHud in a text file without using Goverlay.

Can you create any files in $HOME OR $HOME/.config/ ?

Yes - I can create (and later edit) files under /home/curious_dolphin, even under /home/curious_dolphin/.config, but for some reason once I’ve created a file under /home/curious_dolphin/.config/MangoHud, I cannot edit it even though the file and its parent directory appear to have the same permissions as the other files that I can edit.

In other words, after creating test.txt under /home/curious_dolphin/.config/MangoHud, I cannot edit it:

curious_dolphin@bazzite:~$ ls -la ./.config/MangoHud/
total 20
drwxr-xr-x. 1 curious_dolphin curious_dolphin   42 Feb 20 14:46 .
drwxr-xr-x. 1 curious_dolphin curious_dolphin  552 Feb 20 14:47 ..
-rw-r--r--. 1 curious_dolphin curious_dolphin 9671 Feb 20 12:22 MangoHud.conf
-rw-r--r--. 1 curious_dolphin curious_dolphin    5 Feb 20 14:46 test.txt

However, after creating test.txt under /home/curious_dolphin/.config, I can edit it:

curious_dolphin@bazzite:~$ ls -la ./.config
total 44
drwxr-xr-x. 1 curious_dolphin curious_dolphin  552 Feb 20 14:47 .
drwx------. 1 curious_dolphin curious_dolphin  460 Feb 20 14:41 ..
drwxr-xr-x. 1 curious_dolphin curious_dolphin   42 Feb 20 14:46 MangoHud
-rw-r--r--. 1 curious_dolphin curious_dolphin   10 Feb 20 14:47 test.txt

Gotcha, so in summary, anything that relies on an internet service, such as Signal, Matrix, or Simplex, is vulnerable to government ordered blocks via black list that ISPs are compelled to enforce. Am I thinking of this right?

Out of curiosity, is there anything stopping you from suggesting SimpleX? How does SimpleX compare to XMPP or Matrix?

Are there any other messaging options that are more resistant to government ordered shutdowns than Matrix?

Interesting—I feel like I see Matrix touted as more private than Signal b/c of Signal’s phone number requirement. What compromising metadata does Matrix require that Signal does not?