matlag
@matlag@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on 2 days ago:
Is that what you’re referring to? futurism.com/…/meta-facial-recognition-glasses These people have no ethics and no moral code. They know we’ll hate it, so they want to sneak it!
- Comment on 2 days ago:
Years of privacy violations going deeper and deeper under pretend of “progress” and “pRoTeCt the cHiLdReN”. I am glad that people started rebelling against Flock, and some removed their Amazon cameras following the Superbowl’s ads, but that’s not even close to how much we should be mad at these mass surveillance actors.
- Comment on Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras. Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage. 4 days ago:
Not sure the lemmy crowd is representative of the general public trends.
- Comment on Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires are publicly shielding their children from the products that made them rich 4 days ago:
Oh I’m perfectly aware this is most likely a chain of pressure and responsibility dodging:
- the top demands more users more active,
- the bottom develops some solutions they demo while refusing any responsability for its impact.
- Some middle pressed to meet demand while having only one solution available at the time eventually decide to deploy it, maybe “temporarily”.
- Comment on Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires are publicly shielding their children from the products that made them rich 4 days ago:
Oh they absolutely know. Zuck’s Meta is on trial right now not only because Instagram creates an addiction for kids, but because it was made delibarately, on purpose. Kids addictron was the goal.
They’ve always known. They just don’t care for the rest of humanity.
- Comment on Judge scolds Mark Zuckerberg's team for wearing Meta glasses to social media trial 4 days ago:
Pretty sure they won’t care except if it ends with a multi-billions$ fine. The intent is that by the time, their “smart-glasses” are everywhere and banning them no longer seems reasonable.
So they’ll settle for “privacy settings by default”, meaning they commit to not record anything except if the user expilicitly activate it, and it should be very visible for people around.
They’ll wait a good 6 months before an update introduces back a silent auto-record of some kind, because that company never gave a flying fuck about the law, its users or basic decency.
- Comment on Judge scolds Mark Zuckerberg's team for wearing Meta glasses to social media trial 4 days ago:
Let’s just hope pissing off the judge on mïnute 1 may get them uncomfortable about the rest of the trial.
- Comment on California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves 5 days ago:
That, the coming war against VPN in other states and countries, … Can’t we cut through all these baby steps and get straight to a 1984’s telscreen mandatory in all rooms?
Oh come on! Think about all the domestic violence’s victims!
- Comment on Android will become a locked-down platform in 194 day 1 week ago:
No. As long as the base remains opensource (AOSP), they can remove the bad parts. Graphene has made numerous contributions to AOSP, I’m confident they can manage that. And if the user base growths, I hope their fundings will follow.
It would be a good thing for the world if AOSP was forked with big resources behind an open project with an open governance. But that needs lot of resources.
- Comment on Mark Zuckerberg Lied to Congress. We Can’t Trust His Testimony. 1 week ago:
All four sections carry a penalty of imprisonment for not more than five years, although § 1001 is punishable by imprisonment for not more than eight years when the offense involves terrorism or one of several federal sex offenses. The same five-year maximum penalty attends the separate crime of conspiracy to commit any of the four substantive offenses.
Even 1 year in jail should be a good enough incentive, if only he could not buy his way out.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans 1 week ago:
Agree, but since he stated multiple time that all cars since xxx years were hardware capable of L5 self-driving next year (no need to precise the year, the statement is repeated every year), adding LIDAR now would be opening the way to a major class action. So he painted himself in a corner, and like all gigantic-ego idiots, he doubles down every time he’s asked.
- Comment on All U.S. Social Security numbers may need to be changed following a massive breach that is already being investigated as a national threat 1 week ago:
In any other country, I would agree. In the US, you’re guaranteed they will privatize the shit out of it until it’s costly, inefficient, unreliable, but someone became a billionaire.
- Comment on Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State 1 week ago:
And you’re absolutely certain they don’t sell the data back to US brokers or even authorities directly?
- Comment on BMW’s Newest “Innovation” is a Logo-Shaped Middle Finger to Right to Repair 1 week ago:
The DMCA has a section that says (high level) it is illegal to circumvent a technological protection measure that protects copyrighted materials. DMCA was used for years to prevent farmers from repairing their John Deere’s equipment themselves. They only got that 2 years ago after a legal battle. So the question is: can a fancy screw be considered a TPM?
- Comment on BMW’s Newest “Innovation” is a Logo-Shaped Middle Finger to Right to Repair 1 week ago:
That would be circumventing a protection mechanism. Isn’t that a violation of the DMCA in the US?
- Comment on Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras? 2 weeks ago:
The most appalling thing is the advertisers and whoever approved this live in a bubble where people are ok with massive surveillance, and don’t imagine people will freak out when they see how Amazon can watch them. At least Meta knows their users hate them but are hostages of their network, that’s why Meta buys or crushes competitors before they become too big. I’ve not seen that since a Ford’s VP bragging about how much Ford will know absoltuely everything you do with “your” car (is it really?) and backpedaled live as he realized journalists were horrified. That was a long time ago. Today it’s common.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 weeks ago:
It’s still a payment system. You need banks and shops to get in. In practice, you would have to wire money from your bank account to the Taler wallet.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 weeks ago:
Even non-random ones.
Just how many data breach does it get before we collectively realize it: as long as the pain of the breach is on us, corps will never really care about security.
Slam them with 10% of their yearly revenues on the first breach, and they’ll start taking that seriously.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 weeks ago:
A system that guarantees privacy for the consumer but transparency for the seller (to avoid tax fraud). But It’s basically a digital wallet for the consumer. If you lose control of the wallet, you lose the money on it.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 weeks ago:
Canada has Interac but turned it in a for profit.
The Bank of Canada has considered a digital CAD but not started anything yet. Maybe they are taking notes?
Meanwhile, we could give biz the option to lower their prices and in exchange pass down the cards fees to customers (transparently of course, big display: Visa +n1%, Mastercard: +n2%, …). The current system makes all prices higher but cards provide rebates or other benefits. That’s pretty much a tax on the poor who can’t access “high end” credit cards.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 weeks ago:
So he’ll probably ban OTHER stablecoins to get a monopoly, and probably have the government sign a 10 years long binding contract with his own business.
- Comment on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month 2 weeks ago:
XMPP biggest issues:
- The absurdly and laugably slowness of the protocol evolution on critically needed features: it was bleeding edge years back. The XSF totally screwed up the VoIP extension management. Google dropped a working out-of-the-box solution in 2005. They took 4 years to improve it before declaring the extension stable. Only then did clients start implementations, and bummer: the spec was not perfect, there were a lot of hiccups and “client A can make calls to B but not C” issues, because, who would have guessed, the only way to improve a spec at some point is to test it out there, and not stare at it and make some minor changes. By the time, most XMPP users of the time who wanted VoIP had moved on to others tools, XMPP went from at the top to very late. They’re doing it again with MIX (next gen rooms): the first draft is from 2015. It’s still “experimental”, though some servers team started implementation (such lack of patience…)
- An ocean of servers/clients with no consistency. You get to Matrix, and you have Element for all platforms. It can be native code everywhere, but it’s the same look and feel. You can tell your pops “just install Element”. In the XMPP world, there is no equivalent, though Snikket seems to be going there (consistent UI across platforms): all clients are different, different UI, platform specific with different set of features, some are a 1 guy project. If you’re not guided by a tek-savvy person, you have no idea where to start.
With all that said, I run a server for our family and its resources consumption is barely a blip on the radar. The lightest Matrix servers are an order of magnitude hungrier. And the difference increases with scale!
XMPP is the absolute best solution to multiply small servers, a very good thing for a healthy federation.
- Comment on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month 2 weeks ago:
Drop anything that’s not opensource and federated, except if you want to live the enshitification process over and over.
Matrix might be the closest to Discord. XMPP should also be considered.
- Comment on An oopsie occured 2 weeks ago:
“Your dasher crashed, but based on his tracking, he’s still crawling towards you. This could induce some delay. If you go meet him on the way, you can get a rebate on your tipping fees!”
- Comment on An oopsie occured 2 weeks ago:
It was. But now, if the idea makes it to the right executive…
- Comment on CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant 3 weeks ago:
And their goal is to make sure you can’t do anything without THEIR tools/plants, so that you don’t escape from their control.
Imagine we all work with our hands but decide we’ll only sell what we produce to our local communities and not large corporates.
- Comment on CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant 3 weeks ago:
CEOs will not be replaced any time soon, because they’re all in each other companies board and they’ll stand for each other (or more exactly from setting examples that could apply to them).
- Comment on Tesla profit tanked 46% in 2025 | TechCrunch 4 weeks ago:
As much as I despise her (as much as the rest of that tech-bros lot), I still suspect she’s only seen jail because she was a young woman.
- Comment on Trump’s acting cyber chief uploaded sensitive files into a public version of ChatGPT 4 weeks ago:
Yeah but Sam Altman is a pal, so don’t worry: nothing bad actually happening!
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 4 weeks ago:
If I trust the numbers I found, Threads has 200M users, vs 2.5–3M for all of Mastodon’s instances but-Threads.
Down the same road, again.