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@aaaa@lemmy.world
- Comment on Is Lemmy growing or shrinking? 4 weeks ago:
A lot of people talk about the decentralization being a barrier of entry, but I don’t think it is.
Generally speaking, your average social media user won’t care about that one way or the other. You tell them an instance to look at, they will check it out.
Where I think it goes wrong is the general Lemmy attitude of curating your own feed. Your average Lemmy user will say the best part is that you just block the communities and instances that you don’t want to see.
Your average social media user on the other hand, doesn’t want to spend an hour or a month blocking people and communities to make the site useable. Most folks will come in, see a feed full of tech bros, repost bots with zero discussion, 30 different fetish porn communities, Star Trek memes, and bottom of the barrel shitposts, and they’ll just leave.
The only way I see Lemmy overcoming this is for instance admins to heavily curate the default experience so the feed is friendlier to new users. This would likely require some more tools in place to allow for this, possibly even a default block list that users can customize after they are already drawn in
Also the sorting could be better.
- Comment on Monthly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing? 4 weeks ago:
Yeah anyone wanting to get into the series should begin with asylum. It’s got a more horror vibe which I think holds up incredibly well still.
But the other games are mechanically better, so it’s hard to go backwards and enjoy it quite as much
- Comment on Monthly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing? 4 weeks ago:
This is a very good time to pick up one or more Fallout game. The release of the show brings sales on the games.
- Comment on the internet 1 month ago:
What exactly are they arguing over? I probably shouldn’t ask, but I’ve been fortunate enough to not encounter any of this controversy on my social media
- Comment on The Karen of Lemmy 1 month ago:
Bro aren’t you on Lemmy.world?
You’re already defederated from Hexbear, you don’t have to ignore it
- Comment on Mothers know that this is a wholesome combination. 3 months ago:
I’m pretty sure it’s a grapefruit soda. Definitely not everyone’s favorite flavor, but it’s a thing
- Comment on Report: Bing Gained Less Than 1% Market Share Since Adding Bing Chat 3 months ago:
It’s free, so when I need to ask about something in the news today, I’ll use Bing. Granted I use a browser extension that lets me use Bing in Firefox.
These are useful tools, but not useful enough that I’m willing to pay for them when there’s free options.
- Comment on If the borg were a religion 4 months ago:
Readable images are irrelevant. Your text will be assimilated into the background of the meme and add its distinctiveness to our own.
- Comment on Creamy centres 4 months ago:
Don’t you even take the bones out?
- Comment on RIP Microsoft WordPad. You Will Be Missed 4 months ago:
Generally commercial drive encryption solutions, like Bitlocker, usually has a backup recovery key that can be used to access the encryption key if your TPM is reset, or if your device dies.
So I guess the short answer is most of these solutions don’t fully protect it from being moved to another device, they just add another layer of security and hassle that makes it harder to do. And without the TPM as part of these solutions, you would be entering a 48-character passphrase every time you boot your device, which has several security flaws of its own.
- Comment on RIP Microsoft WordPad. You Will Be Missed 4 months ago:
Assuming you use bitlocker on your PC, how do you know the entire content of the TPM (your bitlocker encryption key, etc) cannot be fetched from the TPM by the manufacturer or any third parties they shared it tools and private keys with?
The TPM specification is an open standard by the Trusted Computing Group, and there are certification organizations that will audit many of these products, so that’s a good place to begin.
As with any of the hardware in your device, it does require some amount of trust in the manufacturers you have chosen. These same concerns would apply to anything from the onboard USB controllers to the CPU itself. There’s no way to be absolutely certain, but you can do your due diligence to get a reasonable level of confidence.
And because it is hardware based, how do I as a user know that it does what it claims it does as I would with a software based encryption software that is open source (like truecrypt/veracrypt).
This is a reasonable thing to think about, although very few individuals are qualified to understand and audit the source code of encryption software either, so in most cases you are still putting your faith in security organizations or the community to find issues.
When it comes to security, it often comes with a trade-off. Hardware devices can achieve a level of security that software can’t completely reproduce, but they are a lot harder to audit and verify their integrity.
In any case, the TPM is something that software solutions have to explicitly call in the first place, it isn’t something that activates itself and starts digging into your hard drive. Which means if you don’t want to use it in your security solution, then it will sit there and do nothing. You can keep using your encryption keys in clear memory, visible to any privileged software.
I don’t know specifically about the XBox and how it uses it, but the TPM absolutely can be used as part of a DRM scheme. Since the TPM can be used to encrypt data with a key that can’t be exported, it could be part of a means to hinder copying of content. Of course this content still has to be decrypted into memory in order to be used, so people looking to defeat this DRM usually still can. DRM as a whole is often shown to be a pretty weak solution for copy protection, but companies won’t stop chasing it just the same.
- Comment on RIP Microsoft WordPad. You Will Be Missed 4 months ago:
Well I have good news for you, the TPM can’t do those things. The TPM is just a hardware module that stores cryptographic keys in a tamper-resistant chip, and can perform basic crypto functions.
In of itself, it can’t be addressed remotely, but it is usually used as a component of a greater security scheme. For example, in full disk encryption, it can be used to ensure that disk can’t be decrypted on a different device.
There’s been a lot of FUD surrounding TPMs, and it doesn’t help that the actual explanation of their function isn’t something easily described in a couple of sentences.
There’s no reason to be afraid of a TPM, and for the privacy-minded and security-conscious, it can even be used as part of a greater security scheme for your device and its data.
Of course at the same time, it’s not a feature most home users would make full use of, and as for not liking Windows, carry on. There’s plenty of reasons to avoid it if those things are important to you
- Comment on xkcd #2870: Love Songs 4 months ago:
“I Will Always Love You” is further left than I would have expected it to be
- Comment on Exxxocomp (NSFW) 4 months ago:
This is the future.
It clearly gets repurposed as fuel for the internal sploodge core, which powers the device
- Comment on The safest way to travel 5 months ago:
Well yeah, what are they gonna do, take the tubes? I’d sooner ask for a site to site…
- Comment on Discord users are cancelling their Nitro after new mobile layout update 5 months ago:
You should have seen how mad people were over the time Discord slightly changed the shade of the icon
- Comment on isEven API 5 months ago:
That’s not even supported by the enterprise version. You’re going to need a special agreement with the iseven people to support numbers like that
- Comment on Remember: 9 months until we build a statue of this guy. 5 months ago:
All hu-mons look alike to me
- Comment on Have you tried... 5 months ago:
Putting “Riker’s Beard” on Deanna in the second panel implies they have a very different sort of marriage than they let on
- Comment on Facebook Marketplace - because you can't get this at Wal-Mart 5 months ago:
I’m confused if this was even meant to be towed. Does it have wheels?
- Comment on Debunking the Top 10 Myths About Mastodon 5 months ago:
It’s a lot like my feelings on cryptocurrency. The dencentralized idea was interesting but it led to mostly discovering several reasons why it wasn’t as good as they thought. Some of the problems were solvable with future iterations, but overall it led to private exchanges that could just take all your money if they wanted, high transaction costs, etc.
With social media, federation addresses one thing: If an instance goes away, the content has already been federated elsewhere. For starters, this has never been a concern for me. I don’t treat any social media network as a long term data archive. If there’s something I need to refer back to, I will save the conversation myself or I am prepared for it to be deleted when I look away. Even on Lemmy, I don’t assume anything I post will stay, because moderator actions are federated, which will delete content from other instances anyway (when that federation is working correctly, at least)
On the other hand, we’ve already seen some of the negative sides of this:
First, users spam offensive/illegal content, which gets federated to all the other instances, leading to admins scrambling to a) stem the flow of this content and b) remove what is there. Ultimately they had to solve this with temporary defederation and user-created tools to help purge some of the content.
Second, federation is a (relatively) complex process, and there are multiple situations that can cause federation to an instance to fail. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen cases where if one instance’s keys are lost and certificates need to be regenerated, any instance that has seen that instance will be unable to federate with it anymore.
Now like I said before, these aren’t unsolvable problems, it’s just a case of the software and concept being relatively new, and needs to mature more.
Now when I switched to Lemmy, the complaints I saw about Reddit had absolutely nothing to do with federation and data availability. All I ever saw people complaining about was:
- Algorithms pushing content to benefit advertisers rather than the best end user experience
- Forcing UIs designed to satisfy advertisers rather than UIs end users want
- Admins/moderators making moderation decisions that users disagree with
These are significant issues, and are worth leaving a service over. However, federation doesn’t address them at all. Lemmy certainly does, but that has nothing to do with federation, that’s just it being open source and community-developed software.
So that’s what I meant. The one thing federation addresses is questionable, and the added complexity has brought about new problems that need to be solved still. I’m not against it, but it was never what drew me to this platform. It’s just a “Huh, that’s neat” kind of feature.
- Comment on Debunking the Top 10 Myths About Mastodon 5 months ago:
Hell, I’m technically-minded and I do understand it, and I still don’t consider decentralization a particularly helpful feature of social media (yet).
Federation is technically interesting, but it introduces a lot of new complications that the software is still too new to have solved. And I’ve always been willing to leave a social media network when it doesn’t suit me anymore, so centralization has never really bothered me.
What drew me here was the growing community. I would still be here if it was just one centralized service
- Comment on Oh, how terrifying. How can you stand it day after day? -Q 5 months ago:
Pretty sure he was mortal the first time in a tng episode. Until a young Corbin Bernsen let him back in the Q club
- Comment on Unlimited Suffering! 5 months ago:
Half of Obi-Wan’s list is just bad choices he made. Pfft. Sucks to suck.
- Comment on Dog and fox 5 months ago:
That quick brown fox is trying to jump over that lazy dog!
- Comment on It's all in the trim 5 months ago:
You’re not wrong, but I think his biggest motivation is when he kissed Deanna and her reaction to the beard was “yuck!”
- Comment on Urban Dictionary: Shitpost 5 months ago:
Shitposts: confuse, provoke, or evoke an unproductive reaction from users
Shitposters: why doesn’t everyone understand the purpose of my post? These reactions aren’t helpful!
- Comment on xkcd #2859: Oceanography Gift 5 months ago:
You’re not allowed in my kitchen
- Comment on Lower Decks, lotta details 5 months ago:
Ever watch Buffy?
Also…
Armin Shimmerman had a recurring role where he spoke without Ferengi teeth in.
- Comment on A surprisingly common incident even in the 24th century. 5 months ago:
Nah, Miles never has coffee in the afternoon