viking
@viking@infosec.pub
- Comment on 'Don't Buy a Swasticar': Tesla hit by UK boycott campaign over Elon Musk's far-right support 2 days ago:
France and UK have higher purchase powers than UK, thanks to Brexit, so I wouldn’t put that down to people being more sceptical.
- Comment on BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expired 1 week ago:
I loved my BB Bold 9600, but the physical keyboard did reduce the screen size to a rather small form factor compared to modern phones. And I dare say that swyping is faster and just as accurate, so even if there would be new phones coming out with hardware keyboards of the same quality as old BlackBerry’s, I doubt I would switch back.
- Comment on You can see who upvoted and downvoted a post by viewing it in friendica. 1 week ago:
How exactly can I see who downvoted? Can’t seem to find it in the regular view, and the debug info only shows the vote count, not the voter.
- Comment on Kindle Is Making It Harder to Switch to Rival eReader Brands. 1 week ago:
I have a first generation kindle that I bought 16 years ago. They used to be awesome, and Amazon shaped the way ecommerce worked. The lesson here is not to be fully dependent on one supplier, not to boycott everything just because it’s big.
- Comment on Are "Lifetime" Cloud Storage Plans scams? 1 week ago:
Yeah what I also saw in the terms was that they reserve the right to sell their company without informing users other than through an update in the terms & conditions, and based on play store reviews, they terminate lifetime accounts if they find that you upload copyright protected files, even if you don’t share them with anyone.
Indexing my stuff and comparing it against external databases is a big no no for me.
So far I’m quite happy with sync.com, been using them for well over a decade. Data is fully encrypted during upload, so no matter if the server is ever breached, they wouldn’t get anything useful out of it.
I also got my own nextcloud instance up and running, but it’s with a shared hosting provider where I don’t feel as secure.
- Comment on Mexican President Threatens to Sue Google Over 'Gulf of America' Label on Maps. 1 week ago:
True, I meant anonymous in the sense that participants are not generally identifiable by one another.
- Comment on Are "Lifetime" Cloud Storage Plans scams? 1 week ago:
pCloud, under business terms fairly towards the end:
Term & Termination
This Agreement may be terminated by either party at any time, for any reason. This Agreement will remain in effect until Customer’s subscription to the Services expires or until the Agreement is terminated. In the event of termination by the Customer, the Customer will remain responsible for payment of all fees and charges applicable to the period during which the Agreement was in effect.
- Comment on Mexican President Threatens to Sue Google Over 'Gulf of America' Label on Maps. 1 week ago:
To an extent. Lemmy is a useful substitute for reddit because it’s anonymous, so I don’t know and to an extent don’t care who I’m talking to. With messenger services it’s a different use case, I need the exact people I want to talk to on there, or it’s essentially worthless.
- Comment on Mexican President Threatens to Sue Google Over 'Gulf of America' Label on Maps. 2 weeks ago:
That’s what YOU get since you’re neither in China nor Japan. They only get to see their relative government’s name. China in fact gets to see nothing since they block Google, but it you happen to be in Hong Kong or Macau, you would.
- Comment on Mexican President Threatens to Sue Google Over 'Gulf of America' Label on Maps. 2 weeks ago:
Nah. I’ll start boycotting google when there are useful alternatives. Amazon, facebook, reddit - no problem.
Google search - fine, I can get by with DDG or Yandex. Gmail - sure, whatever. Maps? Organic Maps (and other openstreetmaps front-ends) works alright for getting your bearings, but it’s a far cry from useful for finding businesses, and terrible for navigation. Waze used to be the only viable alternative, but ever since Google bought them, it’s hard to justify a full boycott without massively inconveniencing myself.
Same for meta as a whole. Facebook and Instagram, sure, no need. But living without whatsapp is simply impossible in some countries, where it’s the de-facto standard for communication, and even used as the only means of contact with government agencies.
- Comment on PayPal owns brands like Venmo, Honey and is heavily integrated into eBay - if you're looking to stop giving your money to bad companies, take a second to search their subsidiary brands as well. 2 weeks ago:
Didn’t actually know about Aqua Panna, that’s the only one I occasionally consume when going to a fancy Italian place where this is the default when ordering still water.
I’d say a good 90% of the rest is completely unknown to me. All the rest that I do know seems to be overprocessed junk food that’s easily avoided by buying fresh ingredients exclusively.
- Comment on ‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off 2 weeks ago:
What screens are you talking about?
- Comment on Trump wants to tax the world 3 weeks ago:
Too bad that Trump listens to some rednecks on Twitter more than any economist out there.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
What exactly do you think happened with slaves too old to fulfill their duties?
- Comment on How can a US citizen invest outside the reach of the federal government? 3 weeks ago:
Anytime! You could also check some blogs like nomad capitalist and others, they offer solutions like incorporating a ltd. company in Georgia (the country) or Belize and stuff, but that also comes with a host of other requirements, reporting and otherwise.
Depending on your assets, there are also some countries like Grenada for example that come with a citizenship by investment program, where you get a passport if you invest either into government bonds or buy a property that you must hold for a certain number of years. If you’d be a citizen from there and casually forget to tick the box for US citizenship when opening your Hong Kong account, you might just get away with it. (Strictly not legal, though).
- Comment on How can a US citizen invest outside the reach of the federal government? 3 weeks ago:
Outside of the immediate reach requires you to open an offshore brokerage account; however thanks to FATCA reporting requirements, most banks don’t want to deal with you unless you have significant assets under management.
Back when FATCA was first introduced I was working in private wealth management for a bank in Luxembourg, and we decided to terminate all but 3 accounts held by US citizens, all of whom had assets above 700k USD. I believe 500k was the internally communicated cutoff.
Banks in Switzerland now typically require 1M CHF to open new accounts for anyone who isn’t onshore (Swiss citizen or resident), Hong Kong, Singapore and Panama also require minimum amounts between 500k to 1M USD. I think Bahamas, Bermudas, Virgin Islands, Caymans and all the other money islands ask for even higher deposits now.
One thing you could consider are the British channel islands (Jersey and Guernsey in particular), since Brexit they’ve had a bit of an offshore renaissance. HSBC Jersey for example only requires 100k GBP to open offshore accounts (though I didn’t check about FATCA requirements since I’m not a US citizen myself).
If all you want is keep smaller amounts outside of the US, you could look into wise.com, revolut and other money transfer services, they allow you to hold different currencies in physical accounts domiciled in other jurisdictions. Read: If you deposit USD and convert it to GBP, AUD or EUR, those funds will be physically stored in UK, Australia and Belgium respectively. Since wise is a British company (revolut as well btw), the US government at least won’t have immediate access.
If there are any online brokers that accept US customers with casual portfolio sizes, no idea.
Crypto of course is also an option, but I don’t trust it enough as long term asset storage solution.
- Comment on Anyone knows what's this on the 5.25" bay? 3 weeks ago:
HDD tray with external fan, I had one just like this.
- Comment on Kiwi Browser is shutting down. 4 weeks ago:
Excellent, thanks. Just installing.
- Comment on Kiwi Browser is shutting down. 4 weeks ago:
Is there a chromium release for Android? I thought they only launched a desktop version?
- Comment on Kiwi Browser is shutting down. 4 weeks ago:
Damn, I was so happy to get an update yesterday after I thought it had died, only to find out it did.
Kiwi was (is) my backup browser if something absolutely refuses to work in Fennec/Firefox; what are y’all using as a last resort chrome substitute?
- Comment on Medical Device Company Tells Hospitals They're No Longer Allowed to Fix Machine That Costs Six Figures 5 weeks ago:
I can’t speak for Terumo, in my books this has always been an issue, so maybe their management assessed how many casualties resulted out of poorly maintained machines and decided that enough is enough.
I’ve explained in a bit more details further down in the comments, the liability issue stems from the fact that people can (and do!) die due to wrongly maintained machines, and this falls back on the manufacturer, since they are the ones who trained the technician who then “certified” the machine. But given that they only do one maintenance run every half year or so, they are far from experts. So either you re-train them once a quarter (during training they work on actual machines that have been modified to throw certain errors, and give them hands-on training to fix it); or you do it yourself. Training usually takes 2 days since there’s quite some theory to cover before the practical stuff; and the training usually happens in our HQ, so include 2 travel days.
If hospital staff is missing 4 days per quarter for one device maintenance workshop, imagine how this will look like if there are 10+ machines they need to be comfortable working with that follow similar re-certification routines. Those people would be gone for 40+ days over a 90 day period. If you account for weekends and time off, they’d essentially be at work for maybe 2 weeks, and someone would have to be on call during the time for other machines in need of maintenance, so you’d end up having to hire 10 times the number of technicians just so that someone is always at work if and when needed.
- Comment on Medical Device Company Tells Hospitals They're No Longer Allowed to Fix Machine That Costs Six Figures 5 weeks ago:
If it was, that reply probably wasn’t coming from me. Unless I’m tripping.
- Comment on Medical Device Company Tells Hospitals They're No Longer Allowed to Fix Machine That Costs Six Figures 5 weeks ago:
As it’s written in the contracts, I assure you. And yet that’s not as clear as day when it ends up in court, since hospitals hardly accept liability without going through all instances. Add negative press to the mix, and you got a nice shitshow going, which is harmful for patients (going crazy for having to undergo already risky treatments with device that’s now considered faulty to some degree), the hospital staff (who faces potential charges up to involuntary manslaughter), and of course also the company that suffers from negative press (reputation and possibly financially).
If all of that can be avoided if certified technicians on the company payroll can do the maintenance, I’m not sure that’s all bad.
- Comment on Medical Device Company Tells Hospitals They're No Longer Allowed to Fix Machine That Costs Six Figures 5 weeks ago:
A malfunctioning device during open heart surgery means a high risk including potential death to the patient.
Liability = responsible for someone’s death.
The consequence would be a potential settlement with their family, negative publicity and whatever might negatively affect the financial bottom line, granted. But believe it or not, we actually care about patients surviving.
- Comment on Medical Device Company Tells Hospitals They're No Longer Allowed to Fix Machine That Costs Six Figures 5 weeks ago:
I work for a company that manufacturers a comparably product to the cited Terumo device, and I can tell you that it’s most likely not greed but pending liability issues.
Those devices aren’t in use 24/7, and only need maintenance every 15 uses, so hospital staff trained to work on them get to use their maintenance knowledge like 3-4 times a year, at most. And since there must be a redundancy in the hospital both with machines (1 replacement on hand per 1 in use) as well as staff, this number even goes down since you alternatemachines (thus stretching their use without maintenance) and people (so they both get to use their experience).
As a result, you end up with machines that are maintained by certified, yet unprofessional technicians. But since the device ends up with an ‘error free’ log, if anything were to happen to a patient due to a malfunction, the manufacturer assumes liability; and would then have to try and prove that it’s actually a human errorby the technician.
The alternatives are either to establish crazy right recertification windows for the technicians (like every 60-90 days), which is also costly and very annoying for them, and puts a serious strain on hospital staff if all manufacturers were to implement similar mechanisms, or, well, maintain the machines themselves. That way the technicians are better equipped due to doing the same steps routinely, and liability lies with the manufacturer either way.
Not everything is evil corpos at work, sometimes there are actual reasons for certain decisions.
- Comment on Microsoft Bing is trying to spoof Google UI when people search Google.com 1 month ago:
I’ll need a source for that.
- Comment on what exercises work for you to avoid back pain? 1 month ago:
Yoga, specifically Hatha Yoga or Ashtanga Yoga with focus on the secondary series (there are 6 total).
I’d highly recommend to start out with classes and a suitable instructor though, there are a bunch of specific warm-ups to loosen some muscle groups and stretching certain areas that allow you to get into the required postures, trying to raw-dog those can lead to injuries if you force your stiff body into some positions it’s not used to.
If all you want are basic exercises to cycle through on a daily basis, 4-8 weeks of guided training is already enough to know what and how to do, you can continue with youtube from then on.
- Comment on German Power Slips Below Zero as Negative-Price Phenomenon Grows 1 month ago:
It’s rare in Germany since we have a quite large population and heavy industry compared to the renewables production. We had days with 100% renewable coverage in the past, but negative energy prices are still a rarity.
- Comment on What is the origin of aliens looking like humans? Why and when did it become the norm? 1 month ago:
Yep, it’s a great book for sure.
- Comment on lemmy should tots let you post things to your own user profile 1 month ago:
I thought it was just onlyfans spambots doing this crap, hoping you’d stalk a profile.
What’s the actual point?