hersh
@hersh@literature.cafe
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 1 week ago:
For most: yes, there is a risk that the vendor has included a backdoor. There is also the risk that they are straight-up lying about how their service operates.
For Signal in particular: You can verify that their claims are true because you can audit the source code.
The Signal client is open-source, so any interested parties can verify that it is A) not sending the user’s private keys to any server, and B) not transmitting any messages that are not encrypted with those keys.
Even if you choose to obtain Signal from the Google Play Store (which comes with its own set of problems), you can verify its integrity because Signal uses reproducible builds. That means it is possible for you to download the public source code, compile it yourself, and verify that the published binary is identical. See: github.com/signalapp/…/reproducible-builds
You might not have the skills or patience to do that yourself, but Signal has undergone professional audits if anyone ever discovers a backdoor, it will be major news.
You are more likely to be compromised at the OS level (e.g. screen recorders, key loggers, Microsoft Recall, etc.) than from Signal itself.
- Comment on PSA syncthing-fork has changed owners 2 months ago:
I get that they don’t want to deal with Google Play
Was that the reason? Shame they didn’t just leave it on F-Droid and GitHub then. Nobody needs to use Google Play (at least not yet…)
- Comment on The Fairphone 5 price has been dropped to €499. The phone is designed to be the most advanced environmentally friendly smartphone. 9 months ago:
Thanks for the info. I have not really tested Seedvault myself so this is all good to know.
Ironically, one of the main reasons I switched to GrapheneOS was because Google’s backups were so frustrating and I was hoping Seedvault would be more comprehensive.
- Comment on The Fairphone 5 price has been dropped to €499. The phone is designed to be the most advanced environmentally friendly smartphone. 9 months ago:
What’s wrong with Seedvault?
- Comment on Anthropic has developed an AI 'brain scanner' to understand how LLMs work and it turns out the reason why chatbots are terrible at simple math and hallucinate is weirder than you thought 10 months ago:
But here’s the really funky bit. If you ask Claude how it got the correct answer of 95, it will apparently tell you, “I added the ones (6+9=15), carried the 1, then added the 10s (3+5+1=9), resulting in 95.” But that actually only reflects common answers in its training data as to how the sum might be completed, as opposed to what it actually did.
This is not surprising. LLMs are not designed to have any introspection capabilities.
Introspection could probably be tacked onto existing architectures in a few different ways, but as far as I know nobody’s done it yet. It will be interesting to see how that might change LLM behavior. I suspect it is requisite but not sufficient for self-awareness.
- Comment on Questions about the Boox Palma/Boox Palma 2 11 months ago:
I don’t have a Palma, but I have a Book Go 6, which looks like it has similar display tech. So I think I can answer some of your questions.
The backlight can go all the way off, to the point where it is invisible in a dark room. You can also adjust the backlight color temperature.
Typing is bad, but I’ve never spent time optimizing it. I would guess that the responsiveness on the Palma might be higher. I also never tried it in high-speed mode, which is much more responsive but has worse ghosting and generally worse image quality. For my use case (99% just reading) I don’t mind the slow response time.
It’s possible to access the normal Android settings, though I just picked up my Boox Go and I can’t actually figure out how. I know I’ve done it before somehow. The Boox settings app has a VPN section, but I don’t see DNS options. Pretty sure you can do this though.
One thing I want to point out is that the Palma is not technically a phone. It’s a wi-fi device, so it will not make calls or send SMS. You would be limited to internet-based messaging apps like Signal or Telegram. I can’t speak to how smoothly those run.
There are also a couple proper phones (with SIM cards) with similar display tech coming out this year. See:
- Comment on Apple CEO Tim Cook Donating $1 Million to Trump's Inaugural Fund 1 year ago:
It’s insane that this is even legal.