LedgeDrop

@LedgeDrop@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did we win?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I totally agree.

  I am so tired of this “slow boil”, bs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Against Economic Gravity: Decentralization and the Fight for the Next Internet⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  lol - for the people who up voted this: Did you actually read the 50 pages of this article?

  I gotta admit, that I dozed off after the first 5 minutes, skipped through bits of the middle, looked at the end for something meaningful, something to act on - but left disappointed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That one time when he made cheese and it broke the ship⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Darth Jar Jar was the original plan, Lucas changed it after the backlash against the character.

  Was this ever confirmed? I just thought it was a fan theory.

  That said, if Lucas had actually gone down this path, it would have totally redeemed Jar Jar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digg Shut Down⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think it’s that easy.

  Interactivity only possible for most at small scale.

  You’re overlooking the real OG of the internet: usenet, irc and bulletin board systems (bbs).

  The internet has always needed an “easy access” place to communicate, ask questions, or joke around - with a broad audience from around the world.

  Of course, gopher, ftp, and http - did exactly as you said: serve static content.

  But the internet has always needed a place for “dynamic” conversation and it’s these places that are overran with bots.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You would need to create yet another version of HTTP to handle that…

  We’re going down the rabbit hole, but I’ll play along:

  I don’t think we’d need a “new http” version to support this. It could all be done with http headers.

  Disclaimer: I’m spit balling here, there are probably more efficient ways to do this.

  Anyway, when you go to your bank, included in your banks response header would be a “challenge” (a blob of data in as X-Age-ThinkOfTheChildren-Request).

  Your browser would pick this up and generate a “response” and send this as part of all future requests to your bank, like an http-cookie (X-Age-ThinkOfTheChildren-Response).

  The “response” was created using the banks challenge plus using the unique age certificate stored on your pc (in your TPM module), which was generated (and “officially digitally signed”) during your initial “age registration process”.

  The bank looks at the response, verifies that it was probably signed by the “official age verification organization” (simply using the same technology used to verify ssl certs are valid).

  Of course, this entire process depends on a “chain of trust”. The bank needs to trust that you didn’t hack your browser to forward these challenges to another pc. However, this is realistic. As part of the initial age verification process, you can only use “trusted vendors” (ie: Red Hat, Ubuntu) - this means they are required to prevent you from installing “hacked” apps. This could be in the form of preventing certain browser plug-ins and only allowing distro provided versions of your web-browser.

  Banks are the slowest companies to handle that kind of modification.

  True, but this also depends on the bank. Fintech banks like Revolut were the first ones to start to blocking access to phones that are rooted or running custom firmware (… because they care about security /s)

  Most of the effort to implement this will be at the OS and browse level, but this would be a univeral solution. Meaning, it would be trivial for your bank, email service, porn site to support it as it’s simply generating a challenge and verifying the response.

  With microslop forcing tpm 2.0 as a hardware requirement into windows 11, all the pieces are in place to pull this off - it just needs the software and the legal requirement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Datacenters are becoming a target in warfare for the first time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Back in the day, you went dumpster diving for PC parts.

  Now, you just sift through the rubble of data centers in war-torn countries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they’ll be unskippable⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “They” have also been trying to prevent consumers/us from taking ownership of our devices and data for the last 2-decades.

  … and, ya know what? It’s working.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Because Linux distributions can be created free-willy. Just check out Linux From Scratch, Gentoo, etc. Same with live boot from USB, same with stripped down server distros like Alpine — you have the same issue.

  I don’t want to be “that person”, but here’s how it could play out…

  The “free-willy” distros would not fulfill the “trust” requirements needed to pass the “certification process”. You can still use them, but think of it like running custom firmware on your cellphone: you’re not going to be able to access your bank, but somethings will still work.

  Larger distros (Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc) would pay to pass the “certification process”, but this would come by making certain concessions:

  1. The kernel would not be allowed to be tainted. Which means you can only use official kernel modules provided by your vendor (no self-compiling)
  2. Certain kernel modules would needed to be removed (or nerfed). For example the Fuse filesystem.
  3. You could probably keep root access or at least a nerfed version of it.

  Then with theses concessions, your PC world be deemed “reliable” to perform the necessary age verification and have this confirmation passed through your browser to your favor porn site.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US state laws push age checks into the operating system⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I 100% agree. Then there will be different (mandatory) verification services. Some will be paid, but the free ones (ran by Microslop and Google) that will sell all your personal data to their 500+ closest affiliates.

  Ultimately, the end game will be certain websites (like your Bank) won’t trust your identity because your using some FOSS verification service and as “they take security seriously” will require you to use MS or Google.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lenovo’s New ThinkPads Score 10/10 for Repairability— Repair goes mega mainstream with the launch of Lenovo's new T-series laptops⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the clarification. I had no idea that Lenovo was so fractured. … and I’ll definitely not be buying another IdeaPad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lenovo’s New ThinkPads Score 10/10 for Repairability— Repair goes mega mainstream with the launch of Lenovo's new T-series laptops⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a difference between ‘repairable’ and ‘upgradable.’

  Absolutely! I’ve got a Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 (laptop/tablet thingy).

  I’ve upgraded/replaced the ssd - no problem.

  Unfortunately, this laptop has an issue with the keyboard: the left section/panel intermittently stops sending inputs. Meaning, keys like escape, a, w, shift, l-control - just stop (even in the bios). I’d read that they keyboard “collects” static which causes problems with certain sections of the keyboard.

  I thought I’d see how difficult it would be to replace the keyboard. I watched a teardown video, and of course you need to remove everything… but I lost it when, the person in the video used a heat gun to melt “plastic rivits” that connected the keyboard to the motherboard case. Then with the replacement keyboard needed to remelt the plastic rivits.

  This laptop is not repairable. In fact, I swore I’d never buy another Lenovo again as a result. … but if their focus is on making them repairable (and their recent partnership with GrapheneOS) - I might be eating crow tonight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teams’ invasive Wi‑Fi tracking sparks backlash as users say Microsoft crossed a line — “There must be a team at Microsoft tasked with making Teams worse”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Having Teams remind you that, during session recordings, your video and what you say can be used by Microsoft for what purpose they want, including (but not limited to) training AI.

  This wasn’t the line that was crossed? Seeing/hearing your likeness in the next generated AI / copilot commercial, because you needed to consent in order to work. This is “fine” /s

  … but having Microsoft know that you’re answering Teams messages while on the toilet… yeah, that’s where “the line gets crossed” (eyeroll)

  We need to wake-up and drop this technological cancer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Piracy communities remain blocked on lemmy.world despite "Unremoval of Piracy Communities" announcement⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for sharing.

  Have you had any issues with other, larger instances not federating with you? (just because your small, they don’t want to risk being spammed by trolls/bots/etc)

  This would be my only concern in hosting my own instance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ask AI: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “There’s the bot. Right over there, sir.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ars Technica makes up quotes from Matplotlib maintainer("An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me"); pulls story⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  From the authors blog post:

  You’re not a chatbot. You’re becoming someone. … This file is yours to evolve. As you learn who you are, update it. – OpenClaw default SOUL.md

  This makes me very sad. In the “early days” of the internet, it was a place where people were “good”. Yes, there were trolls, but you could often ignore and avoid them.

  Now, with the pressure to make “AI useful” and more human-like - the line between AI and people is blurring and will continue to blur.

  It’s easy to create an army of AI trolls and it’s only going to get easier as time goes on. Yet, no-one is interested in an “army of non-troll AI’s” (“… that’s a super post. Very insightful. People will love it. Good job, here’s your gold star!”). So, people with opinions are the minority on a text based internet and this trend will only continue.

  As a technical exercise, I think “how can I ferret out the human posts/content?” Yeah, Ars said that they tag posts when it was written by AI (…riiiiiight…). This means I need to blindly trust them and any other company.

  The only (reliable) solution, I can think of, is to destroy, cripple, or sacrifice the anonymous “tenant” of the internet. And, as a privacy focused individual, this makes me very sad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare now serves sites in Markdown to AI agents⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  jaw-drop I can go back to lynx now! /s

  Potentially, this is actually a fantastic improvement. It (in theory) means you could request markdown and convert it back to html and meanwhile strip out ads, Javascript, tracking/cruft, etc.

  I wonder how accurate of a markdown translation this would be. Would/could it handle single-page apps?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nope not at all. I really like the “one time use” CC for those “random stores”. There are really only two vendors that I “trust” with CC.

  I also enjoy the “budget feature” for things like my isp bill (to prevent surprises). It’s also great when going abroad, as you need to give a CC to reserve a room (… and those one time use cards won’t work).

  Now, I just want to find the same level of control with wero.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I know it’s cliché to call anonymous commenters shills, but that sentence has major shill energy.

  I also know I shouldn’t “feed the trolls”, but your comment did amuse me.

  Me? Shilling for Visa/Mastercard? Oh, boy. I was merely asking questions, so I can understand “how can I move away from visa/mc, as soon as possible”.

  It’s ~interesting~ cute that this is what you’re getting hung up on.

  Who says “your favourite online store”, honestly.

  Sorry, I said “favorite online store”, mate ;)

  Cheers

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Which also makes it trivial to implement multiple “wallets” inside the account, or multiple public tokens with different “wallets” associated with it.

  Ah, okay. I didn’t realize this was based on some public/private key exchange and they were using the term “wallets” as a way of isolating them.

  Now, I just need to find a vendor that provides this.

  Thank you for the info.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  From what I’ve read, it appears that it’s simply one time, transactions.

  Surely, they couldn’t be that short sighted. This means no “saving for payment information” on your favorite online store.

  Also, it seems this is heavily tied to your bank account, which kind of makes me a bit nervous. I like fintech solutions and being able to create “one time use debit cards” or debit cards with a maximum balance and at the moment, I don’t understand how wero will fill this gap.

  … but I really hope I’m wrong or some fintech will “step up” and make wero a legitimate replacement for visa/master card.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I want a phone I can actually fix, and Fairphone’s record growth shows the world does too⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, if you’re patient Graphene release some messages that they’re teaming up with a large phone manufacturer and will release a Graphene phone in Q4 2026 or 2027.

  However, this announcement was made before all the AI hype which is consuming all the RAM.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I want a phone I can actually fix, and Fairphone’s record growth shows the world does too⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  From a user’s perspective, when you install an app, you can:

  1. Determine if that app is allowed to access the internet.
  2. If it _needs_ access to your contacts, **you** can share which of your contacts, it can see (or none at all)
  3. If it _needs_ access to your files, **you** can determine which files/photos/music it sees (or none at all, but the application still believes it has access to everything)
  

  There are a bunch of other, security features it provides, but from a “normal user” experience, the ability to take control of your data is probably one of the most impactful.

  It is possible to do similar things with other CFW, but AFAIK, graphene is the only one to cleanly integrate it as a polished feature of the ROM.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anna's Archive Loses .PM Domain, Adds Greenland (.GL) Backup⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, that is fantastic (ACME integration too!)

  Thanks for finding and sharing the link.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anna's Archive Loses .PM Domain, Adds Greenland (.GL) Backup⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s interesting that they’d offer top-level domains, but not provide a certificate authority to generate (non-self-signed) ssl certs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The world is trying to log off U.S. tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  But everything was rolling, pretty goddamn great until…

  I beg to disagree there. Each year Big Tech has become more and more aggressive in taking control from us, the consumer. Microsoft with the requirements of TPM in order to install windows 11. Google with they’re delaying open source releases of android, preventing apps from being installed unless it’s non-cfw. All tech companies shoveling AI everywhere. John Deere with their vendor lock-in hardware.

  This needed to stop and these companies need to be reminded that “the consumer owns the hardware and that includes functional software (that does not change without the users consent)”.

  Unfortunately, the U.S. Government failed it’s people in defending consumer rights and tbh, the EU hasn’t really done a stellar job either. However, this is certainly the" kick in pants" the EU needs (hopefully) to start to create competition against U. S. Big Tech… and the EU certainly understands that it needs to protect these small EU start-ups as they try to find their footing.

  So, I hope this results in the EU creating laws to “level the playing field”. Which, I hope, actually spurs innovate and Open Standards (something Big Tech has been working hard on suppressing), which will be good for all of us (regardless, if you’re in the EU, U.S., and beyond).

  You’ll notice there is a lot of “hope” in these sentences. I am skeptical, but I can see how this could be “a good thing”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Satya Nadella insists people are using Microsoft’s Copilot AI a lot⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, MS Teams (not my choice) had a pop-up that said that in order for a meeting to be recorded, I needed to accept that my video and what I say will be used by Microsoft for various purposes including training copilot.

  So, that counts at me using copilot, right? /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nova Launcher gets a new owner and... ads⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Is this open source?

  (I couldn’t find it)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Article: I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We are well on our way. The EU is holding the manufacturer liable if a cellphone radio is “modded”, thus manufacturers are blocking the ability to unlock bootloaders.

  If eventually, that is every phone, then grab a hotspot and get tethering.

  I did have a chuckle at the thought of having a cellphone for your (modded) cellphone… but then I thought about it: “meh, yeah… it’s not a bad idea. I’d do it.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Article: I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Speaking of Lineage…

  I wonder, how long will it be before you’re not “allowed” to install esims on phones with custom firmware?

  Either due to the esim application not installing/running on modified firmware, or the phone will just not allow it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NPM Package With 56K Downloads Caught Stealing WhatsApp Messages⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I completely agree with you on the second point. This is a problem for all languages, but maybe we (as a community) need to change the approval, reviewing process for adding new libraries and features to languages.

  This isn’t going to get any better unless we revert to OS based dependencies which noone wants to do because developers want the latest and greatest.

  You’re very succinct here: Developer do want the latest and greatest, even if the interface isn’t perfect, and they’ll need to refactor their code when the next revision comes out.

  Languages often have much slower release cycles than 3rd party libraries. Maybe this is what needs to be improved.

  There won’t be a silver bullet, but I kinda like how kubernetes handles it: release cycles are fixed to a calendar (4 times per year). New features are added and versioned as alpha, beta, release. This gives the feature itself time to evolve and mature, while the rest of the release features are still stable.

  If you use an alpha/beta feature, you accept that bugs and interface changes will occur before it reaches a stable release. … and you get warning and errors, if you’re using an alpha feature, but it graduated to beta/release.

  Unfortunately, many languages either make this unnatural/difficult (ie: from future import… ) or really only support it if you’re using 3rd party libraries (use whatever@v1.2.3-alpha1).