Viewing profile — fwn

> By disabling signature verification you open yourself up to man-in-the-middle attacks and supply chain attacks. I am no expert, but AFAIK Android does not disable signature verif…

Reproducible builds are nice, and I would love to have them for Signal. But I think I disagree with most of what you've written. Enabling "unknown sources" does not make my device …

> [Signal is] obsessed with [...] user tracking, via app store stats. Not sure about that. You do not need Google Play Store to download or update Signal. I use Obtainium to update…

> When you start denying IAMP to your customer in the name of "encryption" at that point it becomes privacy theatre, instead of privacy, irrespective of how nobly activist their in…

I have no experience with style imitation, so perhaps I'm missing something here. I asked Kimi K3 to rewrite your comment in the style of Ernest Hemingway: > I would like to get th…

I am on the paid plan since mid-2015 and nowadays I regularly get ads for concerts in the UI. The ads cannot be disabled and there is no amount I can pay to stop them. I even wrote…

I liked the vast modding community around Morrowind and had plenty of fun playing around with it in my younger years. If the concept of art one has in mind limits creative endeavou…

It is worth noting that most of liberal arts education is fantastically cheap compared to many STEM degrees, especially medicine. Whenever you need a laboratory, a hospital.. it ge…

The about page has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. All you get is five first names. I'm not sure what is meant by "we're building in the open" if it's a closed-source project wit…

What makes sense about selecting instances based on one's own location? Using local infrastructure leaks your location and simplifies law enforcement against the user. For example:…

There is also a whole second category of immense risks of having US companies gatekeeping offensive capabilities, especially for us here in Europe. The centralization/privacy/kill-…

Regulations on forbidden numbers exist, but they are usually not a sensible policy and are not comparable to the regulation of rocket launchers.

Yes, to clarify: I was not arguing against you but against the statement you quoted, made by Dario. Your quote was very relevant, as it highlights the foundational lack of intellec…

Demanding "required safety testing" is demanding a ban. Otherwise the testing would be inconsequential, right? I'm sure he didn't mean just a "lobotomized to be worse than Anthropi…

It is perfectly fine (and in fact standard) to identify people without any payment processor involved. Someone arguing for the ability to pay someone without surveillance does not …

Concealed advertising is highly problematic and deserves discussion. It is not, however, what OpenAI introduced in the article above. Their current ad formats are, apparently, tran…

Cloud risks are very true - for both GoPro and DJI. About a year ago, I was looking for an action camera. I found a good DJI product, but then I learned that you have to link the c…

It is pretty obvious, but as far as I can see, this article has not been disclosed as advertising or sponsored content. I'm in Europe, and I'm no expert on FTC advertising requirem…

I have always assumed that WhatsApp just does a lot of things for Meta that aren't immediately obvious to the user. For example, the app insists on downloading all the "status" pic…

I mostly used GPT-Venti for the complex part, but the documentation was done by either GPT-Grande or GPT-Tall. On a more serious note, I can vividly imagine how difficult it is to …

I'm not sure if this is some kind of tactic, but both of these claims seem trivially wrong. Bluesky is available in both main app stores and on the web. There is no merit in denyin…

Yes, it is specific to Bluesky. It is not dependent on the official app, though: Both the app and the website are subject to this kind of censorship. There seem to be loopholes [1]…

I'm no expert in atproto but it seems to be far worse than that. Apparently, Bluesky applies country-specific labellers automatically based on your IP address. If you register a Bl…