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How the United Arab Emirates Intelligence Tried to Hire Me to Spy on Its People

evilsocket.net

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Re: How the United Arab Emirates Intelligence Tried to Hire Me to Spy on Its People

#71
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is bad for other reasons, too, like creating a lock-in effect and being hostile to clients that remove the dependency on Google Play Services: http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/posts/signal-lock-in.ht...

You could also say that Signal is good because they realized the shortcomings of federation and want to sign their binaries themselves.

What would those shortcomings be? I think that networked software systems should be forward-compatible, so that new features can be introduced without breaking every existing client. Some programmers assert the only way to innovate is by having everyone run the latest version of their software and excluding competing implementations. You can see this phenomenon not only with Signal, but also, for example, with systemd.

Re: How the United Arab Emirates Intelligence Tried to Hire Me to Spy on Its People

#72
post #45

@evilsocket FYI, the blocks on that page are really hard to read on mobile because the line breaks are enforced, requiring left-right scrolling. Seems like a blockquote would be a better choice here.

that should be fixed now, thanks

Re: How the United Arab Emirates Intelligence Tried to Hire Me to Spy on Its People

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it's not that bad if your sponsor doesn't steal your passport" Your employer stealing your passport is something that generally only happens in a hellhole?

Most decent companies there, generally don't do that. However, there are always exceptions. Furthermore, this issue generally plagues the contractor companies (those that provide workers to bigger govt companies - who don't really care and use contractors to get around this in the first place) Quite a lot of private companies do the same as well. Very recently (just 6 months back), a friend of mine, got an offer from…

Yes but what I mean is, that's something that often happens there, whereas even the shittiest companies in the US and Western Europe would never ever do that, because the people/company who took your passport would go to prison or be heavily fined or both if they did.

Which means the UAE is a hellhole no one should visit, because if that's a common enough problem that everyone knows about it, and it's not a problem people face elsewhere, then who knows how many other nightmares lurk beneath the surface in the UAE?

It's not worth the risk for the shaky promise of some amount of money beyond your existing salary (on top of any ethical issues of economically supporting such behavior).

Re: How the United Arab Emirates Intelligence Tried to Hire Me to Spy on Its People

#74
post #45

@evilsocket FYI, the blocks on that page are really hard to read on mobile because the line breaks are enforced, requiring left-right scrolling. Seems like a blockquote would be a better choice here.

that should be fixed now, thanks

NB: you've fixed the styling (renders fairly reasonably on my 10" tablet) but not the markup.

 should be used for preformatted code blocks or similar.

When you're quoting something, the appropriate markup is a tag pair.

Most sane CSS should render that reasonably, preferably simply by indenting the content.

Re: How the United Arab Emirates Intelligence Tried to Hire Me to Spy on Its People

#75
post #46
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the UAE. As long as you don't break their laws the experience is fine. To be honest, I'm more frightened of going to America as a non-white person where even obeying the laws can result in death. Edit: If you disagree with my post please add to the conversation rather than just down-voting.

What you probably don't know is that America is a very big and complex country. It's so big that you can love one part and hate the other part at the same time. It's so complex that even its government is not entirely a single rock. There are avid defenders of human rights as well as evil masters in its government. Somehow they are both coexisting. That's how big America is. I'm non-white and non-American and I certa…

What you probably don't know is that this describes just about every country, even some of the tiny pacific island ones.

Re: How the United Arab Emirates Intelligence Tried to Hire Me to Spy on Its People

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that should be fixed now, thanks

NB: you've fixed the styling (renders fairly reasonably on my 10" tablet) but not the markup . should be used for preformatted code blocks or similar. When you're quoting something, the appropriate markup is a tag pair. Most sane CSS should render that reasonably, preferably simply by indenting the content.

i write posts in markdown, they're then "compiled" into html, I should fix the software I'm using ... but as long as it works, for me it's ok, being it styling or markup :)

Re: How the United Arab Emirates Intelligence Tried to Hire Me to Spy on Its People

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NB: you've fixed the styling (renders fairly reasonably on my 10" tablet) but not the markup . should be used for preformatted code blocks or similar. When you're quoting something, the appropriate markup is a tag pair. Most sane CSS should render that reasonably, preferably simply by indenting the content.

i write posts in markdown, they're then "compiled" into html, I should fix the software I'm using ... but as long as it works, for me it's ok, being it styling or markup :)

In markdown I think a blockquote is indicated by >, so:

> This is a quote

> it is rendered as a blockquote.

Re: How the United Arab Emirates Intelligence Tried to Hire Me to Spy on Its People

#79
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also say that Signal is good because they realized the shortcomings of federation and want to sign their binaries themselves.

What would those shortcomings be? I think that networked software systems should be forward-compatible, so that new features can be introduced without breaking every existing client. Some programmers assert the only way to innovate is by having everyone run the latest version of their software and excluding competing implementations. You can see this phenomenon not only with Signal, but also, for example, with system…

> What would those shortcomings be?

Moxie wrote about it:

https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

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