socsa

When you are practicing hentai poses and mom walks in…

My point is that they are separable threat profiles. If you are more concerned about your sketchy tinder date grabbing your lock screen password, biometrics are great. What I would love is a quick settings toggle for biometrics.

Yeah I don’t really care what a thief does with my phone after they brain me. It’s the skull damage which concerns me. My google account is locked down with a hardware key so there’s only so much damage they can do before I wipe the device. Unless I’m dead, in which case I guess it doesn’t matter. Also my wife knows how to handle this situation. I would strongly suggest investing in posthumous spouse security as early as possible.

For my threat profile, state actors compelling biometrics from my EDC phone is pretty low on my list of concerns. That shit is intentionally sterile because I know they will just push me a compromised “security update” if they want in.

And in any case, I’d still rather be able to fight the collection in public, vs being compromised by anyone who paid the janitor $20 to plug a USB drive into my phone.

If you compare apples to apples there’s barely even a weight savings. Belt drives are either single speed or hub drive which can work with chains just fine. Once you add tensioner circuitry it’s basically a push. The only kind of advantage is that they don’t need lubrication and are quieter.

Ok, that was always allowed!

Wait until you find out how much of Linux the NSA has built.

Right, and both of these ideas represent the same form of flawed modernist structuralism which has been largely supplanted by more contemporary theories which take a more pragmatic view on harm reduction as an iterative process in pursuit of post scarcity materialism. This is literally fucking Dengism, but if you say that people should do that stuff, and also value individual liberty, it’s shitlib and the ppb spam. The entire problem is that so many MLs immediately reject any form of leftist revisionism which doesn’t mesh with, questions, or even dares to reject the authoritarian traditions of Mao or Stalin as some kind of capitalist conspiracy which has infested western academia. This is as ridiculous as it is ignorant and seems to betray their underlying motivation not as one which seeks to uplift workers, but one which seems obsessed with some long defunct geopolitical rivalry. It’s exhausting, and frequently very stupid, despite these people believing that they are some collective political ubermensch.

This is why it’s so frustrating, because tankies being overrepresented in online leftist spaces is one of the things which harms the acceptance of leftist ideals more than most of their imperialist windmills.

People aren’t scared away from socialism by economic democracy, egalitarianism or radical direct action. They are scared away by confrontational and aggressive tankies defending tyrants, who seem to care more about relitigating random cold war drama than lifting up workers.

Honestly I think the .ml folks have shown themselves to be such zealots that they should be considered a potential security threat to the broader fediverse.

The more places defederate from them, the more opportunity and initiative there will be for alternatives to their largest communities to grow.

Yeah, currently every politics thread on the fediverse which gets any traction is hijacked by the same few trolls. Last year they were doing “DNC corruption” and “Blue MAGA.” This year they are all “Genocide Joe.” It’s insanely transparent. I get people have different opinions, but these few individuals do literally nothing on the fediverse but drop the exact same comments in every single thread which has the word “Democrats” or “Biden” or “Harris” in the title.

I have family in China and I need to communicate with them. Seems like a pretty common threat model. Signal works only with a foreign SIM and that’s only tolerated with tourists. XMPP servers get blocked almost immediately.

Do those ios clients support push notifications?

PGP is unfortunately one of the only reliable ways to get encrypted messages into and out of China. Most of that article is kind of nitpicking IMO. The only major cryptographic issue is lack of forward security. The rest can be dealt with if you have a bit of know how.

The problem is that iPhone has some weird shit about push notifications and none of the high security XMPP clients I have tried seem to support them.

This is why we only hire competent engineers.

Fuck it if they can’t compile my LaTeX then they don’t deserve me.

Just access your account through the browser, and then change insurance companies to one which doesn’t insist on harvesting your data.

Right, the entire issue is that it basically acts as a massive layer of insulation between reality and bad management. The whole thing is like a fucking paradox - any time you make a change to workflows or procedures there’s this stupid period where you need to “wait for buy in” where it doesn’t matter how outwardly idiotic the change is, you can’t actually call it obviously fucking stupid for like several weeks, or you are seen as being contrarian, or causing trouble. And the real bullshit is that the “better” the tools are, the more this effect is amplified. So as an engineer, I have paradoxically come to appreciate bad management tools simply because when someone does something stupid with them, I can call it out more easily.

The issue is more that all of these planning tools enable bad managers to implement bad management practices and workflows without any actual tracking for what constitutes bad management. Almost without fail, every manager I’ve worked with who is very attached to these products ends up using them for the sake of using them. And then when that produces shit results it’s all about “engineering buy in” and “process learning curves” and they end up doing real damage to products before someone notices that Jira actions are not correlated with protective management.

The biggest issue is that good, effective management tools actually end up being a double edged sword because of how they shield bad managers the illusion of legitimacy.