• 12 Posts
  • 185 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Well, I realize that 1970s sounds like an age of dinosaurs to some people… But, people back then weren’t cavemen. They had electricity, batteries, video cameras, telephones.

    The concept of an electric outlet in a couch is easy - not sure, but they might even had such things back then. Like to feed a lamp or something. USB is just low voltage and different connector, from the power transmission perspective.

    The concept of a speakerphone with video signal is also easy. The only thing to grasp is that the devices and batteries became that miniature and efficient. Oh, and wireless.

    Explaining that all video and voice recordings from all these neat devices are actually stored by a gigantic corporation, processed with voice and face recognition algorithms, and used to enrich personal profiles collected on all parties of the conversation to boost profits of said corporations, and many people even pay for this - THAT I would find complicated to explain.


  • Fennec is a poor alternative because it connects to Firefox services. Sync is optional, but some internal components will talk to Mozilla, and Mozilla changed their mind about “never selling your data” recently.

    Brave is Chrome with a history of suspicious moves, toxic leadership, involvement with crypto and AI



  • LibreWolf is a decent alternative. I switched to it a while ago as Firefox enshittification required more and more tweaks in configuration to close leaks.

    I’ve heard good things about Mullvad browser too especially on fingerprint resistance, but LibreWolf works for me well enough to not search for alternatives.

    For rare sites that I need to use and which don’t work in Firefox based browsers, I just use Brave.





  • The title of this is a misleading simplification. $4.5 tn is not “Tax Giveaway to the Rich”. It’s a maximum cap on total tax cuts that could be in this budget. It is likely to include renewal of 2017 income tax cuts and increased child tax credit - both of these were popular and not just “for rich”.

    They may also raise SALT cap which benefits higher income people from states with high property taxes. Living in one myself, I can tell you that you don’t need a mansion in a top school district to pay much more than $10k in property taxes. So this one is not just for billionaires for sure, but maybe from upper middle class.

    There are promises Trump made to eliminate income taxes on tips and social security, which are obviously not beneficial only to rich. But I heard it would cost a lot, especially SS one. Not sure if $4.5tn is enough.

    Unfortunately, it looks like proposed spending cuts to Medicaid and food stamps are favored by GOP and may be easy to pass, but they don’t cover tax cuts by a big margin. So they can hurt people in need, and still have to balloon national debt even more.


  • I think this should be baked into client apps.

    The popular email analogy works here too. When you are setting up a new phone, you get a default email client app that offers you to log in or sign up to the default email service. And usually user can choose to log in with their service if choice, for which they have to sign up in advance outside the client app.

    Having a default Fediverse client on new phones is not happening anytime soon, but if someone’s mother installs a client app from the store link sent to them by a family member, she can get similar default onboarding experience.

    Default instance can be picked by geo location, or maybe the less used out of 3 most popular instances. Or even maybe an instance ran by the client app developers.






  • Apple does extensive audit of mobile apps, including limitations of tracking. So the app cannot spy on something you are not letting it to know. But you are giving it a bunch of info voluntarily.

    I’d say using that app on iOS is similar to making a food delivery order using a loyalty member ID. Basically, you are letting the company (McDonald’s) know who you are, what is your phone number, where do you live, and what do you like to eat. And if they wish to, they could use all that to purchase your profile from a data brocker. Or they can sell that info for a few cents to make up on that discount.



  • pound_heap@lemm.eetoAsk LemmyAre there good uses for the blockchain?
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    5 months ago

    Private transactions, despite what people here are saying. Let me explain:

    1. Privacy is not equal to anonymity. The latter is much harder to achieve.

    2. There is Monero, a crypto made specifically for anonymity. It’s not very convenient to use, but it is preserving anonymity with multiple measures.

    3. Even Bitcoin, which is not built for that purpose, is private enough. It depends on how you use it.

    4. Deanonimization in general happens when you link your transaction with personal identifying information, but you can reduce your exposure by following certain opsec rules. I see this situation is better than traditional banking where your transactions are always not anonymous, and privacy is only protected by the bank itself. Data leaks happen, governments can get to your transaction info via legal means, but with crypto you have more options to protect yourself.