It’s all fun and games until you try to use Linux and spend 3 months trying to figure out how to do something like setting up digital 5.1 audio or how to get your graphics drivers to actually work properly
It’s only natural, really. When you get used to putting the brainpower into learning it as if it were breakfast, you feel frustrated when someone comes around putting a tenth of the effort and acting like the world is weighing on them. Then you tend to forget that most people choose something else to put that effort into, same as they forget that you chose this.
Not plausible. You are either lying or lack the skill and experience for handling your system, the latter of which would be okay if you were to admit it.
“git gud”, the exact rhetoric that causes people to stay away from Linux and in the hands of Microsoft despite them making their products worse year over year
for clarity, i think that the worst thing anyone’s been able to decisively prove about telegrams encryption is that it’s vulnerable to replay attacks… which in the context of privacy rather than full security isn’t suuuuper problematic
that’s not to say that there aren’t other flaws; that’s kinda the point behind “rule number 1: DONT INVENT YOUR OWN CRYPTO”: you just don’t know what flaws there are… AES (etc) has had a LOT of eyes on it
but for the most part, the negativity with the crypto boils down to what-ifs
As I see it, the key advantage of Telegram is not technical, it is political.
Yes, Telegram is a slightly shady company with an ambiguous business model and a possibly-dodgy encryption algorithm (when it is even turned on).
But Telegram is based outside the reach of the West (in UAE, eastern Europe, maybe even Russia). Whatever its other problems, nobody thinks that Telegram is under the thumb of Western governments, as the Big Tech corporate messengers almost certainly are.
Personally I don’t care much if Russia or even China is spying on me. Because if we can be certain of anything in this world, it’s that Russia and China are not sharing their spyware data with Western intelligence agencies. And as Westerners we live outside the reach of the Russian and Chinese police states, fortunately. So for us it’s win-win for privacy. That’s the way I see it.
The ideal solution, of course, is a truly private messenger which protects everyone’s privacy, including Chinese and Russians.
Telegram’s servers are located in US, Singapore, Netherlands (and maybe some other countries) from what I’ve gathered. And all chats that are not E2EE’ed are stored there, encrypted at rest at best with keys in the same database, or somewhere else that can still be accessed in automated way. Maybe it is not even encrypted at rest.
The point is, all those countries are either in 5 eyes or have information sharing agreements with 5 eyes countries. So as far as I’m concerned, TLAs can still have their fingers in those pies, in addition to Telegram’s overall shadiness and Russian ties. So maybe you get KGB strongman keeping a watch over your chats too.
This is not something I’d have much confidence in to be honest.
For the average Westerner, the threat from shady Russian agents seems orders of magnitude less serious than that from their own governments and police forces.
For EE2E, the corporate spyware messengers are asking us to take their word for it. Hard.
About the server locations, that’s interesting and does indeed undermine my argument a bit.
When you grow older, you will feel the betrayal of the bed. You will wake sore all over as though your bed beat you while you slept. Back, hips, shoulders, neck, all targets of the bed.
In an effort to relieve her PC of constantly deluge of virus and malware, I switched my Mom over to Ubuntu in the 2000’s. She lasted a month.
The experiment ended when she called me in tears because of her silent 4 week struggle with the OS.
She couldn’t get her scanner to work reliably, and none of her “print shop” software was compatible.
I know more now than I did then, and the distros have come a long way since, but I don’t have the time to retrain her and at 70 years old, I just want her to use what she’s comfortable with, even if that means I have to occasionally scrub her PC.
Wow this article perfectly captures the early 2000s experience of trying to teach parents how to use the internet. Internet access wasn’t very widespread in Australia yet, and my parents weren’t really interested in it and thought it was too difficult to use.
Things from that article that really stuck out to me:
Not being able to type searches directly into the address bar. This confused me as a child, and I was really excited when browsers started to incorporate the feature
Mentioning the use of a pager
Knowing that all the photos in the article are of real people and not AI because it’s from 2002
I don’t see Seven as ASD coded. She has levels of trauma that can sometimes be mistaken as ASD and has lived outside of regular human society for much of her life.
You’re completely right, there is obviously no deeper meaning to presenting a character who is a mature adult yet requires structured classes in order to learn how human beings socialise.
Picard was written by different people who needed different things from the characters, however there were occasional moments where her previous manerisms showed through.
A feral child who was not ASD could have been portrayed like Mowgli (or, for a more Star Trek reference point, Tuvok when he had brain damage). Seven gradually learns how to navigate human interaction (and how to smile, for instance) through studying and is surprised when it’s occasionally useful, a non-ASD character could have learned through interpretation of people’s reactions and would have sought socialisation rather than peace and quiet in a neatly ordered cargo bay (I’m led to believe that’s how it works anyway).
All of the traits you’ve described also very much fit PTSD as well.
To me taking a Watsonian approach to the character we she a woman who was forcibly taken by the Borg and assimilated at a very young age, then years later ripped away from that as well. That’s two extremely traumatic events( that we know of). Then following on we see the character years later at a point where she has somewhat worked though those traumas.
A Doyalist reading we can say it was the 90s and discussions around neuro-divergency and more general mental health were far less common in media. So we’re probably both over reading things.
You may be right, the more of Voyager I watch the more flexible each character appears in order to fit around what the story requires. Apart from Tom Paris repeatedly being an idiot, that’s a constant.
We can agree to disagree and enjoy it on our own terms I guess. If I have been dismissive of your argument I would like to apologise, that was not my intention.
Im guessing based on your username this character is an obsession of yours, and there’s a need to insist your interpretations are absolute fact. But unless the writer’s state explicitly what they were intending with her character. Its all just opinions.
On another note. Despite what you might think based on a lot of comments, it is possible to discuss things on the Internet without being unnecessarily smug and condescending purely because someone contradicted your head cannon
Not an obsession, I tuned out of watching Voyager when it was first on TV and I’m partway through a complete watch now … she’s simply my favorite character from the show, and given that Star Trek fans have a pleasant and active community here I thought it was a good choice. Perhaps I was mistaken.
Being interpreted as smug was not my intention, I thought I was simply stating my opinion with equal force to the poster above. How should I have responded?
When you type a message a message and send it to your counter part, WhatsApp says it encrypts it and the recipient will decrypt it on their side with WhatsApp. However, WhatsApp is closed source. That means you trust WhatsApp to do what it says.
It’s like going to a contractor and telling them your message and handing them a key. The contractor says they’ll deliver it to the other party in a manner that nobody else will be able to read that message. You can ask them provide the tools they do it, explain how they do it, and show you how it’s done, but they say “no can do, trade secret”. Do you trust them?
Alright, let’s say you do trust them, they really do make the message unreadable to anybody but the other party. But every time you want to send a message, you have to go to their building, write down the message on a notepad, and then hand it + the key to the messenger. If you told them “Just to be sure, I’d like to verify that nobody else is here possibly looking at the message while I write, nor reading it when you go into the backroom to render it unreadable” and asked “Can I check for other people here?” to which they respond “no can do, trade secret”. Do you trust them?
Alright alright, so you still trust them. They won’t let you check anything, but you still trust them. The messenger is employed by the one and Sauron Inc. The owner has been caught lying about stuff before, but you trust them. No problem.
Let’s says the messenger says “hey, you know, all the communications you have when you go into the small room there, we can make copies for you! if the messages were ever misplaced, this building burned down or anything, you could always have the communication history”. You find it a great idea! Wow, it’s so convenient. They even suggest to put copies in a building in another city and the building is owned by Darth Vader Inc. You’re ecstatic! To get the process started, WhatsApp walks into your room with a bunch of blank papers and chest, then asks you to hand over your key and closes the door behind them. You are escorted out of the building and wait for the process to be over.
A few months later, the city is bombarded by Megatron. The WhatsApp building is destroyed and your communications are gone! The key you had for the messenger to render your communications unreadable? Gone too! Well, luckily you can just go to another WhatsApp building. You enter, say your name, fill in your details and you are escorted to a room that looks just like the one in the building the Megatron destroyed!
The elation is great! … until you notice that all your messages are readable. Not only that, but the key that’s used to make then unreadable by WhatsApp is sitting there on the desk - pristine and undamaged as it ever was.
Wait a moment… how did the unreadable messages and the key get restored? What exactly did Darth Vader Inc. get from WhatsApp?
Must just be a coincidence, right? You probably had the key in your pocked the whole time and gave it to WhatsApp while you were at the reception filling in your contact details. Your trust is unwavering, the security unrattled, and your communication unscathed.
You are right, we don’t and can’t know if any of what Meta says is true, but at least on the surface it seems to check out. If they are stealing your private key and unlocking all your chats in secret, then they are doing a bloody good job, since no one has leaked anything yet.
Just to clear things a bit, in your analogy you don’t hand the courier both the chest and the key. The chest has a special keypad that accepts two keys, one is your key, the other is the recipient’s key. What you do is you lock the chest with your key and then give it to the courier, which will deliver the chest to the other party, which will then open the chest with his key. In theory the courier never had access to the key.
Now the issues are that you are indeed writing your message from within the Whatsapp building and you can never know if there cameras watching you or not. You also cannot know if Whatsapp has made a copy of your key, or the recipient’s key without your knowledge.
As for how can you recover all your chat history even after you destroy your phone, it’s quite easy and Whatsapp doesn’t need to know anything in particular. The functionality allows you to make a backup and store it on Google Drive. That backup gets encrypted with your password and it’s probably the most secure thing of all, if nothing else because Meta would gain nothing from the backup having poor security (as it would already have all the data if they wanted it) while it would only make them loose face, plus would allow anyone else to gain access to all ~~your ~~their data. After you restore the backup on a new device a new key+padlock pair gets created and the lock gets shared to all your contacts (which will see the yellow box telling them your padlock has changed).
I’m not claiming it doesn’t have privacy issues mind you, I’m just saying that you can’t be sure either way, unfortunately. Still, better than Telegram that doesn’t even encrypt most of your chats.
Maybe that’s a new feature? Does WhatsApp require a password when backing up now? Haven’t used it in a few years, but back when I had it, the backup to Google didn’t require anything besides your phone number and access the google drive on your account - it was only retrievable from WhatsApp and not visible on a Google Drive interface nor API.
Shit if I think I got my point across I’m pretty happy
Actually really I think more often we think “I SHOULD have said that!”. It’s like we know so so many words until a native comes to talk to us and then all our words go hiding somewhere.
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