Comments

Zak, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to asklemmy in How does federation actually work?

Your server sends a message to other servers saying what you voted or replied.

A reply dialog being slow to open sounds like an issue with your client, not federation.

Zak, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to asklemmy in How are "We" to place trust in the fediverse?

What do you mean by “trust”?

Do I trust that vanilla Lemmy code doesn’t contain something nefarious, such as code that detects political positions it doesn’t like and reduces their visibility? Sure. It would be hard to hide something like that.

Do I trust that major servers aren’t secretly running software that manipulates content? Mostly yes. I think it would get noticed since there are lots of vanilla servers to compare behavior to.

Do I trust that all the software is well-designed and bug-free? I write software for a living. No software is bug-free and most of it isn’t well-designed.

Do I trust that everyone who runs a fediverse server isn’t an asshole? Absolutely not. Any jackass can run a server. I run a Mastodon server (on which all users are me).

Zak, 1 year ago to asklemmy in Question for legal folks: Travel based abortion restrictions

The US constitution forbids states from creating ex post facto crimes, and the jurisdiction of state laws does not extend into other states. Texas cannot make it a crime to have an abortion in California, nor to have previously had an abortion in California.

Texas may be able to make it a crime to leave Texas for the purpose of having an abortion. That would make creating any evidence of the reason for travel, or providing explanations to authorities dangerous.

Zak, 1 year ago to asklemmy in Question for legal folks: Travel based abortion restrictions

My real question now is whether the defendant could state

If you’re being investigated by law enforcement in the USA, you have the right to remain silent. Use it.

Zak, 1 year ago to privacy in What is your tracker stats?

This app wants root and despite being open source according to that link, isnt in the official F-Droid repo. I’m skeptical about trusting it.

Zak, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to linux in A response to the "Boycott Wayland" article

In the modern era, the main purpose of a screen saver is to lock the screen, and has been for most users for a long time. Many of us would also like to have pretty pictures on our locked screens.

It no longer has anything to do with preventing burn-in, so you’re right from a certain point of view.

Zak, 1 year ago to asklemmy in After a lifetime against, I'm considering joining social media. Any advice?

I don’t think anyone can give you good advice without knowing the reasons you’d rather not get in to.

I can think of various scenarios where some sort of minimal internet presence under your real name would be useful for social or employment reasons, but exactly what it is you’re trying to accomplish makes a big difference in terms of what tools (including corporate platforms, federated microblogging like Mastodon, a blog, or a static website) will get you the results you want.

What’s popular where you live or in your professional field matters too. For some people, not using Facebook or Linkedin specifically is unusual, but we don’t have enough information to know if that’s true for you.

Zak, 1 year ago to asklemmy in discord vs guilded vs revolt vs element/matrix what is your favorite?

It has ads? I guess my adblocker works then.

Zak, 1 year ago to asklemmy in Why are there so many apps that could be websites?

The number I’ve seen floating around a few places is that app users are, on average seven times more profitable than web users. Reasons include:

• The app being on the device acts as a reminder to the user to interact more
• It’s easier for an app to send notifications to get users to open it and interact more (Android has reduced this by requiring permission; browsers required it long before)
• There are more limited options for blocking ads in an app
• There are more opportunities to collect data in an app

Are there any good reasons for it, too? Security, maybe?

Security for the user? Probably not. “Security” for the developer in that they can prevent people from using the app in ways that aren’t profitable? Likely.

Zak, 1 year ago to asklemmy in People of Lemmy that take more than 5 seconds to start your car and drive, what are you doing?

And people wonder why I care so much about my phone having an analog headphone jack.

Zak, 1 year ago to linux in A response to the "Boycott Wayland" article

Screen locking has obvious use cases.

Zak, 1 year ago to linux in A response to the "Boycott Wayland" article

To quote its author

On X11 systems, XScreenSaver is two things: it is both a large collection of screen savers; and it is also the framework for blanking and locking the screen.

Zak, 1 year ago to asklemmy in Mandatory security check followed by a long travel to area of work. When do you clock in?

The line here is always arbitrarily set, so you’d want to look up what it is at your specific company.

There are very likely laws defining where that line can be set, as Dippy’s comment suggests. It is very likely that the employer is legally obligated to pay an hourly employee for any time they require that employee to be on site, which would include employer-mandated security checks.

Zak, 1 year ago to asklemmy in People who have those talking buttons for their pet, how long did it take for them to catch on, and do they really work?

The idea is to teach the cat to press the buttons to communicate.

Zak, 1 year ago to privacy in What is your tracker stats?

I’m not complaining. I’m asking for some evidence this app is trustworthy.

Security is not binary. Having root can be bad for security, but it doesn’t have to be especially if you’re careful about what apps you grant root to, which is the point of my original comment. Having root can also be a security benefit because it offers more opportunities for detecting and blocking harmful and privacy-invasive apps, as this app does (if it’s trustworthy).

I don’t think F-Droid with the official repositories is a negative for security either; I suspect it’s less likely to contain outright malware than Google Play, and I’m sure the average app on F-Droid is less likely to be privacy-invasive. Adding random repositories suggested by strangers on the internet can be a different story, and asking who can vouch for the one suggested in this thread seems like a reasonable mitigation to me.