NSA Director Paul Nakasone confirmed such purchases in his letter to Wyden, saying the data collected “may include information associated with electronic devices being used outside - and, in certain cases, inside - the United States.”
As a tech-savvy mom, managing work, household responsibilities, and personal commitments can be overwhelming. Having access to a reliable and user-friendly operating system is vital in ensuring a smooth experience…
Hey folks! I’m getting a fresh laptop for the first time in about a decade (Framework 16) in a couple of months and am looking forward to doing some low-level tinkering both on the OS and hardware. I’m planning to convert into a “cyberdeck” with quick-release hinges for the screen since I usually use an HMD, built-in...
Every linux enthusiast should try Qubes at least once. The architecture is totally different, vastly more secure in many ways than most Linux distros. It’s definitely not for everybody, but if privacy and security rank high on your priority list it’s worth a look. It never ends up in Linux top ten lists for some reason, but it’s an incredible OS.
hi I’m still exploring stuff and I was thinking about nix, with all his stuff, what do you guys think? maybe someone with experience can tell me if I should stay away from that or could be a good choice for privacy, anonimity and security
I am working on creating deb/rpm packages for an OSS tool I use. So far, I have been manually testing each deb/rpm in a virtualbox live cd version of that OS but it’s tedious to do that for every release. This is a GUI tool, I basically just need to confirm that the apt install goes correctly and the program can actually...
Show up in every election and vote (and be engaged in other ways politically). It’s very easy to ignore people who don’t vote. Don’t like your options at the polls? Participate in primaries and donate to campaigns pushing ranked choice voting.
Nobody who is knowledgeable about crypto ever thought dogecoin was anything but a meme coin or pump and dump scheme. They would have known it offered zero benefits technologically over existing cryptos. Some may have bought it to cash in on the crazy market surrounding it, but they never thought doge was the future or anything. The people who thought that were the “i read one article and I’m a crypto expert now” crowd referenced in my original comment.
FWIW nobody who is actually knowledgeable about crypto ever thought anything positive about NFTs. It’s all just wallstreetbets types who read one article and think they’re economists now. The tech is interesting and has applications but monkey jpegs are what idiots spent millions on for some reason.
Even in single instances of trust there can be advantages to using blockchain for those applications:
Decentralization can give you better uptime/availability of those documents. If the DMVs website or authentication service goes down, documents can still be authenticated since they and/or their signatures stored in a distributed manner. The internet can go down at your bar but if you have a recent copy of a chain, you can still verify somebody’s ID.
It can make them easier to transfer between parties, and creates a digital “paper trail” which can conform to whatever requirements one might have. For example, you could easily require several parties to sign off any time the document is moved or assigned to a new person.
You can use those documents and their signatures with smart contracts or other decentralized apps. For example, you could sign up for an account at a bank or a platform like eBay using your NFT’d digital ID and the bank could accept it would needing to manually verify if the id “looks fake” or if your blurry phone picture is going to cut it. They don’t have to call up the government and ask them to verify it or pay some third party to match your address against their database of known people, etc.
Maybe you need better transparency in how many documents are issued and (potentially) to whom. Voting systems, for example, are a use case for this. It could be used for shareholder governance structures, etc.
Blockchains can enforce rules which centralized entities can’t, which is important to consider. An example of how this is useful: imagine the government has a digital ID system and it’s run in a centralized fashion, which makes sense, because they are the issuing authority right? Now imagine that centralized system gets hacked and an attacker starts printing and authenticating a bunch of fake ID requests. In the time between when this attack happens and when somebody figures it out, which could be hours to days, banks and other entities could be relying on those fake documents and potentially lose millions. An example of a rule a blockchain can enforce is “this ID issuing authority cannot issue in a single day more than 10% above it’s daily average of issuances over a six month period”, limiting the scope of an attack. One may say “Well, but blockchain can be hacked too!” which is true, but it’s less likely because the software for these networks has thousands of eyes on it whereas there may only be a couple system admins approving changes to your state-run ID database. Open source software is more secure than proprietary for this reason. Additionally, a security flaw needs to effect 51% of the network which isn’t likely to happen when you have a diversity of software versions.
Many smart contracts need ways to protect against sybil attacks (ie one person pretending to be multiple). Quadratic funding being used for charity fundraising is a perfect example. By using credentials issued on chain by centralized authorities, they can verify a person is not multiple people. Quadratic funding is an awesome way to fund public goods.
It can be you. It doesn’t have to be Big Corps or Government. It can be federated instances, it can be self-ownership of data, it can be E2E encrypted.
Pro tip: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit which has been defending your right to privacy for many years. If you shop on Amazon, you can give a portion of the purchase price to EFF. You pay the same amount and daddy bezos gets a few less dollars. Use the affiliate link, not the smile link as smile has been sunsetted: www.eff.org/node/58741
It’s real annoying when a post blows up and the little bell icon in the top right keeps adding to its counter well past the time when you care about that post any longer. Is there some way to ignore further updates to a specific post or comment?
use mastadon or nostr, they are actually decentralized. Bluesky is just twitter 2.0 with the same broken incentives and the same broken business model.
Important notice: Fossil fuel companies have shifted the narrive they push from “climate change isn’t real” to “climate change is real but there’s nothing we can do about it”. We can absolutely do something about it: fight it like the existential threat that it is. Whatever power you can levy in life whether at home, at work, at the voting booth, with your investments, or in the streets: use it.
A man who grabbed our concept of a centralized internet by the balls and squeezed it so hard that the Lemmy’s user count 65xed in a 3 months period. Thank you for your service
Reddit is going to have their IPO. Anybody can buy shares. With enough shares, a shareholder resolution could be proposed and passed. Similar shareholder activism has forced Fortune 500 companies to divest from fossil fuels. We could replace corporate execs at will and have major site changes be put to a site-wide vote. This is...
NSA Buys Americans’ Internet Data Without Warrants, Letter Says (www.reuters.com) Portuguese
NSA Director Paul Nakasone confirmed such purchases in his letter to Wyden, saying the data collected “may include information associated with electronic devices being used outside - and, in certain cases, inside - the United States.”
Linux Mint 21.3: Empowering tech-savvy Moms with the Perfect Desktop Experience (ameliaslyfe.wordpress.com)
As a tech-savvy mom, managing work, household responsibilities, and personal commitments can be overwhelming. Having access to a reliable and user-friendly operating system is vital in ensuring a smooth experience…
"Must Try" distros and DEs?
Hey folks! I’m getting a fresh laptop for the first time in about a decade (Framework 16) in a couple of months and am looking forward to doing some low-level tinkering both on the OS and hardware. I’m planning to convert into a “cyberdeck” with quick-release hinges for the screen since I usually use an HMD, built-in...
NixOS
hi I’m still exploring stuff and I was thinking about nix, with all his stuff, what do you guys think? maybe someone with experience can tell me if I should stay away from that or could be a good choice for privacy, anonimity and security
Testing packaging which targets multiple distributions?
I am working on creating deb/rpm packages for an OSS tool I use. So far, I have been manually testing each deb/rpm in a virtualbox live cd version of that OS but it’s tedious to do that for every release. This is a GUI tool, I basically just need to confirm that the apt install goes correctly and the program can actually...
OBS Studio 30 Released with Support for Intel QSV H264, HEVC, and AV1 on Linux (9to5linux.com)
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I value this meme at eleventy billion and won't take a cent less (lemmy.world)
🇪🇺 How the EU Feels about (lemmy.ml)
Context: Chat Control 2.0: EU governments set to approve the end of private messaging and secure encryption...
So many people still think its ok for them to do📱 (lemmy.ml)
Always a smokescreen to take away your rights. Epstein plead guilty in 2008 to trafficking children to nobody.
Disable notifications for a certain post?
It’s real annoying when a post blows up and the little bell icon in the top right keeps adding to its counter well past the time when you care about that post any longer. Is there some way to ignore further updates to a specific post or comment?
Chat Control 2.0: EU governments set to approve the end of private messaging and secure encryption (www.patrick-breyer.de)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/6469594...
Business is going well (sh.itjust.works)
We're doomed (lemmy.world)
Modern consumer logic (lemmy.ml)
A moment of appreciation for a man who is undoubtedly the world's most successful promoter of Lemmy and the fediverse (lemmy.ml)
A man who grabbed our concept of a centralized internet by the balls and squeezed it so hard that the Lemmy’s user count 65xed in a 3 months period. Thank you for your service
[US] Congress is trying to pass a number of bills which will restrict online speech, the use of encryption, and online privacy. Make your voice heard! (www.badinternetbills.com)
Why don't we buy reddit?
Reddit is going to have their IPO. Anybody can buy shares. With enough shares, a shareholder resolution could be proposed and passed. Similar shareholder activism has forced Fortune 500 companies to divest from fossil fuels. We could replace corporate execs at will and have major site changes be put to a site-wide vote. This is...