It’s interesting how you went from “it’s not relevant at all” to “it’s relevant in general but not in this case” after I gave you a reply.

If you have found a new security or privacy flaw, I would love to hear about it. But pushing your irrelevant opinions on others who are not interested, is unpleasant for us, and a waste of time for you.

My opinions are not irrelevant, as I laid out in my previous comment that you just agreed with. Others are obviously interested, and it’s not “unpleasant” for them, as people responded and upvoted (and no downvotes)–indicating it’s relevant. It’s not a waste of time for me, because not only did it take me negligible time to type literally three sentences (actually, I copy-and-pasted the comment from one I made earlier, I didn’t even write it fresh here), but it has value to others and as such is not a waste of time for me.

So whether he agrees with you that guys can become girls or vice versa, or whether he believes the same narrative that you do regarding corona is simply irrelevant.

The strawman construction was a nice little touch. Completely ignoring the part where I laid out that my personal stance and agreement or disagreement with the CEO is irrelevant, you act as if I personally disagree with the CEO and then use that to dismiss me.

You obviously have an agenda. So be it. But this conversation is truly a waste of time: you were obviously wrong and as soon as that was pointed out you shift goalposts.

If you think the two are unrelated you’re oblivious to the considerations that must be taken into account when discussing potential privacy concerns in software. It’s not ad hominem to acknowledge that the personal convictions and values of the CEO (and indeed other employees) can potentially decrease the sense of privacy of a product.

If the CEO is so adamant in his anti-X stance that he decides it’s acceptable to censor access to materials about X, or perhaps worse that he decides to expose anyone using his software that discusses or supports X, would not consider those valid concerns?

Companies are made of people, and software is made by people. Since people are not neutral, companies and software are also not neutral. The stances of a company or software on privacy, freedoms, etc are all influenced by the stances on those exact issues by the constituent people of the company and developers of the software.

Consider Elon Musk and Twitter. Given Elon’s personal beliefs and how adamant he is to enact and enforce those beliefs, do you consider him a neutral influence on the privacy of Twitter as a product? There is no way to see him as a neutral influence; he has direct influence by his ideological stance on the software. As such, if you have enough distrust in him or his ideological stance, that can transfer to distrust in Twitter as software.

In fact, it’s not even about whether I support the CEO or whether I think his stance is “right” or “wrong” as you imply. It’s entirely about how the CEO sees his beliefs in relation to the company and product he’s overseeing. I could entirely agree with the CEO and still consider their influence to be a detriment to the product if he puts his ideology ahead of pragmatism, for example.

It depends on how Google wants to play this. If they require website operators to use WEI in order to serve ads from Google’s ad network (a real possibility), then suddenly 98.8% of websites that have advertising, and 49.5% of all websites would be unusable unless you’re using Chrome. It’s probably safe to assume they’d also apply this to their own products, which means YouTube, Gmail, Drive/Docs, all of which have large userbases. The spec allows denying attestation if they don’t like your browser, but also if they don’t like your OS. They could effectively disallow LineageOS and all Android derivatives, not just browser alternatives.

It may be dead to its users anyway depending on how forceful Google is with this. If Brave doesn’t work on 98.8% of all websites with advertising or indeed on 49.5% of all websites (approximately Google’s ad network’s reach), it becomes as niche as lynx.

A fork like Vivaldi, Brave or Opera could opt not to implement these changes

It doesn’t quite work like that. They wouldn’t choose to not implement the change, because the change comes from upstream via Chromium. They would have to choose to remove the feature which, depending on how it’s integrated, could be just as much work as implementing it (or more, if Google wants to be difficult on purpose). Not implementing the change is zero effort; removing the upstream code is a lot of effort.

Brave is built on Chromium. So, by default, no they are not safe from this. Without extra effort, Brave will have this feature. I don’t know if its feasible but there’s a chance the Brave devs can remove the code from their distribution, but that’s the best case scenario and just puts them in the same position as Firefox: they get locked out because they refuse to implement the spec.

Within the context of Chrome and other Chromium based web browsers, this means that Google will be able to monitor your web browsing in a new way any time you’re using a browser based on Chrome/Chromium.

With only slight hyperbole, we can say that Google can do this monitoring already.

What’s worse, is now they can:

• Refuse you access to information by refusing to attest your environment.
• Restrict your browser, extensions, and operating system setup by refusing attestation.
• Potentially bring litigation against you for attempting to circumvent DRM (in the USA it’s illegal to bypass DRM).
• Leverage their ad network to require web site operators to use attestation if they wish to serve ads via Google. AKA force you to use Chrome to use big websites.
• Derank search results for sites that are not using attestation.

In my opinion, the least harmful part of this is the ability to monitor page access, because they can more or less do this for Chrome users anyway. What’s really harmful here is the potential to restrict access to and destroy practically the entirety of the internet.

ISPs coming out and bothering you cause you pirate stuff? Never heard of it.

You must have the distinct privilege of not living in the USA or several other Western countries.

I’d jump ship immediately if I got one such letter.

If you mean jump ship off that ISP, there’s nothing you can do. You can go to another ISP (if there even is one in your area), who will do the exact same thing. You can jump ship entirely and not have internet, I guess.

Was that supposed to be some sort of joke or do you actually not know Orwell himself was: a rapist, a snitch, a plagiarist, and a racist? One man, four horrible qualities.

I think there are many other versions of the same story that aren’t plagiarized, aren’t written by horrible humans, and are also better written.

Personally, I’m fond of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I haven’t read it, but you can skip Orwell’s plagiarizing and go to the source and read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We.

Ah I see you mentioned the cuts are only a few seconds long. This wouldn’t catch that very well.

If you have a server outside of your network you could simply hold open a TCP connection and report when it breaks, but I’ll admit at that point it’s outside of what I’ve had to deal with.

Depends on how much you want to set up. For my purposes, I just check for connectivity every minute, and record true or false as a new row in a sqlite database if there is connectivity.

This is what I use on my raspberry pi,

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from datetime import datetime
import sqlite3
import socket
from pathlib import Path

try:
    host = socket.gethostbyname("one.one.one.one")
    s = socket.create_connection((host, 80), 2)
    s.close()
    connected = True
except:
    connected = False
timestamp = datetime.now().isoformat()

db_file = Path(__file__).resolve().parent / 'Database.sqlite3'
conn = sqlite3.connect(db_file)
curs = conn.cursor()
curs.execute('''CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS checks (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT, timestamp TEXT, connected INTEGER)>
curs.execute('''INSERT INTO checks (timestamp, connected) VALUES (?, ?);''', (timestamp, 1 if connected else 0))
conn.commit()
conn.close()

and I just have a crontab entry * * * * * ~/connectivity_check/check.py >/dev/null 2>&1 to run it every minute.

Then I just check for recent disconnects via:

$ sqlite3 ./connectivity_check/Database.sqlite3 'select count(*) from checks where connected = 0 order by timestamp desc;'

Obviously, it’s not as full-featured as something with configurable options or a web UI etc, but for my purposes, it does exactly what I need with absolutely zero overhead.

What a weird take. You’re allowed to pay for whatever you’d like. Personally, I can’t afford to pay for any JetBrains product, even if I wanted to.

Not only are there alternatives which may be better overall or better suited to someone’s needs, that wasn’t even my point. My point was more that it is only temporarily free, and so the parent commenter’s comment of “it’s free” should be taken with a grain of salt if you’re considering the product.

Moreover, we’re in the Open Source community: Fleet is neither free nor open source, and pointing that out here is relevant.

Quoting JetBrains,

Fleet is free to use during the public preview

(emphasis mine)

So it is only temporarily free. Once it’s polished it will no longer be free. Better to not get tied in to something that will be taken away from you before long.

Oh that’s interesting. That makes sense. Like I said I’m using the Kindle 4 from 2011 and it has a slightly different form factor and no way to use a magnetic case.

Huh. Yeah that must be a thing with newer models. Mine doesn’t have any magnets, and its not in a shape a case would even make sense. I do press a button to dismiss the “screensaver” (the thing that keeps you from accidentaly turning pages with side buttons when not in use), but I don’t see an ad on that screensaver. It’s pencils laying on a book, and has been for about a decade now.

I don’t follow. When you say magnetic cover, do you mean some of the newer models? Also, what does pressing the button to unlock it do? Does that turn on wifi or something? I have to press a button to turn my Kindle 4 “on” (aka remove the screensaver and show my book) but that doesn’t cause an issue.

I have a Kindle paperwhite without ads, worth paying extra imo.

Pro tip: if you leave off wifi for long enough, the ads seem to expire and they’re permanently replaced by some generic pencils image or something. And, since having wifi on can cause the kindle to overwrite your cover images, I sync with calibre over USB anyway. I have the ad-supported Kindle 4 from 2011 and haven’t had ads on it since 2012.

Ok, two things are happening here.

they offer no reasonable basis for distrusting Signal, the tech that they attempt to vilify.

One, is that they did provide what they considered reasonable basis for distrusting Signal. Given that they thought Signal should not be trusted, the quote you posted is pretty obviously to be interpreted as: thankfully China hasn’t naively adopted a compromised communications platform with a USA intelligence backdoor. Now, if you want to say their basis for distrust is not reasonable, or is false, that’s completely fine. But in doing so it doesn’t change the author’s intent behind the quote which you posted.

Given said dev’s past comments, it is reasonable to infer that the reference to China presents them as an example to be followed here.

Two, is that it should be pretty clear they are saying China should be followed here in a very specific and explicit way: they aren’t saying follow China in every way under the sun. It’s very obvious from context and from what is explicitly said that they mean: China’s distrust and refusal to adopt (what they consider) a platform with USA backdoors should be followed. And I think that’s an entirely reasonable statement to make. No one should naively adopt compromised communications platforms.

There is no honest reading of the quote (especially given the rest of the context of the essay leading up to the quote) that could lead someone to conclude that this particular essay is (1) advocating for and supporting China spying on its citizens and (2) advocating for other countries following China in spying on citizens. It’s pretty obvious the only honest reading of this is: “I believe Signal has USA backdoors. Given that, I’m glad China hasn’t adopted its use heavily. I also think other countries should follow China in not naively accepting such technologies”.

Again, you can disagree with the foundational reasons for distrust, and that could be very useful. But painting the essay and quote the way you (and others here) are is just intellectually dishonest. Disagree with what is actually said, not with what you imagine (or wish) was said.

But they serve ads. Do they say these ads are fully anonymized? The primary reason other vendors suck up all your data is precisely to serve ads. Why is Brave’s serving ads different?

I personally don’t find inserting affiliate referral codes acceptable either, but yes at the end of the day this is the user’s preference whether or not this is all acceptable to them.