And because Hamas leaders don’t want to find their entire families (regardless of which country they are in) delivered to them in small pieces, just before they get a serving of Novichok themselves.

One conspiracy theory I like is that it’s a measure against people working at two companies, collecting two salaries.

If I installed a different app for every friend I had, I’d have a homescreen full just of chat apps. What’s worse, those niche privacy friendly apps go under or out of favor often.

You might be able to convince some of your friends to install an app just for you once, but by the time you’re telling them “this one now sucks, I’m on other app now” for the second time, they’ll just stop chatting with you, and if you ask them repeatedly, likely shun you even IRL because most people want to live their lives, not chase chat apps for their friends’ weird interests.

And even if they do that, they’ll have one app that they use every day, and one that sits in the bottom of their app drawer. Guess who gets invited to do something on the weekend, the person who shows up on their main contact list, or the person that would show up if they dug out that dusty app? And guess what the phone is gonna do with that app once it hasn’t been opened for a week… it’s going to deprioritize it so it won’t even work properly, while their main daily-opened app always gets push notifications immediately.

You don’t have to like it. You can pretend it’s not happening. But it will happen.

It absolutely is a thing. Network effect matters. Usability matters. Open source/community solutions usually lack that (and the lack of familiarity makes it worse).

The only alternative that’s FOSS and not centrally controlled is Matrix. By being decentralized, anyone can run their own server and good luck stopping that.

There may be 200 other “alternatives”, but they’re irrelevant to the point where I consider then non-existent. Nobody has heard of them. Nobody is using them. Trying to push them on normal people will most likely result in them no longer talking to you as often or at all, and none of the other ones has any chance of reaching a critical mass. Matrix at least has some recognition among nerds and some, tiny amount of adoption outside.

Stop pushing random niche shit, it does privacy a disservice.

A messenger can at best be pseudonymous, since you want your friends to be able to find you.

And in practice, a mobile messenger that actually works (i.e. makes your phone go “ping” when someone sends you a message, not hours later) will always be traceable to you, as it needs to be able to deliver the message.

Also, regardless whether Signal is perfect or not, it’s the one privacy friendly messenger that people actually use. A messenger where you can reach only your privacy-extremist friends is useless. Signal is already on the extreme end for most people, trying to push anything “more perfect” (but more niche) will just make people use WhatsApp.

From the misleading snippets I saw, my best guess was that someone (either through incompetence or malice/desire for a better story) turned “hacked a smartwatch and listened in on an after the fact meeting” into “tracked a submarine”.

Tracking a submerged submarine through a smartwatch is bullshit.

Can we not have clickbait titles on the Fediverse?

Generally people aren’t maxing out their download bandwidths, so if you have peers and are below your upload limit, the bottleneck is either your computer (e.g. disk, CPU), your network (e.g. WiFi, Internet), or the peering between your ISP and theirs (e.g. Deutsche Telekom).

I’m not gonna risk my computer by turning off my ad blocker, but I wonder if that article comes with exactly the kind of chumbox ads that they’re rightfully criticizing.

The baked in garbage is a result of you using shitty sources, possibly because there are few good sources available and thus you find more of the shitty ones.

Usually while the movie is not released digitally, only low quality copies are available. Many sites/groups don’t bother with those because few people want to watch that.

I’d just wait for the release. You’ll instantly find stuff that’s not just clean, but also in a decent quality.

It’s unclear and as I said, some privacy regulators are saying it’s OK. Hence the need for clarification.

Unfortunately, due to lack of clarity (and lack of clarification), many DPAs (privacy regulators!) have explicitly declared the “pay with data or money” model OK.

Google may have been one of the very few cases where a meaningful fine was given. For almost everyone else, blatantly breaking the law paid off big time.

GDPR has turned into a joke due to lack of enforcement (partially due to Ireland serving as a “privacy violation haven”). For years saying “no” to tracking required many clicks, and I don’t know of any companies that received penalties that would exceed the extra profit they made from that. Even blatantly illegal schemes where not agreeing locked you out of the web site usually didn’t get punished.

Many sites still don’t get proper consent, and also check out what many consider under “necessary” or “legitimate interest” cookies/tracking that you get after you said no. In hindsight, breaking the law was the only smart thing for sites to do, and many did.

Then, this bullshit. GDPR and the original explanations were pretty clear that the intent was to ban this kind of “agree or pay” scheme, and here we are. Of course they’ll do it, because they win either way. Either it’s considered legal, or there are no meaningful consequences…

This is not the only thing where the EU moves at a snails pace, ignoring that industry is making a joke out of well intended regulations. Many praise the EU for making Apple adopt USB-C. What they miss is that the attempts to standardize chargers started in 2009, when most manufacturers, Apple included, promised to agree on a standard, and then the EU let Apple dance on their nose flying loopings though loopholes for 14 years. That’s right. Apple introduced Lightning after they were supposed to standardize, and the EU let them.

The big question (which is disputed, even among DPAs) is whether offering this makes it OK to offer it via ads with tracking without a way to opt out for free.

Doing “tracking ads or no service” is illegal - the consent isn’t “freely given” and thus invalid, so they’d be processing data without consent or other valid justification. Some argue that with such a model the consent is freely given…

Either way, the max fine will be 4% of revenue, which means nothing if doing it this way doubles revenue…

Well, now we’ll see if the EU finally pulls its head out of their ass and clarifies that no, “consent” gained this way isn’t “freely given”, or if they legalize the practice and make GDPR even more of a joke.

Various DPAs have taken different positions on this, unfortunately encouraging this practice.

It’s a “fraud prevention company” so some site you bought stuff from passed your data to them.

16 would be 👍 (going by the mapping in this post, or the pinky if you do thumb = 1).

4 is 4 either way.

Don’t forget 4.

As usual, it’s not a shortage of talent, it’s a shortage of talent willing to be exploited.

The article explicitly explains that they “needed” to hire 25 foreign workers to deal with the shortage… after they made 50 local workers quit by cutting pay.