It's not 20 and it's not 2. It's not a person. It's a tool. It can make a person 100x more effective at certain specific things. It can make them 50% less effective at other things. I think, for most people and most things, it might be like a 25% performance boost, amortized over all (impactful) projects and time, but nobody can hope to quantify that with any degree of credibility yet.
> but nobody can hope to quantify that with any degree of credibility yet
i'd like to think if it was really good, we would see product quality improve over time; iow less reported bugs, less support incidents, increased sign-ups etc, that could easily be quantified no?
Probably because the post is not about the good or bad, but about fighting with censorship technically. Usual tor connections have been blocked for a long time in Russia and Iran. They explain the way they bypass these blocks and advancing the TOR.
Nobody blocks them in the UK and the EU so there is nothing to fight in technical terms for TOR Project.
They are not EU/UK political representative to fight legally or politically.
Signal is centralized, hosted on AWS, and through a mixture of legal procedures codified by US law and their bundled gag orders (PR/TT order, SCA warrant, FISA 702, and usage of NSLs) that can be extended for significant lengths of time and, occasionally, in de facto perpetuity, all metadata (who is talking to who, when, from where) can be monitored in real-time without Signal ever being informed. Combined with existing legal procedures for telecoms and VOIP providers for real-time + retrospective location tracking by phone number/associated IMEI/IP address by way of tower connectivity (this framework is required by law [specifically, CALEA] to be implemented by default for all users, not after the fact nor on-request), that's enough data to escalate to standard law enforcement procedures if an incriminating link is found, whereby the phone's internal message history can be dumped either through private (ex.: Cellebrite) or functionally coercive legal means (refusing to decrypt data can get you jail time if you are the subject of an investigation, and deletion of data such as via duress pins etc can get you a destruction of evidence charge), at which point all of your messages can be dumped.
And this all ignores the fact that firmware for basebands and cryptoprocessors (and most other hardware components in all devices) is closed-source, proprietary code, and that Signal piggybacks off of device encryption for at-rest message data instead of reimplementing it in userland. (This feature used to exist and was removed, but can be re-added through the Molly fork.)
I've also known protesters who have also had Signal geoblocked at the site of a protest the moment it was slated to start, forcing members of said protest to fall back to unencrypted methods at crucial times. Being centralized and using US-based cloud infra does a lot to compromise anonymity and security, even if message content isn't immediately readable.
Luckily, Signal is not vulnerable to push notification interception, but if you want a great real-world example of how gag-ordered dragnet metadata surveillance visible to both domestic and foreign governments (by way of international intelligence agreements) can look for massive corporations rendered helpless by this legal framework, that's a great case study to look into. https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
Throwing out the accusation of apps being "backdoored" just obscures the real, de facto "backdoors" that are US law.
> Non-offending pedophiles should be more widely accepted by society. It’s unfair to ostracize someone for a desire they were born with, and integrating them into society makes them less likely to cause harm.
There's no evidence that anyone is born with particular sexual deviations. It attempts to simultaneously absolve and normalize attitudes that ideate rape of children, so long as they don't act on it. That's a pretty thin and permeable line to draw.
I'd stopped scrobbling like 10 years ago, but recently got into it again.
My 16yo son discovered Last.fm and scrobblibg and got me to install the Jellyfin scrobbler plugin. And I recovered my old account! I got some boomer music jokes from him, but it was worth it.
The funny thing is that make a big deal about blocking Brave on "ethical" grounds, but don't e tend the logic to Chrome, Edge or Safari. Talk about punching down/virtue signaling.
They outline a very specific behaviour that Brave engaged in but Chrome, Edge, and Safari do not. Brave was engaging in fraudulent behaviour, wherein it posed a fake donations scheme to users of the browser under the guise of supporting website owners with their implicit but nonexistent consent, and in actuality took the money for itself. Brave then also specifically and publicly singled out Lobsters in an issue. Lobsters devs do not want to spend dev time engaging with scammers operating in bad faith. Seems fair to me.
Allegedly. This, the "Brave was putting ads of their own on other pages" and "adding the referrer code for Binance" stories get thrown around like they were (a) are all huge sources of profit (b) carried on with malicious intent and (c) on par with the BILLIONS of dollars in ad fraud that goes around and Google so conveniently turns a blind eye.
I don't particularly care how much money Brave made off the scheme. If Brave put my name and picture on an advertisement shown to Brave users, said that I was soliciting donations and would receive the money, and then took the money, that is immediately far more personally offensive than virtually anything Google does. I was not myself actually affected by this, but it's incredibly easy for me to understand why someone would want nothing to do with Brave.
Also, it's basically a given that Brave is not in a position to generate billions through such a scheme. It simply doesn't have the market share for that. If Chrome did the same thing that Brave did, they probably would generate billions. It is equally unethical either way.
Moreover, Google has an effective monopoly. Even if you wanted to protest Chrome, you can't do so without effectively shutting down your website. Chrome coerces consent into whatever they do. Brave does not have that power. You describe that as punching down, but just because Chrome has the capability to coerce consent does not mean we should be surrendering our consent to anyone and everyone.
They didn't do that. They were not actively promoting creators. it was the opposite. They were letting people mark someone as a potential recipient of contributions as a way to bootstrap their network.
> just because Chrome has the capability to coerce consent does not mean we should be surrendering our consent to anyone and everyone.
Your bias is showing.
Brave did not "coerce" anything to anyone. Their crypto stuff is opt-in. The ad blocker is opt-in.
Rationalize all you want, if you think that is justified to have a website blocking a browser like Brave because "of what they do to users", then it should be a moral imperative to help others to stop using chrome, edge and Safari.
I've seen the screenshot of the half-screen overlay pop-up advertisement that was displayed to Brave users. The "Welcome!" banner together with an actual photo of the person in question, together with the wording of the solicitation, is something that would absolutely give many, if not most, uninformed users the impression that the solicitation originated from the person featured.
Neither I, nor the linked issue, cite that Brave was blocked "because of what they do to users". If this had happened to me, I would block them based on what they did to me. As I said, the act in question is personally offensive in a way that what Google does is not. It plays on the border of identity fraud. If a browser is using my identity to solicit donations, I'm well within my right to do what I can to interfere with that.
Regards to coercion, I did not say that Brave coerced anyone. I pointed out that Google effectively does via its monopoly power, and that is why that people cannot realistically choose to block Chrome. The matter of coercion is addressing your complaint that they aren't also blocking Chrome, not a criticism of Brave.
> the act in question is personally offensive in a way that what Google does is not.
A perceived, harmless, unintentional and nonetheless remediated offense is worse than the continuous abuse of power and anti-user practices from Google, Microsoft and Apple. It might seem justified to you, but to me it's just displaced indignation and illustrates why we will forever live in this corporate dystopia.
My moral compass does not change based on who is being accused, but context is fundamental to make a proper judgment.
It is hard to come up with a situation where Google would be doing these types of tricks, because Google is already the dominant player in the market and they don't want to create products that cannibalize their own revenue streams.
I think this is about being mad at Brendan Eich, the current CEO of the company behind Brave, for his opposition to legal gay marriage in the late 2000s/early 2010s. A lot of Lobsters moderators are queer and/or politically sympathetic to queer activism.
Which goes to show the importance of judging people by their actions and not their opinions: are they going to boycott Apple as well, since Tim Cook gave millions to Trump?
Brendan Eich donated money to the campaign in favor of Prop 8, the 2008 California ballot proposition that banned gay marriage and that was overturned by the courts some time later. He didn't publicize this himself IIRC but the donations were public information and became well-known when he was (briefly) appointed CEO of Mozilla.
Yeah, I am not interested in playing this tape again. The actions from Brendan as an individual are completely separate from his actions at Mozilla. Mozilla did not change any policy during his tenure and Brave is not accused of any discrimination practices or hostile to any minority group.
[1] ~50 lvls on my paladin char.
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