Of course you can. You said you live in Europe.
Unless you live in Russia or the Vatican, that means your country has signed the European Convention on Human Rights, of which article 8 commits it to respecting your privacy.
So, sure, you’re not going to bother suing. It’s not that important to you. But let’s go easy on the helplessness of “In my country you can’t do that”. Yes. You can do it.
OK, but that incident was well over a decade ago. I agree it was bad but to call it spyware or “malicious” is just spin. If you read the quotations from the time, it becomes clear they really thought users would love it. After all, it’s the sort of thing Windows exiles were probably expecting. So: bad judgement, mainly. They could have just put the feature behind an opt-in modal and avoided the whole furore.
They’re a private company trying to tune their business model in a delicate area under the watchful eye of privacy hawks like yourself. For the price of an occasional lapse like this, we get a rock-solid OS with literal salaried employees to maintain it and keep it secure. To me it seems like a decent trade-off.
No, adding something useful to the discussion should get you a vote. The fact that other idiots agree with you does not magically make your contribution thoughtful, or insightful, or productive in any other way.
Interesting anecdote. Yes I’m aware that the “ht” in http is now basically a historical artifact. It all feels a bit dirty but, as you say, doing things the way the architects intended is probably not worth the effort.
Upside down, as the other comment says. It should rather be forum:// or similar, i.e. a generic self-explanatory term for the type of data. The branded networks like this one would then follow the standard in order to display properly.
Yes, it’s very different from the USA. Campaign spending is tightly limited. In most EU countries, political parties get the majority of their funding from the state, paid on the basis of past election results.
With this can-do attitude, we’re really gonna get things changing!
It’s an intriguing idea and might well be in line with the founding principles of the internet.
As I understand it, the URI is supposed to define the type of data you will find at the address, allowing you to use a client dedicated to that type. So: use a Gopher client for gopher:// data, a newsgroup program for nntp:// data, and of course a web browser for http://.
So the issue here would be to define what “fediverse data” actually looks like. This is quickly becoming quite a technical challenge.
Personally I like the idea of standardizing communication paradigms with a protocol, but you do first have to decide what the paradigms are. A few obvious suggestions:
Since the ActivityPub protocol seems to be the de-facto glue to this fediverse thing, maybe that’s where to look first.
Agreed, it’s definitely a problem. And in fact it’s even worse because it turns out that today’s supposedly progressive and well-informed youngsters in fact get their news from TikTok and tend to vote for authoritarian populists even in western Europe.
Again: downvoting facts, sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears and going “lalalalala”, does not make the facts go away. It is an inconvenient fact that far-right parties across Europe are doing particularly well among young voters.
Then run for election. That’s the point of democracy. If our leaders are bad, there’s no one to blame but ourselves.
Obligatory addendum: A downvote does not constitute a counter-argument.
Yes yes I know that. But the consumer desktop product is a loss leader. There is no demand for payment and yet It obviously cost them something to make.
It would help if European voters stopped behaving like spoiled children and voting for wannabe dictators because inflation or immigration or whatever.
Seems you might be a more sophisticated user than the ones targeted by Ubuntu. That is: Windows normies who find the whole concept of Linux deeply foreboding, but bravely take the leap anyway. As usual, most people in this discussion are neglecting this crucial fact.
Ubuntu is trying to make things easy and secure. I don’t much like Snaps either, but the security paradigm is better than APT, and they are nothing if not easy.
their “selling” point
Here’s one place to begin. They’re not selling it, it’s literally free. Speaking for myself but I just cannot bring myself to criticize a free product which is not a monopoly. And this clearly isn’t a monopoly. It just feels entitled.
Amazon ads
The tiny flaw in the above logic. Reminiscent of similar scandalettes involving Mozilla. But these sponsorship deals have always been easy to disable, even before they get dropped like a hot potato because of the backlash. I always come back to the same thought: how much are we actually paying for this product that is apparently valuable because we’re using it and concerned about its flaws? We’re paying nothing.
Or tell me with a serious face how the snap thing makes the life easier of someone wanting to install a deb.
The typical Ubuntu user will not know what a deb is, and should not be expected to. That’s the point. It’s meant to be easy. Whatever else they are, Snaps are definitely easy.
The same French of whom more than a third want an authoritarian strongman in power? Personally I would prefer to copy the handful of boring countries where people actually trust their leaders and so don’t feel they need to resort to bloody revolution at the drop of a hat.
The digital euro, as a digital central-bank currency, is the last thing we want from the perspective of privacy.
ive heard people say
So, literal hearsay.
its not perfect against if the signal servers where malicious (btw said servers are not open source).
The server is centralized so it’s irrelevant whether it’s open source or not, we have no means of checking.
$1 from the cia funding it is $1 too much.
Seems you’re referring to initial funding from the Open Technology Fund. That’s a US government body that promotes technologies that undermine authoritarian regimes. Signal fits the bill perfectly. In any case that was a decade ago. Since then there has been far more money from various do-gooding individuals and foundations. In particular the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which (I just checked) is vouched for by various whistleblowers including Edward Snowden. So, hardly a stooge of US imperialism.
Yes but the difference with every other messenger is that they can’t even see who your message is going to. Due to E2E encryption of contact data.
What remains is the phone number issue. Verifying a phone number is by far the simplest and most effective way to prevent abuse, which is obviously a major issue with any messenger. There’s no reason to disbelieve them when they this is the reason for it.
So: yes, they know who their users are individually. But they cannot know who is talking to who, let alone what is being said.
This is consipiracism-adjacent.
It’s E2E encryption and the source code is public. Uniquely, the E2EE includes the social graph.
They’ve got money from a bunch of people and organizations, That’s also all public. As for any organization, to have a wide variety of stakeholders with different interests is the best possible guarantee of independent.
But I agree that the ideal destination is to fully federate the protocol.
Correct. This is the reason not to use Revolut.
Choose Wise instead.