• 3 Posts
  • 259 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • because they “care about environment 😉” the €99 charger (which is almost mandatory for a new user) is sold separately.

    It’s because they’re required by law to offer it without a power supply. See Article 3a, section 10.

    Apple’s first-party power supply isn’t “almost mandatory”, and doesn’t cost 99€. The 20W model shipped with the Macbook Neo in other markets costs 25€ on Apple’s German store, and a generic 8€ power supply from Amazon will work. The power supply most people already have for their phone will usually also work.





  • Why?

    It makes sense to try to give users an idea of how robust a project is, but the exact details of the tools involved in its creation rarely add much to that. It gets a little weird with LLMs because they allow someone with no programming skill to create software that appears to work, which ought to be disclosed; “I don’t know what I’m doing and I asked a robot to make this” does indicate unreliable code. A skilled developer having an LLM fill in some extra test cases, on the other hand can only make the project more robust.


  • Well-behaved server software honors delete requests, but there are a bunch of ways for that to fail without anyone doing anything malicious:

    • If your instance shuts down, there is no way for you to generate delete requests
    • If a server admin has to restore a backup from before your request, the deleted data will be restored
    • Immature or experimental software may not work as designed; Lemmy itself has a version number starting with 0
    • Archiving services may keep snapshots of pages from fediverse servers; here’s your user page on lemmy.world on archive.org
    • Fediverse servers often make content available by RSS, and RSS clients may store that content; there’s no way for them to receive a signal that it should be deleted

    And then there’s malicious activity. It wouldn’t be hard to run a server that speaks ActivityPub, subscribes to a bunch of stuff, pretends to honor delete requests, and actually keeps everything.

    Deletion will always be unreliable on the fediverse as long as it runs on technology that looks anything like current implementations.




  • I haven’t found anything I want to install on my iPhone that I can’t. At one point it was emulators

    So you have found something you wanted to install on your iPhone that you couldn’t, but Apple has decided to allow it for now. I think it’s pretty obvious how this is a problem.

    Of course you’re not going to find apps that exist that you can’t install because Apple says so. People won’t bother making them if they can only be distributed to the tiny handful of users with jailbroken devices. Of course it comes up on occasion when Apple withdraws permission, with ICEBlock being the recent socially important case.


  • Way I see it, my iPhone is a pocket version of my Mac.

    The thing is, you can install software from whatever source you like on your Mac. That’s not true of your iPhone - even in the EU and Japan where they’ve been forced to open up a little, apps can only be installed with Apple’s permission.

    Macs were completely open in that regard until recently. You could install apps from wherever you want. Now, Mac apps have to be notarized by Apple or installing them requires use of the command line. That’s obnoxious, but the user still has the final say, unlike the iPhone.



    • Google has announced that a workflow for advanced users to install whatever they want will remain, but hasn’t published details. Many people don’t entirely trust them about this.
    • Third-party Android builds like LineageOS won’t be affected. These need a device with an unlockable bootloader. They can run any Android app that doesn’t intentionally sabotage them (some banking apps do this).
    • Linux distributions for phones exist, and can run Android apps via Waydroid. This provides the most freedom for the user, but the highest effort. This is mainly suited for Linux hobbyists right now.




  • Signal uses reproducible builds for its Android client, and I think for desktop as well. That means it’s possible to verify that a particular Signal package is built from the open source Signal codebase. I don’t have to trust Signal because I can check or build it myself.

    If I don’t have extreme security needs, I don’t even have to check. Signal has a high enough profile that I can be confident other people have checked, likely many other people who are more skilled at auditing cryptographic code than I am.

    Trusting the server isn’t necessary because the encryption is applied by the sender’s client and removed by the recipient’s client.