A well-run community will either be explicit about its age/karma requirement, or it will manually approve filtered posts from low-reputation accounts. I moderate /r/flashlight and we use the latter approach.
That takes work though. Some moderators are lazy, and some communities are understaffed. That’s not good, but it most cases it’s not malicious. It has fairly little to do with Reddit the company making money from advertisers.
And the reason it’s less the default in the US isn’t because people are so forward-thinking to use signal, but iOS being so uniquitous that people use iMessage.
I don’t think that’s quite it. iOS wasn’t as popular in the USA when WhatsApp use really started to take off elsewhere.
Instead, I think it was a combination of unlimited SMS plans being the norm, and most Americans having few international contacts.
How much of the data Meta can siphon is an open question as I understand it. WhatsApp definitely uses encryption, but there are a bunch of ways the client could send them the cleartext, especially if one allows their chatbot into a conversation.
It’s hard to say which is worse. I have a fair number of contacts on Signal now, and I find that’s a good balance of easy and trustworthy.
If I put someone’s number into the contacts on my phone, I will see what messaging apps are connected to that phone number in most cases. If they have Signal, I’ll try that first. I’ll try WhatsApp before SMS because it’s a better user experience and probably encrypted.
It’s definitely unfortunate that it’s a proprietary closed system owned by big tech. On the other hand, SMS/MMS is a pretty bad user experience by comparison, and it’s unencrypted.
WhatsApp has significant market dominance in Europe, to the point that only one or two people I know who live on that continent don’t use it. If you give someone your phone number in Europe, they will almost certainly send you a WhatsApp message, not an SMS.
It’s not a need in the sense that you’ll die without it, but not having it adds significant friction to social relationships.
He did it under his real name. His Github username is his real name, with middle initial. He also links from said Github to his .com, which is also his real name. There is no doxxing here, nor is saying I wish someone hadn’t done the thing they did harassment.
I won’t defend the tone of the article though. I find the photoshopped mugshot and name-calling distasteful.
I want him to do nothing.
He doesn’t work for a distribution or a system integrator. He isn’t the maintainer for systemd either. He’s a random contributor, and he works for a cloud company that doesn’t make or sell the sort of devices these laws apply to.
These age verification laws did not require Dylan Taylor to take any actions. He did that all on his own.
While I have no doubt Meta is doing the absolute minimum it can to comply, they’re not allowed to pick and choose arbitrarily. They can have technical and security requirements, but we’re not hearing from major players about how WhatsApp is refusing them access when they’ve asked.
I’m inclined to think most of them either don’t want to (Signal doesn’t) or aren’t in a position to make it work.
There’s some confusion because of the reference to “Signal protocol”. This refers to the key exchange and encryption protocol originally developed for Signal and adopted by WhatsApp, iMessage, and others.
This is a means of establishing a secure end-to-end encrypted conversation, not a federated protocol for different messaging networks to interoperate. WhatsApp announced that Signal protocol or a compatible E2EE implementation is one of their requirements to allow third parties to interoperate.
Signal has signaled its intent not to interoperate with WhatsApp or anything else several times over the years for both technical and security reasons.
A quick look suggests the UAE has stronger worker protections than are typical for the region. The government strongly encouraged employers to allow work from home last week, but I didn’t find whether that has been continued into this week. It doesn’t look like that recommendation is mandatory for employers.
Someone who reads Arabic will probably be able to find more recent statements from the government with relative ease.
You haven’t said what country or line of work you’re in, so nobody knows what’s normal. Countries in the middle east are not known for their strong commitments to worker rights, so it’s a good guess that having to do whatever management wants or get fired is normal there.
During an air raid, it’s probably safer to travel a short distance to a bomb shelter rather than a longer distance to your home, if that accurately describes the options.
A useful video would be a bunch of people beating on stuff (off-screen or in an extended cut) to figure out what’s actually easy and reliable for beginners, then presenting that information. It would get approximately 237 views, which is roughly a million fewer than the linked video has at this time.
What succeeds on Youtube is entertainment first and information a distant second. A video where everyone sat down in a quiet environment with no pressure, installed a reasonable Linux distribution, and had a smooth experience wouldn’t be very entertaining.
I used Jetpac last time I needed an esim for travel. I did not install their app, but activated the esim manually with the facilities built in to the OS.
Either the AI bubble pops and the demand drops, or the AI industry becomes stable and supply increases.
I’m inclined to bet on the bubble popping. There are real businesses to be built on top of generative AI, but most of the current players have high costs and a long way to go before their revenue comes even close.
I’ve used several iterations of Gnome, several iterations of KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, Hyprland, XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox, and several other things I can’t be bothered to remember. I can be productive on any of them given some time to set them up.
I do have preferences though, and I like KDE on a laptop/desktop and Gnome on a tablet. I just wish Gnome would do something about its horrid onscreen keyboard.
“If you put money in a vending machine and got two items instead of one, would you put additional money in for the second item?”
No, I fucking wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t like to work for anyone who wouldn’t hire me because of that fact.
If 99% of applications that run on *nix desktops didn’t want to accept middle-click to paste text where that’s an operation that makes sense, I would agree with you. I do not believe that to be the case.
KDE and Gnome already have toggles for it, though Gnome’s is in gnome-tweaks because Gnome hates exposed settings.
I’d support unifying behavior between toolkits and apps to provide users with a single point to set their preference, but I use this feature a hundred times a day. I’d also like it to remain the default; *nix desktops should have their own flavor instead of just copying Mac OS or Windows, and middle-click paste has been a part of that flavor for 40 years.
They won’t affect Android builds that aren’t Google-certified directly.
They’ll affect F-Droid in that most people won’t be able to install most apps from F-Droid without an obnoxious process and a waiting period. That will affect what people spend their time building and will likely result in fewer open source apps being created and maintained.