The headline VW to shift from cars to missile defence in deal with Israel’s Iron Dome maker strongly implies that they are going make less cars as a result of their military business, but the article actually says this “shift” is at one of their car factories which they had planned to shut down next year.

The article also neglects to mention some relevant information about the VW Group such as its origins and who owns them today (although they are a publicly traded company, the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, the German state of Lower Saxony, and the Porsche family respectively own 10.4%, 11.8%, and 31.9% of the shares, and the Porsche family holds 53.3% the voting shares).

signal’s “sealed sender” feature has an incoherent threat model

Regarding TVs, WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 publication in 2017 included “Weeping Angel”, CIA malware for Samsung TVs which streams audio from them while they’re in “fake off” mode.

https://mashable.com/article/cia-samsung-tv-hack-weeping-angel

Activity lights are useful

in even more ways than one might think.

(see also this and this later work from the same author…)

based on the other comments here i had to double check if this thread was in !shittyasklemmy@lemmy.ml smh my head

You’re correct on both points (🤦‍♂️ indeed).

I’ve now edited this post to link to their advisory text file instead of their advertising-heavy blog post about it which I had initially linked when the above comment was posted. Thanks.

signal’s claimed inability to collect metadata being an obvious albeit elaborate lie is a strong indicator

Nice, thanks.

It would certainly be nice to be able to pre-download language pair models without selecting to and from and then actually initiating a translation using the model i don’t have yet.

re: getting uBlock externally, i also see the attraction of that approach but unfortunately Debian’s package was last updated in October (from 1.62 to 1.67) while AMO has a release from January (1.69) :/

imo it would be better to bundle UBO and ship its updates along with browser updates.

are there plans to distribute Konform via flathub?

Full-page machine translations are disabled

Firefox translations are done offline (after downloading the model for a langauge pair).

Does anybody know why Konform decided to disable this very useful feature?

It’s a library for detecting which character encoding a string is encoded with.

Here are the docs for the vibe-coded rewrite, and here is the version before it.

The new vibe-coded version also adds language detection; it isn’t clear to me why the current version of the readme shows it classifying the string "It’s a lovely day — let’s grab coffee." as Spanish with 99% confidence, without any comment in the docs about that being a misclassification, but I guess that if the LLM-authored program says it is then that must be one of those phrases that looks the same in Spanish as in English 👀

Why do you think Proton stores the association between accounts and payment identity?

Many privacy-oriented companies actually accept credit card payments and simply don’t store that information.

article in case you can’t read it: https://lemmy.ml/post/44086795

that link only has two paragraphs of the article; there are 8 more in the full article here on archive.org

could Red Hat eventually take control of the project

Fedora started in 2002 and merged with “Red Hat Linux” in 2003.

Red Hat, Inc has had full control of it ever since then.

It is a “community project” inasmuch as there are Fedora developers who are volunteers (and some who are paid by companies other than Red Hat), and the Fedora Council includes people who are not employed by Red Hat - but the Project Leader is always a Red Hat employee, and if the Council ever has an irreconcilable difference with Red Hat then Red Hat can simply ignore and/or dismiss them.

Red Hat owns all Fedora-related trademarks, and the Fedora Project is not an independent legal entity: it is a part of Red Hat.

If Fedora developers don’t like Red Hat’s decisions regarding the project, they can fork it but they’d need to change the name and find some other sources funding.

Also, icymi, Red Hat became a subsidiary of IBM in 2019.

anyone who objects to mass surveillance obviously hates puppies

A cascade of satellite collisions is called Kessler syndrome and the risk of it happening is rapidly increasing due to megaconstellations like Starlink:

Here we propose a new metric, the CRASH Clock, that measures such stress in terms of the timescale for a possible catastrophic collision to occur if there are no satellite manoeuvres or there is a severe loss in situational awareness. Our calculations show the CRASH Clock is currently 5.5 days, which suggests there is limited time to recover from a wide-spread disruptive event, such as a solar storm. This is in stark contrast to the pre-megaconstellation era: in 2018, the CRASH Clock was 164 days.

Kessler syndrome could be a solution to the Fermi paradox.

Why not just use proton?

A few of the many reasons not to use Proton:

• their e2ee is snakeoil (see my comment here about why - but tldr it requires completely trusting them and if you completely trust them you wouldn’t need e2ee, the point of e2ee is to avoid needing to trust the service provider)
• their server-side code is closed-source
• they’re a freemium service which can and does arbitrarily decide to start charging for previously-free features
• they’ve suspended a number of users who they should not have
• their CEO is a trump fanboy.

…

Its Swiss based.

You know who else was Swiss based? 🙄

Not sure about purism but I think its US so avoid it like a plague.

I don’t know enough about Purism to endorse them but afaict they don’t have any of the above problems.

Purism’s e2ee is PGP; you can use their service via their client software or whatever other client you want, and can communicate with people who are using different implementations with different mail providers. I don’t see any mention of them even offering webmail but I expect that if they do they would probably offer PGP there using a browser extension instead of having extremely-impractical-to-verify-before-running-it js code being sent anew from the server every time you load the page (which is how Proton’s webmail works, and also what they offer for non-Proton users to receive mail encrypted using their nonstandard encryption).

I’d rather have US legal jurisdiction and credible e2ee which doesn’t allow the operator to trivially circumvent it for targeted users than to have Swiss jurisdiction and snake oil.

good disclaimer. also, they aren’t open source, and from the tech background of the founder who self-funded it i doubt that he plans for it to ever be. in fact, among other cringe things on Issam Hijazi’s linkedin i see that he’s even worked for, enough to become an expert in the proprietary technology of, (checks notes) the very same zionist billionaire (paywall bypass) who just bought TikTok 😢

Also, one their FAQs is “Where does UpScrolled operate its servers and store data? Does it use Big Tech?”… the answer to which includes:

We do rely on some large-scale cloud providers at this stage — not because it’s our ideal, but because building fully independent infrastructure takes time. We’d rather be transparent about that than claim otherwise. Over time, we plan to reduce reliance on these providers and move toward greater independence.

… but We do rely on some is as far as their attempt at transparency took them - they aren’t actually saying which cloud providers they’re using or for what. (given the founder’s expertise i’d guess it’s probably AWS and/or Oracle.)

Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch’s amazing AUR

I am not aware of any software distribution service with a comparable experience (massive userbase with zero vetting for uploaders) as Arch’s amazing AUR - if you are looking for a way to distribute malware to many unsuspecting people (who’s friends think they’re hackerman), it’s really unparalleled. (😢)

To your primary question, yes, many people do successfully daily drive various Linux distros without ever opening the terminal. 🙄