Komunitas
lemmy.world
Ship based piracy absolutely. Digital piracy: I remember Kazaa and LimeWire where you hoped the thing you were downloading for hours/days wasn’t a virus or a joke meme making fun of you for trusting someone. Getting an entire album of mp3s that were actually the band you hoped for and not missing any songs was a minor miracle. Now there are dozens of automated tools that talk to each other. I type the name of the movie into a search bar, look through a list of posters and click the ‘request’ button. It get’s torrented in the background and then shows up on my Plex server. If I paid for a usenet group all that could happen an order of magnitude faster. Search in one place, watch in one place. It’s not quite as instant as streaming, but at this point I have such a back catalogue to work through that that isn’t really an issue.
Komunitas
kbin.social
The idea is that it would be similar to hardware attestation in Android. In fact, that’s where Google got the idea from. Basically, this is the way it works: You download a web browser or another program (possibly even one baked into the OS, e.g. working alongside/relying on the TPM stuff from the BIOS). This is the “attester”. Attesters have a private key that they sign things with. This private key is baked into the binary of the attester (so you can’t patch the binary). A web page sends some data to the attester. Every request the web page sends will vary slightly, so an attestation can only be used for one request - you cannot intercept a “good” attestation and reuse it elsewhere. The ways attesters can respond may vary so you can’t just extract the encryption key and sign your own stuff - it wouldn’t work when you get a different request. The attester takes that data and verifies that the device is running stuff that corresponds to the specs published by the attester - “this browser, this OS, not a VM, not Wine, is not running this program, no ad blocker, subject to these rate limits,” etc. If it meets the requirements, the attester uses their private key to sign. (Remember that you can’t patch out the requirements check without changing the private key and thus invalidating everything.) The signed data is sent back to the web page, alongside as much information as the attester wants to provide. This information will match the signature, and can be verified using a public key. The web page looks at the data and decides whether to trust the verdict or not. If something looks sketchy, the web page has the right to refuse to send any further data. They also say they want to err towards having fewer checks, rather than many (“low entropy”). There are concerns about this being used for fingerprinting/tracking, and high entropy would allow for that. (Note that this does explicitly contradict the point the authors made earlier, that “Including more information in the verdict will cover a wider range of use cases without locking out older devices.”) That said - we all know where this will go. If Edge is made an attester, it will not be low entropy. Low entropy makes it harder to track, which benefits Google as they have their own ways of tracking users due to a near-monopoly over the web. Google doesn’t want to give rivals a good way to compete with user tracking, which is why they’re pushing “low-entropy” under the guise of privacy. Microsoft is incentivized to go high-entropy as it gives a better fingerprint. If the attestation server is built into Windows, we have the same thing.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
It doesn’t help that they are using facebook-like tactics to try and force/coerce you to download and use their app. I recently was trying to find help getting through a difficult part of a game. Reddit seemed to be where most of the good user discussions were at. Reddit’s mobile page would give me a pop-up stating that this community was not “trusted” and that I need to view on the app or go to the Reddit front page. There was no option to ignore. Trying to close the pop-up would just send me to the front page. Luckily, I know about old.reddit. That’s going to go away eventually though.
Komunitas
programming.dev
Rust adoption is stagnating Is it? I would like to see some evidence for that. When comparing crates.io statistics |Year|Crates| Yearly Crates Increase |Downloads| Yearly Downloads Increase | :–|:–|:–|:–|:–| |2018|21,162|-|688,268,999|-| |2019|29,757|8,595|1,457,578,834|769,309,835| |2020|41,539|11,782|3,079,874,235|1,622,295,401| |2021|64,658|23,119|8,235,327,111|5,155,452,876| |2022|86,776|22,118|17,546,769,164|9,311,442,053| |2023|119,145|32,369|35,556,469,191|18,009,700,027| |2024|149,970|30,825|72,083,950,414|36,527,481,223| By downloads, 2023-2024 has been Rust’s best year so far.
Komunitas
lemmy.ml
a few commenters pointed out that the highest rated VPN providers in this table just happen to be the ones that advertise most aggressively and are well-known for buying positive reviews from tech blogs, which are pretty clearly designed to be misleading Exactly. This is unfortunately common practice, so this breakdown can be dismissed as they’re obviously biased due to monetary motivations. Consider to read Privacy Guides’ take on the matter instead. (Perhaps personal) TL;DR would be that Mullvad VPN in combination with Mullvad Browser offers the most private internet browsing experience for people who don’t desire to connect to the Tor Network. Furthermore, Proton offers a suite of privacy-friendly services for mail, drive, password manager etc. Therefore, for the sake of trusting the least amount of parties for these services (at the cost of putting all eggs in one basket), one might consider Proton VPN instead; additionally it includes a free tier and some support to port forwarding (read: allows the use of torrent applications).
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Yeah pretty much, but it’s wayyyy faster. There’s times where it feels like dnf is hanging trying to download metadata that’s 25KB. I have 1Gb down and it takes like 2 minutes, its ridiculous. I know in the grand scheme of things I’m being petty. But it’s frustrating when the metadata step takes longer than downloading 500MB of packages lol
Komunitas
lemmy.ml
I ignored a recent update that would give me some AI bullshit. After a few weeks, they just pushed the download to me and gave me a notification of a scheduled reboot to finish the install. Frustrating to say the least…
Komunitas
lemmy.fmhy.ml
After a quick glance over your post, I have some thoughts; Free: ProtonVPN ProtonVPN is good for torrenting on the paid plan, not the free plan. Proton doesn’t allow torrenting on their free plan. They will block your connection if they detect that you are torrenting, or they will disconnect you from their VPN tunnel - exposing your real IP on the torrent. Paid: Mullvad Mullvad is a decent choice, though they no longer support port forwarding. ~~You are still able to download, though you won’t be able to seed iirc~~ VirusTotal The problem with a virustotal scan is that pirated software is often false flagged for malware. It’s difficult to tell what is safe from what you’ve downloaded. It’s best to download from a trusted uploader, though that doesn’t always guarantee safety as they can always go rogue (As an example, FTUApps were seen as safe until one of their uploads to 1337x contained malware). Older uploads tend to have less false positives in my experience, though it can be very easy to become complacent. edit; score out comment about mullvad seeding, others have pointed out that it still works fine! oops
Komunitas
lemmy.dbzer0.com
Does it have to be on F-Droid? I use Obtainium. (app configs) Edit: I was using photon and didn’t realize the post was not formatted until I checked regular lemmy and saw the mess it looked like to others. | Name | Description | | :— | :— | |LocalSend|An open-source, cross-platform tool for sharing files and messages securely between nearby devices over a local network without using the internet. |Obtainium|An Android app that allows users to install and update open-source applications directly from their source pages (like GitHub, GitLab, or Codeberg) instead of using an app store. |Aegis|A free, secure, and open-source app for Android to manage 2-step verification tokens for your online services. |CoMaps|An open-source Android application for collaborative, real-time editing of points of interest and maps. |Tasks|A privacy-focused, open-source to-do list and reminders app for Android based on the original Astrid source code. |ZipXtract|A specialized tool designed for extracting files from password-protected or encrypted ZIP archives. |disky|A storage space visualizer for Android that uses a sunburst chart to display file and folder usage. |WallFlow Plus (Alpha)|A wallpaper manager that allows users to create collections and automatically cycle through local images. |Droid-ify|A Material Design F-Droid client for Android that offers a modern interface for managing open-source apps. |Aves Libre|A comprehensive media gallery app for Android that focuses on handling a wide variety of formats and metadata. |Phone|A simple, open-source dialer and call management app featuring a clean interface and privacy focus. |OpenTracks|A privacy-respecting sport tracking application for recording GPS tracks and physical activity. |Eden|An open-source emulator project focused on providing a platform for playing various classic console games. |DAVx⁵|An all-in-one sync solution for CalDAV, CardDAV, and WebDAV to integrate calendars, contacts, and tasks. |Open Camera|A fully featured and completely free open-source camera app for Android phones and tablets. |Obsidian|A powerful, local-first knowledge base and note-taking app that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. |kitshn|A recipe management app for Android designed to help users organize, scale, and follow cooking instructions. |Calculator|A clean, ad-free calculator app that includes unit conversions and a detailed history of operations. |Jellyfin|The Android client for the Jellyfin media server, allowing users to stream their own movies, shows, and music. |Nextcloud|The official Android client for Nextcloud, providing secure access to files, photos, and documents on your private server. |WiFiAnalyzer|An Android utility to analyze Wi-Fi signals, identify crowded channels, and optimize network performance. |Thunderbird|The mobile version of the famous open-source email client, focusing on privacy, security, and multiple account management. |Breezy Weather|A clean, design-focused weather app that provides accurate forecasts from various open-source and professional providers. |addy.io|An Android app for managing your addy.io (formerly AnonAddy) email aliases and protecting your primary email address. |mpv|A lightweight, versatile video player for Android based on the powerful mpv media engine. |Paperize|A tool for creating high-quality, customized wallpapers from simple colors, gradients, or patterns. |M3U|A simple and efficient IPTV player designed to stream content from M3U playlists on Android devices. |FairScan|A privacy-centric QR and barcode scanner that lacks trackers and requires minimal permissions. |Harmonic|A feature-rich and beautifully designed Material Design client for browsing Hacker News. |SpamBlocker|A powerful open-source call and SMS firewall that uses rules and blacklists to block unwanted spam. |Material Files|An open-source Material Design file manager that supports multiple windows and advanced file operations. |FUTO Keyboard|A privacy-focused keyboard that offers voice input and auto-complete without ever connecting to the internet. |KeePassDX|A versatile multi-format password manager for Android that provides secure access to KeePass databases. |Signal|A secure messaging app that uses end-to-end encryption for private chats, voice calls, and video calls. |Bitwarden|An open-source password manager that allows users to store and sync sensitive login credentials across all devices securely. |Audiobookshelf|The mobile client for the Audiobookshelf server, used for streaming and downloading audiobooks and podcasts. |KDE Connect|A tool that enables seamless communication between your Android device and your computer (notifications, file sharing, etc.). |GameNative|A specialized launcher and performance optimizer designed for running native and emulated games on Android. |MJ PDF|A fast, lightweight, and open-source PDF viewer that focuses on simplicity and smooth performance. |Firefox Beta|The preview version of the Firefox web browser, giving users access to upcoming features and performance improvements. |Summit|A modern and customizable Android client for browsing the Lemmy fediverse. |Catima|An open-source loyalty card and coupon manager that helps you digitize physical cards to declutter your wallet. |ArrMatey|A companion app for managing “Radarr” and “Sonarr” server instances for media library automation. |OpenKeychain|An Android implementation of OpenPGP, allowing for encrypted communication and secure digital signatures. |NotallyX|A clean, minimalist note-taking app for Android that focuses on speed and simplicity without unnecessary bloat. |WG Tunnel|A streamlined VPN client for Android designed to manage and connect to WireGuard-based VPN tunnels. |Bluesky|The official mobile client for the Bluesky social network, built on the decentralized AT Protocol. |Mental Math|A training app designed to help users improve their mental arithmetic skills through various exercises and difficulty levels. |Calendar|A simple, open-source calendar and event management app prioritizing privacy and ease of use. |Moshidon|A modified Mastodon client for Android based on Megalodon, offering extra features and UI customizations. |Memories|A high-performance photo gallery specifically designed to work as a client for the Nextcloud Memories app. |AntennaPod|A popular, open-source podcast manager and player that gives users full control over their subscriptions. |Home Assistant|The official app for connecting to and controlling your Home Assistant smart home server. |Off Grid|An application that allows users to run AI language models locally on their Android devices for offline interactions. |Tubular|A fork of NewPipe that includes additional features like SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Today’s game is Mario Kart Wii. I was originally going to setup Retro Rewind to give it a try (it was suggested to me by @[email protected]). I ended up having some issues though, namely that the mod was downloading at 0.50 mbps and would take an hour. I tried to install it manually but that didn’t really work out. So i decided to just play regular Wii, it’s not like it’s a bad game or anything. I’m pretty sure i said this last time though, but i always end up forgetting this game is kind of boring to play alone. The game hurls out red shells like it’s Halloween candy, which, if you’re playing with friends it’s fun. You can all collectively go “That’s bullshit” but then laugh it off. Singleplayer though, it’s just a bit eh. I wouldnt say i got frustrated, but after the 5th barrage of 6 red shells in a row, it got old. The models have this kind of unique charm to them with how jagged they are. I feel like Waluigi alone could shank someone with his fists. And the more flat terrain is charming too, even at 4k. It’s flaws do show, but they’re not glaring so you can kind of ignore them. I only did 4 races, kept things nice and short. I did Sherbet Land, Mario Raceway, Toad’s Factory, and Coconut Mall. I think it’s a pretty good selection of courses to spend the evening on. I was hoping Retro Rewind would be done but the download failed so i had to start over. It only just now finished, so hopefully i can get to it tomorrow. Maybe even get some friends to join me.
Komunitas
discuss.tchncs.de
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39870758 A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code Privacy stalwart Nicholas Merrill spent a decade fighting an FBI surveillance order. Now he wants to sell you phone service—without knowing almost anything about you. Nicholas Merrill has spent his career fighting government surveillance. But he would really rather you didn’t call what he’s selling now a “burner phone.” Yes, he dreams of a future where anyone in the US can get a working smartphone—complete with cellular coverage and data—without revealing their identity, even to the phone company. But to call such anonymous phones “burners” suggests that they’re for something illegal, shady, or at least subversive. The term calls to mind drug dealers or deep-throat confidential sources in parking garages. With his new startup, Merrill says he instead wants to offer cellular service for your existing phone that makes near-total mobile privacy the permanent, boring default of daily life in the US. “We’re not looking to cater to people doing bad things,” says Merrill. “We’re trying to help people feel more comfortable living their normal lives, where they’re not doing anything wrong, and not feel watched and exploited by giant surveillance and data mining operations. I think it’s not controversial to say the vast majority of people want that.” That’s the thinking behind Phreeli, the phone carrier startup Merrill launched today, designed to be the most privacy-focused cellular provider available to Americans. Phreeli, as in, “speak freely,” aims to give its user a different sort of privacy from the kind that can be had with end-to-end encrypted texting and calling tools like Signal or WhatsApp. Those apps hide the content of conversations, or even, in Signal’s case, metadata like the identities of who is talking to whom. Phreeli instead wants to offer actual anonymity. It can’t help government agencies or data brokers obtain users’ identifying information because it has almost none to share. The only piece of information the company records about its users when they sign up for a Phreeli phone number is, in fact, a mere ZIP code. That’s the minimum personal data Merrill has determined his company is legally required to keep about its customers for tax purposes. By asking users for almost no identifiable information, Merrill wants to protect them from one of the most intractable privacy problems in modern technology: Despite whatever surveillance-resistant communications apps you might use, phone carriers will always know which of their customers’ phones are connecting to which cell towers and when. Carriers have frequently handed that information over to data brokers willing to pay for it—or any FBI or ICE agent that demands it with a court order Merrill has some firsthand experience with those demands. Starting in 2004, he fought a landmark, decade-plus legal battle against the FBI and the Department of Justice. As the owner of an internet service provider in the post-9/11 era, Merrill had received a secret order from the bureau to hand over data on a particular user—and he refused. After that, he spent another 15 years building and managing the Calyx Institute, a nonprofit that offers privacy tools like a snooping-resistant version of Android and a free VPN that collects no logs of its users’ activities. “Nick is somebody who is extremely principled and willing to take a stand for his principles,” says Cindy Cohn, who as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has led the group’s own decades-long fight against government surveillance. “He’s careful and thoughtful, but also, at a certain level, kind of fearless.” Nicholas Merrill with a copy of the National Security Letter he received from the FBI in 2004, ordering him to give up data on one of his customers. He refused, fought a decade-plus court battle—and won. More recently, Merrill began to realize he had a chance to achieve a win against surveillance at a more fundamental level: by becoming the phone company. “I started to realize that if I controlled the mobile provider, there would be even more opportunities to create privacy for people,” Merrill says. “If we were able to set up our own network of cell towers globally, we can set the privacy policies of what those towers see and collect.” Building or buying cell towers across the US for billions of dollars, of course, was not within the budget of Merrill’s dozen-person startup. So he’s created the next best thing: a so-called mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO, a kind of virtual phone carrier that pays one of the big, established ones—in Phreeli’s case, T-Mobile—to use its infrastructure. The result is something like a cellular prophylactic. The towers are T-Mobile’s, but the contracts with users—and the decisions about what private data to require from them—are Phreeli’s. “You can’t control the towers. But what can you do?” he says. “You can separate the personally identifiable information of a person from their activities on the phone system.” Signing up a customer for phone service without knowing their name is, surprisingly, legal in all 50 states, Merrill says. Anonymously accepting money from users—with payment options other than envelopes of cash—presents more technical challenges. To that end, Phreeli has implemented a new encryption system it calls Double-Blind Armadillo, based on cutting-edge cryptographic protocols known as zero-knowledge proofs. Through a kind of mathematical sleight of hand, those crypto functions are capable of tasks like confirming that a certain phone has had its monthly service paid for, but without keeping any record that links a specific credit card number to that phone. Phreeli users can also pay their bills (or rather, prepay them, since Phreeli has no way to track down anonymous users who owe them money) with tough-to-trace cryptocurrency like Zcash or Monero. Phreeli users can, however, choose to set their own dials for secrecy versus convenience. If they offer an email address at signup, they can more easily recover their account if their phone is lost. To get a SIM card, they can give their mailing address—which Merrill says Phreeli will promptly delete after the SIM ships—or they can download the digital equivalent known as an eSIM, even, if they choose, from a site Phreeli will host on the Tor anonymity network. Phreeli’s “armadillo” analogy—the animal also serves as the mascot in its logo—is meant to capture this sliding scale of privacy that Phreeli offers its users: Armadillos always have a layer of armor, but they can choose whether to expose their vulnerable underbelly or curl into a fully protected ball. Even if users choose the less paranoid side of that spectrum of options, Merrill argues, his company will still be significantly less surveillance-friendly than existing phone companies, which have long represented one of the weakest links in the tech world’s privacy protections. All major US cellular carriers comply, for instance, with law enforcement surveillance orders like “tower dumps” that hand over data to the government on every phone that connected to a particular cell tower during a certain time. They’ve also happily, repeatedly handed over your data to corporate interests: Last year the Federal Communications Commission fined AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile nearly $200 million for selling users’ personal information, including their locations, to data brokers. (AT&T’s fine was later overturned by an appeals court ruling intended to limit the FCC’s enforcement powers.) Many data brokers in turn sell the information to federal agencies, including ICE and other parts of the DHS, offering an all-too-easy end run around restrictions on those agencies’ domestic spying. Phreeli doesn’t promise to be a surveillance panacea. Even if your cellular carrier isn’t tying your movements to your identity, the operating system of whatever phone you sign up with might be. Even your mobile apps can track you. But for a startup seeking to be the country’s most privacy-focused mobile carrier, the bar is low. “The goal of this phone company I’m starting is to be more private than the three biggest phone carriers in the US. That’s the promise we’re going to massively overdeliver on,” says Merrill. “I don’t think there’s any way we can mess that up.” Merrill’s not-entirely-voluntary decision to spend the last 20-plus years as a privacy diehard began with three pages of paper that arrived at his office on a February day in New York in 2004. An FBI agent knocked on the door of his small internet service provider firm called Calyx, headquartered in a warehouse space a block from the Holland Tunnel in Manhattan. When Merrill answered, he found an older man with parted white hair, dressed in a trench coat like a comic book G-man, who handed him an envelope. Merrill opened it and read the letter while the agent waited. The first and second paragraphs told him he was hereby ordered to hand over virtually all information he possessed for one of his customers, identified by their email address, explaining that this demand was authorized by a law he’d later learn was part of the Patriot Act. The third paragraph informed him he couldn’t tell anyone he’d even received this letter—a gag order. Then the agent departed without answering any of Merrill’s questions. He was left to decide what to do, entirely alone. Merrill was struck immediately by the fact that the letter had no signature from a judge. He had in fact been handed a so-called National Security Letter, or NSL, a rarely seen and highly controversial tool of the Bush administration that allowed the FBI to demand information without a warrant, so long as it was related to “national security.” Calyx’s actual business, since he’d first launched the company in the early ’90s with a bank of modems in the nonfunctional fireplace of a New York apartment, had evolved into hosting the websites of big corporate customers like Mitsubishi and Ikea. But Merrill used that revenue stream to give pro bono or subsidized web hosting to nonprofit clients he supported like the Marijuana Policy Project and Indymedia—and to offer fast internet connections to a few friends and acquaintances like the one named in this surveillance order. Merrill has never publicly revealed the identity of the NSL’s target, and he declined to share it with WIRED. But he knew this particular customer, and he certainly didn’t strike Merrill as a national security threat. If he were, Merrill thought, why not just get a warrant? The customer would later tell Merrill he had in fact been pressured by the FBI to become an informant—and had refused. The bureau, he told Merrill, had then retaliated by putting him on the no-fly list and pressuring employers not to hire him. (The FBI didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment on the case.) Merrill immediately decided to risk disobeying the gag order—on pain of what consequences, he had no idea—and called his lawyer, who told him to go to the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, which happened to be one of Calyx’s web-hosting clients. After a few minutes in a cab, Merrill was talking to a young attorney named Jameel Jaffer in the ACLU’s Financial District office. “I wish I could say that we reassured him with our expertise on the NSL statute, but that’s not how it went down,” Jaffer says. “We had never seen one of these before.” Merrill, meanwhile, knew that every lawyer he showed the letter to might represent another count in his impending prosecution. “I was terrified,” he says. “I kind of assumed someone could just come to my place that night, throw a hood over my head, and drag me away.” Phreeli will use a novel encryption system called DoubleBlind Armadillo—based on cutting edge crypto protocols known as… Phreeli will use a novel encryption system called Double-Blind Armadillo—based on cutting edge crypto protocols known as zero-knowledge proofs—to pull of tricks like accepting credit card payments from customers without keeping any record that ties that payment information to their particular phone. Despite his fears, Merrill never complied with the FBI’s letter. Instead, he decided to fight its constitutionality in court, with the help of pro bono representation from the ACLU and later the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. That fight would last 11 years and entirely commandeer his life. Merrill and his lawyers argued that the NSL represented an unconstitutional search and a violation of his free-speech rights—and they won. But Congress only amended the NSL statute, leaving the provision about its gag order intact, and the legal battle dragged out for years longer. Even after the NSL was rescinded altogether, Merrill continued to fight for the right to talk about its existence. “This was a time when so many people in his position were essentially cowering under their desks. But he felt an obligation as a citizen to speak out about surveillance powers that he thought had gone too far,” says Jaffer, who represented Merrill for the first six years of that courtroom war. “He impressed me with his courage.” Battling the FBI took over Merrill’s life to the degree that he eventually shut down his ISP for lack of time or will to run the business and instead took a series of IT jobs. “I felt too much weight on my shoulders,” he says. “I was just constantly on the phone with lawyers, and I was scared all the time.” By 2010, Merrill had won the right to publicly name himself as the NSL’s recipient. By 2015 he’d beaten the gag order entirely and released the full letter with only the target’s name redacted. But Merrill and the ACLU never got the Supreme Court precedent they wanted from the case. Instead, the Patriot Act itself was amended to reign in NSLs’ unconstitutional powers. In the meantime, those years of endless bureaucratic legal struggles had left Merrill disillusioned with judicial or even legislative action as a way to protect privacy. Instead, he decided to try a different approach. “The third way to fight surveillance is with technology,” he says. “That was my big realization.” So, just after Merrill won the legal right to go public with his NSL battle in 2010, he founded the Calyx Institute, a nonprofit that shared a name with his old ISP but was instead focused on building free privacy tools and services. The privacy-focused version of Google’s Android OS it would develop, designed to strip out data-tracking tools and use Signal by default for calls and texts, would eventually have close to 100,000 users. It ran servers for anonymous, encrypted instant messaging over the chat protocol XMPP with around 300,000 users. The institute also offered a VPN service and ran servers that comprised part of the volunteer-based Tor anonymity network, tools that Merrill estimates were used by millions. As he became a cause célèbre and then a standout activist in the digital privacy world over those years, Merrill says he started to become aware of the growing problem of untrustworthy cellular providers in an increasingly phone-dependent world. He’d sometimes come across anti-surveillance hard-liners determined to avoid giving any personal information to cellular carriers, who bought SIM cards with cash and signed up for prepaid plans with false names. Some even avoided cell service altogether, using phones they connected only to Wi-Fi. “Eventually those people never got invites to any parties,” Merrill says. All these schemes, he knew, were legal enough. So why not a phone company that only collects minimal personal information—or none—from its normal, non-extremist customers? As early as 2019, he had already consulted with lawyers and incorporated Phreeli as a company. He decided on the for-profit startup route after learning that the 501c3 statute can’t apply to a telecom firm. Only last year, he finally raised $5 million, mostly from one angel investor. (Merrill declined to name the person. Naturally, they value their privacy.) Building a system that could function like a normal phone company—and accept users’ payments like one—without storing virtually any identifying information on those customers presented a distinct challenge. To solve it, Merrill consulted with Zooko Wilcox, one of the creators of Zcash, perhaps the closest thing in the world to actual anonymous cryptocurrency. The Z in Zcash stands for “zero-knowledge proofs,” a relatively new form of crypto system that has allowed Zcash’s users to prove things (like who has paid whom) while keeping all information (like their identities, or even the amount of payments) fully encrypted. For Phreeli, Wilcox suggested a related but slightly different system: so-called “zero-knowledge access passes.” Wilcox compares the system to people showing their driver’s license at the door of a club. “You’ve got to give your home address to the bouncer,” Wilcox says incredulously. The magical properties of zero knowledge proofs, he says, would allow you to generate an unforgeable crypto credential that proves you’re over 21 and then show that to the doorman without revealing your name, address, or even your age. “A process that previously required identification gets replaced by something that only requires authorization,” Wilcox says. “See the difference?” The same trick will now let Phreeli users prove they’ve prepaid their phone bill without connecting their name, address, or any payment information to their phone records—even if they pay with a credit card. The result, Merrill says, will be a user experience for most customers that’s not very different from their existing phone carrier, but with a radically different level of data collection. As for Wilcox, he’s long been one of that small group of privacy zealots who buys his SIM cards in cash with a fake name. But he hopes Phreeli will offer an easier path—not just for people like him, but for normies too. “I don’t know of anybody who’s ever offered this credibly before,” says Wilcox. “Not the usual telecom-strip-mining-your-data phone, not a black-hoodie hacker phone, but a privacy-is-normal phone.” Even so, enough tech companies have pitched privacy as a feature for their commercial product that jaded consumers may not buy into a for-profit telecom like Phreeli purporting to offer anonymity. But the EFF’s Cohn says that Merrill’s track record shows he’s not just using the fight against surveillance as a marketing gimmick to sell something. “Having watched Nick for a long time, it’s all a means to an end for him,” she says. “And the end is privacy for everyone.” Merrill may not like the implications of describing Phreeli as a cellular carrier where every phone is a burner phone. But there’s little doubt that some of the company’s customers will use its privacy protections for crime—just as with every surveillance-resistant tool, from Signal to Tor to briefcases of cash. Phreeli won’t, at least, offer a platform for spammers and robocallers, Merrill says. Even without knowing users’ identities, he says the company will block that kind of bad behavior by limiting how many calls and texts users are allowed, and banning users who appear to be gaming the system. “If people think this is going to be a safe haven for abusing the phone network, that’s not going to work,” Merrill says. But some customers of his phone company will, to Merrill’s regret, do bad things, he says—just as they sometimes used to with pay phones, that anonymous, cash-based phone service that once existed on every block of American cities. “You put a quarter in, you didn’t need to identify yourself, and you could call whoever you wanted,” he reminisces. “And 99.9 percent of the time, people weren’t doing bad stuff.” The small minority who were, he argues, didn’t justify the involuntary societal slide into the cellular panopticon we all live in today, where a phone call not tied to freely traded data on the caller’s identity is a rare phenomenon. “The pendulum has swung so far in favor of total information awareness,” says Merrill, using an intelligence term of the Bush administration whose surveillance order set him on this path 21 years ago. “Things that we used to be able to take for granted have slipped through our fingers.” “Other phone companies are selling an apartment that comes with no curtains—where the windows are incompatible with curtains,” Merrill says. “We’re trying to say, no, curtains are normal. Privacy is normal.”
Komunitas
lemmygrad.ml
The great farce of late-imperial Europe is that every time Brussels stumbles into another historic blunder of its own making, it immediately searches for a foreign hand to blame. And so the EU’s court chronicler, Politico, delivers its latest fever dream: that Belgium, the most indecisive, over-medicated country in the bloc, has somehow transformed into “Russia’s most valuable asset.” In reality, the only asset Russia needed was the EU’s own arrogance. Belgium merely did the unthinkable, it told the truth. What Politico dresses up as geopolitical intrigue is actually a confession of EU derangement. The EU are trying to engineer the largest state-sanctioned theft of sovereign wealth in modern history, a direct raid on the Russian Central Bank’s reserves and expected applause, unity, and moral ecstasy. Instead, Belgium asked the only sane question left in Europe: “Are you all completely out of your minds?” For this, Politico paints De Wever as eccentric, impulsive, unstable, the same labels always deployed when someone refuses to bow to the imperial autopilot. But the deeper scandal is that Brussels expected him to sign off on detonating the post-war financial order for the sake of one more photo-op with Zelensky. Politico can hide behind metaphors of summit dinners and langoustines, but the legal reality is brutal: raiding another nation’s central bank is not a policy disagreement. It is a declaration of financial war on the entire world. It would obliterate sovereign immunity, destroy the neutrality of reserve holdings, and instantly signal to the global South that their assets in EU banks are hostage to EU’s emotional spasms. One act, one reckless stroke of a pen, and the euro collapses as a safe currency, capital flees to Asia, and the West loses its last functional pillar of power. Belgium saw the cliff’s edge, Brussels mistook it for a (perverse) moral leap of faith. Politico’s narrative stumbles further when it pretends the only danger lies in Moscow’s retaliation. It does not. Russia’s symmetric countermeasures are well-known, lawful, and devastating: nationalization of Western corporate assets, seizure of industrial infrastructure, liquidation of bond holdings, and the dismantling of Western financial footprints inside Russia. The value of Western assets exposed inside the Russian Federation rivals what sits in Euroclear. Brussels knows this. Euroclear knows this. Investors know this. Only the EU pretends the ledger is irrelevant. But the real threat is not Russia’s response , it is the irreversible collapse of trust in Western custodianship. Once the EU steals central bank reserves, no nation with self-respect will ever again store wealth in Europe. The theft of Russian reserves would be remembered not as an isolated act, but as the day the West proved it cannot be trusted with global money, let alone soverign assets. This is the part Politico is terrified to articulate. Belgium wasn’t protecting Russia. Belgium is trying to protect the very system the EU purports to defend. Yet instead of portraying De Wever as the only adult in the room, Politico stages a melodrama about a Flemish nationalist gone rogue, supposedly spoiling the EU’s grandiose plan to hurl another €140 billion onto the Ukrainian funeral pyre. The reality is simpler, Belgium refused to mortgage its own future so Europe could continue its cosplay as a geopolitical superpower utterly detached from material reality. The EU elite wanted to play empire with someone else’s risk. Belgium refused to be the guarantor of their delusion. What makes Politico’s narrative even more absurd is that it accidentally reveals the deeper rot, Europe’s elite caste are incapable of unity, incapable of strategic thought, incapable of honesty. Merz shoots from the hip. Von der Leyen improvises legal fantasies. Orbán holds a veto the size of a continental fault line. Trump instinctively knows he needs an offramp via peace talks and is happy to download project Ukraine’s corpse along with the humiliation onto Western Europe. Zelensky arrives in Brussels begging for cash while European governments fight over whether the money should be spent on their own weapons factories. This is not a union. This is a collective suicide pact. And through all this chaos, Politico clings to the illusion that Russia must somehow be “laughing.” But Russia isn’t laughing. Russia is watching. Watching as Europe destroys its own energy security, its own industrial base, its own strategic autonomy, its own diplomatic credibility, its own financial reputation, and finally — with this proposed asset raid, the very legal foundations of the Western economic system. If Moscow appears calm, it is because it doesn’t need to act. Europe is demolishing itself at a pace Russia could never have engineered. Belgium’s “no” was not an act of betrayal. It was the last flicker of European rationality. The EU’s hysteria and psychosis, not Russia, created the crisis. Europe is trying to violate international law, sabotage its own financial institutions, and torch what remains of the bygone postwar order to salvage the illusion of a war it has already lost. Belgium simply refused to join the ritual suicide. So let us rewrite Politico’s headline as history will record it: “How the EU Became Russia’s Greatest Strategic Gift.” Not because Russia manipulated Europe, but because Europe manipulated itself, into hysteria, into decay, into legal nihilism, into economic ruin. Belgium didn’t hand Russia an asset. It denied the EU the final act of self-destruction… for now. The tragic irony of the entire Politico piece is that its authors still cling to the fantasy that Europe can recover simply by shaming Belgium into compliance. But history will not be kind to this moment. When future scholars study the collapse of the Western financial empire, this attempted seizure of Russian assets and Belgium’s lonely refusal, will stand as the point where the veil fell, revealing a Europe that could no longer distinguish faux moral posturing from strategic insanity. Belgium didn’t break with Europe, it broke with Europe’s delusions. The EU convinced itself that tearing down the last pillars of the post-war order was an act of courage. Belgium saw it for what it was, a death rite dressed as morality. And when this era ends, when capitals move eastward, when trust evaporates, when the euro cracks under the weight of its own blind arrogance, historians will look back on this moment. They will not ask why Belgium said no. They will ask why Europe said yes. Source: https://xcancel.com/IslanderWORLD/status/1996577782608847087
Komunitas
lemmy.bestiver.se
I know @Aks from IRC. He works on KDE Software, has made many lovely games and I even use his colorscheme in my terminal! Please introduce yourself! I’m Akseli but I usually go as Aks on the internet. I’m in my 30s and I’m from Finland. I’ve liked computers since I was a kid, so naturally I ended up doing computer stuff as a day job. Nowadays I work on KDE software at TechPaladin. How did you first discover computers as a kid? I was 3-4 years old. We had an old 386 DOS computer and I usually played games like Stunts on it. I was always behind when it came to hardware. While all my peers at school would have PS2s, I played on NES and PS1. Over time I just liked to play and tinker with different kinds of machines, mostly old left-over computers. But games were my main hook, I always wanted to make my own. And I did! What were your first games like? My very first game was with FPS Creator when I was ~13. My friend and I had some inside joke about a game with tons of enemies and a gun with 6 bullets, so I ended up recreating that. The game is really bad, but that was sort of the point. The next game I made when I was 18 or so, with Unity. Similar theme, but this time the enemies were dancing and bouncing skeletons, and you had a shotgun. It was so silly. I then made a roguelike, and 3D platformer, and FPS called Penance that has about 19k downloads. You can find my games on Itch. Lately though, I haven’t had the energy to finish my game projects e.g. Artificial Rage: https://codeberg.org/akselmo/Artificial-Rage I sank a fair few hours into Penance! I also really liked the Christmas game you made your sister. Do you ever put Easter eggs in code or often make projects for others like that? I put some Easter eggs. For example someone complained that in Penance all the weapons look like woolen socks(?). So I added a pair of wooly socks in the starting area. I also proposed to my wife with a game, which had a small hallway with pictures of us. It was a fun little project, but a bit cut short since I tried to work on it as a secret, which proved difficult! We have made a few games together. She went to a web-dev bootcamp but doesn’t code anymore, although she gladly works with me on various game projects. How do you ideate the game play, style and such things? While playing, I usually think it “would be cool if I had this game but changed this and that…” which provides a great starting point. Then it just naturally evolves into it’s own thing. Penance was pretty much me going “I want Quake but with random generated levels” but then I ended up making a campaign with handcrafted levels to it anyway, beside the random generated endless mode. Really, I just make things I want to play. People liking it is just a bonus. One of my favorite game projects is Castle Rodok because it is full of lore about my own RPG world. It’s not very popular, but I like it a lot. It was a passion project. What languages and technologies did you use? With tools, I’m driven by need more than wants. My day job is all C++, which I’m fine with. I am very much a fan of “C-style” languages. They’re boring and get the job done. For things I want to get running quick, I usually use Python, which I used a lot in test automation for all kinds of devices. Mostly medical devices so I can’t talk about them due to NDAs. Most of my games have been in Unity, but Crypt of Darne uses Python and I also have played around with C and Odin for my game projects. I have tried LISPs and functional programming languages and such, but I just have hard time with them. Especially with those that propose a completely different syntax for me. I haven’t had any projects with Rust but I liked tinkering with it it, besides the ‘ lifetime syntax which I easily miss. I am very boring when it comes to programming languages, I like to stick with what I know. I wanderlust about what I can create: Games, apps, systems software, drivers… Many ideas but hardly any time. But work comes first, so I mostly work on KDE things right now. For my own things, If I feel like working on a game, I go with the flow and do that. What was your experience with different OS before finding KDE? I’d wanted to move on from Windows and dabbled with Linux a bunch, but could never stick to it because I could not play any games I owned in Linux. When I learned that Linux systems can in-fact game, it didn’t take me long to switch. At first, I just dual-booted and tested the waters. I tried Linux Mint and Ubuntu, which were fine, but I had some issues with X11 and it’s compositing eating all the FPS, so I gave up for a while. 6 months later I tried Kubuntu which worked really well for my needs. After some time I hopped to Fedora KDE, and there I found out that Wayland completely removed the issue with the compositing eating FPS in games. KDE was also very easy to learn and understand. I didn’t really need to customize it. Then I found an annoying bug I wanted to fix it and started to contribute. What was the first contribution experience like? I had no idea how to do anything with C++. I learned C from scratch making Artificial Rage, studying how to create a project with CMake and all that, but luckily the internet is full of advice. So I had not used C++ before and just started learning to make that first contribution! I just joined the Matrix chats and asked questions; people were very helpful. Onboarding was great. It wasn’t very big though, I just looked at the surrounding code and made my contribution look the part. Feedback in the merge request on Gitlab helped wrap it up. One of my first larger contributions though was adding region and language settings to system settings. This allowed users to change, for example, date-time settings differently than currency. This was mix of C and C++ and was difficult! Diligently reading the docs, looking at similar code and a lot of build->test->change->build again… it started to work! Then the reviews helped too. But C++ is such a different beast, I’m still learning it to this day. I’d say I know less C++ and more about problem solving. It also helps that the “Qt dialect” of C++ is rather nice. The Qt framework does a lot of the work for you. For example, the signal and slot system or objects having parent objects that clear their children when they’re deconstructed. Qt’s documentation is also pretty great. I’m still learning and don’t have much in depth knowledge, but I hate header files. Modifying the same thing (function declarations) in two places makes no sense. It should autogenerate as part of the compilation. I found some such header generating tools, but they go unused and quietly forgotten. I suspect they would confuse language servers too, so it’s a tooling issue. What are your thoughts on Linux over all, big things which need changing but no one is working on or nice initiatives which you think will improve things, etc.? The Linux desktop is getting much, much better and I see a hopeful future. Will it ever be the main OS, like Windows is? Probably not, unless hardware manufacturers/OEM’s start installing Linux distros by default, instead of Windows. But I’m hopeful we’ll get to 5%-10% worldwide usage. Now that gaming is possible on Linux, a lot of people moved over. Just few weeks ago I installed Bazzite for my friend who has been using Windows forever, but didn’t want to use Win11. Our next step is to make sure accessibility is up to snuff. At least for KDE, we have an accessibility engineer who is brilliant at their job. Then, I think immutable systems might get more popular. Personally I’m fine with either, but for those who view their computer more as an appliance than a computer, immutable systems are very nice: They allow them to jump from broken state back to working state with ease (select different boot entry at startup). Complex software’s never done; improvements are always needed. Accessibility means more than just accessibility settings: Make it easy to install, test, run, etc… If Linux desktops can get more hardware manufacturers on board to install Linux desktop as default, that will certainly help too. Also shoutout to the [EndOf10](https://endof10.org/ initiative, when I shared it around to my non-nerdy-friends, they were very curious about Linux desktop and I had an excuse to ramble about it to them! In a nutshell: I am hopeful, but we can’t rest on our laurels, we need to stop fighting “whats the best desktop” and work together more. BTW, if anyone reading this has been Linux curious, go for it! Take a secondary device and play around with it there. And I also want to point out that dont be afraid to contribute to things you like in any way you can, be it software or hardware or actual physical world. How do you see it in light of more phone usage, less desktop usage? Have you any impressions of governments or businesses moving to linux? Computers are still widely used where I live, at least within my generation. Those who game especially often have a desktop PC. It may not be top-of-the-line hardcore gaming rig, but they have one to play a bit of Counter-Strike or similar games. Phones are the king of “basic stuff” and for many people a tablet functions as a simple internet-appliance. I can only hope that projects like [PostmarketOS](https://postmarketos.org/ will help to keep these tablets and phones working when the regular android updates stop, to ease the avalanche of e-waste. When it comes to governments and businesses, I wish they did it more. I have heard that in Germany more governments are testing it out. In Finland, I do not know, but I would like to drive more for it. It’s certainly an area where we should try to help as much as possible as well. How can we (individuals or organizations) help? Individual users: Make sure to report bugs and issues, and share knowledge. Do not evangelize or push the matter, just say it’s something you use and elaborate when people ask. Too many times I’ve seen people pushed away from using Linux desktop because people are very… Pushy. As surprising it may be, not many people really care as much as we do! Organizations: Try to adopt more FOSS technologies for daily things, e.g. LibreOffice. Start small. It does not need to be an overnight change, just small things here and there. How many resources do you have compared to the demands of everything you are working on? We’re definitely stretched. We always could use more help, though C++ seems to deter that help a bit, which I can understand. But if I could start from scratch, I’m sure anyone can! Besides, more and more projects use QML and Rust. For testing, there’s Python. What prerequisites are there for contributing? We have Matrix chat for new contributors, where people can ask questions (and answering questions there is also a way to contribute.) All of it is documented. When triaging, I am trying to more often tag bugs in bugzilla as “junior jobs” to make things more approachable. Mentoring etc. is a community effort, and those who are willing to learn will receive help, though we’re all rather busy so we hope people put some effort into trying to learn things too, of course. How could bug reporting be improved? I think we could half-automate bug reports, to make things easier: Gather basic information and ask basic questions upfront, without needing to open a web browser. For crash reports, we use a tool called DrKonqi: When app crashes, it gathers backtraces etc. automagically and allows the user to type what happened in a field. Something similar for regular ol’ bugs would be great. Games do this with taking screenshots and logs when player opens the bug-report tool. But someone would still have to go through them, which is also an excellent way for anyone to contribute: Go through some bug reports, see if you can reproduce them or not, and report back to it with your system information. Anyone can do it, it’s not a difficult job, just a bit tedious, especially when there’s thousands of bug reports and 10 people going through them. How do you approach problem solving? Depends on the problem! If a bug causes a crash, a backtrace is usually helpful. If not, I go with trusty print-debugging to see exactly where things start acting weird. I like to approach it from many different angles at same time: Sometimes I try to fix the bug to figure it out: Why does a given change fix the bug? The fix may not be the correct fix yet. Of course, a well written bugreport with good reproduction steps helps a lot! git blame is a good friend, asking people who implemented things can really help. But sometimes I work on code where it just says “moved to git in 2013” and the original code’s from the 90s. Talking to other people Writing notes down as you try to understand the bug Anything that pokes your brain in multiple different directions. I really like the idea of fixing a bug in multiple ways to really see what’s needed. How do you determine whether something is the proper fix or not? Sometimes the code just “feels right” or someone more knowledgeable can tell me. Of course, fixing simple visual errors should not need a ton of changes around the codebase. Changes should be proportional to the bug’s difficulty/complexity, but there’s no clear answer. It’s more a gut feeling. What inspires you to have an online presence (in irc, commenting, blog posts etc.)? How do you decide when to make a blog post or not? For blog posts, I ask myself: “Do I need to remember this?” Some are just a note for myself, which others might find useful too. I once deleted my lobste.rs account because it took up too much time. Now that all my work is remote, I kind of miss coffee-breaks and office chitchat, so I hang about in IRC, Matrix, Fediverse, Lobsters etc. to fill my Sims status bar. I still prefer remote work, but I wouldn’t mind hybrid option at times. Also, removing the lobste.rs bookmark stopped me reflexively clicking it. Due to learning I have ADHD and very likely autism, I have worked on myself (mentally) and internalized that I don’t need to constantly go through these sites. Notice the problematic behavior, then cut it out. Whenever I notice I’m stuck in a loop opening and closing the same sites, I’ve learned to close the web-browser and do something else. The hardest part is actually noticing it. Do you have any interesting personal tools? I use your colorscheme. I journal a lot on a remarkable2 tablet when working, writing down what I have done, should do or notes figuring out problems. Writing by hand helps me remember things too. I made an RSS “newspaper” script for my tablet too, which also shows the daily weather now. I also use todo.txt for tasks, like my own list of bugs and other projects I need to go through. I even wrote an app for it called KomoDo. Then I use Obsidian for any technical notes and know-how, like programming and computer things that are pain to write by hand. When did you migrate to codeberg? It was even before Github started getting “AI” stuff. I just got tired of Github being a social media site instead of a good platform. SourceHut would have been nice too, I just didn’t know of it at the time. I’m also wary of the email workflow, but wouldn’t be opposed to learning it.
Komunitas
lemmy.ml
Privacy stalwart Nicholas Merrill spent a decade fighting an FBI surveillance order. Now he wants to sell you phone service—without knowing almost anything about you. Nicholas Merrill has spent his career fighting government surveillance. But he would really rather you didn’t call what he’s selling now a “burner phone.” Yes, he dreams of a future where anyone in the US can get a working smartphone—complete with cellular coverage and data—without revealing their identity, even to the phone company. But to call such anonymous phones “burners” suggests that they’re for something illegal, shady, or at least subversive. The term calls to mind drug dealers or deep-throat confidential sources in parking garages. With his new startup, Merrill says he instead wants to offer cellular service for your existing phone that makes near-total mobile privacy the permanent, boring default of daily life in the US. “We’re not looking to cater to people doing bad things,” says Merrill. “We’re trying to help people feel more comfortable living their normal lives, where they’re not doing anything wrong, and not feel watched and exploited by giant surveillance and data mining operations. I think it’s not controversial to say the vast majority of people want that.” That’s the thinking behind Phreeli, the phone carrier startup Merrill launched today, designed to be the most privacy-focused cellular provider available to Americans. Phreeli, as in, “speak freely,” aims to give its user a different sort of privacy from the kind that can be had with end-to-end encrypted texting and calling tools like Signal or WhatsApp. Those apps hide the content of conversations, or even, in Signal’s case, metadata like the identities of who is talking to whom. Phreeli instead wants to offer actual anonymity. It can’t help government agencies or data brokers obtain users’ identifying information because it has almost none to share. The only piece of information the company records about its users when they sign up for a Phreeli phone number is, in fact, a mere ZIP code. That’s the minimum personal data Merrill has determined his company is legally required to keep about its customers for tax purposes. By asking users for almost no identifiable information, Merrill wants to protect them from one of the most intractable privacy problems in modern technology: Despite whatever surveillance-resistant communications apps you might use, phone carriers will always know which of their customers’ phones are connecting to which cell towers and when. Carriers have frequently handed that information over to data brokers willing to pay for it—or any FBI or ICE agent that demands it with a court order Merrill has some firsthand experience with those demands. Starting in 2004, he fought a landmark, decade-plus legal battle against the FBI and the Department of Justice. As the owner of an internet service provider in the post-9/11 era, Merrill had received a secret order from the bureau to hand over data on a particular user—and he refused. After that, he spent another 15 years building and managing the Calyx Institute, a nonprofit that offers privacy tools like a snooping-resistant version of Android and a free VPN that collects no logs of its users’ activities. “Nick is somebody who is extremely principled and willing to take a stand for his principles,” says Cindy Cohn, who as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has led the group’s own decades-long fight against government surveillance. “He’s careful and thoughtful, but also, at a certain level, kind of fearless.” Nicholas Merrill with a copy of the National Security Letter he received from the FBI in 2004, ordering him to give up data on one of his customers. He refused, fought a decade-plus court battle—and won. More recently, Merrill began to realize he had a chance to achieve a win against surveillance at a more fundamental level: by becoming the phone company. “I started to realize that if I controlled the mobile provider, there would be even more opportunities to create privacy for people,” Merrill says. “If we were able to set up our own network of cell towers globally, we can set the privacy policies of what those towers see and collect.” Building or buying cell towers across the US for billions of dollars, of course, was not within the budget of Merrill’s dozen-person startup. So he’s created the next best thing: a so-called mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO, a kind of virtual phone carrier that pays one of the big, established ones—in Phreeli’s case, T-Mobile—to use its infrastructure. The result is something like a cellular prophylactic. The towers are T-Mobile’s, but the contracts with users—and the decisions about what private data to require from them—are Phreeli’s. “You can’t control the towers. But what can you do?” he says. “You can separate the personally identifiable information of a person from their activities on the phone system.” Signing up a customer for phone service without knowing their name is, surprisingly, legal in all 50 states, Merrill says. Anonymously accepting money from users—with payment options other than envelopes of cash—presents more technical challenges. To that end, Phreeli has implemented a new encryption system it calls Double-Blind Armadillo, based on cutting-edge cryptographic protocols known as zero-knowledge proofs. Through a kind of mathematical sleight of hand, those crypto functions are capable of tasks like confirming that a certain phone has had its monthly service paid for, but without keeping any record that links a specific credit card number to that phone. Phreeli users can also pay their bills (or rather, prepay them, since Phreeli has no way to track down anonymous users who owe them money) with tough-to-trace cryptocurrency like Zcash or Monero. Phreeli users can, however, choose to set their own dials for secrecy versus convenience. If they offer an email address at signup, they can more easily recover their account if their phone is lost. To get a SIM card, they can give their mailing address—which Merrill says Phreeli will promptly delete after the SIM ships—or they can download the digital equivalent known as an eSIM, even, if they choose, from a site Phreeli will host on the Tor anonymity network. Phreeli’s “armadillo” analogy—the animal also serves as the mascot in its logo—is meant to capture this sliding scale of privacy that Phreeli offers its users: Armadillos always have a layer of armor, but they can choose whether to expose their vulnerable underbelly or curl into a fully protected ball. Even if users choose the less paranoid side of that spectrum of options, Merrill argues, his company will still be significantly less surveillance-friendly than existing phone companies, which have long represented one of the weakest links in the tech world’s privacy protections. All major US cellular carriers comply, for instance, with law enforcement surveillance orders like “tower dumps” that hand over data to the government on every phone that connected to a particular cell tower during a certain time. They’ve also happily, repeatedly handed over your data to corporate interests: Last year the Federal Communications Commission fined AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile nearly $200 million for selling users’ personal information, including their locations, to data brokers. (AT&T’s fine was later overturned by an appeals court ruling intended to limit the FCC’s enforcement powers.) Many data brokers in turn sell the information to federal agencies, including ICE and other parts of the DHS, offering an all-too-easy end run around restrictions on those agencies’ domestic spying. Phreeli doesn’t promise to be a surveillance panacea. Even if your cellular carrier isn’t tying your movements to your identity, the operating system of whatever phone you sign up with might be. Even your mobile apps can track you. But for a startup seeking to be the country’s most privacy-focused mobile carrier, the bar is low. “The goal of this phone company I’m starting is to be more private than the three biggest phone carriers in the US. That’s the promise we’re going to massively overdeliver on,” says Merrill. “I don’t think there’s any way we can mess that up.” Merrill’s not-entirely-voluntary decision to spend the last 20-plus years as a privacy diehard began with three pages of paper that arrived at his office on a February day in New York in 2004. An FBI agent knocked on the door of his small internet service provider firm called Calyx, headquartered in a warehouse space a block from the Holland Tunnel in Manhattan. When Merrill answered, he found an older man with parted white hair, dressed in a trench coat like a comic book G-man, who handed him an envelope. Merrill opened it and read the letter while the agent waited. The first and second paragraphs told him he was hereby ordered to hand over virtually all information he possessed for one of his customers, identified by their email address, explaining that this demand was authorized by a law he’d later learn was part of the Patriot Act. The third paragraph informed him he couldn’t tell anyone he’d even received this letter—a gag order. Then the agent departed without answering any of Merrill’s questions. He was left to decide what to do, entirely alone. Merrill was struck immediately by the fact that the letter had no signature from a judge. He had in fact been handed a so-called National Security Letter, or NSL, a rarely seen and highly controversial tool of the Bush administration that allowed the FBI to demand information without a warrant, so long as it was related to “national security.” Calyx’s actual business, since he’d first launched the company in the early ’90s with a bank of modems in the nonfunctional fireplace of a New York apartment, had evolved into hosting the websites of big corporate customers like Mitsubishi and Ikea. But Merrill used that revenue stream to give pro bono or subsidized web hosting to nonprofit clients he supported like the Marijuana Policy Project and Indymedia—and to offer fast internet connections to a few friends and acquaintances like the one named in this surveillance order. Merrill has never publicly revealed the identity of the NSL’s target, and he declined to share it with WIRED. But he knew this particular customer, and he certainly didn’t strike Merrill as a national security threat. If he were, Merrill thought, why not just get a warrant? The customer would later tell Merrill he had in fact been pressured by the FBI to become an informant—and had refused. The bureau, he told Merrill, had then retaliated by putting him on the no-fly list and pressuring employers not to hire him. (The FBI didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment on the case.) Merrill immediately decided to risk disobeying the gag order—on pain of what consequences, he had no idea—and called his lawyer, who told him to go to the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, which happened to be one of Calyx’s web-hosting clients. After a few minutes in a cab, Merrill was talking to a young attorney named Jameel Jaffer in the ACLU’s Financial District office. “I wish I could say that we reassured him with our expertise on the NSL statute, but that’s not how it went down,” Jaffer says. “We had never seen one of these before.” Merrill, meanwhile, knew that every lawyer he showed the letter to might represent another count in his impending prosecution. “I was terrified,” he says. “I kind of assumed someone could just come to my place that night, throw a hood over my head, and drag me away.” Phreeli will use a novel encryption system called DoubleBlind Armadillo—based on cutting edge crypto protocols known as… Phreeli will use a novel encryption system called Double-Blind Armadillo—based on cutting edge crypto protocols known as zero-knowledge proofs—to pull of tricks like accepting credit card payments from customers without keeping any record that ties that payment information to their particular phone. Despite his fears, Merrill never complied with the FBI’s letter. Instead, he decided to fight its constitutionality in court, with the help of pro bono representation from the ACLU and later the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. That fight would last 11 years and entirely commandeer his life. Merrill and his lawyers argued that the NSL represented an unconstitutional search and a violation of his free-speech rights—and they won. But Congress only amended the NSL statute, leaving the provision about its gag order intact, and the legal battle dragged out for years longer. Even after the NSL was rescinded altogether, Merrill continued to fight for the right to talk about its existence. “This was a time when so many people in his position were essentially cowering under their desks. But he felt an obligation as a citizen to speak out about surveillance powers that he thought had gone too far,” says Jaffer, who represented Merrill for the first six years of that courtroom war. “He impressed me with his courage.” Battling the FBI took over Merrill’s life to the degree that he eventually shut down his ISP for lack of time or will to run the business and instead took a series of IT jobs. “I felt too much weight on my shoulders,” he says. “I was just constantly on the phone with lawyers, and I was scared all the time.” By 2010, Merrill had won the right to publicly name himself as the NSL’s recipient. By 2015 he’d beaten the gag order entirely and released the full letter with only the target’s name redacted. But Merrill and the ACLU never got the Supreme Court precedent they wanted from the case. Instead, the Patriot Act itself was amended to reign in NSLs’ unconstitutional powers. In the meantime, those years of endless bureaucratic legal struggles had left Merrill disillusioned with judicial or even legislative action as a way to protect privacy. Instead, he decided to try a different approach. “The third way to fight surveillance is with technology,” he says. “That was my big realization.” So, just after Merrill won the legal right to go public with his NSL battle in 2010, he founded the Calyx Institute, a nonprofit that shared a name with his old ISP but was instead focused on building free privacy tools and services. The privacy-focused version of Google’s Android OS it would develop, designed to strip out data-tracking tools and use Signal by default for calls and texts, would eventually have close to 100,000 users. It ran servers for anonymous, encrypted instant messaging over the chat protocol XMPP with around 300,000 users. The institute also offered a VPN service and ran servers that comprised part of the volunteer-based Tor anonymity network, tools that Merrill estimates were used by millions. As he became a cause célèbre and then a standout activist in the digital privacy world over those years, Merrill says he started to become aware of the growing problem of untrustworthy cellular providers in an increasingly phone-dependent world. He’d sometimes come across anti-surveillance hard-liners determined to avoid giving any personal information to cellular carriers, who bought SIM cards with cash and signed up for prepaid plans with false names. Some even avoided cell service altogether, using phones they connected only to Wi-Fi. “Eventually those people never got invites to any parties,” Merrill says. All these schemes, he knew, were legal enough. So why not a phone company that only collects minimal personal information—or none—from its normal, non-extremist customers? As early as 2019, he had already consulted with lawyers and incorporated Phreeli as a company. He decided on the for-profit startup route after learning that the 501c3 statute can’t apply to a telecom firm. Only last year, he finally raised $5 million, mostly from one angel investor. (Merrill declined to name the person. Naturally, they value their privacy.) Building a system that could function like a normal phone company—and accept users’ payments like one—without storing virtually any identifying information on those customers presented a distinct challenge. To solve it, Merrill consulted with Zooko Wilcox, one of the creators of Zcash, perhaps the closest thing in the world to actual anonymous cryptocurrency. The Z in Zcash stands for “zero-knowledge proofs,” a relatively new form of crypto system that has allowed Zcash’s users to prove things (like who has paid whom) while keeping all information (like their identities, or even the amount of payments) fully encrypted. For Phreeli, Wilcox suggested a related but slightly different system: so-called “zero-knowledge access passes.” Wilcox compares the system to people showing their driver’s license at the door of a club. “You’ve got to give your home address to the bouncer,” Wilcox says incredulously. The magical properties of zero knowledge proofs, he says, would allow you to generate an unforgeable crypto credential that proves you’re over 21 and then show that to the doorman without revealing your name, address, or even your age. “A process that previously required identification gets replaced by something that only requires authorization,” Wilcox says. “See the difference?” The same trick will now let Phreeli users prove they’ve prepaid their phone bill without connecting their name, address, or any payment information to their phone records—even if they pay with a credit card. The result, Merrill says, will be a user experience for most customers that’s not very different from their existing phone carrier, but with a radically different level of data collection. As for Wilcox, he’s long been one of that small group of privacy zealots who buys his SIM cards in cash with a fake name. But he hopes Phreeli will offer an easier path—not just for people like him, but for normies too. “I don’t know of anybody who’s ever offered this credibly before,” says Wilcox. “Not the usual telecom-strip-mining-your-data phone, not a black-hoodie hacker phone, but a privacy-is-normal phone.” Even so, enough tech companies have pitched privacy as a feature for their commercial product that jaded consumers may not buy into a for-profit telecom like Phreeli purporting to offer anonymity. But the EFF’s Cohn says that Merrill’s track record shows he’s not just using the fight against surveillance as a marketing gimmick to sell something. “Having watched Nick for a long time, it’s all a means to an end for him,” she says. “And the end is privacy for everyone.” Merrill may not like the implications of describing Phreeli as a cellular carrier where every phone is a burner phone. But there’s little doubt that some of the company’s customers will use its privacy protections for crime—just as with every surveillance-resistant tool, from Signal to Tor to briefcases of cash. Phreeli won’t, at least, offer a platform for spammers and robocallers, Merrill says. Even without knowing users’ identities, he says the company will block that kind of bad behavior by limiting how many calls and texts users are allowed, and banning users who appear to be gaming the system. “If people think this is going to be a safe haven for abusing the phone network, that’s not going to work,” Merrill says. But some customers of his phone company will, to Merrill’s regret, do bad things, he says—just as they sometimes used to with pay phones, that anonymous, cash-based phone service that once existed on every block of American cities. “You put a quarter in, you didn’t need to identify yourself, and you could call whoever you wanted,” he reminisces. “And 99.9 percent of the time, people weren’t doing bad stuff.” The small minority who were, he argues, didn’t justify the involuntary societal slide into the cellular panopticon we all live in today, where a phone call not tied to freely traded data on the caller’s identity is a rare phenomenon. “The pendulum has swung so far in favor of total information awareness,” says Merrill, using an intelligence term of the Bush administration whose surveillance order set him on this path 21 years ago. “Things that we used to be able to take for granted have slipped through our fingers.” “Other phone companies are selling an apartment that comes with no curtains—where the windows are incompatible with curtains,” Merrill says. “We’re trying to say, no, curtains are normal. Privacy is normal.”
Komunitas
lemmygrad.ml
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9899994 wake up open twitter to catch up see deepseek did it again (and as a reminder, Deepseek-r1 only came out in January so it’s been less than 12 months since their last bombshell) One more graph: What this all means Traditional AI models are trained to be “rewarded” for a correct final answer. Get the expected answer, win points, be incentivized to get the answer more often. This has a major flaw: a correct answer does not guarantee correct reasoning. A model can guess, use a shortcut, or even have flawed logic but still output the right answer. This approach completely fails for tasks like theorem proving, where the process is the product. DeepSeekMath-V2 tackles this with a novel self-verifying reasoning framework: the Generator: One part of the model generates mathematical proofs and solutions. the Verifier: Another part acts as the critic, checking every step of the reasoning for logical rigor and correctness The Loop: If the verifier finds a flaw, it provides feedback, and the generator revises the proof. This creates a co-evolution cycle where both components push each other to become smarter This new approach allows the model to set record-breaking performance. As you can see from the charts above, it scores second-place on ProofBench-Advanced, just behind Gemini. But Gemini isn’t open-source, Deepseekmath-V2 is. The model weights are available on Huggingface under an Apache 2.0 license: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Math-V2. This means researchers, developers, and enthusiasts around the world can download, study, and build upon this model right now. They can fine-tune or change the model to fit their needs and research, which promises a lot of exciting math discoveries happening soon - I predict (on no basis mind you) that this will help solve computing problems to start with, either practical or theoretical. Beyond just the math, the self-verification mechanism is a crucial step towards building AI systems whose reasoning we can trust, which is vital for applications such as scientific research, formal verification, and safety-critical systems. It also proves that ‘verification-driven’ training is a viable and powerful alternative to the ‘answer-driven’ method used to this day.
Komunitas
ibbit.at
Photo by Tyler Fulk Ezra Klein had a classic column in the New York Times today where he advertises in his title, “America’s Housing Crisis, in One Chart.” The chart he highlights — new housing units per capita — is informative, but not quite in the way he says. The chart shows the cyclical ups and downs in the housing market and then a massive plunge in construction following the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007-2008. Construction falls to one-third the long period average by 2010. It gradually creeped up so that it was 75 percent of the long period average by the pandemic. It rose somewhat further after the start of the pandemic, fueled by low interest rates and increased demand. Klein looks at his chart and sees massive underbuilding of housing which he attributes primarily to excessive government restrictions on building, such as zoning and outdated safety requirements. I look at his chart and see the lasting devastation to the housing market that resulted from letting a bubble grow unchecked in the first decade of this century. Asset Bubbles Are Bad News While some of us were trying to warn of the risks of the bubble; the big names in economics (e.g., Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers) were singing the praises of innovative financing and the resulting increase in homeownership. When the bubble burst, not only did we get a financial crisis and the worst recession since the Great Depression; we also got long-lasting damage to the housing market that is still being felt today in the form of higher house sale prices and rents. The reason for highlighting the impact of the bubble and its bursting, rather than the problems cited by Klein, is we need to have a sense of relative importance. Restrictive zoning is definitely a problem, and we should look at regulatory constraints, especially on manufactured housing, that may needlessly limit supply and push up prices. But we had restrictive zoning and needless regulations before 2008 and still managed to build plenty of housing. That suggests that these are not the main obstacles to more construction. The Collapsed Bubble Explains the Housing Construction Shortfall In fact, if we look at Klein’s chart, it seems that most of the shortfall in housing, which he and others put at between 2-5 million units, was the result of the plunge in construction immediately after the collapse. Using 1.5 million units a year as a target for balancing the market (people are welcome to use a higher or lower one), we fell 6.4 million units short of needed construction levels in the decade from 2008-2017. Construction has continued to climb upward in subsequent years so that in 2024 we were at 1.6 million completed units, somewhat above the 1.5 million target level used above. Construction will fall this year and next, as the rise in interest rates slowed starts, which will mean fewer completions in 2026. This history doesn’t change the fact that housing costs too much and we need more construction, but it suggests that the problems may not be as deeply entrenched as Klein’s analysis implies. Rents and house sale prices were just moderately outpacing inflation until the pandemic. When COVID-19 hit, the pandemic relief packages put money in people’s pockets; at the same time, the opportunity to work remotely expanded enormously. This both meant that people were saving money on commuting costs — which they could spend on housing — and that they needed more room at home to accommodate an office. Those factors, together with low interest rates, led to a buying boom in 2021-22, and a surge in house sale prices. The Case-Shiller house price index rose by more than 50 percent in the five years from February 2020 to February 2025. Rents also surged, but not quite as dramatically. Price and Rents Are Now Falling in Real Terms But this was a one-time effect. With the number of people working remotely having stabilized, there is no longer a big surge in demand. The weakening economy also helps on this one. House sale prices have actually taken a modest downward turn since February, falling by almost 1.0 percent as of August. That translates into a 2.5 percent real decline, adjusting for inflation. It is likely this decline will continue and perhaps accelerate somewhat. (I am not anticipating the sort of collapse we saw in the 2008-2010 period, since homeowners are not heavily leveraged and in need of selling.) There is also evidence that rents are falling, certainly in real terms and possibly also in nominal terms. The rent indexes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) have a serious lag, reflecting long-term leases, but indexes that measure rents on units that come on the market are showing flat or declining prices. This is also the case with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ New Tenant Rent Index, which uses the CPI methodology, but only on units that come on the market. This means that the problem of high housing costs may be correcting itself, but it would be good to hasten this process. Telling people that they have to wait three or four years for an apartment or house to become affordable is not a good story and certainly not good politics. Reviewing safety regulations are definitely a good place to start. I’m less convinced on zoning. As much as it would be desirable to have denser housing in many areas, the politics on zoning are difficult, as Klein acknowledges. The story also is rarely unambiguous. I am sure I will never be able to afford to live in San Francisco, but I still think that when I visit the city it is really neat to walk through neighborhoods filled with houses and small apartment buildings, constructed in the early part of the last century. This is not just a personal preference. San Francisco has a huge tourism industry, as does New York and Paris, and many other cities that have preserved a large portion of their past. It would be wrong to dismiss this preservation as simply selfish NIMBYism. So, I would encourage efforts to reform zoning with the caution not to expect too much from them. (I will say that my friend Jared Bernstein’s proposal for a rent subsidy for high-cost cities taking steps to increase construction, which is endorsed by Klein, is almost certainly a political non-starter. It would imply transferring money from relatively poor red areas to relatively wealthy blue areas.) Other Schemes I would also throw in a few other ideas that could provide some modest short-term help. A progressive property tax that would, for example, have a higher marginal tax rate on homes that sell for more than twice the median in an area, would provide incentive for rich people to take up less space. It also has the advantage that assessed valuations are already on the books, so it requires no new administrative structure. The same is true for vacant property taxes. This would provide disincentive for leaving units vacant. San Francisco and some other cities have already tried this policy. Even if this tax just leads many property owners to lie, it still raises the costs for them to have a vacant unit. Incentives for converting office space to residential are also a good policy. Some office buildings are less well-suited for conversion than others. This means we want offices to move from the places that are easy to convert to the ones that are difficult. Government can help here. And moderate rent control can be useful, especially as a short-term solution. There is also evidence that increased concentration in the construction industry following the collapse of the housing bubble has reduced building. This suggests that anti-trust policy may have a role to play in bringing down housing costs. But the main point here is that the major shortage of housing the country faces now is not the result of zoning or regulatory obstacles but rather an overreaction to a collapsed bubble. Just as investors can be irrationally exuberant in driving a bubble, they also can be irrationally pessimistic in the wake of a collapse. It also didn’t help that the weak labor market coming out of the Great Recession meant that tens of millions of people didn’t have the regular income they needed to secure a mortgage. Also, millions had their credit ruined by a foreclosure after the crash. All of this should just remind us that asset bubbles are not fun, at least not after they burst. We should remember this when we hear people singing the praises of AI. The post Ezra Klein Needs to Look More Closely at His Housing Chart appeared first on CounterPunch.org. From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed
Komunitas
ibbit.at
It’s been twenty-three years since the day Phoenix was released, the web browser that eventually became Firefox. I downloaded it on the first day and installed it on my trusty HP Omnibook 800 laptop, and until this year I’ve used it ever since. Yet after all this time, I’m ready to abandon it for another browser. In the previous article in this series I went into my concerns over the direction being taken by Mozilla with respect to their inclusion of AI features and my worries about privacy in Firefox, and I explained why a plurality of browser engines is important for the Web. Now it’s time to follow me on my search for a replacement, and you may be surprised by one aspect of my eventual choice. Where Do I Go From Here? It’s Hackaday, in Ladybird! (Ooof, that font.) Happily for my own purposes, there are a range of Firefox alternatives which fulfill my browser needs without AI cruft and while allowing me to be a little more at peace with my data security and privacy. There’s Chromium of course even if it’s still way too close to Google for my liking, and there are a host of open-source WebKit and Blink based browsers too numerous to name here. In the Gecko world that should be an easier jump for a Firefox escapee there are also several choices, for example LibreWolf, and Waterfox. In terms of other browser engines there’s the extremely promising but still early in development Ladybird, and the more mature Servo, which though it is available as a no-frills browser, bills itself as an embedded browser engine. I have not considered some other projects that are either lightweight browser engines, or ones not under significant active development. It’s Hackaday, in Servo! Over this summer and autumn then I have tried a huge number of different browsers. Every month or so I build the latest Ladybird and Servo; while I am hugely pleased to see progress they’re both still too buggy for my purposes. Servo is lightning-fast but sometimes likes to get stuck in mobile view, while Ladybird is really showing what it’s going to be but remains for now slow-as-treacle. These are ones to watch, and support. I gave LibreWolf and Waterfox the most attention over the summer, both of which after the experience I’d describe as like Firefox but with mildly annoying bugs. The inability to video conference reliably is a show-stopper in my line of work, and since my eyesight is no longer what it once was I like my browsers to remember when I have zoomed in on a tab. Meanwhile Waterfox on Android is a great mobile browser, right up until it needs to open a link in another app, and fails. I’m used to the quirks of open-source software after 30+ years experimenting with Linux, but when it comes to productivity I can’t let my software disrupt the flow of Hackaday articles. The Unexpected Choice It’s Hackaday, in Vivaldi! It might surprise you after all this open-source enthusiasm then, to see the browser I’ve ended up comfortable with. Vivaldi may be driven by the open-source Blink engine from Chromium and Chrome, but its proprietary front end doesn’t have an open-source licence. It’s freeware, or free-as-in-beer, and I think the only such software I use. Why, I hear you ask? It’s an effort to produce a browser like Opera used to be in the old days, it’s European which is a significant consideration when it comes to data protection law, and it has (so far) maintained a commitment to privacy while not being evil in the Google motto sense. It’s quick, I like its interface once the garish coloured default theme has been turned off, and above all, it Just Works. I have my browser back, and I can get on with writing. Should they turn evil I can dump them without a second thought, and hope by then Ladybird has matured enough to suit my needs. It may not be a trend many of us particularly like, but here in 2025 there’s a sense that the browser has reduced our computers almost to the status of a terminal. It’s thus perhaps the most important piece of software on the device, and in that light I hope you can understand some of the concerns levelled in this series. If you’re reading this from Firefox HQ I’d implore you to follow my advice and go back to what made Firefox so great back in the day, but for the rest of you I’d like to canvass your views on my choice of a worthy replacement. As always, the comments are waiting. From Blog – Hackaday via this RSS feed
Komunitas
ibbit.at
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, November 24, 2025 In 2010, I wrote a book called War Is A Lie, with an updated edition in 2016. If I’m lucky and find time — and maybe if they ease up on the wars for a little while — I’ll get a new version out in 2026. But I can already apply the basic idea of the book to the threatened war on Venezuela. The argument in the book is, of course, not that wars aren’t real, but rather that nothing that is commonly said to justify them is true. The book begins thus: “Not a single thing that we commonly believe about wars that helps keep them around is true. Wars cannot be good or glorious. Nor can they be justified as a means of achieving peace or anything else of value. The reasons given for wars, before, during, and after them (often three very different sets of reasons for the same war) are all false. It is common to imagine that, because we’d never go to war without a good reason, having gone to war, we simply must have a good reason. This needs to be reversed. Because there can be no good reason for war, having gone to war, we are participating in a lie.” If the U.S. launches a newly escalated war against Venezuela, and someday it ends, the war may turn out to have been a futile attempt to bring democracy to the ungrateful and incapable people of Venezuela who, we will be told, simply didn’t want it. Or — this being Trump bizarro land, with honesty bursting out in odd moments — perhaps we’ll just be told that the war was a theft of oil. If Russia has ultimately joined the war (the worst is always possible), then of course Russia will have started it — if anyone is left alive to care. But that’s all for an unpredictable future. Before the end of the war, if an indefinite occupation develops because Venezuela shockingly behaves like every other invaded place on Earth ever and fights back, then until that occupation ends, the reasons to keep the war going may include the solemn need to get more U.S. troops killed in support of those already killed, or various tales about drugs and democracy, or (if a Democrat has ascended the throne in the Trump Ballroom) the Rules Based Order, or (if one hasn’t) perhaps just old-is-new-again straight-up racism. But that’s all for after a new war has been started. What about the things we are being told right now to try to get a war started (which will likely mostly be forgotten in the future)? Well, first of all, what we’re being told is not working. Polling shows the U.S. public strongly opposed to a war on Venezuela. That fact will vanish from future tellings whether the war happens or not. Consider, though, what it says about the need to bring democracy to Venezuela through a war opposed by the people whose government is launching it. To make sense of the term “democracy” in U.S. foreign policy, it simply has to be understood as “U.S. power.” There have been misleading polls finding majority support for blowing up boats supposedly full of drugs and arrived in the United States with those drugs. Those polls have been used to provide cover for murdering everyone aboard boats that were actually found over a thousand miles away from the United States. In propaganda terms, the purpose of murdering those boatloads of people has perhaps included the unsuccessful effort to gain support for a wider war, but has certainly included the successful effort to get all decent people to focus on asking and answering the wrong questions. Murder is illegal. War is illegal. Threatening war is illegal. These basic facts are obscured when the question becomes “Does Iraq have WMDs?” or — in this case — questions like these: “Is blowing up boats part of a war?” or“Does the drug cartel invented by the CIA really exist?” or“What obscure arguments have Trump’s lawyers used to make the murders part of a war and therefore legal (even though war is not legal) while at the same time making those murders neither part of a war nor even hostile so that the War Powers Resolution does not apply?” We do not need to dignify such questions with our attention. Murder is illegal whether or not part of a war. It would be illegal even if Congress were to pass a resolution against it. It is illegal even though the Senate has voted down a resolution against it, and even though House Speaker Mike Johnson is illegally refusing to hold a vote. The exceptionally blatant illegality of attacking Venezuela, even in the eyes of many supporters of militarism in general, is likely why the head of Southern Command quit last month. The growing discussion of the responsibility to disobey illegal orders is not unrelated to this threatened war. The UK has reportedly stopped sharing information with the United States that could be used to facilitate this war. Imagine how far over the line you have to be for that to have happened. A New York Times columnist tells us that the United States should overthrow the Venezuelan government because it is allied with enemies of the United States and because it is cruel to the Venezuelan public. Either of these arguments would allow almost any country to attack various other countries. The notion that Russia, China, and Iran — either separately or together — are trying to gain a “foothold” in a part of the world properly belonging to the United States from which to launch their attack on Washington may be an embarrassingly absurd projection, but even if it were plausible, it wouldn’t justify attacking Venezuela and driving most of the rest of Latin America into closer alliances with those designated enemies. The illegal U.S. sanctions that have been killing large numbers of Venezuelans are of course at the root of much of the suffering for which U.S. columnists like to blame the Venezuelan government. In years gone by, the Nobel Peace Prize went a couple of times to Iranian opponents of the Iranian government as it was in the crosshairs of the Pentagon, but those laureates would criticize the Iranian government and quickly make clear that they didn’t want their country bombed, as that would be even worse. This year, the prize went to a Venezuelan who wants her country starved and invaded. This is used to generate the lie that Venezuelans are willing to be attacked in order to free them from their government. If you are tempted to believe such madness, think about how frustrated you are with the U.S. government, and then ask yourself whether you’d like your house bombed. Of course the notion of “overthrow” is supposed to suggest something quick and easy, an operation during which most people’s houses are spared. But quick and easy usually turns into endless and catastrophic. It’s a tragedy that the Iraq Syndrome is wearing off, that people are forgetting how actual wars relate to pre-war sales pitches. Coups tend not to be followed by peace so much as by endless killing and destruction. It’s worth bearing in mind that overthrowing a government is a crime, and the opposite of law enforcement, because we have also been hearing a lot about those murdered being criminals. Trump recently suggested that it was all right for Saudi Arabia to murder a U.S. journalist because the journalist was “controversial.” Wars tend to be marketed with a stronger claim than that, namely one of criminality. More than that, wars are usually marketed as a defense against aggression by the other side. The Venezuelan government has no difficulty marketing its side of the looming war in those terms. Trump, on the other hand, has to sell this war as a defense against an “invasion” by drug dealers or simply by the wrong sort of people. But that’s not a simple sell, possibly not even to the most sadistic “tough-on-crime” racist xenophobe, because speaking Spanish or even selling drugs is not exactly the same as mass murder and destruction, as well as because Venezuelan immigrants are mostly fleeing U.S. sanctions, a war will cause a huge increase in immigration, and the Venezuelan children blown to pieces in this “defensive” war will be seen on social media — horrors that will seem to virtually everyone worse than speaking with an accent. Simply labeling an imaginary drug cartel as a “terrorist” organization — in an act that actually terrifies people in Venezuela — lacks substance and imagery. Hard as that sell is, the war pitch to contemporary liberal war fans usually goes even further than that. Usually a claim is made that each war is a last resort, that everything other than war has been exhaustively attempted first. This is always a nonsensical claim, as there are always more things to try, but Trump’s long buildup works against him here, since he hasn’t been trying anything other than threatening war, and even a child could tell you that all he would need to do to avoid the war he is threatening is to not wage it. If all the lies are not the real reason for the war, what is the real reason? Well, usually there are many, and they include such odd factors as where the oil is, Marco Rubio’s childhood, the weapons Lockheed Martin would like demonstrated, what Trump believes will boost his news coverage during the holidays, lust for power, sadism, etc. There’s usually not just one reason. There’s usually not a way to make “sense” of the reasons. The Table of Contents of War Is A Lie gives an idea of what the actual reasons are not: Wars Are Not Fought Against EvilWars Are Not Launched in DefenseWars Are Not Waged Out of GenerosityWars Are Not UnavoidableWarriors Are Not HeroesWar Makers Do Not Have Noble MotivesWars Are Not Prolonged for the Good of SoldiersWars Are Not Fought on BattlefieldsWars Are Not Won, and Are Not Ended By Enlarging ThemWar News Does Not Come From Disinterested ObserversWar Does Not Bring Security and Is Not SustainableWars Are Not LegalWars Cannot Be Both Planned and AvoidedWar Is Over If You Want It Please take a minute to sign this petition. I just discussed this topic on Santita Jackson’s show as did Adrienne Pine: The post War on Venezuela Is A Lie appeared first on World BEYOND War. From World BEYOND War via this RSS feed
Komunitas
lemmy.ca
Deb packages can be built by anyone, including proprietary software makers. Installing .deb files downloaded from random web sites is like running .exe files downloaded from random web sites. Not safe or (as you discovered) ad-free. If you want to avoid ads and malware, I suggest installing only from a trustworthy distro’s software repository, using its built-in package manager.
Komunitas
ibbit.at
On Tuesday, in quick succession: The House passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act 427 to 1; and Hours later, the Senate passed the Act 100 to 0. The White House said that Trump would sign the bill when “it reaches his desk,” which should be Wednesday. Signing the bill will trigger a 30-day period for the DOJ to produce the Epstein files in a downloadable, searchable format. Each of those victories is contingent, but they are victories nonetheless. Progress is slow, until it isn’t. Tuesday was one of the days when years of effort came to fruition in hours. The victory is cause for a moment of reflection and celebration before we begin imagining the complications to come. Pat yourself on the back. Take a bow. Take a deep breath and relax, if only for a few hours. You deserve it. There is only one explanation for the rapid-fire developments on Tuesday relating to the Epstein files: Trump and his enablers can read polling data. Seventy-five percent (75%) of Americans support the release of all Epstein files. (An additional 13% support releasing some of the files.) It is rare for 88% of the American public to mostly agree on anything. And producing records that evidence the sex trafficking operation of a convicted felon is something that Americans can agree on. Each day Republicans delayed the release made Trump and his minions appear to be more complicit in covering up rich and powerful men who raped, trafficked, and abused girls and young women. That lesson will not be lost on the DOJ as it releases documents that redact the names of perpetrators in violation of the Act. That is a fight to come after we see the DOJ’s production. Let’s keep our powder dry. News outlets are not reporting the language of the Act’s exemption that permits the DOJ to withhold documents. The text is helpful in understanding the scope of the DOJ’s authority to withhold or redact documents. See the text of the Act’s exemption, which is set forth in the footnote below.1 After years of struggle, we are closer than ever to the release of the files. But until Trump and Bondi comply with the Act’s provisions, we must not relent! Protesters should continue to highlight the need for full disclosure. The American people are on the side of full transparency—an advantage that we should exploit to the fullest extent possible! Keep up the good work! A three-judge panel invalidates racially gerrymandered districts in Texas Tuesday also brought a stunning victory against the Texas legislature’s attempt to create racially gerrymandered districts that favor Trump. Over the summer, Trump ordered the Texas legislature to engage in mid-census gerrymandering to create five “safe” Republican seats in Congress. Texas complied in an ugly process in which Texas legislators made no effort to conceal their racial animus in creating new districts. On Tuesday, a three-judge panel ruled that Texas illegally used race to create five new districts and ordered that Texas revert to the congressional district lines that existed prior to the illegal gerrymander. In finding that the Texas legislature engaged in racial gerrymandering, the three-judge panel relied on a DOJ letter that was key to the redistricting process. In the letter, the DOJ did not express the need for partisan gerrymandering (which is legal), but instead raised concerns about the racial makeup of the targeted districts. See Chris Geinder, Law Dork (Substack), Court blocks Texas redistricting, finding it likely unconstitutional, with DOJ largely to blame. The three-judge panel voted 2 to 1 to invalidate the racially gerrymandered districts, with a Trump appointee voting in the majority. The majority noted that Governor Greg Abbott disclaimed partisan motives, but instead highlighted the role of race in creating the districts: When given an opportunity to publicly proclaim that his motivation for adding redistricting to the legislative agenda was solely to improve Republicans’ electoral prospects at President Trump’s request, the Governor denied any such motivation. Instead, the Governor expressly stated that his predominant motivation was racial: he “wanted to remove . . . coalition districts” and “provide more seats for Hispanics.” The fact that the racially reconfigured districts would happen to favor Republicans was, to paraphrase the Governor’s own words, just a fortuitous coincidence. Texas has already appealed the ruling to the US Supreme Court. Based on the Court’s current jurisprudence, it should uphold the ruling of the three-judge panel. There many moving parts here. The Supreme Court could reverse the ruling of the three-judge panel, saying that it occurs “too close” to the 2026 midterms. If the Supreme Court so rules, that rationale should also protect California’s newly created districts. There are other scenarios in which the Supreme Court could invalidate the Texas districts while leaving the California districts in place, which would mean that Trump’s “redistricting strategy” had backfired against him. That is a low probability outcome, but Trump is on a losing streak. Stay tuned! “Things happen.” Trump met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House on Tuesday. The post-meeting press conference in the Oval Office was a thing of ugliness. ABC White House correspondent Mary Bruce asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: “And your royal highness, the U.S. intelligence concluded that you orchestrated the brutal murder of a journalist. 9/11 families are furious that you are here in the Oval Office. Why should Americans trust you, and the same to you, Mr. President?” Trump jumped in to answer before MBS could respond. Sounding like a mob boss commenting on someone who (allegedly) committed suicide by jumping through a sealed window on the 10th floor of an abandoned building, Trump commented on the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by saying, “Things happen.” To remove all doubt about his meaning, Trump said, “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about.” The “thing” that happened to Jamal Khashoggi was gruesome beyond telling. The details are summarized in this separate document, taken from the Wikipedia entry, Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi - Wikipedia. After saying that “things happen” to people who aren’t “liked,” Trump said that MBS “knew nothing” about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s statement contradicts the findings of his own CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, both of which concluded that Khashoggi’s killers were directed by MBS. See Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Assessing the Saudi Government’s Role in the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi. (“We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”) Trump now describes the man deemed to be responsible for Khashoggi’s killing as a “great guy.” See The New Republic, Trump Freaks Out That MBS Might Be Embarrassed by Khashoggi Question. Kudos to Mary Bruce for asking a tough question that needed to be asked. Trump’s attack on Bruce and ABC was reprehensible. Trump said: It’s not the question that I mind. It’s your attitude. I think you are a terrible reporter. It’s the way you ask these questions. You start off with a man who’s highly respected, asking him an insubordinate question. Trump returned to ABC later in the press availability, saying I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake and it’s so wrong. And we have a great (FCC) commissioner, the chairman, who should look at that because I think when you come in and you’re 97% negative to Trump. And then Trump wins the election in a landslide. That means, obviously, your news is not credible. And you’re not credible as a reporter. Trump’s attack on Mary Bruce comes five days after Trump verbally attacked a female reporter during a press availability on Air Force One. The reporter, Catherine Lucey from Bloomberg News, asks Trump about the release of the Epstein files. In response, Trump thrusts his finger toward her face and says, “Quiet. Quiet Piggy.” See video embedded here: President Donald Trump Tells Female Reporter ‘Quiet, Piggy’ Trump’s attack on reporters, especially female reporters, is consistent with everything we know about his propensity for degrading and assaulting women. Coming on a day when Trump suggested that “things happen” to reporters who are “not liked,” the verbal attacks on reporters are threats that should be rebuked by every member of Congress, including Republicans. Trump’s lavish reception for Mohammed bin Salman and his eagerness to protect MBS from questions about his complicity in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi shamed America, once again. I look forward to the day when honorable men and women reestablish America as a force for good on the global stage. It cannot come soon enough! Concluding Thoughts The newsletter is a bit shorter this evening because I began to write it before attending the fundraiser for Latino Victory and Onward Together, featuring Heather Cox Richardson, Hillary Clinton, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. While I was at the event, the news cycle upended itself, so I rewrote most of the newsletter upon returning to our hotel room after the event. Ah, well! Such is the fate of news commentary in the Age of the Fifteen-Minute News Cycle. The event was fabulous for many reasons, but especially so because I was able to greet hundreds of readers! It is always uplifting and confidence-inspiring to meet readers who are committed to our common cause. Bless you all for the work you do, and for supporting the event! (A recording of the event will be available; details tomorrow.) It was a treat to see Heather Cox Richardson skillfully moderate a discussion between Hillary Clinton and Lin-Manuel Miranda. There were many memorable exchanges, but I was struck by the emphasis that HCR, HRC, and Lin-Manuel placed on viewing this moment through the lens of history. We are living through a difficult moment in our history. As a people, we have lived through moments more perilous for democracy and dangerous for Americans. That doesn’t lessen the seriousness of the challenges we face. But it should fill us with confidence that we can endure this moment of crisis, as our predecessors endured prior crises. Our task is to continue the fight long enough for the next generation to relieve us in the defense of democracy. If we can do that, we will honorably discharge our debt to those who delivered us safely to this moment with democracy intact. We can do that. We are doing that. The victories of the last two weeks should give us confidence that we can continue to do so. We won’t win every battle. We don’t need to. We need only win most of them, over time. That is the lesson that history teaches us: Abide. Endure. Do not quit. Talk to you tomorrow! Pro-democracy protest photos: Northridge, CA: On 11/16/25, Northridge Indivisible and the Northridge Patriots held a Raising Canes rally to raise awareness about cuts to Medicare, Medi-Cal, and Social Security. The Northridge Patriots are a group of senior citizens at The Village at Northridge, an assisted living facility. Participants’ ages ranged from 67 to nearly 100 years old, and then some younger people joined. Indivisible, San Jose, CA Charlotte, NC Many of us in Charlotte have been inspired by you all for months as we have grown our protest movement of weekly protests. We now protest at ~25 locations including three highway overpasses. With ICE/CBP newly arrived in Charlotte our protest crowds have grown, so that today we had 60 on the bridge. On Sunday we had 100+ where we normally have a couple dozen. Our Saturday “Signs of Fascism” walk was well received. National Cemetery, Cape Cod, MA Saturday, Nov 15. Cold. A battalion of volunteers bundled up while collecting grave flags. 77,000+ flags removed over the 5-acre hallowed grounds site. A solemn day. Daily Dose of Perspective The Pelican Nebula, undated from my files, taken from my backyard in Los Angeles, CA. Located 1,800 light-years from Earth in the Cygnus Constellation. 1 PROHIBITED GROUNDS FOR WITHHOLDING— (1) No record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary. © PERMITTED WITHHOLDINGS.— (1) The Attorney General may withhold or redact the segregable portions of records that— (A) contain personally identifiable information of victims or victims’ personal and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy; (B) depict or contain child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) as defined under 18 U.S.C. 2256 and prohibited under 18 U.S.C. 2252– 2252A; © would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, provided that such withholding is NARROWLY TAILORED AND TEMPORARY; (D) depict or contain images of death, physical abuse, or injury of any person; or (E) contain information specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive order. (2) All redactions must be accompanied by a written justification published in the Federal Register and submitted to Congress. (3) To the extent that any covered information would otherwise be redacted or withheld as classified information under this section, the Attorney General shall declassify that classified information to the maximum extent possible. [NOTE: The bolding and capitalization are mine, for emphasis.] From Today’s Edition Newsletter via this RSS feed