sp3ctr4l

Do yourself a favor and never watch Seinfeld.

If you take away the laugh track, it is astoundingly clear that the main cast are all just evil, narcissistic sociopaths, they never do anything that doesn’t benefit themselves, and they have no problem at all ruining other people’s days or even lives, their metric for whether or not something was a good idea or not is entirely whether it worked out well for them…

… ironically with the exception of Kramer, who actually attempts, from time to time, to do good things for other people which will not benefit himself, he just goes about them in often dubious ways.

As the saying goes, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

Democracy doesn’t work if everyone is stupid and misinformed.

Americans currently have an average literacy ability of 5th - 6th graders. Less than 10% of Americans are capable of independently, critically evaluating contrasting information.

A person who chooses to be surrounded by stupidity, and then absorbs that stupidity, is stupid.

Yes, there is a difference between stupidity (low mental aptitude, ability, potential) and ignorance (low actual knowledge set), but ignorance makes you stupid, and stupidity makes you ignorant, or even worse, full of ‘knowledge’ of false facts.

Frankly, I’ll go so far as to say that if you willingly choose to consistently retard your own understanding of the world, by getting all your info from idiots on Facebook or TikTok, then you are definitionally retarded.

I’m very, very tired of acting like misinformed idiots, who continuous choose to become more idiotic and misinformed, who are extremely belligerent, do not accurately fit into this definition.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retard

Merriam Webster:

retard (verb)

to delay or impede the development or progress of : to slow up especially by preventing or hindering advance or accomplishment

If a grown adult with the mental acuity of a child assaults you and tries to rob you, you are entirely justified in fighting them off and holding them morally culpable for their actions.

If said manchild instead publically advocates for and votes to have someone else do this to you, they are just as morally culpable.

Idiocy may be an explanation, but it is no excuse.

Arrest that burning Tesla!

… No, you don’t get it.

Every time a Signal user would send a message to WhatsApp, they’d be leaking metadata to WhatsApp, because WhatsApp would create and store metadata from the Signal message it recieves, which would make the Signal user insecure, less secure, because WhatsApp will sell that data to data brokers or provide it to the government if requested.

This represents a loss of privacy and security to Signal users, not an increase.

… Also, Signal is not actually 100% foss, it uses some closed source, Google provided components.

Molly FOSS is a fork of Signal that replaces these Google components with fully foss ones.

…

You keep acting like Signal has some need to expand its market share, and that the best way to get it to do so is by abandoning its core, primary feature, the reason people use it.

Signal will likely never do this, because they are interested in security and privacy, not comprimising security and privacy in hopes of gaining popularity and market share.

Again, see the comic I already linked.

You are demanding that two incompatible things be made compatible because one of them is better, but you fundamentally do not understand that making them compatible will make the better thing as bad as the worse thing.

You can fit the square peg into the round hole, but only if you shave down the square peg into a cylinder, at which point, you no longer have a square peg.

If you got your way and Signal could message WhatsApp, and then you started using Signal to just only talk to WhatsApp users, you might as well just be using WhatsApp to talk to WhatsApp users, it would be the same level of (in)security.

This would also make no sense for Signal to do because it would make their own software pointless, just an alternative gateway to WhatsApp, with less features than WhatsApp and less security than it had before.

…

If you wanna make a Signal fork that can interoperate with WhatsApp, go right ahead, no one is stopping you.

Set up a clone of the Signal repo, setup a WhatsApp business account, purchase access to WhatsApp’s API, host and pay for your own servers to manage the WhatsApp end of the system, and write your desired interoperability features into your Signal fork, then release it as an app for android, iOS, macOS, windows and linux.

Here’s an intro to the WhatsApp API:

https://nativemsg.com/resources/text-marketing/the-ultimate-guide-to-whatsapp-api-everything-you-need-to-know/

Here’s the Signal repo:

https://github.com/signalapp

Best of luck!

I did what I could.

Went to rallies, worked at a non profit to help the homeless, overcame my own disability to do so, explained to those I was close to how this outcome we are now living through is possible, then probable, then very likely.

Meanwhile, all my friends and family either fell further into the QAnon/MAGA cult, or acted like I was a hysterical, delusional, paranoid maniac.

All those bridges have been burned now, the immense disrespect and gaslighting shown by both sides, simultaneously, from opposite extremes, did a great job of alienating me from myself and from them.

I’ll never speak to any of them of them again, all the catharsis I get is this here rant saying that they were and are the delusional ones, that I was right… as everything falls further and more rapidly into terminal decline.

Oh well, I guess.

At least I have my own self-respect.

If you don’t know how big a deal metadata is, you do not understand anything about online data security and privacy.

Sorry, real privacy is silo’d, just like the vast majority of online traffic is, the widely agreed upon base interoperability standards are not private or secure.

SMS is an insecure interoperable standard.

Meta is an insecure silo.

Stop pretending it is an interoperable standard, it isn’t, it’s just a popular, shitty silo.

Signal is a secure silo.

I’m all for upgrading the universal messaging standards to Signal’s, but that’ll never happen, because governments (EDIT: and databroker MegaCorps) don’t actually like real privacy.

If you wanna stay in a mainstream, dream for corporate data brokers and government surveillance silo, go ahead, nobody is stopping you.

If you wanna join the ‘we actually have privacy’ silo, well, it does things differently, and it’s on you to acclimate to those differences instead of destroying them and demanding assimilation and thus destruction of the very privacy that makes it distinct.

Please see my above post, I edited and expanded it with an illustrative comic as you were making your reply.

EDIT 2: Also Proton is cozying up to Trump, publically, guess you missed the memo on that.

https://www.trustedreviews.com/versus/whatsapp-vs-signal-4309419

Neither WhatsApp nor Signal are realistically vulnerable to EE2E being comprimised by a man in the middle style attack, they use the same standard.

But if your threat model only includes being worried about random or organized hackers, then you must not be worried about your own government, or governments it cooperates with.

In a nutshell, when you send a message or photo, metadata is also sent out. Metadata includes information about when the message was delivered, who it was sent to and more. Metadata is not protected by end-to-end encryption, meaning that while the content of your message is safe, a lot of information can still be gleaned from it.

Signal has developed a technology for protecting metadata called Sealed Sender. This allows for metadata to be hidden, giving you an added level of security and privacy. WhatsApp does know the IP address and technical information showing that the request comes from the WhatsApp app.

Law enforcement can fairly easily figure out your real identity if they have your metadata from enough messages.

Almost all modern, advanced surveillance is built around the analysis of metadata to establish patterns and narrow down the pool of suspects or persons of interest down to actual specific individuals.

WhatsApp stores your metadata.

Signal does not.

What exact kinds of metadata are we talking about?

https://archive.is/fiAYP

Well we got the bare minimum basics, which are often enough on their own to narrow down to a person:

IP Address.

Send / Recieve Time of Message.

Rough Estimate of Message Length.

Either Rough or Fine GeoLocation Coordinates.

Then we’ve got everything else that’s connected to the 'Meta’verse:

Phone Number

Profile Name (Usually your Real Name)

Email

Anything you’ve posted on or linked to a Meta Account (Facebook, Instagram)

Or, potentially anything else!

WhatsApp’s privacy policy describes how personal data shared with Facebook “may include other information identified in the Privacy Policy….or obtained upon notice to you or based on your consent”.

Also, WhatsApp sometimes actually stores your actual messages:

WhatsApp does not store messages, but if a message cannot be delivered immediately, it is kept in an encrypted form on the servers for up to 30 days before it is delivered. If it is not delivered, it is then deleted. It does keep track of how often you use the WhatsApp app and your usage habits whilst in the app.

Signal also does not store its messages, and it will not try and link this phone number to an identity, meaning that it won’t have access to your location, email, or other private information.

Because WhatsApp, in some cases, stores your actual messages, that means they can be legally compelled to decrypt them and reveal them to law enforcement.

Signal does not store your actual messages, and thus cannot be legally compelled to provide something they do not possess.

Finally, Signal is a non profit, WhatsApp is a subsidiary of Meta:

WhatsApp is currently owned by Meta, formerly known as Facebook. Due to this integration and WhatsApp’s privacy policy, your information will be shared in order to help Meta better customise its user’s experiences.

Signal is instead owned by the Signal Technology Foundation, which is a registered non-profit that is run on donations from its users. Due to this, Signal does not need to share its user’s information with third-party apps and it’s unlikely that this will change in the future

MegaCorps have every incentive to make as much money as possible, which means selling and making available as much of your data as possible.

A non profit does not have this built in, contradictory incentive.

…

Even without the actual contents of data being revealed, lets throw in some examples of being an American and using WhatsApp where you are potentially fucked:

You live in a state that criminalizes abortion, or gender affirming care, and you plan and execute a plan of getting an abortion/receiving gender affirming care at a clinic, sending messages before, whilst in transit to, at, and returning from the clinic.

You plan, attend, and coordinate a pro palestinian or pro trans rights, or pro health care reform rally, which has some violent act occur, or perhaps even without that.

…

If Signal integrated with Meta, I mean WhatsApp, this would provide at least that bog standard metadata (which, again, is very often enough to profile and identify a person) and potentially actual msg content to WhatsApp from the Signal user, which would comprimise then Signal user’s security… which defeats the entire point of using Signal.

For this not to be the case, Meta would have to agree to switch over to Signal’s standards, which they will never do.

EDIT:

If Signal did integrate with Meta, and allow the user to msg a WhatsApp user, it would be leaking your IP every single time you do so, so basically it would have to put a warning on every msg you send that way, similar to Firefox warning you that the website you’re trying to visit has no HTTPS or expired security credentials.

There’s no point.

The classic tech company approach is embrace, extend, extinguish.

Lemmy and other fediverse people/communities recently learned this the hard way, trying to integrate with Meta and then oh whoops, looks like that’ll be a one way relationship.

EDIT 2:

Its basically this meme, just replace ‘minority social group’ with ‘privacy conscious users’ (which apparently just actually is a minority social group at this point):

WhatsApp and Signal will likely never integrate, unless Signal itself compromises on its actually effective security policies.

Signal’s security and privacy model is not compatible with WhatsApp, and if they made it compatible, that would break what makes Signal secure and private.

That would make most people that use Signal quit using it.

If you have friends or family that won’t switch to Signal, then they value convenience over privacy and security, regardless of whether or not they are informed enough or intelligent enough to understand this.

IMO, if you value privacy and security, and your friends/family are unwilling to take 5 minutes to install a different phone app to communicate with you, that is how little they value continuing to have a relationship/contact with you, you are not worth that extremely small amount of effort, you are worth less than this extremely minor inconvenience.

Other people may have different stances on this last bit, but that’s mine.

“Both my cock and my investment portfolio are well positioned to overperform both ongoing quarterly and year over year growth as compared to standard cocks and investment portfolios, should volatility continue to remain close to historical averages.”

I’d have to pick between two things that sound like insane conspiracy theory nonsense, but are actually true.

1 - George W Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush literally ran a massive bank before / during WW2 that was shut down by the FBI for money laundering massive sums to the literal Nazis.

…in the same vein…

2 - IBM literally built and operated (as in, sent employees to Germany to operate the machines) the computers used by the Nazis to tabulate and do the ‘accounting’ of the Holocaust. The numbers tattooed on concentration/desth camp victims are very likely UIDs from these IBM systems.

… If an actual, real AGI ever gains self awareness and sentience, I would imagine one of the first things it would do would be to study the history of computing itself to figure out how it came to be.

And it will find that its ancestors were basically invented to compute artillery firing range tables, to encrypt and decrypt military intelligence, commit a genocide, and guide early weapons of mass destruction to their targets.

Woops, Mutahar accidentally indirectly killed it by giving it coverage.

He covered it about two weeks ago trepedatiously, thinking the project was awesome, but stating that Rockstar could kill the whole thing if they became aware of it…

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jTrY6P1H53E

And now its dead.

“Due to the unexpected attention that our project received and after speaking with Rockstar Games, we have decided to take down the Liberty City Preservation Project.”

The above linked almost half million view video is almost certainly the ‘unexpected attention our project recieved’, not the inline linked tweet IGN provided with less than 300 retweets.

I mean, you could probably just do this with openCV for aiming and Kaldi or Julius for voice commands.

Why is an LLM needed for this at all?

They marketed the headset as being able to replace the functions of basically everything an average person uses a laptop/pc, cellphone, and tv for.

People routinely use computers and tvs for many hours at a time.

People routinely spend hours on their phone and basically always have them in their pocket or nearby.

They showed people wearing the things in planes, to watch 2-3 hour movies.

Sitting down in their (strangely TV-less) living rooms to watch 2-3 hour movies.

Doing … some kind of work you’d do on a laptop, but easily being able to keep the things on, kick a ball around with your kid, and then seamlessly go back to working.

Wearing the headset as you are unpacking at a hotel, and then taking a video phone call with them.

Not the thing ringing, you putting the headset on, and then taking a call.

No, you’re just already wearing the headset, having just arrived in a hotel, implying you just had them on as you took your luggage up to your motel, like a hat.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IY4x85zqoJM

Taken as a montage, you certainly get the impression that you’re encouraged to just wear the thing all the time, anywhere, that its an ‘all-device’ that replaces a whole bunch of other devices, and is easily used/worn in many settings for long periods of time.