Authorities don’t need to ask Signal for metadata; Signal promises they don’t log any themselves and that is probably true.

But, they outsource their server operation to Jeff Bezos, and then they do some absurd security theater to pretend that cryptography makes it so that the server (Amazon) couldn’t possibly log metadata - which is obviously false.

How to install Linux on a dead badger (written in 2004, might not work with modern distributions)

that is a publication of DI, who are proponents of ID 😂

thanks for the heads up that they’re in the AI commentary business now 🤡

today: “Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov told parliament that the Commission president’s plane had not been disrupted but had only experienced a partial signal interruption, the kind typically seen in densely populated areas. […] But just hours later, the government again changed its position, with Zhelyazkov holding an impromptu news conference early afternoon to revert the official line to the electronic warfare happening in Ukraine once again.”

This blog post has some details about the bad reporting around this story (claiming they used paper maps, and that they were circling for an hour) but it ultimately does agree that the “some issue with the GPS” reported by the pilot (the post includes radio recordings from the air and again from the ground after landing where the pilot says “GPS issues”) must in fact be some type of GPS interference.

Meanwhile flightradar24 says “Yes, and we’re also saying there is no evidence of spoofing. There are numerous issues that could have affected the crew’s ability to perform a GPS-based approach that aren’t related to jamming or spoofing.”

🤷

ADS-B is quite far away from GPS frequencies, so yeah.

ADS-B packets include coordinates from GPS as well as several values related to the estimated accuracy of said coordinates (which is how flightradar24 is reporting that they had good GPS signal throughout the flight).

We Need To Talk About “Authoritarianism”

with BlueSky I’d have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes

I think this is a common misconception based on some critics’ incorrect assumptions and back-of-the-envelope math. See the atproto overview for the different components involved, and then this post (from a BlueSky employee) “A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month” for some numbers.

If I understand correctly, to run a “full nework relay” does mean to consume all of the text posts from all known servers, but not necessarily all of the media, and not necessarily to keep data you aren’t interested in for any long period of time.

Also, you can run your own PDS and/or App Views without running your own relay at all. And, you can also use multiple other people’s relays.

Disclaimer: I’m not an atproto expert, and I haven’t set any of this up myself.

Flight24 indicates that there was a strong GPS signal throughout the flight. Is there some other type of signal which you think they jammed instead of GPS?

you’re suggesting they jammed the pilots’ GPS but not the transponder’s?

The blog post also says this:

There is one other thing which Bluesky gets right, and which the present-day fediverse does not. This is that Bluesky uses content-addressed content, so that content can survive if a node goes down. In this way (well, also allegedly with identity, but I will critique that part because it has several problems), Bluesky achieves its “credible exit” (Bluesky’s own term, by the way) in that the main node or individual hosts could go down, posts can continue to be referenced. This is possible to also do on the fediverse, but is not done presently; today, a fediverse user has to worry a lot about a node going down. indeed I intentionally fought for and left open the possibility within ActivityPub of adding content-addressed posts, and several years ago I wrote a demo of how to combine content addressing with ActivityPub. But nonetheless, even though such a thing is spec-compatible with ActivityPub, content-addressing is not done today on ActivityPub, and is done on Bluesky.

My comment should have been clearer; what I meant when i said it is more “decentralized architecturally” I was referring to the data model part of the architecture as opposed to the physical server infrastructure currently operating it. The latter is obviously quite centralized still, but the former is designed for resilience against nodes unexpectedly (and permanently) failing.

Flightradar24 says “The aircraft’s transponder reported good GPS signal quality from take-off to landing” 🤔

(via)

ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀

It’s a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.

otoh, atproto’s PLC DID method is also not really decentralized… but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.

To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).

Makes me curious as to what happened here

You can see the deleted comments in the modlog. There is also a thread for discussing the deletions in this thread here.

i looked into other services with did got an llm to put those ideas in the required format for the issue. Can you please point out the hallucinations in the issue so i can go and fix them

No. Asking other people to read (and now also to correct!) your LLM slop is extremely inconsiderate. Please don’t do that again.

in the computing context, “lock-in” is shorthand for vendor lock-in.

How exactly do they hope to lock devs in github??? That’s absurd, there’s no way they can achieve that. I can always take my projects elsewhere and there’s nothing they can do to stop me.

I can’t tell if you’re joking? If not, what do you think “lock-in” actually means?

It doesn’t mean that it is impossible to leave, it means that there is substantial switching cost. And, that is certainly the case for github-hosted projects: all active contributors need to make a new account somewhere else, issues and discussions need to be migrated, CI workflows typically need to be rewritten, and good luck finding something that gives as much free compute for CI as github does. Yes, it’s easy to mirror a git repo onto another service, but github is much much more than just git repo hosting and each of their features have their own switching cost.

Also, OP actually said “lock devs in” rather than “lock projects in” - I actually am forced to have a github account if i want to contribute to projects which refuse to move their issues off of it 😢 … and the difficulty in creating new accounts anonymously these days prevents me from contributing to several things (lemmy, for instance) which i otherwise would.

here is the full res version of the image, via the author’s 2019 twitter thread… where there was also this important update two years later:

this other post “A Marine Biologist Ranks Shark Emojis” covers some of the same and also some other ones

regarding metadata on Signal