Just a stranger trying things.

  • 3 Posts
  • 59 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • In the case of ente, they have gone above and beyond to give full control to their users of their backing up process and backed up media:

    • they provide a sync feature from ente to a local destination on your computer using the desktop app. It can run continuously to reflect all changes to your media and its organization in ente.
    • they provide a CLI, so that you can program and implement your own export behavior it seems.

    To me, it really shows they care about the users and do their best to avoid vendor lock-in.

    And I personally feel much more confident in a company when their business model is a paid one. I’m a very happy customer, I have also convinced multiple people who seem happy too.


  • I will always remember my first experience using MacOS: I am comfortable with computers and a relative needed help with their recently purchased macbook. I had plugged in a USB stick to transfer some files and was done and wanted to eject it. I spent way too much time than I care to admit, trying all possible options, right-clicks, settings, everything imaginable, to eject the damn thing.

    It was impossible to me to find the simplest operation with a USB stick, something required to operate it. I capitulated and looked online. The solution? I had to drag and drop the USB stick icon into the trashcan!?!?!?

    To this day, I will never understand the absolute ridicule of this and I will never comprehend how anyone is expected to figure it out on their own. And this is from the OS touted as the most user friendly and intuitive. Go figure.

    Edit: this was a long while back, no idea how it is nowadays.



  • Same, I rocked a second hand GTx 680 from 2012-2013, which I upgraded to a second hand RTX 3060 12GB for a fantastic price, in 2024. Still rocking a DDR3 platform with the intel i7 4400K. And that’s more than enough for most games with nice graphics on 1680x1050 :) (display probably 15 years old too). Eventually, I will be looking for some other second hand components to upgrade the rest of the system, but it does everything more than well enough.









  • Dude, I had been using the default keyboard from GrapheneOS since I couldn’t find a decent keyboard and gave up on swiping all together. I had heard about the futo keyboard but was unaware how mature it is. I installed it and set it up. I am very pleased! It has a lot of settings, and while the swiping isn’t perfect yet, I can actually feel like it’s learning from my usage. Very encouraging and it really brings me joy.

    The Google keyboard was the best for me, but this is really not far behind. Thank you FUTO! Will be donating <3



  • It’s unfortunate that you react like this. I don’t claim to be an expert, never have. I’ve only been asking for evidence, but all we get to are assumptions and they all seem to stem from the fact that allegedly the CIA has indirectly funded Signal (I’m not disputing nor validating it).

    The concern is valid, and it has caused a lot of distrust in many companies due to the Snowden leaks, but that distrust is founded in the leaks. But so far there is no evidence that Signal is part of any of it. And given the continued endorsement by security experts, I’m inclined in trusting them.



  • They have to know who the message needs to go to, granted. But they don’t have to know who the message comes from, hence why the sealed sender technique works. The recipient verifies the message via the keys that are exchanged if they have been communicating with that correspondent before or else it is a new message request.

    So I don’t see how they can build social graphs if they don’t know who the sender if all messages are, they can only plot recipients which is not enough.


  • If you open the latest instance, from August 2024, you will find a California government request, for a number of phone numbers.

    The second paragraph of that very page says:

    Once again, Signal doesn’t have access to your messages; your calls; your chat list; your files and attachments; your stories; your groups; your contacts; your stickers; your profile name or avatar; your reactions; or even the animated GIFs you search for – and it’s impossible to turn over any data that we never had access to in the first place.

    They respond to the request with the following information:

    1. The responsive information that Signal possessed was:

    a. REDACTED: Most Recent Registration: 2023-01-31 T19:42:10 UTC; Most Recent Login: 2023-01-31 T00:00:00 UTC.

    b. REDACTED: Most Recent Registration: 2022-06-01 T16:30:01UTC; Most Recent Login: 2022-12-12 T00:00:00 UTC.

    c. REDACTED: Most Recent Registration 2021-12-02T03:42:09 UTC; Most Recent Login: 2022-12-28 T00:00:00 UTC.

    The redacted values are the phone numbers.

    That is the full extent of their reply. No other information is provided, to the government request.



  • and requires phone numbers (meaning your real identity in the US).

    This gets shared a lot as a major concern for all services requiring a phone number. It is definitely true that by definition, a phone number is linked to a person’s identity, but in the case of signal, no other information can be derived from it. When the US government requests data for that phone number from Signal, like they occasionally do, the only information Signal provides them with is whether they do have a signal account and when they registered it last and when they last signed in. How is that truly problematic? For all other services which require a phone number, you would have much more information which is where it is truly problematic, say social graph, text messages, media, locations, devices etc. But none of that is accessible by Signal. So literally the only thing signal can say is whether the person has an account, that’s about it. What’s the big deal about it? Clearly the US government already has your phone number because they need it to make the request for Signal, but they gain absolutely no other information.