They might be academics, but definitely not scientists

Just give me a Linux client for proton drive please. I’m tired of manually uploading/downloading files 😐

I guess the idea is (make of that what you want):

• Usenet is not illegal by itself (but well, same goes for torrenting)
• As long as law enforcement doesn’t get its hands on the server it can’t tell what you download, as long as you use TLS (no VPN required, but doesn’t hurt either)
• But even if: Usenet providers (hopefully) don’t keep logs of what you downloaded, so for all we know you just paid the provider to download actual news/Linux ISOs?
• But even if they do: You are not uploading anything -> you are probably less interesting to law enforcement and they might just ignore you (especially if you use some payment method that might require going through some extra steps to link it to you as a person)

I use ChatGPT sometimes to give me a pointer in what directions I could go/research more for a given problem. But if I ever take the code provided by it, I need to review it line by line and half the time it doesn’t even compile anyway. At this point it’s just a helper to suggest to me what to google for and then I do the rest😅

Just relax and make some tea at 4:18 :) No coffee though!

Honestly I would probably just stop using YouTube altogether if I was forced to use it unmodified.

My takeaway is more like: This one almost made it through and was caught by accident. How much more backdoors actually were not caught and made it through? I would bet some money on it being more than 0 :(

I guess it is impossible to say what would have happened if Google never used XMPP. To me it mostly looks like google joined XMPP and made it way bigger than it was before and eventually left it again, making it small again. But is it worse than before Google even joined?

Maybe, but can we say for sure?

Maybe the lesson is not “don’t let the big corporate players in”, but rather “make sure the development of the underlying protocol itself is done in an open way”. If Google/Meta adds proprietary extensions, just don’t add them to the main protocol. If they leave the protocol again or changed their implementation in a way that is largely incompatible with the open version, nothing is lost than what they brought in initially. Doesn’t that make sense?

I’m actually curious about “Embrace Extend Extinguish”: What can they do? They “extend” the ActivityPub protocol in a proprietary way, ok. Doesn’t mean any other instance has to use that, no? Ok, that would mean if an instance doesn’t follow that extension, it can’t interact optimally with Threads, but how does it matter? To me it seems all that can be lost by that is the content/user base that Threads brings into the Fediverse and then we are at the same point as we would be if we defederated immediately. Maybe I’m missing something here?

But it couldn’t be easier to just set up a second remote, that isn’t GitHub with just vanilla Git, if you don’t trust Microsoft (Or even fully switching to a different remote). Why is there a need for something else in addition?

“Schrank” is not really a drawer. Translating it as “cupboard” would be more appropriate, I think.