A lot of us “do the bare minimum” do the bare minimum because of all of the time in the past we spent going the extra mile only to be rewarded with ever greater expectations for identical compensation and opportunity.
Or in my case, get singled out by a manager from another department for no reason, who then gaslights the other managers into thinking I don’t do shit when I’m the only person in my section that even does anything at all. Go through the whole “try to make them quit” playbook but never do anything wrong so they can’t fire me. I would have outlasted all those fuckers if circumstance hadn’t forced me to move out of state.
Pretty sure they just wanted to eliminate my full-time position to save money.
Spoken like a real android user. All my iPhone friends (and especially family) refuse to download any other app, they just complain that I physically can’t download iChat.
I don’t have time to respond to everything, so I’ll just respond to the first one- which is that it’s tankie copium. I don’t deny the Signal Foundation might be taking money from government groups- I believe it is. But looking at the groups its pretty clear what it is, Radio Free Asia, as in the Asia branch of Radio Free Europe. Aka, their goal is to make people living in US adversaries rebel. The US does not censor private communication, it would be very quickly found out if I sent a text to my friend and they couldn’t receive it, or I was sent to jail for the content of that speech.(That’s not to say its not spied on though.) However, in many(most?) US adversaries there is active censorship of opposition communication, the US generally(although not always) supports the opposition by nature of them being the opposition- this is why(if you believe the narrative that everything is a cabal of the powerful) US tech companies supported the Arab Spring. This is why Radio Free Europe broadcast in support of Dubček and the Prague Spring, why they also supported the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. All that is just to say the US can follow the narrative of being 100% power seeking while still supporting open communication platforms. (After all, the US government also either directly created or contributed to SHA-2, Tor, and Ghidra too) And, Signal is open source, read the code and network traffic yourself, they won’t remove encryption for US allies.
That doesn’t mean they’re immune to criticism, they may be able to explain it, but I personally probably wouldn’t donate to an organization that has the money to pay part time developers $450,000 according to their Form 990, but its not my money so not my place to judge how its spent.
The part about “not reading private messages” I think is mistaken, or rather, maybe amiss. I mean I don’t have evidence, so this is all conjecture. The sophistication of data surveillance and data gathering makes the content of the message rather meaningless in my view.
EDIT: Oh, I don’t think any adversaries of US, even if working together, make any meaningful threat towards it. It’s really hard to imagine, esp. considering the US has a bunch of successful coups & stuff under their belt.
I wasn’t saying the US doesn’t spy on private messages, I was saying Signal is open source so it would be hard to hide a back door. So I don’t see how any other E2E encrypted messages could be more secret then Signal. I guess obfuscating the messaging servers.
The sophistication of data surveillance and data gathering makes the content of the message rather meaningless in my view.
That’s a fair point but I don’t know if there’s any other good solution to that.
yeah i’m rethinking some stuff too, even in some utopia i think some information related to me might make life inconvenient, so the best way to protect that (e.g. not disclosing it digitally) maybe needs outta the box solutions.
related, does anyone even bother to look at physical mail for stuff? like if i put a cipher in a letter with no return address, using that pen ink that you can erase (which comes back if you put it in a freezer) and only i and my contact have the key to the cipher which we exchanged in-person; could anyone reasonably know it?
it seems digital stuff might be a carrot for surveillance people, maybe it can be made into a honeypot and physical or analog means can make a return.
I think finding novel ways to communicate with a specific person and not be monitored is easy. The difficulty is opening a new line of communication on an already monitored one, communicating to new people, and one of those new people not blabbing.
After all, if you play on a private Minecraft server and spell out text with dirt blocks, I don’t think anyone’s going to bother writing code to analyze your Minecraft network traffic.
GDPR deletion is nonexistent (it won’t delete your username or your messages, making it less effective than on Discord, let alone Signal)
… Etc.
Ironically, older federated messaging systems like XMPP might be better by coincidence. Message archiving was an optional addition and some servers, such as the popular Riseup one, do not implement it.
Yeah, fair. It can’t delete your messages to the extent a centralized system, and that’s an indication of the lack of centralized control? It’s a different threat model I think many find satisfying (though perhaps not most).
Meanwhile Matrix was built & funded by Israeli Intelligence (to which I’m sure there are anonymous donors today). It’s expensive replication model means only those with the deepest of pockets can run a server leading many to flock to the mother instance of Matrix.org centralizing, replicating the data to a single node (being decentralized in theory, not so much is practice). It’s funny to see them call out Signal, but luckily there are private, free alternatives to both.
Huh, would it be possible to provide a source? I might be bad at searching, I’m not finding anything…
EDIT: Ok I found one with some search operators. I can provide links, most were less trustworthy, I’d reserve judgement.
An organization which was initially responsible for Matrix, AMDOCS, is allegedly (I say allegedly since I didn’t confirm it to a reasonable extent) an organization based in Israel which appears to have products related to surveillance
By association, Matrix is tainted, perhaps it has sophisticated backdoors along with the other myriad of issues mentioned by other commenters
To give an alternative explanation with plausible hypotheses
An organization linked to intelligence surveillance, created and discarded software, which occurs with most software, and I would imagine occurs with software developed at an organization linked with surveillance as well (if it’s publicly funded, i.e. by a government, I’d lean into this)
Though suspect in origin, the amount of time the software has been independent, and with its open codebase, means any backdoors or other nefarious artifacts can be reasonably said not to exist
An organization linked to an intelligence agency would perhaps be the one to expect to have a secure messaging platform, one could imagine said organization would develop a solution in-house as even with software audits, they may not be certain of any external software which may itself be compromised by an antagonist or have vulnerabilities which they could not control
Some food for thought. I’m not one to jump to conclusions, I think claims require proportional evidence, and obviously my judgement isn’t the same as a security researcher or clandestine operator, so settling on what ‘appears’ to be true without proper investigation isn’t something I do.
Who is unsuspecting? I choose to use a iPhone because:
It is a closed ecosystem, a billion apps is enough for me. I wanted to be able to update the phone for many years I didn’t want to have preinstalled 3rd party bloatware I wanted a device that was less prone to malware
Android is a great OS, and it is better in some areas than iOS, but nothing particularly important to me.
Only Americans are concerned about green and blue bubbles. If it’s so upsetting to you, use WhatsApp. Don’t blame Apple because Google couldn’t standardise on a single messaging app for more than 5 minutes.
Using Google devices and pointing at Apple and saying “they’re evil, don’t use them” is laughable. They’re all bad companies, no organisation should be worth trillions.
I wanna throw in my 2 cents as I’m considering getting an iPhone after only ever using Android
Recently I’ve started noticing how much disrespect for your time and attention I’ve experienced on Android. It’s not so much Android itself, but the ecosystem around it:
A layer of bloatware from most major manufacturers
The Play Store and Samsung store trying their hardest to sell you some bullshit app with the most obnoxious clickbait banner.
My Samsung phone forcing me to install some random apps I don’t want with a prompt that I can’t dismiss.
Google or Samsung (I can’t remember which) trying to get me to agree to personalised ads by presenting it as if it’s a ‘we’ve updated our terms’ type prompt.
Google ads being generally annoying.
And more general malware-like behaviour trying to sell me shit. I don’t care.
I’m not my grandma who’s just going to blindly fall for whatever slight of hand that gets them 10c when I install some borderline malware app, it’s just annoying. I just want a phone that’s reasonably powerful, and works.
Android itself is great, and I’ve been able to improve the experience by using an ad blocker and f-droid where possible, but it’s rough. I can’t install a custom ROM as my banking apps don’t work if I do :////
I hate looking up to Apple as a solution here as they’re do a bunch of shitty things
I pretty much agree with all of that but wanted to add that when BlackBerry BB10 was discontinued (miss you, Z30) I had the option of Microsoft, Google or Apple. I chose the least bad of a poor bunch… The original monopolists or an ad-obsessed stalker were of no interest to me.
Open source projects do not grow by themselves. It requires serious effort from dedicated developers to develop and maintain applications as complicated as an emulator. Yuzu’s developers are banned from doing so and I don’t see how this incident could help bringing more developers.
I’m sure there will be developers capable enough to keep it working on new operating systems. Games that worked with it until now will keep on working, and that’s what matters to most people anyways. No need for major changes to the codebase.
I don’t think it’s diminishing the work of the Yuzu devs, but more so a strong belief in the capabilities of the open source community. They worked their asses off and are extremely talented, and I’m sure there are others who will hop in and carry the torch.
I’m also curious if there’s a programmatic way to circumvent the argument Nintendo made about bypassing DMCA by separating the emulator from the code that utilizes the keys such that you can use tool A to bypass DMCA, and tool B (Yuzu with game decryption removed) to run the circumvented game. In this case tool A already exists, and tool B could be a fork of Yuzu.
This is similar to how Tachiyomi forks can still exist. Even though tachiyomi never had a real case go to court, they’ve separated the extensions library from the reader so nothing comes “preloaded” with any potential copywrite infringing parts.
A permanent injunction is entered against Defendant enjoining it and its members, agents, servants, employees, independent contractors, successors, assigns, and all those acting in privity or under its control from:
a. Offering to the public, providing, marketing, advertising, promoting, selling, testing, hosting, cloning, distributing, or otherwise trafficking in Yuzu or any source code or features of Yuzu
IANAL but that sounds like the court is banning those developers from working on Yuzu. I mean, you can still try to work on project that is 90% Yuzu but with another name but I feel like your lawyer would advise against that.
Okay then what? Unless the devs try real hard to stay hidden, Nintendo’s lawyers will do a little bit of digging, they will find out who those pseudonyms are, and sue again. And this time the devs will be extremely lucky if they can get away with just paying out 2.4m because the law generally does not appreciate it very much when you try to ignore and avoid its previous rulings. A console emulator is absolutely not worth the potentially devastating legal consequences.
My rule at work has always been based around the bears and hikers analogy. You dont have to be the best at what you do. Just dont be the worst.
Also some jobs afford opportunities for non-conventional self-education. If you can learn useful personal or professional skills while at working, do it, and under the guise of work.
I do not want to risk an unnecessary ban, and I use an old official version anyway. Discord gives a lot of “freedom” as far as information and insight into internet social activity goes.
This time it won’t be based in Jersey either good luck closing down a project hosted in China or San Marino. The Yuzu team has done a great service closing the case as quickly as possible
Not necessarily. The LLC will pay out as much as it can and then filler for bankruptcy. The individuals will likely get off scott free since they’ve not actually been convicted of any wrongdoing.
I imagine that developing Yuzu and Citra would be a huge item on their CVs, too. Honestly, if Nintendo were smart, they would have tried to buy the project somehow and hire the developers to work on backwards compatibility for whatever the console that comes after the Switch 2 is…
This made me wonder if blockchain tech could, hypothetically, be used as a sort of distributed SCM platform, where each commit is stored as data appended to a transaction, not unlike git. Blockchain’s polycentric structure would solve the issue of resilience and integrity, and Monero’s technology could be used to anonymize the commits.
This would of course come with all of the disadvantages of blockchain, and the project would still need a central authority to accept or reject commits, to manage branches, and to define which transactions represent the HEAD of each branch. I think it’s at least an interesting concept.
But we can already mirror a git repository, and you can already sign your commits. The weak point here was the developers’ identities, not the platform on which the data was hosted.
Right? It seems the official discord also had links to where to get ROMs, as in pirated ROMs. I can’t believe they got complacent knowing Nintendo could come after them at any second.
It is working. It buys them enough time to sell enough new hardware and games. It will take a really long time until development picks up again, since basically every developer associated (not necessarily every one who has contributed to the project) with the yuzu group can no longer legally work on that project. So basically a lot of expertise is lost.
Although i think the need and the drive to use emulators is higher then ever. So the next project without direct responsibility will come eventually I think.
It’d be pretty great if an entire generation referred to this phenomenon as the Nintendo Yuzu Effect instead of the Streisand Effect. Or maybe the YouTube Adblock Effect? These companies keep accidentally telling everybody about shit that is relatively unknown yet universally desired in order to not have to pay exploitative prices. Even early Switch games are still fucking impossible to find for less than their launch price. And actually, now that I think about it, the MSRP of the Switch itself still hasn’t dropped either. It costs just as much today as it did 7 goddamn years ago to legally buy a Switch, BotW, and Mario Odyssey. Nintendo’s greed is the reason Switch piracy was ever big enough to be worth chasing, and now chasing it will cause an even bigger boom in it. Well, that and their shitty controllers. I don’t blame anybody for wanting to play BotW with an Xbox controller on their last-gen PC.
Nah keep it Streisand effect, as that’s where the term originated, if we changed phrases every single time a company did this, we’d be changing it every hour.
Fair, but they still could have heard it on the radio while their parents were driving them to hockey practice or welding seminars or whatever 9yos did back then 🤷
Which adds to the point: even though no one knows who she is anymore or about her giant beachfront mansion she tried to have removed from the Internet, her name lives on in infamy
Historians will look back one day and be like “this woman was so renowned for her terribleness, we can trace the entymology of this modern word back to her name”.
If gameboy games are anything to go by, prices almost never drop. I remember getting a GBA game for 20 euros back when the Nintendo SD was already ending its end of life.
It’s getting pulled down basically everywhere so you’re going to have to find some smaller communities or individuals to get your hands on it now. That’s the real annoying part here lol
The code itself is not illegal, so hosting it is fine.
Just dont encourage piracy, like at all. No linking, no support, and certainly not patching for games which didnt come out yet and offering these fixes early for payment.
Yeah, there's totally not Mirrors around with the original source code that got pulled, and the entire internet having collectively archived it before Yuzu itself pulled the plug
Also it was the only Switch emulator in existence, there totally isn't another emulator going around
Also you totally should not follow what I said here, y'know, emulation is wrong after all according to Nintendo
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