QuadratureSurfer

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

This has nothing to do with RCS from what I read on the article. It looks like the UK wants to be able to tell companies to disable security features such as End to End Encryption so that they can view the messages.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

Well, then there’s also the people that don’t realize that there are all sorts of programs out there that will try to take that “anonymized” data and then tie it right back to a persons profile.

For example, you can anonymize GPS location data, but just because you strip away identifying information doesn’t mean that you’re truly anonymous. It can still be obvious where you live and where you work. And once you figure out where they live (again based on anonymous data) you can tie that information right back into their profile and continue to track them as if nothing has changed. popularmechanics.com/…/identify-individual-users-…

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

You sound like you know a lot more than everyone else on this subject so I thank you for your responses as a means to educate others.

Just a word of advice, be sure to treat others with respect rather than assuming the worst of their intentions or calling them idiots because they don’t know as much as you.

My response is still relevant to the conversation as we are talking about “anonymized data”. The link in my comment above proves that just because you are told your data has been “anonymized” does not truly mean that it’s impossible to re-attribute it back to an individual.

So if you trust that Apple has great techniques for data anonymization, that’s awesome, feel free to expand on that and explain why. Just don’t go around telling others that simply having any sort of anonymization technique makes it so you don’t have to worry.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

Can you explain a bit more about Apple grouping their data into cohorts? I haven’t heard much about this before. For example, how would grouping data into cohorts work with GPS data?

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

To add on to this, the title should really end with, “than being vegetarian”, or else the title should be " Consuming animal products creates four time more greenhouse gases than being vegan,…"

It’s not really a 1 to 1 comparison if you’re comparing a meat eater with someone who doesn’t consume milk, meat, eggs, or any other animal products. You can also have meat eaters that don’t consume milk due to allergies and such.

Plus, technically speaking (with cultured meat on the rise), there could be vegans that aren’t vegetarian, as vegans could still eat cultured meat.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

To be fair, I think both sides blow it out of proportion and that can stifle discussion. It won’t be the “end of the world” where everyone will die, but we will have the “end of the world” as we know it.

I think one of the main points that need to be stressed to the kind of people in your example would be droughts.

Droughts will continue to get worse and will affect everyone. With a bad enough drought, we won’t be able to feed entire cities. And that’s when things really start to fall apart.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

I haven’t seen it happen on Brave browser yet. We’ll see how long that holds up.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

For a writer… You’re not writing a whole lot or even really trying to break down why it’s a bad story…

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

Lol, I’m glad he at least included the full email response from them. You can tell he’s a little salty and still misinterpreting things when you read about how he took their response to the Search Crawler part.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

This article shouldn’t affect Brave users themselves.

The content of the article deals with issues that only website owners/publishers have to be salty about. Much of what’s left comes down to the legal grey area of how to treat LLMs like ChatGPT and whether they’re allowed to scrape websites for training data or not.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

I… I feel so alive For the very first time And I think I can fly

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

Ideally, detecting bots should be up to the Admins. They should have access to the vote information, and they can share the tools with other admins to detect it. But the average user should not have unrestricted access to this data.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

Especially because you might not know why someone was downvoting the post/comment.

Case in point: lemmy.ml/comment/1009973A decent number of users thought it was a good idea to downvote this post because they didn’t want to give Nazis more publicity. However, someone could take a look at all of the downvotes on this post and make the assumption that everyone who downvotes it is a Nazi themselves.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

Let me be a little more clear, the Admins of your account’s particular instance should be the only ones that have access to your votes.

Now the question remains about when your account posts/comments into a different instance, who should have access to those votes? Perhaps your instance has a way of obfuscating the votes of any user coming from your instance, or else only the admins of the community that you’re posting into will have access to your votes?

The problem really comes down to how we avoid the problem with duplicating votes. Currently this is easy as each vote is public so every instance can verify the correct vote count. But implementing either of the solutions above will need a way to verify the correct number of votes.

To top it off you would also need a way to detect if a malicious instance had come along and started lying about how many votes had been cast.

One thing we can look at under the hood would be how cryptocurrency works as they have solved both the problem of duplicate values as well as the ability to trust those values being sent. All of the code is free and open source so we can pick out the parts that we need and reuse it. (And no, I’m not telling people to go out and buy crypto).

Z Cash would be a particularly good one to look at as it ensures a “zero knowledge” (or “zero trust”) method of sending the values across “nodes” (or in our case “instances”). Using this, who is voting on what would be hidden, but we could ensure that the values are correct.

Additionally you could probably throw out the second hashing algorithm altogether and just keep the Blake2b hashing algorithm as this one is far more efficient and quick to compute (and that second algorithm was mostly thrown in to prevent people with specialized hardware from being able to come in and beat anyone else running on just a GPU/CPU). github.com/zcash/zcash

However, using this particular method would make it so that not even the instance admins would be able to view the details of anyone’s votes (which may be a good thing after all if we decide that any random instance admin is not to be trusted).

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

The crypto example was only a suggestion because they have simply solved the exact same problem we are looking at: duplicate votes (transactions) and verifying the results while being able to hide it.

I would love to hear any other suggestions that people may have that solve these problems. Copying open source code from crypto isn’t the only option. So let’s look for solutions instead of dismissals (unless you’re arguing for keeping votes public of course).

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

Actually, it’s even easier than that, just make a kbin account then go to any Lemmy instance and you can check the upvotes/downvotes.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

Right, but in this case your upvotes/downvotes are public to anyone that has a kbin account, it’s not just the instance Admins that can see.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

One example (not the only way to deal with this) is to do what some crypto algorithms have done. Here’s the source code for z cash: github.com/zcash/zcash

Using something similar to this you can hide who is voting for what while being able to trust that the number of votes are accurate.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

No, if you go to old.reddit.com/prefs/ the “make my votes public” defaulted to keeping votes hidden from other users.

Most users from Reddit that are coming here are voting while not realising that their votes are completely public to anyone that simply uses kbin to browse through any instance.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

Doesn’t have to be major slip ups. Just little tidbits over time on a comment here, a post there, and the aggregation of that data can really narrow the results down.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

Given the number of lurkers on Reddit, you would probably end up with a lot of false flags.

QuadratureSurfer , 1 year ago

Kbin allows downvotes, they’re just called “reduces”.