Melody Fwygon

  • 3 Posts
  • 328 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Low quality article that ignores the issues and fails to acknowledge the reason for phones being necessary in school; likely because they’re talking about a non-American school.

    That said; they also didn’t acknowledge that the devices can be used to enrich studies when applied and used correctly.

    The study they cite in the article is low-quality data that conflates correlation with causation and relies on wildly inaccurate self-reporting from students, parents and teachers.

    This isn’t a controlled trial; this isn’t even a blinded study; nor is the data integrity controlled…it’s entirely self-collected and recorded by unqualified observers.


  • Now we wait for someone to build an absolutely wonderful chat app on top of this wonderful bit of PoC code…

    I genuinely hope someone does. Imagine what this could do if this was routed over Tor using Private Services.

    Run this over that; and you’d have a bullet-proof text chat. Wrap a nice GUI client around all of that and you have a proper secure, anonymous messenger with no problems. With a little more build-out; you could even implement the Matrix protocol over this wire-line and basically have full inter-federation and moderation over a secure wire protocol; allowing for complete privacy and client integration.

    TL;DR: Matrix over PQChat over Tor. Think about it. A Post-Quantum Dark-Matrix web.




  • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.onetoMemes@lemmy.mlDear iPhone users:
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    5 days ago

    Uh, No. Hell to the fucking no. Bring back SD expansion. Treat it like the data storage device it was.

    Your beefs with Google are misplaced; because they were trying to mess with what folders were used; and with trying to protect user privacy because applications were misusing storage to violate their user’s privacy.


  • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.onetoMemes@lemmy.mlDear iPhone users:
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    6 days ago
    • Losing SD Expansion sucks; they should bring this back. Only reason they stopped this is greed.
    • Yet another Nice-To-Have that is gone; but I’ve never seen any phones that weren’t Samsung with this. This one doesn’t really even affect waterproofing; or phone size so they have no excuse.
    • I certainly miss this one; but the FM Radio was present back on my 2020 Moto G6 Power. It was present on my 2020 Moto Edge. This one got stolen from us because we lost the 3.5mm Jack too…they used the wire from your wired headphones as an FM Antenna lead.
    • This is nice; but I ended up having to root my Nexus 6 to make this work properly and use all the colors the LED could perform. I don’t really miss it with Bezel-less phones.
    • I hate that bootloaders are frequently locked; but it’s been less necessary to root Android as it’s improved over the years. There are still a few pain points; but not quite as many that require root.
    • This is another case of greed. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have removable batteries for phones that aren’t IP67 or higher. If it ain’t waterproof; there’s no reason to seal the battery in…and replaceable batteries is a benefit when they accidentally ship units that become “spicy pillows” when the batteries swell due to bad batteries. It also simplifies disposal of phones; which don’t need disassembly if they’ve got a removable battery.

  • Can it? Maybe. It’s not impossible; but it isn’t practical and most ISPs limit their shenanigans to grabbing your unencrypted DNS requests.

    Will it? Probably no; aside from the previously mentioned DNS redirections; they’re not interested in most people’s packets, only in how many they deliver.

    Should you care? I won’t tell you not to take precaution, but I do urge you to consider your threat model carefully and consider the tradeoffs. When Security & Privacy goes up, Convenience and Functionality WILL go down. Balance your needs. Don’t put yourself in a state of Privacy fatigue.

    Are there easy fixes? Maybe. I think a VPN or using Tor would solve your concerns here anyways; it’s not required that your modem be running OSS that you can control. If you can achieve it; that’s still good for you; but it’s not something to be sweating if your modem isn’t capable and your invasive ISP is the only effective option.






  • The rot is deep. Avoiding it often requires you to become a hermit.

    You try convincing your tech unsavvy friends to change services, your boss to let you use linux, and all your favorite communities not to use Discord, Google and YouTube. Last of all; good luck finding that one obscure widget you need right now to make something work without using Amazon.

    I promise all of the above are harder than they sound. It shouldn’t be harder; but it is.




  • It feels like this vulnerability isn’t notable for the majority of users who don’t typically include “Being compromised by a Nation-State-Level Actor.”

    That being said; I do hope they get it fixed; and it looks like there’s already mitigations in place like protecting the authentication by another factor such as a PIN. That helps; for people who do have the rare threat model issue in play.

    The complexity of the attack also seems clearly difficult to achieve in any time frame; and would require likely hundreds of man-hours of work to pull off.

    If we assume they’re funded enough to park a van of specialty equipment close enough to you; steal your key and clone it; then return it before you notice…nothing you can do can defend against them.


  • (As if spoken by the King to Simba:)

    Rust: Everything from the bottom of this cliff to the acacia tree there is ours. Make sure you ask permission before you take something, take nothing you are not permitted to take. We don’t go beyond that tree; and if you even think about the elephant graveyard beyond it; I’ll kill you myself.

    C: Everything the sun touches is yours. I caution you to not venture into the shadows; but I will not stop you, for you are a king, and nothing a king can do is unnecessary if it is for his people.


  • I think there’s a problem with the ‘C only’ devs refusing to be accomodating to the Rust developers. Instead of being stubborn; why not provide them what is needed and help the Rust team learn how to maintain what is needed themselves?

    None of the reasons I’ve seen mentioned are legitimate reasons for refusing to at least help them a few times, and helping them to learn how to do the onerous task themselves so they can keep it off the main plate for too long.

    C devs do not need to learn Rust to provide critical information; they need only be present and cooperative with Rust devs to help them find, convert, and localize data structures for Rust use. They can stand to sit and pair code with their Rust Dev counterparts long enough to teach a Rust Dev counterpart how and what they need to look for in C code. It’s not that big of an ask, and it’s not something that really is a large ask. Provide the bindings for a short period of time, and work on training a team of Rust Devs to maintain the bindings.

    That way both sides are stepping up to meet the others and the data isn’t being sat on by the C-only Devs.


  • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.onetoMemes@lemmy.mlmeta lemmy cross-instances dissing
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    14 days ago

    In aggregate; 5 instances, less than 5 communities, and more than 69, nice, blocked users.

    I don’t mess around. I don’t hesitate to block people who argue needlessly, make my experience less informational or less entertaining, troll, or disregard arguments made in foundational logic to push a point of view or ‘win the argument’. Similarly my instance ignores downvotes and does not display them; as with most platforms which behave similarly to reddit; they simply do not work outside of your personal, local account, local instance, user-sorting context.


  • While there is no harm; I could easily understand why parents might not want this measure passed. Frequently the costs get passed onto them in a painful way; either at the lunchline every day or indirectly via the taxes they pay and how much the school spends.

    I think it could be easier if instead of passing the law for everyone statewide; they just let schools and districts “opt into” this sort of thing by polling parents; and “voluntarily join the study of this subject” rather than being forced into it by state legislature statewide. Then the State can control and gather data in their own ways…and maintains their own control group; which makes a better study. They can’t control the quality of the control group when using data borrowed from other states…what they get is what they get.


  • I really hate when lawmakers base policy on shaky evidence.

    I do think that some children could benefit from dye-free diets; but not all. Make it a matter of school policy that is defined every 3 to 6 months by asking the parents to lend their voices/ballot on the matter; outline the potential “pros and cons” directly on the ballot and let the parents decide each cycle if they want school lunches to go dye-free. Additionally you could poll the children regularly to monitor for dislike of food as well as have lunch monitors just take notes on how much food is eaten.

    Then sit back and watch as some schools try it out and some don’t; and you’ll have the ability to gather solid empirical data on if these are indeed problematic for children.