i don’t think that’s the right take black markets and opposition members i’ve used / talked with focus on disposability not security the premise of their communications is always “the platform is bugged” and in case of opposition members “the government can always just beat you and trick you into unlocking your phone” deals happen on messenger all the time and burning messages / rotating phones and accounts is very common. for opposition members, messaging apps are purely for benign communication and actual discussion happens in person or in truly destructible formats or it’s not recorded at all periodically anon burner message apps appear on app stores and rotate out pretty fast once they start getting too much attention the idea of a perfectly secure app for communication is currently mostly a fantasy; if a malicious actor wants to get your info and communication they will. this doesn’t mean give up completely and be insecure but instead just be in a position to ditch the app when it becomes necessary, if you need that level of security it’s better people be trained to understand the reality of what can be done with the communication methods they use and how they can be punked so they can make informed decisions — i’m fine with signal’s goals and efforts but i’m not a fan of signal advocates treating security and privacy like another round of the OS wars, that teaches people the wrong lesson and makes it harder to convince ppl privacy and security are a problem we need to take seriously not just for criminals but for everyone. privacy and security benefit us all or it benefits no one
I have heard this play out too many times. Most recently here, a college junior's wife revealed four months after marriage that she is actually a lesbian (she didn't share it – he caught her in their bedroom with a colleague of hers when he returned home early from the office), and he would be free to do what he wants; she should be too. Hit him hard, but he said they should go for an annulment— out of question; a divorce— out of question. Her point was if she had to do all this, why would she have agreed to a marriage in the first place! It was to get society off her back and her parents. Well, he filed for divorce, and it resulted in false dowry cases (yes, it's that part of the world), cruelty.. a long list. He was in lock-up for almost a month and a half, his almost 80 father and 70 mother was in a case of beating her up - (they met her exactly once – two days after marriage for a day when they went to his native village and after that they barely even talked to her on phone when they came back to they city they worked in), he lost almost everything he had, and finally, he just broke down in court and, against his lawyer's advice, just told the judge to give her whatever the judge wanted and just grant him a divorce. This was after almost three or four years of struggle. This guy is damaged now. We were in two sports team together in the college. One of the gentlest people I know. He had a minor stroke recently. He has sleeping issues. He is still fighting to just stay alive. It's difficult for him to get jobs because there's police record against him. He worked for a major MNC bank and he was fired summarily. No, this is not an isolated cruel example of extreme and from the hinterland of the world - this is an example of people fucking others over, mercilessly. No, this is not fighting to stay afloat in the water. It's like kicking someone off the boat because they were closer to the life jacket on the boat by few feet of another available lifeboat that the person could have taken instead. No, it's actually worse! I am sorry for how the world treated you and him, but no, fuck no! Life fucked him – or could have fucked him, so he gets to fuck others, right? Awesome! > but that doesn’t mean he was a bad person. No, he is a bad person! Ffs.
2026 is nearly upon us, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple remain steadfast in the refusal to ever allow anyone to share wide-gamut or HDR images. Every year, I go on a rant about how my camera can take HDR images natively, but the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube. It's absolutely bonkers to me that we've all collectively figured out how to stream a Hollywood movie to a pocket device over radio with a quality exceeding that of a typical cinema theatre, but these multi-trillion market cap corporations have all utterly failed to allow users to reliably send a still image with the same quality to each other! Any year now, maybe in 2030s, someone will get around to a ticket that is currently at position 11,372 down the list below thousands of internal bullshit that nobody needed done, rearranging a dashboard nobody has ever opened, or whatever, and get around to letting computers be used for images. You know, utilising the screen , the only part billions of users ever look at , with their human eyes . I can't politely express my disgust at the ineptitude, the sloth, the foot dragging, the uncaring unprofessionalism of people that get paid more annually then I get in a decade who are all too distracted making Clippy 2.0 instead of getting right the most utterly fundamental aspect of consumer computing. If I could wave a magic wand, I would force a dev team from each of these companies to remain locked in a room until this was sorted out.
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