This is incredibly important. Signal is considered the “gold standard” of encrypted and private communication for a reason.

Some photographer took a picture of a politician in the Trump admin using a Signal clone. That signal clone allowed the user to archive chats to a third party.

While I agree in theory, in practice open source has a similar amount of expected trust as closed source can have in many cases. I use all sorts of open source software without reading the code. I ain’t got time for that.

I can trust that software from a lot of organizations are trustworthy even if it is closed source, but I can’t trust any open source repo without reading the code. I habe to use other ways to evaluate it, is it probable that someone has audited it? Is it popular? Is it recognized as safe and trustworthy? Is the published and finished build the same as the one I would get if I built it myself?

But yes, you can never be 100% certain without open source and auditing it yourself.

I do trust that my travel pass app from a government organization doesn’t install malware / spyware on my phone. I can’t trust a random github repo even if it is open source.

We had some emergency law that was almost passed recently. As in it passed the first of two rounds. The second voting round is just a formality, all laws are just passed after the first in practice. Luckily some law professor raised the alarms and it did not pass the second time. So within a couple of hours margin it was stopped.

The law gave the government the ability to force people to do a lot of stuff, work any job at any place in Norway. If you do not comply you could get up to three years in prison. It would not be a problem with the current or any government in the near future, but it is a law. And we can’t have laws that rely on trusting politicians. Because we might have politicians with anti democratic tendencies in the future

I think certain arguments work, and certain don’t.

I live in a very high trust society, Norway. This has a lot of advantages, but also some downsides.

We trust eachother, our neighbours, our government and our media. Which is fantastic, and well deserved. The government deserves the trust.

This makes it hard for me to make people realize how important privacy is, because they trust organizations with their data.

During COVID, Norway made their own app for tracking who met to prevent the spread. Of all the apps in the world, Norway wanted to push about the least privacy friendly app in the world. This from a country with the highest press freedom and rankings for democracy. Most people though it was fine, because why not? We trust our government.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/norway-covid19-contact-tracing-app-privacy-win/

Luckily someone protested enough, and it got scrapped for something better.

When I try to convince someone I have a couple of angles:

1. You trust the government and organizations with your data today. But do you trust the government in 30 years? Because data is forever. The US has changed a lot in a very short time, this can happen here as well

2. You have a responsibility for other peoples privacy as well. When you use an app that gets access to all your SMSes and contacts you spy on behalf of companies on people that might need protection. Asylum seekers from other countries for instance.

I have been thinking about how or if I would track my own children. I do not have any at the moment though.

I think the only system that would work with tracking and still be ethical is a system with accountability.

They need to know that I would never check unless there was an emergency. So we’d have to have some sort of immutable log that they can check regularly. So they know if I checked their location. It should not be like a panopticon. in which they don’t know if the parent is checking their location or not. That changes behaviour. Even with the trust that I would not check, just me having the option would alter behaviour probably.

Youth and kids are independent individuals with their own rights to privacy, autonomy, right to select their own friends and acquaintences, right to freedom of expression and movement, right to make mistakes, etc. If they are thought right and have a high trust bond with their parents, preferably with little judgement, then it will probably be fine and most issues can be solved.

I know we should not objectify people, and I rarely do.

That said… As a heterosexual man I got to say that this is one of the first times I have truly seen how handsome Elvis was. God damn.

I disagree. I believe that in the right hands it sharpens as it passes. If it does not, then you might need to change the way you talk to others in order to get there.

There are many times I have had thoughts that are principally correct or ideologically true to my beliefs, but that has been more moderated as I have heard the opinions and thoughts of others.

In a perfect world my values would be shared by everyone and the principles I hold would be shared amongst everyone. But we live in a world of compromise, and we can not fight every fight. And also, I am not infallible, my core beliefs are probably somewhat wrong.

Take the very current situation with free speech. I used to have a lot stronger opinion in support of absolute free speech, now I am more reserved. Principally I believe in absolute free speech still, but that won’t work in a non-perfect world

404media.co has a really high quality one! They also got a 2024 award from EFF.

“Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way technology is shaping–and is shaped by–our world. We bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL through investigative reporting, smart blogging, and breaking news. At 404 Media you’ll read, and hear, stories you can’t find anywhere else written by journalists who are leading experts on their beats.”

Why would you want to think independently? I am a collective thinker. I ask other people their opinions and discuss it with them. That’s how I learn and form my own opinions, and how you end up with good solutions to problems. You don’t have enough time to form good opinions on lots of topics, but you have time to curate your sources and who you discuss things with. You should aim for a good signal/noise ratio.

Thinking independently / being a free thinker is overrated in my opinion. A somewhat elitist way of describing oneself. “Not being a sheep” etc.

Identify your core values, sensible opinions can be derived from those. If there is a mismatch between your derived opinion based on one of your core values, then maybe you have to reconsider your core values. The best way to discover those is through discussion with others.

Being truly curious and discussing openly with others is one of the great joys of socializing. It can be done with people from all parts of the political spectrum. It’s much more enjoyable than small talk.

I am curious why you are getting downvoted here. Can someone explain? I was considering putting a rainbow sticker on my laptop for solidarity

I don’t have in-depth knowledge of the differences and how big that is. So take the following with a grain of salt.

My main point is that using containerization is a huge security improvement. Podman seems to be even more secure. Calling Docker massively insecure makes it seem like something we should avoid, which takes focus away from the enormous security benefit containerization gives. I believe Docker is fine, but I do use Podman myself, but that is only because Podman desktop is free, and Docker files seem to run fine with Podman.

Edit: After reading a bit I am more convinced that the Podman way of handling it is superior, and that the improvement is big enough to recommend it over Docker in most cases.

There are another important reason than most of the issues pointer out here that docker solves.

Security.

By using containerization Docker effectively creates another important barrier which is incredibly hard to escape, which is the OS (container)

If one server is running multiple Docker containers, a vulnerability in one system does not expose the others. This is a huge security improvement. Now the attacker needs to breach both the application and then break out of a container in order to directly access other parts of the host.

Also if the Docker images are big then the dev needs to select another image. You can easily have around 100MB containers now. With the “distroless” containers it is maybe down to like 30 MB if I recall correctly. Far from 1GB.

Reproducability is also huge efficiency booster. “Here run these this command and it will work perfecty on your machine” And it actually does.

It also reliably allows the opportunity to have self-healing servers, which means businesses can actually not have people available 24/7.

The use of containerization is maybe one of the greatest marvels in software dev in recent (10+) years.

Deus Ex

Haha, thanks!

Finding grey hair in your beard. The first time I started to feel older was once I found a couple grey hair in my beard. None in my hair, just beard

It’s a compromise for sure, and not entirely consistent with the values of a vegan / vegetarian.

I wanted to reduce my meat and animal product consumption and it removed most of the social friction. The constant need to tell hosts of social gatherings of my preferences. I did not have to constantly hear whining from my grandmother about how they ate in the old days, and how we “city-folk” are.

I am currently a meat eater, but try to not eat meat too often. I would not consider myself a flexitarian, but eat way less than before.

I have attempted being ovo lacto vegetarian in the past, flexitarian and pescitarian, but never vegan.

My experience is that your motivation for not eating meat is why people care. If you do it for ethical or environmental reasons and not health ones. Then people will feel that you are thinking that you are superior to them.

Health one is the most accepted reason, because it is not an “attack” on someones values. Yes, it is ridiculous that people feel this way.

However it is more work having guests that have special dietary needs, and vegans and vegetarians are choosing it. People with allergies or religious reasons are not.

My experience is that the easiest way to get the most results with the least friction socially is to be a flexitarian. Eat vegetarian / vegan when you are cooking or buying food, and eat the meat and animal products you are served. That reduces your consumption of animal meat and products by 80-95% without the hassle.

I managed to be a flexitarian for 2-3 years, but gave up. Vegetarian I only managed like a month or two.

Also remember B12!

Yeah, that’s a good one too.

Every time I think about how important we are to them and how loyal they are, I end up thinking about the “Jurrasic Bark” episode in Futurama 😭

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK3PWHxoT_E

Your dog might not be your entire life, but you are the entire life of your dog