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Cake day: October 2nd, 2020

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  • seems like i’m mostly telling people in this thread not to feel bad about their prior cringe…

    i really didn’t follow this closely AT ALL. but i feel like back in the day libertarian ideas were much more left of center than they are now. to my inexpert perception, it feels like libertarianism (and alot of other things) have been co-opted by conservatism over the years.


  • which version of the hollow earth are we talking? if you mean a giant hollow shell, then yeh i’m not sure how well supported that is.

    if you mean the honeycomb earth idea, where there could be myriad of huge deep caverns. then i’m kinda open to that possibility.

    (not that my geoscience knowledge extends beyond highschool geography and the odd wikipedia article - so would welcome an opportunity to discuss with someone adept.)


  • hey man, i think you may have misinterpreted who i was replying to /what i was saying, or perhaps i didn’t communicate perfectly.

    i am 10,000% on your side with this, and very much appreciate your post and appreciate your support in this thread/community on this topic. it’s actually giving me a tiny bit of hope that this community isn’t entirely lost.

    i’ve really grown absolutely weary of the ridiculous denialism in society and especially in so-called tech communities on this topic.

    the kindest thing i think you could say about the rampant denialism is they emotionally do not want to believe it could be happening, and therefore all rationality has gone out the window.

    these threads are always a circle jerk of denialists repeating popular media headlines which say “its not happening”, and then if you read the article IT DOESN’T SAY THAT AT ALL. and these denialists WON’T EVEN FUCKING READ THE ARTICLES THEY POST.

    apart from the emotional cope, perhaps also partial exposure to eg. basic consumer stuff like installing steam or downloading a movie, so they assume the bandwidth is too high to exfiltrate audio cos their music/game/movie audio files are big, completely ignoring the fact that the telecomms industry has put many decades and $ into producing efficient voice codecs for around 50 years now. they probably think nyquist is a brand of cough medicine

    same goes for all the other erroneous ‘consumer tech’ false facts they parrot back and forth.

    eg. the lunacy of saying the tired old statement “if they were listening ALL THE TIME, we’d know” completely ignoring threshold based noise gates have been a thing for well over half a century.

    these self-proclaimed know-it-alls can’t even put in 10 minutes reading BASIC topics in an encylopedia to realise this shit was solved over half a century ago. (actually you don’t even need tech knowledge or an encylopedia to imagine such a fundamental thing as…i don’t know…not recording when nothings happening 🤯). they can’t put in even BASIC effort, yet are SOOO smug in not only telling us “its absolutely not happening”, but they actually can’t wait to be rude and ridicule randoms for even asking the question.



  • ganymede@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlOur phones DO listen to our voices 24x7
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    16 days ago

    cos the majority in this thread cannot even read the articles they cite mistakenly thinking it supports their unscientific claims that this topic is decided.

    afaict no researcher has formally claimed a full coverage binary analysis.

    if you know of such a study please link?

    afaict the researchers are very upfront about the limits to the coverage of their studies and the importance of that uncovered ground being covered.

    when the researchers themselves are saying the work isn’t over. why are all the super geniuses in this thread so smugly announcing this topic is wrapped up?

    i guess they know better than the actual researchers do. amazing, someone should tell them not to worry cos the geniuses in the forums have it all worked out 🤣

    [if you’re unable to reply with a direct excerpt from actual formally issued research (not some pop media headline) i will not bother responding]


  • ganymede@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlOur phones DO listen to our voices 24x7
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    18 days ago

    yeah the level of technical competence on this site has plummeted since the influx of the reddit crowd.

    just enough consumer tech enthusiast knowledge to delude themselves they can smugly and self righteously shit on the average non-tech person.

    and now they’re the majority, drowning out legitimate curiosity by loudly parroting headlines from articles they didn’t even read. slowly turning lemmy into the regurgitated reddit pop media shithole they wanted to escape.

    this topic is especially difficult because of the clear emotional desire for it not to be true. hence the degree of fragile cope in this thread.

    thankfully not everyone here is a lost cause, and you’ve been given some good advice on delineating the other possible causes for what you’ve observed. when we do a careful analysis we must ofc consider all possibilities.

    what i’ve not seen properly acknowledged in this thread, however, is that the possibility of alternative explanations doesn’t preclude the possibility of voice-based surveillance either.




  • ganymede@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlOur phones DO listen to our voices 24x7
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    18 days ago

    Of course a researcher is never sure something is 100% ruled out. That’s part of how academic research works.

    once again, that isn’t what they were reported to have said. [and researchers don’t need to repeat the basic precepts of the scientific method in every paper they write, so perhaps its worthwhile to note what they were reported to say about that, rather than write it off as a generic ‘noone can be 100% certain of anything’] it’s a bit rich to blame someone for lacking rigor while repeatedly misrepresenting what your own article even says.

    what the article actually said is

    because there are some scenarios not covered by their study

    and even within the subset of scenarios they did study, the article notes various caveats of the study:

    Their phones were being operated by an automated program, not by actual humans, so they might not have triggered apps the same way a flesh-and-blood user would. And the phones were in a controlled environment, not wandering the world in a way that might trigger them: For the first few months of the study the phones were near students in a lab at Northeastern University and thus surrounded by ambient conversation, but the phones made so much noise, as apps were constantly being played with on them, that they were eventually moved into a closet

    there’s so much more research to be done on this topic, we’re FAR FAR from proving it conclusively (to the standards of modern science, not some mythical scientifically impossible certainty).

    presenting to the public that is a proven science, when the state of research afaict has made no such claim is muddying the waters.

    if you’re as absolutely correct as you claim, why misrepresent whats stated in the sources you cite?


  • ganymede@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlOur phones DO listen to our voices 24x7
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    18 days ago

    no, they don’t

    Please be careful with your claims.

    In my experience, whenever investigating these claims and refutations we usually find when digging past the pop media headlines into the actual academic claims, that noone has proven it’s not happening. If you know of a conclusive study, please link.

    Regarding the article you have linked we don’t even need to dig past the article to the actual academic claims.

    The very article you linked states quite clearly:

    The researchers weren’t comfortable saying for sure that your phone isn’t secretly listening to you in part because there are some scenarios not covered by their study.

    (Genuine question, not trying to be snarky) Will you take a moment to reflect on which factors may have contributed to your eagerness to misrepresent the conclusions of the studies cited in your article?


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    18 days ago

    Anyone saying they know for 100% certain it’s not happening is probably speaking from their emotional desire for it not to be true - rather than actual fact.

    Anyone who has looked into the actual technical aspects, rather than spouting the usual surface-level “tech facts” or parroting headlines (rather than the actual academic findings), cannot seriously claim to know for certain its 100% not happening.

    @op i would advise caution on stating ‘24x7’ until there is evidence of that specific claim. (unless you’re referring to while voice assistants are enabled.)


  • this is a complex topic and probably belongs in a different thread.

    essentially i don’t personally believe in punishing citizens of a country for the actions of its politicians.

    at best its misguided, at worse it basically empowers politicians on both sides who draw power from friction between citizens of different nations. typical divide and conquer bs.

    why do you not think a software developer wouldn’t have to

    wouldn’t or shouldn’t? if you mean wouldn’t, it’s not surprising and its not the dev’s fault they have to comply with policy, so the criticism is not with them.

    if you mean shouldn’t, i don’t agree with punishing athletes either, but regarding foss specifically, isn’t the “friendly competition” of olympics equivalent to that? sort of. in some ways yes. in other ways its actually the opposite.

    collaboration is actually the opposite of competition.

    and while there’s a case for the benefits of healthy sports competition, i don’t believe it truly fulfills the spirit of international goodwill to the degree it says on the packaging. foss and other forms of international collaboration for the betterment of greater society are definitely on a higher rung - in my opinion at least.




  • its BIG. could be great to see some different teams tackle different issues.

    for example a transcode team to tag and convert different media to the latest efficient formats might save alot of space.

    and eg. voice-only recordings could be suitably encoded vs music etc

    also some methods for diffing snapshots, or some kind of compromise on snapshots storage with minimal changes? not ideal but might be enough to get across the line maybe?

    re. the “most important”, aside from specific items or archives, imo a crucial role might be text-only snapshots of most of the web. would help increase accountability amongst modern media outlets, journalists etc



  • reddit is a cesspit, on reddit it used to be that misinformation or incompetency cope would be promptly identified, now its the top 5 comments on any thread…and the next 5 are circle jerks.

    in other words: welcome reddit refugees. please please feel free to leave the reddit mindset at the door on your way in :)