definitely agree with you.

also PGP is so easy to use that honestly I really cannot grasp why it’s not more used for critical communication like this. if the emails were encrypted this would be much less of a problem

The main thing I would point to is that Matrix itself only does text; the Element client uses Jitsi to add in audio/video calls and screensharing […]

Matrix VoIP is a thing, and it’s usable for audio & video on many clients, element and fluffychat come to mind, but probably more.

element call is also coming into element (and possibly other clients) for video calls and screensharing

My other gripes are just with the user interface, […] it really doesn’t look like Discord

why does that matter?

why not matrix?

The medical industry has very bad security practices in general from what I hear. You can basically expect that your medical history is accessible to lots of companies that should have nothing to do with it, not just Microsoft. Pretty much all of your health data is probably in the hands of at the very least Google and Amazon and the sad reality is that people don’t care about security and privacy until it’s too late. The number one server provider for anything healthcare related is AWS and the legal requirements they have to follow for data protection, HIPAA, are the sort of requirements that only a politician would think are actually beneficial to keeping data secure.

EDIT: to be clear, I hate it, and I think you made the right choice, but sadly expecting privacy of our medical information is gonna keep being a battle, until the medical industry starts taking it more seriously

Thanks for checking out the article! As for skimming through it, well, I guess I’ll take that as a hint that I need to write shorter posts as I do have a tendency of blabbering too much when writing haha

I didn’t know about scribe.rip, I will definitely use that instead of medium from now on thank you!

No way, really who could’ve guessed? I’m shocked, I’m telling you shocked…

oh wait, I’m not

way too specific… is this the plot to a book? if so what’s it called?

Those tests are worth more than four years of college?

Yes a test to figure out if you can perform your job is significantly more valuable than a collage degree, this doesn’t mean that college has no value, mind you, it just means that knowing how to do the job and knowing that you fit in with the company culture is vastly more important.

Go get a bunch of I.T. certifications. Get your CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+ Get a Microsoft MCP or MCSA

Those certifications are useless, they look good on your resume because managers love showcasing their staff’s “certifications”, as many companies that don’t understand IT put value on the certifications more than anything else, but they don’t actually provide you any value in of themselves. Sure it might be interesting how many network switches you can daisy chain according to the standards, but it has no real value most of the time, if that’s information you need in your job it’s something you can just look up, HOWEVER, asking you random questions that pertain to the job during the interview IS a good way to understand if you’re a good candidate, and, often, the actual response doesn’t matter as much as your reasoning for getting to that response.

When an interviewer at google asks you how many pennys it would take to make a structure as tall as the empire state building, it doesn’t matter what the answer is, truly, even if you got the exact number of pennys, just saying the number would mean you don’t pass the interview, your answer would be worth less than an answer that gets it wrong by 75% but is well reasoned, what they care about is how you come up to the conclusion that you come up with, the solution is useless.

how would you know

wouldn’t it have been easier to just read the source code? (not that GNU’s code is easy to read, but still)

this is definitely satire, otherwise it would take longer than the age of the universe to finish coding it lol

That’s not the issue. You can attempt as many passwords as you want in actually secure password managers as well. KeepassXC for instance IS secure, you can still brute force the password, but because of the hashing algorithm they use it’s extremely hard. With PKZIP if you know some of the words in the file, you can easily guess the password in just a few hours because the encryption algorithm it uses isn’t secure

It is

EDIT: I’m wrong, I don’t know what I was thinking, I misremembered hearing something apparently. Thank you for the corrections

Thank you! More people should do this. It may seem like $5 is nothing, but it’s actually great help. Even $1 helps out FOSS projects, as if even just 1% of the users of such projects donated $1 each month that’d be able to make a good income,

Someone really should maintain a list like that, hosted on multiple non big tech git hosts.

This recent Anti-FOSS propaganda needs to stop

Seconded, and added Haier to my mental list of companies to never buy from.

The UK has a data protection agency? Does the UK know? Have they been asleep for the past 20 years?

How about using LDAP? It’s a bit complicated to learn but it’s easy to integrate it in a bunch of applications and it allows you to manage user accounts and permissions in one central place.

Maybe try LLDAP which is a modern implementation (haven’t used it myself) which is designed to be simplified and I assume more welcoming to newcomers.

asus’s router webui

Pretty clear you either haven’t read the bill or grossly misunderstood it. What you describe is not proposed legislation - it’s the current reality that individuals and independent repair shops already live with.

The 2024 variant of the bill isn’t actually publicly available online, but here’s last year’s WIP text:

https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023R1/Downloads/MeasureDocument/SB542

Absolutely, the bill you mentioned is the one I was referring to. It does state that manufacturers must provide documentation, tools, and parts to both independent repairers and owners under fair terms. However, the real issue lies in how “fair and reasonable terms” are interpreted and applied in practice.

Here’s a quote from Google’s actual response:

User safety should be a top priority. Improper repair can be dangerous—especially if individuals use faulty parts or are unfamiliar with safety critical components, such as lithium ion batteries.** Legislation should acknowledge the risks borne by unskilled repairers and allow original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to provide parts assemblies rather than individual components to reduce the risk of injury.**

Doesn’t scream right to repair to me, let’s continue.

Right to Repair regulation should focus on: Devices that are repaired by an OEM’s existing repair offerings3 Right to Repair legislation in the United States is focused on leveling the playing field between OEM repair and independent repair offerings and putting consumers first, which we fully support

So, if they don’t repair their devices and only replace assemblies, they’re not required to do anything for RTR, how convenient!

Right to Repair regulation should focus on: Parts that are provided by an OEM’s existing repair operations

Hmm… So the easiest way to comply with the law is to not do anything

Policies should encourage repairers and recycling centers to recycle or to dispose of e-waste responsibly. We believe repair can be an important mechanism to reduce the large and growing problem of e-waste

Classic corporate green washing, this doesn’t mean recycling, it means break products, into as many parts as possible and dispose of them.

This is what recycling means to big tech:

Those are icloud locked iphone mainboards that have had their chips drilled through (this is "recycling). Some extremely smart people have figured out how to scrap them for parts, but that’s the ingenuity of actual repair people, not Big tech’s recycling.