Good to hear that. Scrolling through some recent posts here rings enough bells that the possibility would haunt me in the back of my mind for a while. But where to even start?

Thanks for sharing

Holy shit, that has a name?!

… Am I supposed to seek medical advice now or what?

Instagram IIRC

This sounds solvable, doesn’t it? Have the extension cable have a chip saying it can do X at maximum, then compare with whatever is to be extended and communicate the minimum of both upstream. Might not become a sleek cable-like design, but would extend the 240W cable with the extender safely staying at 120W

Someone I know recently showed me that extension. I replied to them with “why bother with a browser extension, just paste the DOI into Anna’s Archive and it’ll show up 99% of the time” and showed it to them on their computer. It then showed a message along the lines of “you can access this file, but not here. Go to this site instead”.

They were signed into their university account. As you use that extension yourself, do you know if that’s normal behavior? I’m afraid the extension flagged this person at the campus IT department or something like that

Is it the case where they postponed the vote again because they anticipated it being turned down and needing to wait ages before being allowed to vote again?

If so, perhaps Poland could host the next vote, deliberately not postponing when it seems it’s not going to pass. Maybe even start trolling and remove concessions that would’ve pleased other countries, forcing even more anti-votes and removing some risk of it passing unexpectedly (I don’t know if that would be viable to actually implement though).

We need it to properly fail big time if we don’t want to fear for our privacy every couple months

This is the missing link in my idea. I suppose there to be a lot of reasons why Ukraine, if it wanted to enact this bottom of the barrel, shitpost-tier of international policy, couldn’t simply “stage” something that would force all of NATO to stand behind the invading country due to a technicality?

There already exists a “Google Play licence check” permission apps can use to verify whether or not the app has been bought on a Google account that’s present on the device.

If people can crack the app to remove this (which is a thing for some of the popular apps), they’ll also figure out how to patch this out. This is strictly useful for free apps, and only serves to make it unviable to distribute verifiably clean apk’s outside of Google Play (so rip APKMirror)

It isn’t. I’ve personally had it happen where a relative who went to some country that bans video calling and VoIP (except for the unencrypted/honey pots of course) and used Signal to call people back home (only because I told them it would be unblocked due to censorship circumvention). Despite everyone in my household being familiar with WhatsApp, I was the only who did video calls with them and had to share my device so others could also call them. Even when I’d set up Signal on one of their devices, they still complained it was to difficult to use, insisted I’d uninstall it when the trip was over and used it a grand total of once.

I honestly think it’s partly to do with the nerd factor. This same relative turned out to also have installed the backdoored unencrypted app to chat with others, but hid it from us due to me being vocal about not using that. These other households, also WhatsApp based, managed to install, sign up and use that just fine. They also couldn’t be bothered to set up Signal for some reason, yet gladly accepted the suggestion to use the honey pot.
I think that these people in my circle don’t care about security at all and only care about the platform. If it’s “secure”, “private” and “censorship resistant” and they haven’t heard of it until I, the “techie”, explain the technological benefits of it, they’ll think it’s a niche “techie” thing they’re not nerdy enough to understand. If I get them to use it, they’ll keep thinking this whenever something is slightly different than WhatsApp and be frustrated. Meanwhile they can get behind the honey pot because “WhatsApp doesn’t work there, this is just what people in that country use”. It appears normal because “normal people” use it all the time, and they’ll solve any inconvenience themselves because “normal people (can) use this, and I’m normal too”.

I once had a screw on a laptop that wouldn’t unscrew and eventually somewhat lost its shape. I had asked my uncle for help, who gave me the solution. I think it was slightly less bad than this, but it might help:

1. Apply WD40 around the edges of the screw, such that it could enter the hole
2. Apply it to the screw head
3. Hold your screwdriver in the hole and gently tap it with a hammer a couple of times
4. Slowly attempt to screw it out, whilst applying firm downward pressure on the screw

Note that the amounts of WD40 you have to apply are tiny. We’re talking drops of the stuff. It might be best to attempt to spray something else, and use the residue on the nozzle to apply it

The Netherlands only remains “neutral” because of the clause that forces companies to detect unknown CSAM and/or “grooming” material (last time I checked). It’s only a matter of one or two countries that can make the difference, with most neutral countries probably having similarly “minor” objections.

It could’ve been. You and me probably would’ve blocked ads regardless of their content for various reasons, but I’d imagine that Google wouldn’t have reached this critical mass prompting this scheme if their ads were properly vetted.

The technologically literate capable of installing ad blockers are the minority, and those who’d do it out of principle are a smaller subset of those

Firefox is looking to implement Manifest V3 to keep extension feature parity with Chromium, but their version will not ban the one API that adblockers use. So Firefox will eventually be V3 compliant