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DerekBickerton

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newsletter.bijanstephen.blog 2y ago

Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology

DerekBickerton
2pts0
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com 2y ago

Tunable Consistency in MongoDB

DerekBickerton
2pts0
www.computerweekly.com 2y ago

Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published

DerekBickerton
121pts134
design.theguardian.com 2y ago

The Guardian digital design style guide

DerekBickerton
65pts21
www.stopspying.org 2y ago

Privacy Toolkits

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2pts0
jamesbasoo.com 2y ago

Control Pixel Art Sprites with CSS Scroll-Driven Animations

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1pts0
thecontractor.io 2y ago

Data-Bouncing – The art of indirect exfiltration

DerekBickerton
1pts0
techryptic.github.io 2y ago

Annoying Apple Fans: The Flipper Zero Bluetooth Prank Revealed

DerekBickerton
2pts0
thewire.in 2y ago

Apple Warns About 'State-Sponsored' Attacks on iPhones in India

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7pts0
www.politico.com 2y ago

The Man Behind Biden's Sweeping AI Executive Order

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3pts0
poke-holo.simey.me 2y ago

Pokémon Cards CSS Holographic Effect

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1pts0
open.mozilla.org 2y ago

Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

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241pts155
www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu 2y ago

The Feynman Lectures on Physics

DerekBickerton
1pts0
www.nakedcapitalism.com 2y ago

UK Government to Abolish Biometrics and Surveillance Safeguards

DerekBickerton
3pts0
docs.cossacklabs.com 2y ago

Themis is a cross-platform high-level cryptographic library

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2pts0
silver.urih.com 2y ago

SilverBench - Online multi-core CPU benchmark and stress test

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1pts0
media.toyota.co.uk 2y ago

Toyota sets out advanced battery technology roadmap

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2pts0
realpython.com 2y ago

Python Virtual Environments: A Primer

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3pts1
www.asymco.com 2y ago

The Apple Investor's Dilemma

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2pts0
om.co 2y ago

iPoddery

DerekBickerton
1pts0
www.lawfaremedia.org 2y ago

The Shapeshifting Crypto Wars

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4pts2
aeon.co 2y ago

Déjà vu – A window on the past and a key to human survival

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2pts0
tutanota.com 2y ago

Global Encryption Day: Any backdoor would do more harm than good

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8pts0
www.around.com 2y ago

Chasing bugs in the electronic village (1992)

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27pts5
www.technologyreview.com 2y ago

The Fight over the Future of Encryption

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2pts0
www.around.com 2y ago

Chasing Bugs in the Electronic Village (1992)

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1pts0
ptaff.ca 2y ago

Sunrise, Sunset, Daylight in a Graph

DerekBickerton
3pts0
timharford.com 2y ago

The art of making good misstakes

DerekBickerton
1pts0
petapixel.com 2y ago

Photographer showcases the power of iPhone 15 pro max

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39pts51
erictreacy.github.io 2y ago

Mimic.css – CSS Animation Library

DerekBickerton
2pts0

You could be a CDN (Content Delivery Network) and act as a point-of-presence (PoP) for the country you're in. Mirror Linux distro ISOs, offer the ability for netizens to download offline versions of Wikipedia which are over ~50GB sans images.

SMS is a dated technology and I despise services that use SMS, especially for OTP / PINs used to sign in. SIM cards can be 'swapped' by bad actors all too easily. I understand you want to stop abuse, but there's other ways to do this like CAPTCHAs or putting your site on Cloudflare and filtering out rogue/malicious IPs like VPNs/Tor, or doing things like rate-limiting.

I've reached generic TLD fatigue. There's a new one each week. I regularly buy domains with OVH since they have a wide array of TLDs at a good price[0]. Over the years I let many of them expire because either 1) I let my dreams die, or 2) I couldn't afford to renew it. Mostly it's because I let my dreams die, not financial shortcomings though.

[0] https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/domains/tld/

A cold start is the hardest part. It's important to discern what part of your content is noise or genuinely helpful, but if it falls on deaf ears, that gets annoying, and I know your pain. It's not enough just to 'engage' and follow interesting people, there's a whole art to Twitter that I won't discuss here, as its too lengthy (and I haven't had my coffee).

In addition to driving out non-compliant VPN providers and using regular means to block domains and IP addresses

How do they get the point-of-presence VPN IPs? Does Russia go to the OpenVPN/Wireguard page of VPN services and download each country config file and build a naughty list of VPN IPs?

my peers from college are senior software engineers, my relatives are all in high places in big companies

Comparison is the thief of joy. I re-frame any FOMO (Fear of missing out) as JOMO (Joy of missing out).

The only person I compare myself to, is the person I was yesterday. (Have I improved?).

Am I just terrible at opsec

I divide my digital life into two realms. Pre-Snowden and Post-Snowden. Pre-Snowden I did not know about opsec or how valuable it was. Post Snowden I am more careful and regularly spin up new handles so that I do not have a single repository with all my info on there. There are types who prefer to use the same handle everywhere but overlook the risks of doing that.

And all this privacy tooling is a bandaid solution to the problem of privacy in the digital realm. It addresses problems after the fact rather than addressing the underlying symptom which is dragnet surveillance, surveillance capitalism, and people farming / i.e using people as a datapoint to power an AD engine.

Social Media sites curate what people see based on their personality profile

Depends on whether you use the algorithmic feeds or not. I have to mentally resist the temptation to browse Twitter's 'For You' section, and I would much rather use their lists feature, where I can browse what actually interests me instead of reading what the Kardashians are up to now, or some gore-fest about the Russo-Ukraine war in my feed.

I find most of my photos to be cruft, and take time to delete photos that are no longer relevant, or have lost their initial value. I don't take many photos, I'm talking about memes and interesting things I found online. Over time these build up if you don't take the time to delete most of them. Then when I reach ~1000 photos in my camera roll, I just put them in cold storage on Amazon Glacier and forget about them.

The experience was quite pleasurable until she started to recall memories of her emotionally abusive father, who had an alcohol addiction. In the weeks following her psilocybin exposure, she had vivid and painful recollections of her childhood, which precipitated an acute depression.

This is what psychedelics can do, they can resurface painful memories and trauma. It's up to the person to (soberly) address this with counseling. I try to see this as a positive thing. If people bottle up trauma it could ruin their whole life since it's never dealt with or addressed.

I hope other countries don't copy the UK. With the Internet we have choice of jurisdiction and can happily avoid any cryptography projects operating out of the UK. I don't care if WhatsApp will become wiretapped in the UK. My beloved Matrix operates out of there, that's what concerns me.

And I have to use WhatsApp because of its network effect (all my friends and family are on it). I have tried recruiting them on to Signal and Matrix, but the mental fatigue for them of doing that; means I have only have three friends on Signal, and ~100s stuck on shitty WhatsApp.

Hopefully the more tech savvy friends of mine will ditch WhatsApp and choose Signal. And I'm not saying Signal doesn't have its issues (meatspace identity tied to your number etc) but it's far superior to WhatsApp which collects too much metadata like, it knows your contacts, when you talk to them, IP and other metadata.

Does anyone else have this issue of recruiting friends and family onto more privacy-respecting messenger apps?