But was it an escaped boomslang snake?

You’re absolutely right on that one! Hadn’t thought of it from that perspective, but hell yes.

To be fair if you’re anything past Boomer, at this point you should be too embarrassed to vote for any GOP candidate. When the party decided to support Trump—a guy with proven sexual assault charges, pending fraud charges, pending classified document charges, a penchant for insurrection that he happily acknowledges, and more and more video surfacing of him unable to be coherent, hopefully most everyone with any connection to reality has realized it’s time to kick him and the GOP to the curb.

Everything you’ve said aside from the CSAM scan doctor thing has absolutely nothing to back it up so far. (And for the record, I absolutely agree CSAM scanners can be wrong—a human needs to be involved at some level, which they were in the system Apple devised. At any rate, I guess this convo is over as we obviously inhabit very different worlds.

*blink blink*

Scan private iCloud images? What part of the E2E did you miss? Also, if this is the plan I think you’re talking about for CSAM, they actually abandoned that, even though it was a pretty decent plan…

Well, it would most likely show up in the network traffic if they were doing that for starters. And no one doing security analysis on iOS has ever mentioned that AFAIK. And since Apple bases about 90% of their marketing on protecting your privacy, that would be very bad for them as a company.

I mean, what’s stopping someone poisoning a library on open source? That’s actually provably happened.

Which is not to ding open source, which I quite like too. Just saying you are running certain risks no matter what you choose and in a phone OS, if you just want it to work and not think about it, I personally feel like Apple is a decent risk still.

OS 9 on macOS did me dirty when I tried to delete it for the final time. The OS X operating system folder is named System. And the OS 9 folder is named System Folder.

So I typed rm -rf System and then tried to type the \ character so I could put in the space between the two words. Which is right above the Return key. Guess what I hit instead of \…

I hit control-C almost immediately but it still got through C inside the System folder. Apparently nothing absolutely vital lives in the A-C folders, btw. I was able to even reboot and it all came up normally. Only thing was I couldn’t run any Carbon apps (which was kind of crucial at the time) so I still had to do a reinstall of the OS.

Lol.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/advanced-data-protection-for-icloud-sec973254c5f/web

Pretty much agreed, except iCloud allows full E2E encryption if you enable Advanced Data Protection…

Siri is maybe a different story, alas. But at least you can disable the always listening feature if you want.

If you’re into Insta, be sure and check out PixelFed.

Yeah, but that’s unavoidable. Whereas, Tesla and Waymo, etc getting to use our roads for self-driving testing is just our government not doing their job to protect the roads adequately, IMHO. This is veering way off topic, but I just recently watched a video that had stats on Teslas and the fact they’re like 8.2x more likely to be in a crash than a standard level 2 car driving system.

Honestly, a search engine companion is probably its least offensive case, you’re correct. Mostly, it makes me so mad because they are polluting our entire collected knowledge base, because there is no way to watermark anything as AI-generated (especially when it’s text, not images) which means that every search you make from here on out returns worse results. It’s like being forced to share the road with self-driving Teslas because the self-driving car companies (especially Tesla) have made us all involuntarily part of their beta test.

The “screw everyone else trying to use the same public resource” mentality is out of control.

There is no such thing as a good AI engine… all I really want from any AI engine is the ability to watermark everything it outputs as generated by an AI so it can later be filtered out when it’s discovered to be inaccurate or just simply plagiaristic.

I would fucking rather pay not to have AI in my browser, FFS…

For values of public posts, yes.

My default for new posts is followers only and I have approve followers checked. (And I’m pretty picky, so far.)

More to the point, the discussion started out about the back end (whoever is in control of the servers selling all your data straight out of the database) and you’re referring to the front end (using a tool to scrape as much posted content as possible).

With respect to Blue Sky, which I was specifically addressing, it only has 3 million active users vs Mastodon’s 8 million right now though, which also somewhat obviates the whole network effect for new BS users. Not to mention since it is also decentralized, it does still suffer from the issue of instancing. About the only thing it may have going for it is an algorithm. I don’t honestly speak to that since I’ve only been there briefly, but since Twitter ran just fine without one and attracted tons of users (and got a lot of them angry when they switched to an algorithm), I suspect it isn’t a huge deciding factor for a lot of users.

I guess my point is… Blue Sky is still trying to launch and struggling. Mastodon is much more mature and only going to accelerate into the network effect more rapidly from here on out as well as standing a much better chance of not just being enshitified 5-7 years down the road, so when choosing between the two, I would definitely encourage any friends leaving Xitter to join Mastodon rather than Blue Sky.

Also, I feel like the users that care about algorithms and following Drake or whoever are just going to stick with Xitter anyway, because they really don’t care about all the “drama” of who owns it or what they are doing with their data.

Aha, I did indeed miss the “external storage” row—mostly because it only uses the “Tb” acronym quite late in the description. I think the difference between Firewire and USB-C is minimal? (ie they are both “fast enough”) but I guess having wifi is a step up (although I always still plug my phone in to transfer music at this point so…)

Haha, yes it is an unfortunately acronym their name makes.

This is insanely priced, particularly when you see that it literally loses on everything but battery life compared to the original iPod 5gb, let alone the Classic.

Last time I tried to use Blue Sky it was so incredibly broken. And that was like November 23? I assume at the time that Twitter was exploding with people jumping for life rafts it was even less feature complete. They probably would have just doomed themselves via word of mouth if hordes of people had come straight from Twitter to BS. At least this way they are managing expectations a little bit.

OTOH, having said that, I don’t understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists. Kick in a couple bucks a month to your server admins and the dev team and know that at least you’re not the product and not just building up something that is on the road to yet another enshitification.