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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • Here’s a fun one

    You know how you go to the public pool and you smell the chlorine keeping the water clean? That’s not chlorine you’re smelling.

    Chlorine is a great sanitizer but when dissolved in water it has almost no smell. However, chlorine binds to organic substances like dead skin cells and especially strongly to urea (aka pee), forming chloramine. Chloramine has significantly less sanitizing capability than chlorine, but it has a very strong chloriney smell.

    You can get rid of chloramine by ‘shocking’ the pool- adding an oxidizer or increasing the chlorine level very high to what’s called breakpoint chlorination. Shock powder is expensive though so it’s not always used as often as it should be.

    So when you go to the public pool and you get that strong chlorine smell, all that means is either the pool water is dirty and hasn’t been shocked in a while, or someone peed in the pool recently.

    Enjoy your swim!


  • Xmpp definitely wins in privacy. What is there to privacy more than message content and metadata? Matrix definitely fails the second one, and is E2E still an issue for public groups? I don’t remember if they fixed that.

    XMPP being a protocol built for extensibility means it will be hard for it not to keep up with times.

    Okay so how does modern XMPP protect this? When I last used XMPP, some (not all) clients supported OTR-IM, a protocol for end to end encryption. And there wasn’t a function for server stored chat history (either encrypted or plaintext).
    Have these issues been fixed?



  • (This is not an insult, I just had a realization that I think might affect you)-- do you know what the name comes from?

    Years ago there was a thing called a beeper before everyone had cell phones. It was a one way paging system-- you’d give your friends your beeper number, they’d call it, type in their phone number, and their number (or whatever they dialed in) would appear on your beeper. You’d then use a landline phone to call them back (early versions of the system had no text or reply capability, only numbers and only one-way).

    I always thought it was a cool name. But thinking about it I realize someone less than maybe 25-30 years old might literally have never encountered such a device. Much like a 5.25" floppy disk or rotary dial phone, they went out of style years ago and a young person might never have encountered one.

    Curious if that’s you?



  • This is really not accurate. Matrix is not designed to be a super privacy first protocol. It’s like Lemmy in the it’s designed to solve a problem and be a useful federated collaboration tool. It borrows features from a number of popular messaging platforms. Message history is stored on the server but encrypted client side so privacy is preserved. It supports group chat rooms. It supports voice and video. And most importantly, it supports bridges- you can connect your matrix to other services that are completely incompatible with matrix using a bridge. Perhaps the best example of this is Beeper, which is built on matrix. They are trying to replicate the user experience of the old app Trillian- beeper can link with a number of chat services including Google messages, slack, WhatsApp, telegram, signal, etc. Thus you get all your chats in one place.


  • Oh yes for sure. Wasn’t saying otherwise. Was only pointing out the details because the way the program worked previously, it was kind of an all or nothing thing. And thus, Aqara joining could be taken as a sign that they are going to make everything completely open and interoperable and work perfectly directly with HA. I don’t think that’s the case.

    This is still a very important step. Open standards may be the most important part of home automation, but the second most important part might well be respect. Go back just a year or two and HA and open source in general were basically ignored in the market. Now things are changing.
    Every company that partners with HA further cements HA and open standards in general as a legitimate / major player in the automation market that manufacturers ignore at their own peril. The more that happens, the more products will be developed with open standards in mind.





  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.todaytoPrivacy@lemmy.mlIs TOR compromised?
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    2 months ago

    All the crypto in the world won’t help if you do stupid stuff and have crap OPSEC.

    A big part of that is stay under the radar. If I were NSA I’d be running a great many TOR nodes (both relay nodes and exit nodes) in the hope of generating some correlations. Remember, you don’t need to prove in order to raise suspicion.

    So for example if you have an exit node so you can see the request is CSAM related, and you run a bunch of intermediate nodes and your exit nodes will prefer routing traffic through your intermediate nodes (which also prefer routing traffic through your other intermediate nodes), you can guess that wherever the traffic goes after one or two relay hops through your nodes is whoever requested it.
    If you find a specific IP address frequently relaying CSAM traffic to the public Internet, that doesn’t actually prove anything but it does give you a suspicion ‘maybe the guy who owns that address likes kiddy porn, we should look into him’.

    Doing CSAM with AI tools on the public Internet is pretty stupid. Storing his stash on cell phones was even more stupid. Sharing any of it with anyone was monumentally stupid. All the hard crypto in the world won’t protect you if you do stupid stuff.


    So speaking to OP- First, I’d encourage you to consider moving to a country that has better free speech protections. Or advocate for change in your own country. It’s not always easy though, because sadly it’s the unpopular speech that needs protecting; if you don’t protect the unpopular stuff you jump down a very slippery slope. We figured that out in the USA but we seem to be forgetting it lately (always in the name of ‘protecting kids’ of course).

    That said, OP you should decide what exactly you want to accomplish. Chances are your nation’s shitty law is aimed at public participation type websites / social media. If it’s important for you to participate in those websites, you need to sort of pull an Ender’s Game type strategy (from the beginning of the book)- create an online-only persona, totally separate from your public identity. Only use it from devices you know are secure (and are protected with a lot of crypto). Only connect via TOR or similar privacy techniques (although for merely unpopular political speech, a VPN from a different country should suffice). NEVER use or allude to your real identity from the online persona. Create details about your persona that are different from your own- what city you’re in, what your age and gender are, what your background is, etc. NEVER use any of your real contact info or identity info.



  • This is exactly the issue. A friend of mine knew for a fact she never wanted to have children, but at the time was in her early twenties. Finding a surgeon who would do it was damn near impossible. Half of them refused without speaking with her husband (!) the other half just refused period saying she was young and didn’t know what she wants and would change her mind later.

    At NO point was ‘my body my choice’ part of the discussion.

    There was a similarly good thread on Reddit a couple weeks back about a woman who just gave birth and was having a lot of pain and knew something was wrong, and the doctor just dismissed her and said she’s being hormonal. It wasn’t until her husband threatened to sue the hospital that they finally got her a different doctor, who rushed her into the ER and as I recall said if she waited another day she’d have died.

    The point is, and the problem is, that medical establishment has an awful habit of denying women agency over their own bodies. Always wrapped in valid reasons, but the result is still the same.





  • Don’t participate in wanton consumerism.

    This is the answer. And it comes with other benefits also.

    I do okay financially. I don’t have problems affording necessities. But I have found there is also a lot of satisfaction in being more self-sufficient, in relying less on supply companies to deliver my every need. And it saves a ton of money.

    Food is a big one. I used to spend a ton of money on takeout, delivery, junk food. But here’s the thing, basic cooking really isn’t that hard. It doesn’t have to take up a lot of time, especially if you meal prep. And the resulting food is both better in quality and better for you.

    On that same thread, the grocery store is not always your friend. Especially if it’s one of the big national chains. You will find much better quality produce at your local farmer’s market, and it’s often cheaper too. Certainly way more flavorful, the vegetable that was in the dirt yesterday tastes way better than the one that’s been in a warehouse for a month. Happier chickens lay tastier eggs. Etc.

    And there’s a lot of stuff you can do yourself. A vegetable garden is a great place to start, if you have even a tiny backyard. Think folding table size. Plant yourself some tomatoes and put up a net frame so animals don’t eat them, they will be the best tomatoes you’ve ever had. But planting and growing stuff is one of the most efficient ways to get food- Stick it in the dirt and water it and you get food for free!

    Then think about all the shit we buy. How much of it do we really need? How much of it ends up in the landfill in a year or two? When purchasing things, think about the product entire life cycle and how each step will affect you. IE, Don’t just think about the dopamine rush you’ll get from unboxing your shiny new toy, or the novelty of using it the first couple times, ask yourself is it going to enhance your life owning it over the long term, and is that amount of enhancement worth its purchase price and the space it consumes?