Using a docker container provides you with the exact amount of extra protection as using a VM: zilch.

Only advantage is you can use other people’s config easily.

• signed, someone happily using their own VM-based setup

Would passkeys solve your grievances for you?

• LLMs are a complete dead end when it comes to actual intelligence, understanding, or sentience
• constant fearmongering from decades of media makes you afraid of sentient AI. I think it’s important to recognize that. I’m willing to bet that if people would have grown up with, say, Iain Banks’ Culture instead of Terminator, the idea of sentient AI would be exciting. (Not a value judgement, just pointing it out.)

Well… In my case it would be “calculate how much loss you’ve been making by growing your own veggies!”, lol.

(Container gardening and watering add up, but I am not complaining, I am not doing this to save/earn money)

I was SO confused until I checked the community.

Thought this was about literal, real-world vegatable gardens as a hobby.

I hate the HA implementation of voice assist. It’s either “what you are saying has to be recognized as EXACTLY this string” or it’s “try an LLM lol”.

Hie the fuck do you influence if your voice recognition model spits out “To-do, ToDo, todo, To-Do, To Do or to do”? Because if you try to add an item to the ToDo list, then this difference matters to HA.

The answer is: by matching what is recognized against all known entities, and picking (with a threshold) the closest match. But that’s just not possible currently.

Thanks for sharing that link! Interesting post and interesting blog in general!

Yes, any version of age control which would realistically get passed will be bad. This:

additionally, in my opinion no one who wants to enact such a thing is doing it in good faith. it is a pretense towards an ulterior goal[2]

is absolutely true. The fact that those privacy preserving approaches exist but aren’t used is all the proof I personally need of this.

I’d have imagined something along these lines:

• USER visits porn site
• PORN site encrypts random nonce + “is this user 18?” with GOV pubkey
• PORN forwards that to USER
• USER forwards that to GOV, together with something authenticating themselves (need to have GOV account)
• GOV knows user is requesting, but not what for
• GOV checks: is user 18?, concats answer with random nonce from PORN, hashes that with known algo, signs the entire thing with its private signing key
• GOV returns that to USER
• USER forwards that to PORN
• PORN is able to verify that whoever made the request to visit PORN is verified as older than 18 by singing key holder / GOV, by checking certificate chain, and gets freshness guarantee from random nonce
• but PORN does not know anything about the user (besides whether they are an adult or not)

There’s probably glaring issues with this, this is just from the top of my head to solve the problem of “GOV should know nothing”.

Yes, of course, it’s everywhere. What’s left but becoming a hermit…?

But you know what makes me extra mad about the age restrictions? I don’t think they are a bad idea per se. Keeping teens from watching porn or kids from spending most of their waking hours on brainrot on social media is, in and on itself, a good idea. What does make me mad is that this could easily be done in a privacy-respecting fashion (towards site providers and governments simultaneously). The fact that it isn’t - that you’ll need to share your real, passport-backed identity with a bunch of sites - tells you everything you need to know about these endeavors, I think.

ChatControl is back on the table here in Europe AGAIN (you’ve probably heard), with mandatory age checking sprinkled on to as a treat.

I honestly feel physically ill at this point. Like a constant, unignorable digital angst eating away at my sanity. I don’t want any part in this shit anymore.

Nice, that’s great to hear!

Viel Spaß! War im Mai 3 Wochen dort, absolut begeistert, jetzt wird fleißig Japanisch gelernt 😄

Ah, too bad! But thanks, that’s good to know.

Not gonna lie, I’m a tiny bit jealous of you 😄 It’s gotten to a point where having to use Android is a constant, low-intensity source of stress just because of how closed and privacy-unfriendly it has become.

Thanks, that is a very kind offer!

The secific app is xdrip+. But it’s probably not possible to test it out, because starting/working is not the issue, the issue is making sure that it has a 100%% stable background connection with my blood glucose sensor, recovers from failures, restarts in the background on closure,… Eventually, I’ll get my hands on a linux handheld and try for myself :)

That being said - how’s your experience with Sailfish been so far?

Ah, true. I honestly think we need to get to a point where smartphones intended for use with linux are profitable / widespread.

But that’s a catch 22 with UX and HW both being required for companies to invest in the other.

Again for Germany, it’s handled by a single provider, and they absolutely do utilize CoCo tech. (Source: I work at one of the involved companies, sorry, not going to be more specific)

In the case of Germany: confidential computing tech ensures all data is encrypted in storage and in memory, shielded even against data center employees / hosting providers. I imagine that’s become the standard for most countries.

IDK man. AfD are the ones raging against “political correctness” here. Dude decided to not be politically correct and label the Nazis Nazis.

Make sure you choose a proper open source one, else the app might collect data as well…