My wife did the same on signal. When I showed her the “Note to self” feature she was amazed an. started using it. She use to get annoyed that we would text and her note would get lost but now it doesn’t.

It isn’t about finding the best, it is about finding better than the worst. My wife needs the features Obsidian has, she says she wished her notes would visually link together. What she doesn’t know is that such apps exist.

She wishes she could sync files between her phone and computer and not have to go to a website to get them. syncthing does that.

The other day my wife was talking about her new job and having to take notes. For the past 30 years I’ve been keeping notes in text, then markdown in vim, starting with personal scripts, then vimwiki. A coworker showed me Obsidian, which while not FLOSS, does use an open standard for all it’s files. It pretty much does what my setup does.

Then it dawned on me that my wife and other non-techies just use whatever their computer has on it by default (i.e. OneNote). She never thought to go out and look for better productivity software. The idea that there is tons of better apps out there doesn’t register. She has a phone, knows about the app store and gets tons of stuff there but as for her desktop or laptop the idea of apps outside of MS Office and the video games she plays is lost on her.

My current GraphineOS phone will probably be my last smartphone. I’ll be moving to a dumb phone and a data hotspot connected to some type of cyberdeck. Will have that thing locked down, blocking known abusive companies like Google. Honestly could care less about using any service that touches them.

One about the size of a womp rat.

What I really love about this scam is that it was NOT going to just be a 3rd party phone with Trump branding. They were going to actually make a new, 100% American designed and made phone by the Trump brand. And this was going to happen for a mere $500.

At that pricepoint for a startup they wouldn’t be paying anyone anything. That is a pipedream of a kickstarter pricepoint for a phone. Them blaming Samsung for this would be laughable

No, the better solution is for sites that age verification is pointless to block Utah. If you make a mobil app check the GPS or IP and disabl the app if they are in Utah. People should go on sites like Yelp in mass and put down votes on every establishment in Utah so that ths site becomes useless for anyone in Utah. Pretty much just destroy all tech and internet for all things Utah.

Whats even more crazy is you can show a MAGA an old statement of his and they say he is joking. Then show them him acting on that statement and you can actually see their brain melt.

I worked in the energy industry for over a decade and a half and I was amazed at how every CEO we had (because they rotated out every couple of years) seemed to only pick the actions that made stort term money while royally screwing over the next CEO’s tenure. And the crazy part was everyone knew this was happening. Some CEOs even stated the quiet part out loud.

I currently run GraphineOS. I will probably buy one more refurb phone that can run it until Android is dead. Then I am switching to a dumb phone for calls and SMS, and a mobile hotspot connected to a pocket sized cyberdeck. I can still run the apps I want and no longer need Android. With a 3d printer, 25 years of being an electrical and software engineer I can easily make a device that does what I actually want.

Is this practical for the average person? Of course not. But this whole problem is something the average person can fix. STOP BUYING SHIT FROM COMPANIES WHO SCREW YOU!!! Use your power as a consumer and stop giving them money. Make them feel the pain of doing anti-consumer actions. None of this stuff is a requirement for life. If they see a hit in sales, if everyone who makes apps pulls them from the app store, they will change. But it requires everyone to act, and we damn well know most of yall will do nothing but complain.

This problem is a foot gun where we are all buying the gun, loading it, handing it to someone while sticking our foot out and we want to blame them for the bloody hole. Stop it!

They are going to accept whatever the government says is acceptable. We are already seeing it where IPs from some states get blocked when state law says you need to submit an ID to get access to porn.

I think the issue you’re having is that you’re still under the impression that the point of this law is to actually restrict minors from accessing sites. It’s not. And we know this because of what the politicians are doing and how they are doing it. I’ve written about this before but I’ll give you the short version.

Self reporting Date of Birth doesn’t work as people lie so you need something better. But as we have discussed there isn’t typically a great option because of the way government and technology works. Anyone in the government who thinks any solution won’t have holes is an idiot, so we can ignore those people for right now. The rest of the people pushing this bill must then have malicious intent.

What happens after this bill is implemented and holes are found? The same politicians say “We need to just go full ID instead of Age” and because they already have the bill passed for age it will be a far more simple bill to just bump up what goes into the Operating Systems. Heck it will most likely be snuck in some other unrelated bill and no one will care.

If all they really wanted was for there to be age restrictions they would have left it up to the service providers to find a way to resolve the age issue. This is how we see it implemented with all IRL issues. There isn’t a government provided token created for the sole purpose of purchasing beer or guns or hard copy porn. When you go to a liquor store it is up to the seller to do a verification. I’ve seen people use foreign passports, one guy came into a bar I was working and showed me his birth certificate because he didn’t have a drivers license anymore. If someone just looks really old they don’t even get carded.

Why would we want the sites to find a solution? Because some solutions are bad, like giving your full ID. If any site asks for that people can say nope and not use those specific services, finding alternatives that ask in ways the individual is comfortable with. You can trust who you want to trust and ignore those you don’t. Where as if the government takes the info an keeps a big database and you have no other options you’re just SOL.

no, the point of the key is to access infomatîon without giving away personal information.

Even a photo ID doesn’t prove age. It just shows a record of what age the gov thinks someone is. They are still prone to forgery, misuse, etc. There isn’t any actual method of showing someone’s age so we can skip that part and focus on what the actual need of the user is, accessing a website while not handing over more personal information than is necessary.

It can be a shared token. For example a cryptographic hash. There are many solutions for the problem of certifying a token while giving no traceable data.

In most solutions there would be the traceability of knowing “User X went to site Y and site Z” but never knowing who “User X” is. There have been solutions proposed that create site specific hashes where it becomes more difficult if not impossible to track a user across different sites. So it just depends on if this issue needs to be resolved or not.

Personally I would be fine letting every porn site I use know I’ve been to every other porn site. If you wanted to go somewhere that you don’t want them to know, throw out your token and go get a new one.

You are changing the goal. The point of this is to provide THE USER with a solution where they don’t have to give away their personal information to the Government or the 3rd Party site. We do not care about situations where users commit crimes as that means our focus is on the Government’s needs which they would already have met by just implementing a “Show us your ID” solution.

Now you could make the pin be a biometric so it’s physically connected to the user. But part of the solution needs to be that the token is not identifiable with the user. If I pull of my wrist band no one will know it was mine. If you throw out your token someone could go around testing everyone’s fingers and find out it was yours.

Also where they are taking off and landing in Russia is a big flat wasteland. It’s the ocean of the land. There isn’t a lot of empty space in the US unless you are either in the desert or in the places we grow corn and wheat. Less shit to crash into when it’s water in the US.

That’s not true. It’s simple if all you actually want is age verification.

You go in to the government building and show your ID. Seeing you are 18 or older you get to go to another room where they don’t check your ID, just give you a token saying the one holding it is over 18. Make the token like a FIDO key where you have a pin you set yourself.

There is an air gap between the validation and the token creation so there is no way to go from token to ID. You make the key use a pin so we consider it to be once usable by one person.

The issue is not about the technology. The issue is that we all know this has nothing to do with kids getting on porn sites.

What are you doing on your work VPN that you care if the government illegally looked at? I work in an industry that legally requires security like a VPN and I don’t care if the government broke the rules. It’s above my paygrade.

We’ve now hit the point in the timeline where these morons thought maybe if we change the name back no one will think it was us.

“What? No, we are the Department of DEFENSE. That whole thing going on in the Middle East was caused by the Department of War. That’s not us.”