Yeah, this is the reason. TankieReplyBot used Lemmy's WebSocket API because it was far more efficient for a bot to receive events as they happen rather than constantly checking for new comments and posts. With that gone, the bot will have to be rewritten to use polling instead, and the last time I did that, it caused my IP to be rate limited within an hour and that was with a relatively long polling interval.
Have you ever seen UPS' website? lol
© 2020 United Parcel Service of America, Inc. UPS, the UPS brandmark, and the color brown are trademarks of United Parcel Service of America, Inc. All rights reserved.
I'm definitely not your overlord. Nope, not at all, not sure why you'd ever think that. Definitely no sarcasm in this comment.
The NSA’s BULLRUN program suggests that the TLS encryption is compromised anyway.
I doubt that. Potentially, at some point, that might've been true, but TLS constantly changes which encryption algorithms are used. The older algorithms that leaked documents state the NSA had cracked are no longer allowed in TLS and your browser will refuse to load pages that use them. Current algorithms are far more secure and the open source implementations used for them have no back doors. They're being audited constantly by hundreds of thousands of cybersecurity experts. If any back doors appear, we'll know pretty quickly. If you're using a proprietary browser like Chrome, however, there's no way to know if Google has altered the implementation in some way (although someone at Google probably would speak up if that was the case), so I'd recommend never using a proprietary browser. Use something like Firefox or Chromium instead. Ideally, Firefox or one of its forks such as Librewolf.
My money is on certificate authories having given the NSA a backdoor ‘for national security
This wouldn't do anything but make it a little easier for the NSA to run man in the middle attacks. It would not give them the ability to crack any encryption at all or even make that easier, and if the CA was ever discovered doing this, they'd go out of business immediately (this has happened before), so they're highly disincentivized from allowing it.
I don’t think that they need to compromise an app directly.
This is actually true, but not in the ways you listed. A lot of the web is now using Cloudflare's free CDN service. They proxy their traffic through it to make their sites faster and reduce server load. Cloudflare issues their own TLS certificates and the connection is made between the browser and their servers before getting forwarded to the destination. That means Cloudflare is in possession of plain text data from all users who use any site that happens to use Cloudflare. If Cloudflare has given the feds a backdoor (and they probably have), that would give them lots of data. Lemmygrad is not using Cloudflare, nor do any of my services including the genzedong matrix server.
Also, most people are using proprietary OSes like Windows or Android with Google services. No one has any idea what data is being collected by those, and what is being done with that data. So, for anything truly sensitive, use an open source OS like Linux.
If you need to communicate privately, please don’t use an open forum. Use an OS without telemetry (not Windows), make self-generated keys for GPG emails or OMEMO chat, and verify the key signatures directly with your comrades. If you need to communicate anonymously, bear in mind that there is no silver bullet.
This is good advice. Ideally, if your life genuinely depends on being able to communicate or otherwise use the internet privately, use an amnesic OS like TAILS that will irretrievably erase anything you were doing once you shut down or for something more permanent, an OS specifically designed for protecting your anonymity, such as Whonix.
There would be no need because if you use a proprietary operating system as nearly everyone does, they can and do just take the data directly from your device.
sudo is just running things as root, which is an account on every Linux system that has permission to do everything. The dangerous part is running a sudo command if you don't know what it's doing, because using the extra permissions, a command can do things like delete your files, break your system, install malware, etc. sudo itself isn't going to do anything bad, but the command it runs could.
Mostly as a joke. No one seriously uses it as a descriptor. We call ourselves Marxists-Leninists.
That term wasn't made up by us lol, we stole it from libs when they started calling us that.
We support Stalin and Mao because they advanced the Marxist cause. We support them because they worked towards establishing communism. Most of what the west spreads about them is blatant propaganda. The CIA itself admitted in an internal brief that Stalin was never a dictator. I also personally know people who have lived under Stalin and speak very highly of him. If you read their works, it would be obvious that they're not monsters and they never were.
Here's a screenshot of Waydroid running on my PinePhone Pro. I'm using an Android image with microG. The black bars on the top and bottom are part of Phosh, the desktop environment I'm using, then everything in the middle is Android running inside a Waydroid container.
I run Arch on a PinePhone Pro. It's been working really well. Recent updates have improved it a lot. The phone now wakes itself up from sleep when it receives a call or SMS, calls and SMS have been very reliable, MMS messages now work, etc. I even have Android apps running on my PinePhone Pro using Waydroid, which is now hardware accelerated. I use it as a daily driver and it's a very good daily driver.
The only major issue is that the drivers for the cameras haven't been mainlined yet which means that even if you get a kernel that supports them, most camera apps won't support them and the ones that do don't have postprocessing yet, so the white balance is off and the quality is horrible. If you don't need the cameras though, it works really well.
That was my bot. Lemmy removed a feature the bot was using, so it stopped working.