Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Section 3: Disqualification from office for insurrection or rebellion

Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

After decades of license strangleholds by the likes of MPEG LA and Microsoft, it's refreshing to see open codecs adopted in mainstream hardware and APIs. Hooray for progress!

Epic cons:

Also:

• Epic has already been caught scanning and collecting data from files on people's hard drives that are totally unrelated to Epic or its games.
• Epic's habit of interfering with game availability, through exclusivity deals.

Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)

To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic's largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic (likely including user data) and they directly benefit from Epic's growth.

Steam pros:

Also:

• Actively funding and supporting development of linux gaming technologies for more than a few years now, to the point where linux is now very much a viable gaming platform.

Steam cons:
Drm

Given that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don't think it's appropriate to list under "Steam cons". I'm not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.

If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM, and it's trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.

Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games

Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)

This seems like a step in the right direction. Much like language translation, doing it on-device is the only way to preserve people's data agency / privacy.

It's not just Protonmail.

Blacklists like these aggressively and unapologetically collect all privacy-focused email domains they find, including simple forwarding and tagging services. With more and more sites using these lists to reject or black-hole email addresses, it has become difficult to protect one's self from spam and cross-site account tracking.

Dear web developers, please don't use these lists. Well-intended or not, they are privacy and user-hostile.

The important thing about RISC-V is that it's a completely open CPU architecture that could be competitive with ARM. It's arguably the best chance we have at performant computing hardware that doesn't spy on us or become useless after just a few years. We need this.

Blocking its development would be a big win for certain corporations, and a loss to basically everyone else. The AutoTL;DR bot didn't capture that side of the issue, but a quote in the article does allude to it:

"It would be like banning us from working on the internet," Kang said. "It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created."

I think a better title for your post would be, "Why do you use Steam?"

I think the OP of that post would have had a better reception if they had:

• Responsibly disclosed what they found, rather than using it to stir up drama on social media.
• Mentioned that it's just a web forum account, not connected to game accounts or anything else of value.
• Targeted the software vendor (https://www.ubbcentral.com/) instead of picking on one particular customer who used that software.
• Refrained from spreading misconceptions and unfounded assumptions about how the technology works.
• Responded to the reasonable follow-up questions, such as those that came when readers discovered that the problem was reported fixed three years ago.

People in that thread responded with skepticism and criticism to an irresponsible, misdirected, misleading, alarmist mess of a post. That's hardly surprising.

More good news: There are lots of simpler hosts that are more deserving of your money than Jeff Bezos.

Uh, Elon, did you just copy the X Window System logo?

Key points off the top of my head:

• Both Signal and Matrix have solid cryptography. (In fact, the Matrix Megolm protocol is built upon Signal's Olm protocol.)
• Signal's client is open-source, but not its server. Matrix clients and servers are open-source. (Note that open server code is less important than open client code when end-to-end encryption is used.)
• Both have had security audits, and presumably will have more in the future.
• Both have cross-platform support. Matrix has a greater variety of clients, and last time I checked, the desktop clients were better than Signal's.
• Signal prides itself on minimizing metadata exposure. Matrix started later, and hasn't yet moved all metadata (e.g. reactions, group membership?) to an encrypted channel. (Note that metadata protection can't ever be complete for either one of them, because an attacker that can gain access to the servers could just as well gain access to the routers, and correlate packets at the network level.)
• Signal is a centralized service (hosted by Amazon last time I checked), meaning all traffic flows through one place and can be shut down or monitored there. Matrix is federated, much like Lemmy.
• Signal does not offer self-hosting. Matrix does. (One might do this to be sure they always have a copy of their past messages, or to be independent of public server outages, or to be the sole keeper of data and metadata in conversations between local users.)
• Signal requires a phone number, which makes having an anonymous account challenging for many people. Matrix doesn't require anything, but some Matrix servers require an email address for account recovery purposes.
• Signal apparently integrates cryptocurrency payments. Matrix does not.

The most obvious security vulnerability that I can think of is that the person you are communicating with (or, conceivably, oneself, as well) is using an insecure/compromised application that may be leaking information.

Indeed, end-to-end encryption is unable to protect the endpoints. That's true of both messengers.

Since you brought it up, note that smartphones generally run system-level software that is controlled by the OS maker, meaning that Google or Apple have the ability to monitor those endpoints. Signal's approach to addressing this is to offer a Google-free build of their app, if you can find it, buried on their web site and with a scary-looking warning against using it. Matrix publishes their apps on F-Droid, so there's an easy Google-free option. Of course, most of the people using either messenger will have downloaded from the big app stores, so even if your phone and app are Google-free, it's likely that most of your contacts' phones are not. I believe Matrix has an advantage here, simply because their Google-free builds are easier to find and keep updated, and are therefore probably in use by more people.

Highlights:

The crash started apparently out-of-the-blue, hitting thousands of Argentinian users on a Debian-based distro called Huayra, and specifically on version 5 which was based on Debian 10.

Everybody seemed to crash while searching for images on Google.

Google's code was allocating 20000 variables in a single frame.