We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history. And that willingness to take on the hard things, even when not universally accepted, is exactly what the internet needs today.

But you're not doing the hard things. You're doing the easy thing. Capitulation to surveillance capitalism is the easy thing.

I'd say there are three pieces, each feeding into the next.

1. A Culture Favouring Novelty Over Replication - There are no Nobel prizes for replicating findings. There is no Fields medal for roundly and soundly refuting the findings of a paper. There is no reputation to be built in dedicating oneself to replication efforts. All incentives push towards novel, novel, novel.
2. Funding Follows Culture - Nobody wants to pay twice for a result (much less thrice) especially if there's a chance that you'll expose the result as Actually Wrong on the second or third go.
3. Publish or Perish - Scientists have material needs -- both personally and for their actual work -- acquired through funding. That funding demands the publishing of novelty. If your results aren't novel, then they won't get published (not anywhere that matters, anyway). And if you don't get published (where it matters), then you don't get funded. And if you don't get funded, you perish. And so the circle of scientific life is complete.

At every step, the incentives involved in the production of science are, ironically, rewarding un-scientific behaviour and ignoring -- if not outright punishing -- actual science. Until replication is seen as an equal to novelty, this regime will persist.

Isn’t Linux still Linux even though probably a lot of the original code is gone?

The Kernel of Theseus.

191,229 USD

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840/202342569349300244/full

Yeah, Signal is more than encrypted messaging it’s a metadata harvesting platform. It collects phone numbers of its users, which can be used to identify people making it a data collection tool that resides on a central server in the US. By cross-referencing these identities with data from other companies like Google or Meta, the government can create a comprehensive picture of people’s connections and affiliations.

This allows identifying people of interest and building detailed graphs of their relationships. Signal may seem like an innocuous messaging app on the surface, but it cold easily play a crucial role in government data collection efforts.

Strictly speaking, the social graph harvesting portion would be under the Google umbrella, as, IIRC, Signal relies on Google Play Services for delivering messages to recipients. Signal's sealed sender and "allow sealed sender from anyone" options go part way to addressing this problem, but last I checked, neither of those options are enabled by default.

However, sealed sender on its own isn't helpful for preventing build-up of social graphs. Under normal circumstances, Google Play Services knows the IP address of the sending and receiving device, regardless of whether or not sealed sender is enabled. And we already know, thanks to Snowden, that the feds have been vacuuming up all of Google's data for over a decade now. Under normal circumstances, Google/the feds/the NSA can make very educated guesses about who is talking to who.

In order to avoid a build-up of social graphs, you need both the sealed sender feature and an anonymity overlay network, to make the IP addresses gathered not be tied back to the endpoints. You can do this. There is the Orbot app for Android which you can install, and have it route Signal app traffic through the Tor network, meaning that Google Play Services will see a sealed sender envelope emanating from the Tor Network, and have no (easy) way of linking that envelope back to a particular sender device.

Under this regime, the most Google/the feds/the NSA can accumulate is that different users receive messages from unknown people at particular times (and if you're willing to sacrifice low latency with something like the I2P network, then even the particular times go away). If Signal were to go all in on having client-side spam protection, then that too would add a layer of plausible deniability to recipients; any particular message received could well be spam. Hell, spam practically becomes a feature of the network at that point, muddying the social graph waters further.

That Signal has

1. Not made sealed sender and "allow sealed sender from anyone" the default, and
2. Not incorporated anonymizing overlay routing via tor (or some other network like I2P) into the app itself, and
3. Is still in operation in the heart of the U.S. empire

tells me that the Feds/the NSA are content with the current status quo. They get to know the vast, vast majority of who is talking (privately) to who, in practically real time, along with copious details on the endpoint devices, should they deem tailored access operations/TAO a necessary addition to their surveillance to fully compromise the endpoints and get message info as well as metadata. And the handful of people that jump through the hoops of

1. Enabling sealed sender
2. Enabling "allow sealed sender from anyone"
3. Routing app traffic over an anonymizing overlay network (and ideally having their recipients also do so)

can instead be marked for more intensive human intelligence operations as needed.

Finally, the requirement of a phone number makes the Fed's/the NSA's job much easier for getting an initial "fix" on recipients that they catch via attempts to surveil the anonymizing overlay network (as we know the NSA tries to). If they get even one envelope, they know which phone company to go knocking on to get info on where that number is, who it belongs to, etc.

This too can be subverted by getting burner SIMs, but that is a difficult task. A task that could be obviated if Signal instead allowed anonymous sign-ups to its network.

That Signal has pushed back hard on every attempt to remove the need for a phone number tells me that they have already been told by the Feds/the NSA that that is a red line, and that, should they drop that requirement, Signal's days of being a cushy non-profit for petite bourgeois San Francisco cypherpunks would quickly come to an end.

It looks like a summary ("Insight") of the same paper:

This Insight is based on a study that seeks to address this gap, offering a comprehensive examination of a left-wing extremist community on Reddit known as ‘tankies’.

Oh. This is the same article that we tore to shreds several months ago back when it first popped up on arxiv:

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/988070

Man, there’s a lot of shit one can criticize Apple for, but planned obsolescence? I’m typing this from my 2012 MacBook Air, which has my iPhone 8 plugged into it that I use for work every day. I don’t upgrade because I don’t have a need to.

I don’t upgrade because I don’t have a need to.

You don't upgrade because you can't. Apple intentionally locks down its products. And that's before getting into the numerous lawsuits over battery life and iOS slowdowns.

Apple is absolutely engaged in planned obsolescence.

Scratch a liberal and a fascist will bleed.

Scratch a liberal and a fascist will bleed.

Discord is probably the tool best-suited to capture users’ social needs right now. It’s definitely the best Reddit alternative we have.

Sure, Discord chats are great, particularly for smaller communities/IRL friends. But as an alternative to subreddits or classic forums they’re absolute rubbish. Lemmy seems to be the only real game in that town for now.

Every time I see "to learn more, come hang with us in our Discord," I die a little. Discord is a chat application. It isn't meant to be a repository of knowledge for your app/service. That's what your website is for. And it's not a substitute for a proper knowledgebase or documentation either.