slashdot
feeds.twtxt.net
 (6d ago)

OpenAI’s Sam Altman Wants AI in the Hands of the People - and Universal Basic Compute?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave an hour-long interview to the “All-In” podcast (hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg).

And when asked about this summer’s launch of the next version of ChatGPT, Altman said they hoped to “be thoughtful about how we do it, like we may releas … ⌘ Read more

⤋ Read More
movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » Another thing that doesn’t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

I’m (just) old enough to have experienced the German Democratic Republic first hand and if they had had any of these capabilities … 🙈🙈🙈

⤋ Read More
mckinley
twtxt.net
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » Another thing that doesn’t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de People just don’t ask these questions. It’s really a serious privacy issue, and I don’t see it brought up very often. Not even in privacy-minded circles. If you’re using a proprietary operating system on any Internet-connected device, you need to assume that the vendor can see everything you do on it and maybe even what you do on other devices as well..

⤋ Read More
movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » Another thing that doesn’t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

@mckinley@twtxt.net Thanks for the info. 🤔

This is quite bizarre. Why are we accepting this? 🤔 I guess it just doesn’t matter to people when they use Google for everything anyway (mail, Google Drive, …) … 😒 Bah.

It’s extra “funny” in my case, because I run that Matrix server myself, so I assumed that data is only sent between that server and the clients. But no, of course not, lots of things still get shoved through Google and Apple. 😂😭 How silly.

⤋ Read More
mckinley
twtxt.net
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » Another thing that doesn’t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

Actually, it looks like notifications using Google’s service can be encrypted end-to-end. I don’t know if this is used much in practice or if you can tell if the notifications on your device are encrypted. There seems to be some conflicting information out there.

Even if the content is encrypted, though, you’re still giving quite a bit of metadata to Google by using their notification service.

⤋ Read More
mckinley
twtxt.net
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » Another thing that doesn’t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

It looks like ntfy.sh can work either through the OS’s notification service or by maintaining its own connection to the server in the background. For privacy, you definitely want to use “Instant Delivery” and self-host the server.

https://docs.ntfy.sh/faq/#how-much-battery-does-the-android-app-use
https://docs.ntfy.sh/faq/#what-is-instant-delivery

⤋ Read More
mckinley
twtxt.net
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » Another thing that doesn’t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I haven’t done any app development, but I know notifications on phones are indeed dependent on cloud services run by the OS vendor which talk to servers run by the app vendor on your behalf. This is supposedly better on battery life, but it conveniently lets your OS vendor read all your notifications.

Mobile XMPP clients usually implement notifications using XEP-0537 and it goes like this:

Your XMPP server -> Client vendor's notification server -> Client OS notification server -> User's device

It’s not end-to-end encrypted so servers will usually just send a dummy message through (You received a message from juliet@capulet.lit!) so you have to open the app to see the (hopefully) encrypted message.
It’s a similar flow on both iOS and Android and I assume Matrix clients work the same way.

⤋ Read More
prologic
twtxt.net
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » Okay, I've built full search capabilities for yarnd 😅 Let's see how many bugs I've created 🤣

Sorry folks, it was a total disaster 🤣 Had to disable the new feature 😢

  • ran out of disk space
  • blew up the db on this pod (corrupted)
  • lots of missing features and. broken shit™

⤋ Read More
prologic
twtxt.net
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » Hey @bmallred 👋 Can you see this? 🤔

The weird this is I still see your profile as

bmallred may not follow you

I assume you share your followings publicly, I see them on your feed, so I assume so. I was going to debug this on my side too today to see if.I goofed something up but my pod is rather busy so I hadn’t done that yet 😅 (actually working again finally on search)

⤋ Read More
movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » I was able to take a photo of the large sunspots that made the news these days:

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks 😅

This is my setup, I think I posted these before:

Image

Image

It’s a Celestron Ultima 100 (originally bought for bird watching, not a telescope) with a special adapter so that I can mount my Canon EOS 600D directly. The sun filter is just a generic filter for 100mm scopes. The tripod isn’t very good and actually rather annoying. 😂

It’s not a very complicated setup. 🤔 Being able to mount the camera directly is crucial.

⤋ Read More
movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » Another thing that doesn’t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com It would appear so. 🤔 (I’m too lazy to set that up, though, I rather just don’t use notifications. They’re not that important in this case.)

I was not aware that I needed a cloud service for something as (seemingly) simple as local app notifications. 😳

⤋ Read More
movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (1w ago)

Another thing that doesn’t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

I run a Matrix server for our family. I use “FluffyChat” on my phone. Traffic from the phone to my Matrix server is allowed and chatting in FluffyChat works.

But I don’t get any notifications anymore on new messages.

So, what’s going on here? Does FluffyChat, which only really needs to talk to my own server, rely on some cloud service for notifications? Seriously? 🤔 How does that work, does this cloud service see all my notifications or what?

Anyone around who did app development on Android? Can you shed some light on this?

⤋ Read More
prologic
twtxt.net
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » @prologic Regarding the static URL: The hostname at least is a CNAME record and resolves to something at cloudfront. What I meant was that I, as a user, cannot configure this URL anywhere in the Android UI. 🤔

Oh so it really does hit some stupid arbitrary endpoint at AWS 😱

⤋ Read More
movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » @prologic Hmm, have you used a GPS device 15, 20 years ago? I had one in my car. It would take a long time until it got a first “fix” of your location. That’s because it can take up to 12 minutes until you have gathered all the data directly from the satellites. These days, GPS trackers on smartphones get a fix within seconds, maybe 30 seconds tops, because they get pre-seeded with (approximated) satellite positions via A-GPS.

(The old device I’m referring to was a handheld device. It was not built into the car and was not running 24/7.)

⤋ Read More
movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » One thing I’ve learned from locking down my Android phone (see #pknsrda):

I’ll make an experiment: I’ll keep blocking all the phone’s internet traffic and then we’ll see how bad the GPS performance will get in a couple of hours/days. 😅 (If I got it all wrong and it still works fine, that’d be great!)

⤋ Read More
movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » One thing I’ve learned from locking down my Android phone (see #pknsrda):

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, have you used a GPS device 15, 20 years ago? I had one in my car. It would take a long time until it got a first “fix” of your location. That’s because it can take up to 12 minutes until you have gathered all the data directly from the satellites. These days, GPS trackers on smartphones get a fix within seconds, maybe 30 seconds tops, because they get pre-seeded with (approximated) satellite positions via A-GPS.

We also not only have the USA’s GPS these days but also other satellite systems like the EU’s Galileo or Russia’s Glonass. A-GPS helps you get “in contact” quickly with more satellites, which enhances the precision quite a lot.

So, yeah, you can use it without A-GPS. But it would be very annoying and imprecise. I bought a new phone last year and A-GPS was broken on that one (I saw no internet traffic at all), which made it basically useless, to the point where I wouldn’t want to use it at all. I sent it back and bought another model.

To my knowledge, the only way to use GPS without something like A-GPS is to have it turned on all the time, so you get regular updates directly from the satellites.

⤋ Read More
prologic
twtxt.net
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » One thing I’ve learned from locking down my Android phone (see #pknsrda):

I can’t imagine it’s a static URL either, it surely has to be a unicast address of some sort. Relying on a static URL sounds like an utter disaster to me 🤔 I’d have to read the open spec on this…

⤋ Read More
prologic
twtxt.net
 (1w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » One thing I’ve learned from locking down my Android phone (see #pknsrda):

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Surely it isn’t as bad as this though right? 🤔 I mean reading the Wikipedia page on A-GPS, it sounds to me like it sends enough data to the nearest tower to give you enough data to warm-up the GPS receivership, presumably with GPS coordinates of the tower itself? I can imagine this data payload would include the Date/Time, IEMI and possibly your SIM details and Phone number (why not). It could be worse 🤣

⤋ Read More
movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (1w ago)

One thing I’ve learned from locking down my Android phone (see #pknsrda):

The data for assisted GPS does not come from Google or, better yet, A PUBLIC SERVICE, but from a server hosted by the hardware manufacturer. Without regularly fetching fresh A-GPS data, the GPS performance is much worse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS).

This means that the hardware manufacturer has (more or less) direct control over whether I’m able to use GPS or not. This isn’t an Android setting, it’s buried deep within the device, no way to change the URL. If that manufacturer decides one day to cut me off, for whatever reason, or goes bankrupt or whatever, then I’ll have to buy a new phone.

And of course, this data transfer is encrypted as well, so I don’t know what my phone sends to those servers.

All this smartphone business is such a clusterfuck. I should have never bought one of those things.

⤋ Read More
prx
si3t.ch
 (1w ago)

Je cherche de quoi s’isoler du bruit pour me concentrer. C’est pour plusieurs heures, il faut donc que ça soit plus confortable que des boules quies. Des suggestions?

⤋ Read More