Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one

Neither #ElonMusk nor #Tesla is helping with #ClimateChange. They are giving us an easy out that won't actually work. Even so-called #green energy has an environmental impact, including water use, mining, use of oil for plastics, etc. At this point, electric cars should be taxed the same as any other, except maybe cheap ones. It is absurd at this point to subsidize building environmentally damaging luxury cars like Teslas. Get more people walking, biking, taking transit

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/07/31/0128257/elon-musk-predicts-electricity-shortage-in-two-years

Its frustrating to see how deeply #Copyright cartels have infiltrated our culture, that people call making cost-free digital copies "theft" even in countries where it is fully legal to do so. It is not even "copyright infringement" if it is not against the local copyright laws. And yes, unlike laws about theft, copyright laws vary widely around the world. I've always liked "Copying Is Not Theft" has an illustration of the difference https://yewtu.be/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

I still don't get why #Apple #AppStore or #GooglePlay do not allow devs to give source when uploading apps for review. It makes review tasks much easier and more reliable, as we've seen with #FDroid's review. Would it scare the #proprietary app devs too much? Are they more interested in cheap "window dressing" reviews than actually catching things? It is hard not to see bias since both are #gatekeepers getting lots of money from apps they are policing.
For example
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/apple-tries-to-close-privacy-loopholes-with-new-app-submission-policy/ 1/

Crazy #circumvention tool idea: set up #spam #honeypot then mine the emails for #IPFS gateways, which are then automatically shared out to users who have browser plugin installed which unblocks access to anything in IPFS.

Looks like the latest release of #FDroid, v1.17.0, does not get flagged by #Google, at least in the #Android 14 emulator. I heard some reports that v1.16.4 also isn't flagged. I don't really know why its flagging F-Droid then. v1.16.4 has an unchanged #targetSdkVersion, but v1.17.0 has it bumped to 28. I have found no way to get info on why they are flagging the app, just this silly "unsafe" warning screen. Is F-Droid being flagged by Google Play Protect on your devices? Please let me know.

On the other hand, #MLS includes "Group Integrity", which means that all members in a group see the same state. This means all members see the same list of members, same message transcript, same message order, etc. #Signal Protocol does not guarantee Group Integrity. I think this is an important property, but I wonder how much this was actually abused in the real world with other protocols? 3/

One big concern I have about #MLS over something like #Signal Protocol is that it makes it so the cost of sending a message to a group of 10 is about the same as sending to a group of 1000 or more. This is the opposite of how physical social interaction works, it is much more effort to speak in front of large groups. This gives advantage to spam, disinfo, trolling, etc. as compared to protocols where the cost linearly increases as the number of users in the group increases. 2/

#MLS Messaging Layer Security has just been officially standardized by the #IETF, this is a great new development, especially in combination with standard protocols like #Matrix and #XMPP. https://blog.phnx.im/rfc-9420-mls/ 1/

#CriticalMass #Vienna heat map of paths taken since 2011.