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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • Nah what we need is good privacy-focussed companies getting into the public IAM space.

    You know how you can sign into stuff with your Google or Facebook account? And get a 2FA push to your phone?

    Like that. Except by a company with a shred of ethics and morality. Like Proton.

    I do also think that we all should have a cryptographically secure federally issued identity for official uses such as signing documents or signing into financial accounts and other things that must use your official identity, and not an online pseudonym. Like SSN but on a smartcard. Basically CAC or ECA but for general civilian use.




  • JasonDJ@lemmy.ziptoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldIt's good to be da king
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    24 hours ago

    Please be a more conscientious consumer of media.

    The source in that article is a an analysis of Bank of America’s internal data. It is not “half of all Americans”, it is “half of Bank of America customers”. Which already qualifies the dataset as people who have a bank account (and at that, one as expensive and hostile to low-income customers as BoA)

    If it were more than single digit millions, it would be “tens of millions”. And even once you get to “over a hundred million”, you’re still talking of less than a third of Americans.

    “Millions and millions of Americans” is something that spin doctors say to make you think that it’s a majority of Americans. It’s very far from it. “Millions and millions of people” may even be less than a majority of Minnesotians

    Edit to add: This federal reserve study showed that 6% of American adults are completely unbanked (as in, no bank accounts at all) and 16% are underbanked (having a checking or saving account, but no other banking products or use alternative products like payday advance or money orders).

    Further in the study it shows over half of Americans have carried a balance on a credit card in the past 12 months.






  • I’m not sure if you realize this, but “millions and millions” is still “single digit millions”. The talking heads say things like “millions and millions” because it sounds like a lot, but that’s actually a minority.

    That still leaves hundreds of millions of Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck. In fact, they’re living at least 4 paychecks out on revolving debt.





  • I’m not saying we shouldn’t. I’m saying this to counter the Steve Jobs anecdote above me. He exploited a loophole to avoid some fines because of his exorbitant wealth. Obviously that’s a bad thing and he should’ve paid, and exploiting the loophole to park in handicap spaces, even at Apple (where he could just reserve a spot for himself), is just a sign of his narcissistic psychosis. But to point it at him as an example of why it wouldn’t work is missing the forest for the trees.

    I feel the same way about UBI. Who gives a shit if Musk gets a check for $2000 every month or whatever. He doesn’t, and that’s a drop in the bucket of the whole thing, especially considering he (should/would) be paying way, way, way more in funding such a program. He’s a distraction. I care way more about everybody else getting it.




  • JasonDJ@lemmy.ziptomemes@lemmy.worldKeep it simple
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    3 days ago

    Dude I just bought 4 refurbished Linksys MX4200 (tri-band) access points for $80 (total), put on OpenWRT, and built a mesh system. I’m incredibly happy with the result, especially for the price. And, I’ve got wireless bridges all through the house so I can keep some things off the forwarding channels and only in the back haul.

    It’s not wired, but it’s close enough and doesn’t require me drilling through all my walls running cable or carving out a space in the house for all of it to coalesce.

    Granted, I’m in an area with not a lot of wireless interference…I work in enterprise networking and I’ve had a lot of issues with remote workers on wireless networks that weren’t capable of handling the volume of data that the users were uploading. Sometimes just because there’s too much interference…but a lot of the time it’s because of misconfiguration (either out of ignorance or because the good features, like multicast-to-unicast, are missing), or printer drivers that spam the wireless with multicast whenever the printer is offline (which I’ve seen a surprising amount of times).

    If you’re on wireless…multicast is bad, mmmkay? Only “one” device can talk at a time on wireless (barring MIMO shenanigans), and when it’s multicast traffic…it has to get sent at the lowest compatible rates. A lot of routers set this to 6Mbps or even 1Mbps by default. So your nice fancy “1200Mbps” wireless has to slow down a crawl every time your Roku wants to tell Alexa that it’s there. Which is surprisingly often. Scale up for all the internet-of-crap stuff people have and it’s a miracle their wireless works at all.

    Oh and I’ve found people with extenders they don’t know about. Ring Chime? Apparently it functions as an 802.11n (only) extender. Huge bottleneck right there. And then it can only be as good as the signal it gets from the next access point.


  • It’s a delicate topic. TikTok collects a ton of data from devices and infers a ton of data from watching patterns. This is really true of most of the modern web apps, but especially true of TikTok because the short-form means more content to churn through, and the algorithm is practically an IV drip of dopamine.

    The much, much more important issues are user privacy and truth-in-media, and is something that just as well needs to be pointed at Meta and Twitter and Reddit and Google. TikTok is probably more critical at the present moment, because it’s run by a country our president-elect wants to start a trade-war with, and they’ve got quite an upper hand with all the data that we, the users, give them for free, via a propaganda machine under their control.