Modern lithium batteries can last decades! LFP batteries can take thousands of discharges cycles, and most systems wouldn’t be designed to fully drain the batteries anyways (keeping them at more optimal levels of charge to maintain capacity).
solar systems don’t require that much ongoing maintenance. There just aren’t many consumable components. (And battery recycling is getting better by the year)
I don’t know a single person in my life who thinks US healthcare is good, so that’s weird. And many my peers a have good jobs with good health insurance. Everyone I know has at least one bad story about insurance, if you’ve ever had more than really basic checkups.
TLDR, it only impacts Visa Cards if you have express transit mode enabled, and relies on a MITM attack.
There are two root issues:
1. iOS does not verify the actual transaction value, it just verifies that a flag is set indicating it’s a low value transaction. (Eg for express transit where no faceID is required.) Apple says the root cause is credit card companies, but they could clearly fix this.
2. In visa transactions with an offline terminal, the credit card doesn’t cryptographically sign the data it’s sending, which is why the MITM attack is able to adjust the transaction metadata getting sent to the phone. (MITM attack basically changes the transaction flow to make it look like an offline transit reader asking for a low value amount of money, and ios approves the transaction with no verification, despite it being for $10k) Mastercard doesn’t have that vulnerability because the transaction metadata is cryptographically protected/verified. Visa claims that the attack is too hard to pull off for it to be worth changing.
> 1. iOS does not verify the actual transaction value, it just verifies that a flag is set indicating it’s a low value transaction. (Eg for express transit where no faceID is required.) Apple says the root cause is credit card companies, but they could clearly fix this.
The video explains why this is the credit card company responsible for this. The value of a low vs high value transaction changes depending on local currency, credit card company risk profile, etc. It’s not unified at all, even within the same country. And values change over time, so having to reissue cards to change it would be impractical.
My experience writing code is that it’s more terse and specific, even in its own voice. I find it catching bugs more often during implementation more too, comparing directly against 4.6. I think I prefer its style because it seems to be way less verbose
Truth is if mastodon.social gets ddosd the same as Bluesky I can still use the rest of the network fine. Proof is in the pudding. tons of instances that make up the fabric of redundancy. I think most people would be served better if Bluesky acted differently early with their rollout in a sharded manner?
i get real tired of people trumpeting that bsky is distributed.
Can i run a private node? can i run a functional node completely within my network segment? because i can with gnusocial and misskey; i've never run mastodon; i am on fosstodon and a couple of other mastodon-likes.
bluesky is to discord what mastodon (fedi) is to IRC.
don't let the fact that most people use the main instances fool you, there's thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of instances. I haven't seen a tally recently, i forget the account that shows them for each "instance type", like pleroma, misskey, mastodon, pixelfed, whatever the reddit clone is, whatever the 4chan clone is, and so on.
anyhow when elon bought twitter mastodon surged. I hope they didn't spend millions upgrading the main instances because most of that dropped off because, you know, everyone's on twitter. only a few million on mastodon.
My whole point is, trying to shoehorn words like "distributed" into a system that i cannot run independently is, well it's just not distributed, that's all.
edit: maybe this is sour grapes because i never got an invite; but maybe i think it's just twitter with a different coat of paint and different buzzwords attached.
This is half true. If mastodon.social goes down every single one of the accounts made on that instance go down as well.
In truly decentralized protocols you own your identity and can take it elsewhere, for instance, in Nostr and SSB, a relay/pub going down is no big deal since you can connect to other servers and maintain communications.
historic posts from the known network and (sometimes media, instance setting) are cached on your own instance in ActivityPub.
interactions travel across the known network graph.
if an instance vanished forever, overnight, there is at least an imprint of it across the network, albeit instance specific.
that may be by design, there are jurisdictions that have people complying with laws and things. not sure how the ecosystems you mention deal with that in particular
That doesn’t answer the point I’m making.
If the instance your account was made on explodes, YOU lose your social graph, wether some of your posts survive cached elsewhere is not relevant, your account is gone, and so are your connections.
You have no way to prove an account made after the original instance went down belongs to someone, that’s the issue with federated systems.
As for content moderation, in nostr relay operators such as nostr.build handle legal takedowns on a daily basis, SSB is a little trickier since it’s mostly p2p but pubs are still able to control what flows through them to some degree.
the web, which also gets referred to as decentralized, suffers from the same proof problem. we have identity tied largely to dns. web sites can claim whatever. somewhere a line was drawn to indicate what matters most is creating something without a single point of failure?
The people I follow on mastodon come from a wide variety of instances. While mastodon.social is the largest instance, most of the accounts I follow are elsewhere.
Granted, all the smaller instances are likely easier to DOS as they are small instances. But mastodon is actually decentralized. If any one instance goes down, everything else keeps working. Unlike Bluesky and ATProto which is more of a theoretical “could be” decentralized.
I’ve been installing apps from the App Store for more than a decade and have never ever accidentally downloaded spam or malware. I’m sure it’s there but it’s really not “riddled” with it in my experience searching for apps. What it’s riddled with is subscription-based apps whose free tier is worthless
Another huge benefit is you can actually get high-bitrate streaming. Ripping a 4k Blu-ray & streaming it from home (for those who may not want to sail the seas) is sooooo much higher quality than typical streaming.
It is so sad how with the internet we have accepted terrible media quality. Instant messaging and social media reduces photos to 1MP and heavily compressed. It's fine for a photo or meme you are only looking at once and scrolling past. But if it's something you'd want to save, the quality is garbage.
I'd honestly rather apps stop providing hosted media and just do the delivery, let me worry about backing up history. iMessage seems to be the only one sending things in full quality.
iMessage doesn't require you to store history in icloud, it can just store everything locally if you want. But yes, I'd rather not have stored history, or the option to pay for storage than to have all media crushed beyond recognition.
A few times I've wanted to print something and found it was sent over an IM app and compressed to 100kb rendering it useless.
I don’t think it defeats the point at all. Uploading photos to Google is a massive privacy concern. Apple is maybe better in that way, but very limited cross-platform support, and when I’ve tried it, poor performance & pricing. Neither do well at higher end photography either.
I self host for privacy, which makes me feel uncomfortable about all my private data sitting unencrypted on a server I don't control. It's better in that you don't have fully automated google AI scanning your data, but it's still exposed. None of the self hosted apps are designed with e2e encryption in mind so you'd be better off using icloud.
Lets say you don't leave it unencrypted on disk, only in memory. Do you really think vps providers are slurping your personal data out of a VM's memory in the same way google do dragnet personal data gathering? If your adversary is the government, sure they probably can do that, but otherwise it seems unlikely.
solar systems don’t require that much ongoing maintenance. There just aren’t many consumable components. (And battery recycling is getting better by the year)
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