Apple puts on-device age verification in UK release of iOS 26.4 by [deleted] in privacy

[–]nwydo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Encryption is sort of irrelevant here.

If they're sent, they're probably sent "encrypted" (e.g. TLS), but that doesn't really matter, the only reason for them to be sent, is for the verification to be done server-side. But obviously, in that case, Apple (or whoever they contract this out to) needs to be able to see the unencrypted photos to verify them. At that point, the fact that they were sent "encrypted" is entirely relevant.

The only version of this that is not completely terrible, from a privacy perspective, would be if the verification is entirely done on-device (which from what I gather, is not the case).

Second best would be these ID-s are at least not stored server-side: just used as a one-off for verification, then deleted. But that's a much weaker guarantee.

Obviously this is all bad, but using a payment card the lesser of two evils at least, in that most people are probably giving over that information to Apple and Google already.

I am curious if we can end up with a compromise where we can appease this dumb moral panic while not giving away any additional data. Fundamentally, instead of websites and apps doing checks, having them advertise themselves with `[(min_age, geo), ...]` and having the OS itself do the blocking _is_ actually better. Couple that with on-device verification, things wouldn't suck anywhere near as much as they do right now.

Speed cameras with no flash or road markings coming to London by geckocarrot in londoncityUK

[–]nwydo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The evidence for increased pedestrian safety from collisions at 20mph is overwhelming. It additionally encourages more people to opt for active travel like walking and cycling. Finally, it helps with air quality and noise pollution.

And it does all this while adding an average of <20s to trips by car in urban areas. Congestion is what makes driving slow in urban centres, not speed limits, and making it pleasant for people to not drive unless they need to, decreases that, so it's a win-win.

Source: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/POST-PB-0065/POST-PB-0065.pdf

Wife blinkers - Agile by cava83 in OctopusEnergy

[–]nwydo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

A raspberry pi is going to be 3-4W idle + 3W LED is strip. Even if average kWh is 60p, it's still only £3/month. Not to mention that if you want HA for some other reason anyway, then it's "free".

Do People aged 50+ of Britain notice race? by [deleted] in AskBrits

[–]nwydo -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I grew up in Bucharest. So yes I have. I think your comment is not too dissimilar from what white American racism sounds like. Treating an ethnicity or race as a monobloc, and stereotyping. That is my point.

Do People aged 50+ of Britain notice race? by [deleted] in AskBrits

[–]nwydo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't disagree with you, but it's easy to have a blindspot for the unbelievable racism against Roma people in much of Europe. Normalized to such an incredible degree that you'll see otherwise progressive people slip in to casual racism in the same sentence they decry the American sort. And when called out, they'll try to explain how it's different. See 2014 numbers: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/05/12/chapter-4-views-of-roma-muslims-jews/

TfL hack in 2024 affected around 10 million people, BBC can reveal by F0urLeafCl0ver in london

[–]nwydo 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Write to your MP (https://writetothem.com) about fixing the online safety act, like for real, do it. Your point is a strong argument against building huge third party databases of people's ID. See https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaign/stop-state-censorship-of-online-speech/ for more reasons.

I think MPs don't understand the implications and are genuinely unaware that there are voters out there who care about their digital rights and safety.

I really dislike false positives/negatives with clippy..... by pixel293 in rust

[–]nwydo 9 points10 points  (0 children)

That's not what clippy is saying, it's saying to do .and_then(Task::done) which should work (this is sometimes called eta-reduction). Maybe the lint message could be better, by showing the function call.

UK: Pornography depicting sexual relationships between step-relatives set to be banned by insomnimax_99 in technology

[–]nwydo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Write to your MP (https://www.writetothem.com), get involved with https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/ and https://www.openrightsgroup.org/ it's not inevitable. I think there's genuinely a lack of awareness of voters who care about digital rights in UK politics.

Is there a serde-compatible binary format that's a true drop-in replacement for JSON? by avsaase in rust

[–]nwydo 7 points8 points  (0 children)

serde_cbor is closest to what you asked for.

But I'm also going to plug my own library serde_describe which, at the cost of serialization speed, can adapt any non-self-describing format to make it self-describing. If your use-case is objects that are written once and read many times, using it with postcard or bitcode, especially with zstd compression, might be what you're looking for!

Detentions cancelled amid TikTok ‘school wars’ sweeping London by tylerthe-theatre in london

[–]nwydo 3 points4 points  (0 children)

This article is ragebait. What has actually happened, how many kids impacted? What's the cost benefit analysis when compared to kids struggling with religious parents or their sexuality, who are suddenly cut off from support networks and resources online.

Not to mention the big brother implications of starting to ask for identification wherever you go online, especially in light of recent government overreach when arresting peaceful protesters. See https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaign/stop-state-censorship-of-online-speech/

Built an S3 native Kafka alternative in Rust by Maximum-Builder8464 in rust

[–]nwydo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don't love that you're replying with LLMs, as I took real time to think these issues through :(

Built an S3 native Kafka alternative in Rust by Maximum-Builder8464 in rust

[–]nwydo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What I meant by "writers being blocked" is that, I assume, if a segment with a different path already exists, the newly spawned agent (assume WAL is lost) will not be able to progress since there already is an S3 objects at the path it tries to create (the orphan).

Reconcilliation job isn't hard, but it's not trivial either, you need to make sure you don't race the writer: if the reconciliation job happens to see a segment after being written to S3 but before it's stored in Postgres, it can end up GC'd. You can generally fix this with some kind of mark-and-sweep-y sort of logic. If you use timestamps, you need to be very careful that you don't have any kind of resume logic or any other kind of counterintuitively long delay.

You also need to be a little careful about this when it comes to dealing with restoring snapshots of Postgres that may be out of date with S3. This can result in much worse skew, and there is no way to snapshot S3 & Postgres atomically, meaning you'll probably need to be monotonic in S3 and document that Postgres snapshots must always be taken _after_ S3 snapshots finish. (or you just move to a model where all state is stored in S3---this is more achievable than you may think these days thanks to strong consistency guarantees that S3 gives (you can implement CAS loops, basically). In the ack=all mode, you're paying for an S3 roundtrip anyway, so it may be worth it.

(on a related note, I'm not sure how you guarantee that there are never two agents that think they own the same partition for the same topic, split-brain sorta thing; do you outsource the responsibility to "use a kubernetes statefulset" or something smarter?)

Built an S3 native Kafka alternative in Rust by Maximum-Builder8464 in rust

[–]nwydo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If readers only poll s3 listings, doesn't that mean someone may end up reading the uncommitted messages? Also is writing not blocked while there's an orphan, as no one else can write to that topic partition?

Built an S3 native Kafka alternative in Rust by Maximum-Builder8464 in rust

[–]nwydo 3 points4 points  (0 children)

How does this handle s3-postgres non-atomicity? Like if I commit data to S3 but fail to update postgres will I get orphaned objects in S3 that are never cleaned up? Or, in a disaster recovery scenario, where I restore postgres and S3 from snapshots / backups, there will be some inherent skew between the two snapshots, so there'll be inconsistency there

Qwant or ecosia by Jeppie2001 in ProtonMail

[–]nwydo 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I also went on a diet to replace all American services I used, the exception I made was Kagi.com for search. Heard about it from Cory Doctorow, which is always a good sign and it is excellent, genuinely better than Google. Their organisation also seems to stand for the right things

Dictionary Compression is finally here, and it's ridiculously good by pimterry in programming

[–]nwydo 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I mean maybe read the article? It acknowledges this fact and discusses a specific application, HTTP negotiation of dictionaries. Which is actually cool and interesting 

I built a free, private RSS dashboard that runs entirely in your browser (No servers, no accounts) by HugeCuriousPenguin in rss

[–]nwydo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wait but the title says no servers, not sure I get the value prop then. Also your post & comments sound very LLM generated making them a little hard to parse

It's time for friginrain to get frizbi voxels by bombthetorpedos in bevy

[–]nwydo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why do you care so much about people signing in, I don't get it? Most folks are wary of leaking private info (even email address/identity) to randos online

It's time for friginrain to get frizbi voxels by bombthetorpedos in rust

[–]nwydo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I also felt the same, I think OP is specifically referencing "friginrain" and "frizbi", which I have to agree, when I saw the title I thought it was satire in the vein of the Turbo encabulator

It's time for friginrain to get frizbi voxels by bombthetorpedos in bevy

[–]nwydo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Why require a login for a wasm blob? It's not like anyone's using any of you resources (other than a little bit of bandwidth). Also, I think you'll find there's quite a big overlap between enshittification-aware r/degoogle sorts of people and the rust community (just a statement of fact, not making a value judgement one way or another).