I for a while was completely into crypto and really hoped it would replace a few mega corporations and enable easy convenient transactions… but that never happened. I can’t buy groceries or pay rent with any crypto. Infact In fact I regret spending the crypto I did have on the very few things or places I could spend it. Crypto(at least imo) went from something new and exciting and limitless to now being only something you buy and then hope the value goes up. It’s useless as anything else. It’s now all snake oil salespeople trying to pump up some shitty crypto that has 0 new features and was created to pump and dump.

Stablecoins can't go up. That's my point

iOS doesn’t support email encryption. My provider(mailbox.org) offers an option to automatically encrypt all incoming email.

The teacher noticed a few irregularities such as the time the student spent inside the submitted project. The cheater student only had around 55 mins logged whereas everyone else had 7-8 hours. That set off alarm bells for the teacher who then actually looked into the paper more and noticed fake citations and it was flagged as “ai” generated when they ran it through a few ai detectors.

A year or two ago I was writing a plug-in for yt-dlp for a new site and I don’t really know python that well so I popped into a python irc support room and was getting some help when the user asked what I was ultimately trying to do. When I mentioned yt-dlp the user said he could not help me any longer since he was employed by Google and continuing to help me was in violation of his employment agreement. He even linked some document from corp.google.com(or something along those lines). I was pretty surprised and even a little annoyed because after saying all that he framed me/yt-dlp as being piracy…

I love stuff like this!

While it’s never been officially proven, there is a interesting story behind truecrypt. It was allegedly written by one guy (Paul Le Rou) who was a programmer turned cartel boss/gun/drug runner.

But back to your question, truecrypt was professionally audited and deemed “secure”, some issues were found but none that were back doors or significant. Shortly after(might have even been during) the audit truecrypt deleted all old versions and posted a weird message telling people to use bitlocker.

After some time veracrypt picked up the torch and has continued developing what was truecrypt.

Wow .. what a crazy story

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux

This guy's life definitely needs a movie

I think it said there’s a 447 page book and a few articles. This plus a little probable fiction could be a long tv series.

The possibility of being Satoshi of bitcoin also. Entertaining read. Programmer -> cartel boss.

Signal isn’t a social network… it’s a messaging app.

I mean, I dont agree with the person you are replying to, but signal absolutely is a social network. Its a network you use to communicate socially.

You can argue its not social media, but I think the stories feature definitely puts it on the social media spectrum to some degree.

Does anyone actually use the stories feature?

My friends on Signal do, but I have no idea how widespread it is across their whole userbase. It's not as in-your-face as Instagram, which is actually kind of nice, but like it's being said - signal is social media. you can choose to not use that feature but that's on you. To look at you and your friend group and extrapolate from there is not science, or data driven. the plural of anecdote is not data.

It's like saying no one uses Facebook or Google anymore. That's true for certain bubbles, and it's hard to know when you're in one, but, say least for those two, it's not too hard to look outside your bubble.

Now the cryptocurrency integration, that one I do wonder about. (Since my friend group doesn't use it and I'm extrapolating :) ).

I disabled that feature as soon as it appeared (the less I use a messaging app, the best it is) and forgot about it.

Your comment makes me curious: I do really wonder how this feature is used. Signal announced it was really something users were looking for. I wonder if it was a weak attempt at convincing the Instagram crowd or if it is really popular with some population.

In the end, I’m still angry that they removed SMS support. That was really useful to have only one messaging app on my phone.

My friend group uses Signal for cross-platform group texting and the stories feature is super popular. Great for putting up non-intrusive pet pics or memes. IDK the rationale for introducing it, but I do think it's a fun feature that makes it feel more like a WhatsApp/social messaging replacement, rather than just something people download to coordinate protests or sell drugs.

Thanks for this comment. It makes me understand better how it could be used (never saw the need myself, even when I was on Whatsapp. I probably too old)

> Your comment makes me curious: I do really wonder how this feature is used.

This is why I don't begrudge sending telemetry for how I'm using software. As a developer myself, I really want to know if the code I'm writing is at all appreciated or if I'm just coding into the void, so I'm happy to send stats on how some one else's software is getting used.

I turned it off as soon as it was debuted.

Same thing. Parent comment doesn't make much sense though!

You mean: it wasn’t.

If it walks like a duck.

I’ll have to check this out.

You do realize that tor is open source and has been under scrutiny by some of the worlds leading security researchers? It may not be 100% perfect, but claiming it’s useless and ineffective simply because it was born out of government research is completely asinine.

Like always, communities reform. There’s a Swiss site now that I’ll have to leaved “REDacted” that is just as good if not better than what.cd