It’s not the norm but it does happen quite a bit, especially in authoritarian countries at land borders where the officials are always looking for a way to justify their jobs. It happened to me last year and that was in China, although in that case leaving not entering.

PS: for info, that was in Xinjiang at possibly the highest security border in the world. I showed the official a bunch of my mundane tourist photos, which was enough to have me on my way. Not a pleasant experience though.

At this rate there’ll be more people who love America outside it than inside it!

Yes, good parallel, didn’t think of that. Perhaps there’s just a limit on how much you can decentralize without things breaking down for either social or technical reasons.

Hyperbole aside, what’s incorrect?

PS: yeah yeah, downvotes just prove you can’t answer. Next.

Very interesting, thanks.

Atproto scales quadratically, […] harms performance AP scales horizontally

Clearly true. But this suggests to me that ATProto might still work well with, say, 5 or 15 "PDS"s. That is still enough IMO to guarantee a high level of pluralism.

In a commercial market, let’s say for telephony or cars or web browsers, we readily accept that there are only a handful of players. Indeed, there’s generally an optimal number, high enough to guarantee competition but low enough that we can keep track of the brands and trust that they won’t go out of business tomorrow.

And nothing is stopping at least one of those few brands from being a “good guy”, akin to Mozilla’s historic role in the web-browser market. It could be run by say, Wikimedia, for example. At least we would know that it would not disappear tomorrow, which is more than can be said for most Lemmy instances.

I agree that there should be enough space for both ATProto and AP to thrive.

Despite everything, this remains a state created by Enlightenment liberals, extremely decentralized, with a powerful independent judiciary and literally the strongest speech protections in the world.

Obviously the direction of travel is wrong, but let’s keep some perspective.

PS: disappointing to see such a display of irrational groupthink in this community, I had hoped for better. Perhaps the instance was a clue.

Blah blah blah. My point concerned the title and only the title. All the rest is irrelevant. I know every bit as much about Telegram as you do.

I’m not American. The fact is that the FSB is only a threat to those with Russian citizenship or who live within the Russian Federation. Let’s be real: that’s not the vast majority of people reading this.

I would encourage you to read more than the title of a blog post before you critique it. At least skim around.

Thank you for the condescending advice, and you’re correct that I didn’t read it - but in this case, why would I bother? The argument is right in the title, it’s been made a hundred times before, and apparently needs refuting 100 times too. There are reasons for Westerners not to use Telegram. This isn’t one of them.

What jurisdiction does the FSB have over you? None, and it has zero interest in helping those that do. This is the rationale for not worrying about backend security on Telegram. Transport security is a another question.

Very useful, thanks.

As I see it, Bluesky is fundamentally different from Xitter and it is a major step in the right direction. It is short-sighted to reject it because of some technical imperfections.

The fundamental question IMO is whether there is enough mindshare (i.e. users and attention) to allow ATSocial (AKA partial federation) and ActivityPub (AKA total federation) to both be successful. I’m thinking there is. After all, the vast majority of people are still on ad-fuelled corporate social media, with all its internal contradictions.

Irrelevant if nobody else uses it. It’s partly because techies can never agree on a single alternative that we’re still stuck with WhatsZuck.

SMS? Outside the USA it’s used for almost nothing but 2FA codes at this point.

Þere aren’t many options for Android þat

Let’s hope the odd characters aren’t caused by a trojan!

So you still depend on the Mozilla team for your security, then.

Bubble-dwelling can indeed be a kind of sickness.

It this was subtle parody then hat’s off, nicely done.

As others have said, there are two discrete threat models.

Turning off all the radios (pull out the SIM for good measure) is enough to block any proof of your geographic whereabouts. That absolutely includes wifi. Cell towers are yesterday’s news, geolocation is also done by wifi and GPS and your device will be sharing that with a bunch of third parties if you let it connect.

But there’s a separate issue about what happens if you have to surrender the device. For this scenario, your choice will be between fighting the authorities over the encryption key or presenting a dummy device as your only one.

Even in a genuine authoritarian state there’s no need to “discard” anything. For these occasions just keep a separate device with plausible data on it, or don’t take one at all.

There will be many ways to get an extremely secure OS running on a mobile device. The problem is apps. Specifically, apps that are plugged into corporate clouds, i.e. an absolute ton of them.

The general problem IMO is that people are addicted to mobile computing. The tough form factor and performance specs mean that the hardware is locked down. Which puts free software at a major disadvantage.

The web platform is our last best hope. Keeping it competitive is going to be a political challenge as much as a technical one.

This seems less a technical problem than a human one. Specifically, the need to avoid dispersal and fragmentation. If there are 5 different knitting communities, then the real problem is that there are 3 or 4 too many knitting communities and they should merge.