Shine Get

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Bingo. RCS is yet another proprietary protocol, one controlled by Google and without an open specification. RCS also doesn’t have a standardised approach to encryption as it’s designed for lawful interception.

    So unless Apple have licensed Google’s implementation/extension of RCS, this will be a shitty, insecure way to communicate between the Apple Messages and Google Messages apps and nothing more.

    Google did an impressive job applying pressure and suggesting RCS was a perfect solution when in fact it’s just putting more control in Google’s hands. RCS is not an open “industry” standard. You nor I as individuals can implement it without paying license fees to see the specification and fees to have our implementations tested and accredited.

    And Google have extended GSMA’s RCS with their own features (such as encryption) which is not part of the official standard and they haven’t made open either.

    If Apple had been pressuring Google to implement the iMessage protocol or whatever, we’d have been up in arms (and rightfully so).

    And instead of us all collectively hounding Apple and Google to ditch proprietary protocols and move to open ones such as Matrix, Signal, XMPP, etc (ones where we could all implement, use open source software clients, etc) we’ve got this shit:

    Proprietary, insecure, non-private communication protocols baked into the heart of hundreds of millions of devices that everyone is now going to use by default instead of switching to something safer, private, public, open, auditable, etc etc.








  • Linux has lots of flavors; and just like ice cream, you can have a scoop, see if you like it, and try another one later.

    I’ve been through so many Linux and Unix flavors over the years, it’s borderline absurd. But what was great is that I found a flavor just right for me and my needs, like finding your ideal car. Don’t worry about making the right decision on a flavor at the start, just dive in.

    Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, Pop! OS, Manjaro, elementary OS, Zorin etc are great starting points. You’ll hear people bigging up Arch, Nix, Gentoo, Slackware, Void, etc. There’s are all great in their own way and very well might be the right thing for you but don’t feel pressured to jump in the deep end (unless you love that thing, then be my guest - Arch was a lot of fun getting it up and running for the first time).

    The best decision I can suggest is learning about mount points and having a drive dedicated to your files and simply mounting that drive inside your home directory. It means you can wipe and try another distro wherever you like without having to copy your files off and on over and over again.






  • No. Most SSDs actually contain far more storage internally than the SSD controller exposes. They then even out the wear and tear of the flash memory “packages” by cycling through the various packages and, given there being more packages than actually exposed for use, this offers a level of redundancy so the device lasts longer.

    Because of this, wiping the logical device (e.g. zero filling or writing random data multiple times) doesn’t actually guarantee every storage package is written to / overwritten. Thus data may still reside even after wiping (that can be accessed by reading the packages directly and skipping the controller which abstracts these packages into a virtual block device).

    Some SSDs offer a secure wipe tool that does a low level wipe of every page or wipes out an encryption key and generates a new one but not every SSD on the market offers that feature.

    From the company my org has used to decommission old hardware; an industrial grinder is sadly the most assured way to guarantee no data can be recovered.