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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 11th, 2024

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  • Uh, no it’s not.

    It is. As a result of the Epic Games v. Google, Android builds with the Play Store are required to allow users to install apps without any warning at all. They obviously can’t allow any app to be installed without a warning because this would be a boon to malware authors, so this is now enabled with verification. You can now even share apps you build with your friends without requiring them to go through an unverified apps flow with a scary warning. Additionally, Google is not allowed to take a revenue cut from those installs.

    You’re confused because the install process for apps that are not verified (a path that didn’t exist before at all) or installed from a system app store has changed. This now has to be done with adb, which takes effect immediately, or via an on-phone process that takes a day to complete. Once it is done, this setting is copied to new phones, so the process actually becomes easier for most people who do this because they don’t have to go through the process repeatedly.




  • You embarrassed yourself online because you have a weird offense to even the notion that weed can be used for medicinal purposes

    If anything, I take offense to people being given bad medical advice. If you were prescribed cannabis, you would be among them.

    What have I said that is demonstrably false? Please demonstrate. I’m all ears. What should I have researched instead of the HSA website?

    Chill.







  • articles like this one

    Do not support Snowden’s claim that the NSA could read any American’s emails or listen to any American’s phone calls. Greenwald (through Snowden’s insistence) thought that DITU was an NSA computer inside American Internet companies. That’s the source of the misconception, which resulted in Greenwald’s sensational claim, “But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies’ servers.”

    The article itself is a misreporting of this WaPo article that said half of the communications contained references to American residents. This makes sense of course, because the foreign accounts being surveilled were thought to have national security importance for the U.S.

    In truth, entire teams of journalists from multiple outlets worked on different parts of those stories

    And the ones who knew what they were talking about disparaged Greenwald’s reporting that was based solely on Snowden’s ignorance. The first newspaper to get the story right was the New York Times. Then CNET’s Declan McCullough repeatedly called Greenwald out on his poor reporting. ZDNet quite reasonably asked why neither Greenwald nor his editor bothered to consult a subject matter expert. The tech blogosphere ripped it apart at the time, to the point that Greenwald kept responding in an unhinged way to open source tech celebrities on Twitter. But you didn’t need to be in tech at the time to understand this. This got picked up in mainstream news summary sites like The Week.

    You didn’t even address the fact that the US forced the plane of the president of Ecuador to land in Europe due to pressure from the US, because it flies in the face of your narrative that the US is a righteous place where you can trust the law

    That’s because it was Bolivia, and each country has a right to police its own airspace. France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy can choose which planes they allow to fly over their countries, and that is their right under international law. The US didn’t unlawfully down a plane over a European country’s airspace.

    You know how they got around not being able to spy on Americans? They got the brits and other countries to do it for them. That is what the Five-Eyes organization is all about

    This is a conspiracy theory that isn’t supported by any documents at all, especially nothing in Snowden’s documents. This agreement started as BRUSA, which was a no-spy agreement, which Germany requested access to after the Germans and the Americans had been caught spying on each other in the early 2000s. This no-spy provision is alluded to in the WaPo article I linked to above: “At one level, the NSA shows scrupulous care in protecting the privacy of U.S. nationals and, by policy, those of its four closest intelligence allies — Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.”


  • Snowden claimed PRISM lets the NSA read any American’s emails and chats. Greenwald believed him because he didn’t know any better. It turned out not to be the case. Instead, the US government could request real-time copies via Section 702 orders (used for data for specific accounts belonging to non-Americans outside the US) that would be ingested by the FBI’s existing wiretap integration for requesting data for Americans under court ordered surveillance, and PRISM was just the data ingestion system that integrated with the FBI for that non-American data. It’s clearly shown in the slides, but neither Snowden nor Greenwald had enough smarts to Google the word, “DITU” on the slide and came up with wild conspiracies involving NSA computers running in Google’s data centers requesting any data they liked.

    The only illegal domestic surveillance program in the entirety of the leaks was a system that collected phone metadata about who called whom when for how long. The leaks showed that it could only be queried in a very particular way. Snowden thought the NSA could listen in on any American’s phone calls and read any American’s email, but nothing of the sort showed up in his leaks.

    Why should he trust US whistleblower laws? Because they work. The guy who leaked Trump’s call to Zelensky asking him to investigate Hunter Biden was protected by whistleblower laws to the point that you don’t even know his name. After he filed a whistleblower complaint and the investigation began, multiple other witnesses came forward. None of them have been prosecuted, and this was even under Trump, who is unafraid to file meritless lawsuits. If Snowden just blew the whistle on the single illegal program in his leaks, he would be in the U.S. earning royalties from his book deal.






  • The SCMP is, as you said, a chinese newspaper. So it absolutely makes sense that they’d ask China-focussed questions like “Were there chinese systems compromised?”

    And Snowden claimed to be a patriotic American. Why would he tell the Chinese about the systems that the U.S. had compromised? He also told the SCMP that he chose Hong Kong years ago, so telling them about these hacks clearly wasn’t some spur of the moment decision made with little forethought.

    This is not some vast conspiracy theory requiring dozens of people to be in on some secret plan. This is a simple analysis of a single simple-minded man.