[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 12 points 18 hours ago

Leaders at Allied Universal, which provides security services for 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies, said their phones were “ringing off the hook” on Wednesday with potential clients. Allied covers a wide spectrum of services — including stationing guards outside offices, chauffeuring executives, surveilling their homes and tracking their families.

Protecting a chief executive full time costs roughly $250,000 a year, said Glen Kucera, who runs Allied’s enhanced protection services.

NYT article

25

The link is to a year-old article that helped me decide not to pay Alaska Airlines’ voluntary SAF carbon mitigation fees. I’m still not certain about the right choice, and would like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

The big picture includes acknowledgement that there’s no such thing as ethical consumption within capitalism, so in some ways this choice is entirely irrelevant. Also that flying is by far the most polluting form of transportation per passenger mile so we should each minimize doing it. Finally that flying has the most challenging logistics of shifting energy sources, fundamentally because batteries are heavy.

Alaska offers me a choice during the checkout procedure to contribute to SAF accounting for between 5% and 20% of the fuel that my flight will use, but it has nothing to do with the fuel actually consumed by my flight. They are already buying some amount of SAF and using it in their SFO hub only, so the program is hand waving about the fungibility of fuel consumption. Really they’re just offering me the opportunity to donate money towards their SAF usage, indirectly supporting the growth of the SAF industry.

It seems to me that the whole SAF industry is currently greenwashing bullshit, piggybacking on the big lie from the past few decades that adding ethanol to automotive gasoline is “sustainable” in some meaningful way. But that ignores the water usage depleting aquifers at an accelerating rate, necessary fertilizer use and soil depletion, using food-producing acreage for fuel instead, energy usage in planting/harvesting/refining/distilling, and so on.

Please validate my choice not to donate to the current state of SAF, or provide links to interesting reading that supports your claim otherwise.

[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 19 points 3 weeks ago

For $4.2 million, the administration had just sold off the first 561 acres of Blue and Gold, an estimated 83,259 trees.

They’re selling off rights to log (miscategorized) old growth forest for an average of Fifty. Fucking. Dollars. Per. Tree. That’s damn near free.

[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 57 points 1 month ago

The article is very misleading. It says

The research paper…notes that the human body is particularly efficient at generating 40 MHz RF energy. Tapping into that through a 'worn receiver' provides power without using any invasive means.

But I read much of the pdf linked at the bottom of that link, and there’s nothing about the human body generating energy at 40MHz. The trick is that skin is pretty effective (sort of) at conducting energy at that frequency, so the authors hooked up a power transmitter worn on the forearm, 5 or 15cm away from a receiver on the hand.

This isn’t about powering anything by body energy, it’s about strapping a battery-powered transmitter somewhere on your body and then having another device pick it up when strapped somewhere else on your body. No thanks.

Oh and it’s actually pretty inefficient and won’t provide much usable energy.

[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 20 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

You can get tiny rubber hands that each go onto one of your fingers. There are lots of vendors that sell these on Amazon, and presumably many other places. Different skin colors exist.

I’ve also seen even tininer ones that you can put on the first set of hands, so maybe you can find those as well.

[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 months ago

They don’t store anything about your association with other numbers; that stays on your devices. Your phone number is used as your identifier for account creation and originally for finding other people to talk with, but the only data Signal keeps associated with your number are registration timestamp and last connection timestamp. You can see that by reading the redacted subpoenas and responses that they publish.

They have recently introduced usernames so that you can avoid having to share your number to communicate with someone else.

I don’t have a good citation for this, but I believe the phone number registration requirement will remain indefinitely, likely to cut down on spam and bots. But there’s a difference between privacy and anonymity - I’m looking for privacy in my communications, not anonymity from my friends. State actors can know that you use it but not what you’re saying or to whom (unless, say, the NSA is specifically targeting you, but that compromise will be of your device as a whole rather than breaking Signal or getting data from them).

[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 22 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

A free app with no advertising doesn’t make that kind of money, it gets progressively deeper into debt to a good Silicon Valley rich guy who got it off the ground, Brian Acton.

His biography on the Signal Foundation website:

Brian Acton is an entrepreneur and computer programmer who co-founded the messaging app WhatsApp in 2009. After the app was sold to Facebook in 2014, Acton decided to leave the company due to differences surrounding the use of customer data and targeted advertising to focus his efforts on non-profit ventures. In February of 2018, Acton invested $50 million of his own money to start the Signal Foundation alongside Moxie Marlinspike. Signal Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to doing the foundational work around making private communication accessible, secure and ubiquitous.

Prior to founding WhatsApp and Signal Foundation, Acton worked as a software builder for more than 25 years at companies like Apple, Yahoo, and Adobe.

The Wikipedia article on the Foundation says the loan balance was up to $105M later in 2018. Meanwhile, Acton is still worth $2.5B according to Wikipedia, so things are probably fine for now, even 6 years later.

But you’re right that Signal eventually needs revenue to keep even a small team of high caliber software engineers and devsecops folks around. You very much want excellent engineers to continue to be involved with critical encrypted communications software on an ongoing basis, so it will cost money indefinitely. Presumably Acton does not wish to bankroll it indefinitely.

Again back to the interview:

I wouldn’t imagine that most nonprofits pay engineers as much as you do.

Yeah, but most tech is not a nonprofit. Name another nonprofit tech organization shipping critical infrastructure that provides real-time communications across the globe reliably. There isn’t one.

This is not a hypothesis project. We’re not in a room dreaming of a perfect future. We have to do it now. It has to work. If the servers go down, I need a guy with a pager to get up in the middle of the fucking night and be on that screen, diagnosing whatever the problem is, until that is fixed.

So we have to look like a tech company in some ways to be able to do what we do.

I’m really glad they pay those engineers that much, so that Zuckerberg and his ilk can’t entice them away with oodles of money. One presumes they also believe in the cause, but I think this currently looks like Acton fighting surveillance capitalism with what capitalism got for him earlier in his career.

Cofounder Moxie Marlinspike is clearly a brilliant hacker and coder who was crucial to Signal’s creation, but I think it makes sense that he hasn’t stuck around to try to solve the long term business problem of keeping it aloft infinitely.

So what to do about it? The OP interview is with Meredith Whittaker, who’s entire job is figuring that out:

Since she took on the presidency at the Signal Foundation, she has come to see her central task as working to find a long-term taproot of funding to keep Signal alive for decades to come—with zero compromises or corporate entanglements—so it can serve as a model for an entirely new kind of tech ecosystem.

I’m a recurring donor because I want Signal to succeed and I want to vote now with my wallet, but fundamentally it’s on Whittaker to figure out how to make the long term work. Here’s what she says:

I see Signal in 10 years being nearly ubiquitous. I see it being supported by a novel sustainability infrastructure—and I’m being vague about that just because I think we actually need to create the kinds of endowments and support mechanisms that can sustain capital-intensive tech without the surveillance business model. And that’s what I’m actually engaged in thinking through.

[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 23 points 3 months ago

Don’t forget voice calls! It has some rough edges there (my audio doesn’t always connect successfully, etc), but when it works the codec sounds better than a standard phone call and there’s no mass surveillance. I use it in place of phone calls for all the people in my network who have it, including my immediate family.

[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 44 points 3 months ago

Signal is the best thing going on in tech these days. I’m very glad it’s being led by Meredith Whittaker.

Did you know you can get a cool badge on your profile pic if you’re a recurring donor? $5 a month is far less than the value I get from it, but that’s all it takes for a cool badge (and knowing that you’re doing something active against the awful state of big tech today).

[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 10 points 3 months ago

If I had an expensive EV with an expensive battery in it, I would not want to be wasting my precious limited number of charge cycles on running my house.

Unless you’re talking about a home-scale project to repurpose retired EV batteries for stationary storage. I’ve only ever read about grid-scale versions of such projects.

[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 27 points 4 months ago

but translation certainly isn’t [done on device]

Google Translate has downloadable language packs and runs on device, including offline in foreign countries without roaming data. Including the live video OCR and replacement.

That’s not to say that what you experienced isn’t creepy, but it’s not necessarily cloud-driven.

[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It’s true that it’s mostly a symbolic act, but the rebellion matters, especially from old accounts. It’s also a nice way to mark the time after which I never participated in SO again. After my ban expires, I’ll deface my questions again. And again. Until they permaban me.

[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 11 points 7 months ago

They seem to only be watching the questions right now. You’re automatically prevented from deleting an accepted answer, but if you answered your own question (maybe because SO was useless for certain niche questions a decade ago so you kept digging and found your own solution), you can unaccept your answer first and then delete it.

I got a 30 day ban for “defacing” a few of my 10+ year old questions after moderators promptly reverted the edits. But they seem to have missed where I unaccepted and deleted my answers, even as they hang out in an undeletable state (showing up red for me and hidden for others).

And comments, which are a key part to properly understanding a lot of almost-correct answers, don’t seem to be afforded revision history or to have deletes noticed by moderators.

So it seems like you can still delete a bunch of your content, just not the questions. Do with that what you will.

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trailee

joined 9 months ago