Why do you consider telegram private? It’s a pretty bad option for that. They are only using true end-to-end encryption when using the explicit “secret chat” feature, which is limited to one-on-one still, afaik.

“Normal”/default encryption gets resolved on telegram servers, so your clear text messages are sitting there for them to do whatever they want. Given that telegram is based in UAE and has knownRussian management influence,I’d be extra hesitant.

It also is for-profit and closed-source for the servers ( only clients are open source), so nobody knows what the servers really do.

If you care about privacy, go use Signal or any Matrix-based messenger such as Element. Especially because they lack zero of the comfort and usability that Telegram offer, but are much more secure.

Inherited a Hilti Hammer drill from my dad that was used for basically everything in construction and demolition he ever did since before I was born - around 4 decades ago. It was and is the tool he and now me always go to when cheaper drills can’t deal with the problem. Be it hammering through super massive concrete walls or enduring hours-long destruction sessions, it just does the job.

Nowadays it looks like a utter piece of junk that got tumble dried with rocks, but it’s as reliable as on day one.

Most of the classic big financial tech mainframes actually run on COBOL, at least in Europe. Though even those are very slowly being replaced, mostly by Java. Still, freelancers with COBOL specialty do rake in huge sums. It’s not only about the rare tech skills ( COBOL isn’t worse or harder than other languages, it’s just old and thus simple), it’s about having those skills combined with a sufficiently high security clearance.

Id2 is the actual successor. It’s planned to be the first VW “affordable” EV with a starting price below 25000 euros when it releases in 2025. At least they now try to target the budget market, but I’d never recommend a VW. They have done so much bad quality cars since the late 90s…

Laying even 10 times the cable should not be more difficult when you have 60 times the total population (335mio in US vs 5.6mio in Finland) and hence more resources.

And sure, Alaska definitely it’s expensive and inefficient to service, having a pop density of about 0.5 inhabitants per km². But unlike Northern Finland, most of Northern Alaska is in fact entirely void of human life and more akin to a desert. There really mostly are a handful of oil industry clusters and native communities. And still, the extremely low pop density means it’s only 730 000 people living in Alaska. That is 0.2% of the entire population of the USA. If you were to completely ignore and not service Alaska, you should have a an even easier time providing service to the vast majority of the US population in all the main states. I think it’s pretty clear this is a political failure and not a matter of financial resources or natural obstacles.

You are absolutely correct that distribution matters. However, Finland has an even more uneven population distribution than the US. 75% of the population lives in the costal cities, with 30% of the entire population living in the capital region( density of 193 persons/km²). The entire rest of the country is not empty dessert ( which would require no services), but very sparsely populated rural woodlands, down to 2 people per km².

Density still is an overall useful quantifier given that extra knowledge, as providing services for a small population of only 5.6mio inhabitants is not easy either. Sure, providing coverage for the 75% in the cities is fairly easy. But that still leaves 1.5mio rural residents, which require huge investments in cable to supply with broadband. And due to the vast distances, you definitely cannot cover them with wireless alone, if you were thinking that.

Finland is not a small country compared to its population density and distribution.

Finland has 18 inhabitants per km².

USA have 35 inhabitants per km².

What’s your source on the reverify thing? I use matrix a lot, and this hasn’t been an issue I ever experienced anymore since they introduced cross-signing a couple years ago.

Same goes for the common clients such as element. It has been clunky in the past, but after the past major overhauls ( also years ago now) everything has been silky smooth for me, if not better than others. The one thing left I prefer from Signal is the one-time photo share.

Matrix is great, clients are great too, only the server part still is annoyingly complicated and messy. Would only recommend that for tinkerers, on that case it’s a great path to learning about the complexity of addressing lots of security concerns that others gloss over.

Edit: to add - there’s a reason why the French government and the German military decided to build their secure internal IM infrastructure on Matrix. Obviously they are hosting their own private network, but if the concept is good enough for European government and military, it is an indicator for quality especially in terms of security and privacy.

I was about to say… What does “suitable” mean? I grew up in the 90s, and “suitable games” ranged from SimCity or the settlers to age of empires, crusader Kings, quake, doom, unreal tournament or half life.

There is no need to over protect kids from the “simple” evils: when I was very young, I didn’t want to play violent or scary games, even knowing they exist. Later I got curious and explored them. Depending on your choice a game such as the settlers, age of empires or crusader Kings could well be classified violent and “unsuitable”. But violence is everywhere, and those were some of the games that I fondly remember for instilling a huge curiosity in history and cultures in me. And yes, we were marketing victims as well: everyone spent way too much on Magic, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards and related toys. But it didn’t infect every part of our lives.

Help your kids reflect on their choices and wants. Help them find out why they really want to pay too much money for that shiny Roblox skin. And offer alternatives with free, open content sharing so they realize they are being swindled. Media literacy is much tougher today because companies got much more insidious marketing vectors to infect kids.

Nowadays there are thousands of games being released per week, in addition to classics such as Minecraft, Terraria, Rimworld, Eco, which still have very strong modding and multiplayer communities.

Taste is actually a valid and very important identifier used for classifying minerals during geology field work when there is no access to advanced diagnostic tools. For health reasons, it’s obviously not the primary method, but it usually follows the “scrape test”. Scraping the mineral over a known hard surface tells a whole lot about hardness, texture, color, granularity…

How do you think they would verify or sanction an invalid ballot? Given that voting is secret and therefore there’s logically no personal information on the ballot, this would be rather tricky - or extremely worrisome for democracy. ;) So no, it’s definitely not illegal in any somewhat democratic nation. And yes, most countries do count invalid votes separately. This can be an important indicator that something went wrong. Eg if suddenly all districts report much higher numbers of invalid ballots, something might have gone wrong in the counting process or just the ballot design might be too confusing. Definitely worth looking into, though. And if a single district shows an unusual count of invalid ballots compared to others, that also is worth looking into.

Many that intentionally vote invalid claim to do so to show their frustration with all party options. However, this hurts democracy. Even if do not love or even like any of the parties/candidates, you still should vote.

Vote for the “least of the bad”. A vote for a democratic candidate that has a boring mix of policies planned that you don’t fully support is still a lot better than anything on the other end of the spectrum, with radical extremists working to undermine society or democracy itself. By voting invalid, your missing vote ends up being “shared” by everyone, and I’m certain there’s some on the list that you really don’t want to even have the tiniest shred of your vote.

You go to vote and invalidate the ballot. Mark none or all of the boxes or write ‘fu’ on it. It’s not that hard.

Which is fine

But that’s boring. Just close your eyes, grab any packet or bottle at random and apply with gusto. This way you will always be surprised at new and fresh taste combinations!

Interesting, will have to read up on how that works in Brazil. We also have a separate tax id here ( which is also used for pension and social security ), but that one is even more secure/private than the passport ID. We only provide that to our chosen medical insurance provider ( bc they need to register it with the ministry of finance ) as well as employers ( because 50% of the insurance has to be paid by employers).

It’s explicitly not allowed and intended for generic identification purposes, because it makes it too accessible for identity theft and associated scams.

Where do you live that providing your government id to a business is standard? In Germany, the only one outside of a judge to be allowed to request that is law enforcement ( even then only with proper cause ). Of course, some businesses are legally required to request and process your ID number ( e.g. when booking international flights, medical insurance companies etc), but these are under tight federal control and supervision to ensure data safety.

Age verification sometimes is a thing for purchasing 18+ things ( media or drugs like alcohol & smokes), but even then businesses will only ever perform a visual check of the date of birth on your ID. Technically they can never demand to hold your ID, not even for a short time just to better read the date. You only have to show them your ID. And actually recording and/or storing any of that information would be insanely illegal.

Germany / Europe might have its issues, but we at least try and take our freedom and data privacy serious. I would never dream of handing my ID to a generic business like a club for anything more than the age check.

Isn’t it weird that EU, famous for being so fragmented that they can’t decide on common interior or foreign policy, all while being ridiculed for their large and inefficient bureaucracy, still is the sole entity that manages to stand up to mega corporations?

And those are sometimes fights that have zero benefit to a different wealthy elite, but actually protect citizen liberties.

I shudder to think how the world would look like if EU had not established and enforced the GDPR as well as it does. Consumer protection is probably one of the only fields where the EU had a global positive impact.

Yes. User Agent is a http header that is part of every request you send to a server. As such, it is 100% client side and it can be whatever you want, it’s just a text string. For layman users, I’d recommend using an addon for it, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/

Of course, you can also change the user agent string in the browser config manually. The official Mozilla support page describes the process in detail: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-reset-default-user-agent-firefox

We factually know that China is committing (at least cultural) genocide, possibly more such as forced sterilizations and relocations against Uighurs in Xinjiang, and we still deal and trade with them. Not only some big evil corporations, many individuals knowingly buy Chinese products all this. Because they are cheaper. Money talks now, money talked back then. Yes, everybody is to blame for their part in not speaking and acting against injustices of the world, but there are different levels of “helping” someone commit evil.

Back in the 30s and for decades after, many in the US could not share the same bathroom or attend schools/education based on the color of their skin, and many in the general populace were fine with it.

Pretty much. RCS just defines the protocol. That is basically how messages are formatted, how recipients and senders are labeled, how timestamps are formatted, how messages are compressed, transferred and possibly stored and resent in case of inability to deliver (e.g. recipients phone is off) and a lot more technical stuff.

To use this, you need a network of servers that can actually receive messages from phones/ cell network, then possibly transfer them to a server/ cell tower near the recipient(s) to have it broadcast there, making sure only the intended recipient can decrypt it, and possibly storing it for an unknown duration and a number of attempts to deliver it if the recipient is unreachable. And possibly sending a receipt or failure-to-deliver message back to the sender as well. And all of this has to work reliably 24/7, because people will not accept downtimes.

And then you also need client software on the phones to send/receive messages using the RCS protocol as well, hopefully handling true e2e encryption as well.

It’s a lot of hardware and software engineering to actuallyimplement such a seemingly fundamental standard.