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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Erm, WhatsApp would suggest otherwise.

    WhatsApp was the vector for zero click access to a target’s phone from Israel’s weapons grade hacking Pegasus toolkit. They would send a video call, typically in the middle of the night, and with no input from the used they’d get full access. My personal belief is that they used functionality WhatsApp itself uses to access user data.

    There was also an encrypted phone called ANOM, which had this trick calculator app with a hidden encrypted messager. “Made for criminals, by criminals”. Except, when the guy started his business he got investment from the FBI and Australian Federal Police to pay for the servers and some of the phones themselves. Basically every time it sent an encrypted message it sent a separate encrypted message to the ANOM servers. It’s entirely possible (perhaps even likely) that WhatsApp would do this also.

    As for Google, they’re truly insidious. Lots of banks now require you to connect to Google captcha servers - they don’t give you the pictures, it’s just the back end, basically the tracking parts. Then there’s the controversy about them collecting location data when users have said no. They absolutely do collect data they shouldn’t.


  • I dunno, if a car kicks up a rock from the road and smashes a windscreen, that’s considered no one’s fault. Even though the car in front kicked it up.

    In this case, NASA have assumed that things would burn up in re-entry, based on past experience and modelling. For some reason that didn’t happen here. However, that might not be enough to prove liability - if NASA is considered to already make reasonable efforts to prevent this.











  • Apparently I was mistaken, I think I skimmed the article while I was at work and drew the wrong conclusion. Lauren Windsor was not supporting Alito, she was exposing him.

    However Frank Schaeffer did indeed kickstart the abortion movement with his movie 1,000 Dolls, as well as a bunch of other films he made for Reagan. There’s a BBC podcast called Things Fell Apart that goes into it in its first episode, it’s well worth a listen. So is the rest of the series, it’s all about the birth of various culture wars.









  • We’re talking about a hypothetical example. What I’m saying it is only comparable to a cis person objecting to being called cis if your example is a trans person objecting to being called trans. Both would be wrong as they are factually correct technical terms, and thus they aren’t being used as slurs.

    A closeted trans person would be offended that you outed them, not that you called them trans when they are. Although, if they were closeted then you’d probably have no reason to think they were trans.

    Calling someone “cissy” is almost certainly meant as an insult, though, because that’s not the technical term. That’s like calling a gay person a fag, or calling a black person the n word. Calling a cis gendered person cis or cisgender is like calling a gay person gay.

    Rejecting a label isn’t really valid when the label applies to you. You can’t eat pizza and then claim you’re not a pizza eater.

    And, at the end of the day, the measure that matters is not whether or not you like it, it’s actual harm. Calling someone cis is very unlikely to cause them harm. Calling someone a fag could lead to harm (eg Top Gear people driving through Alabama with gay writing on their trucks).