Technology

A list of grievances of the US government and I think that they are directing the arrest of Pavel durov

"The company can gain access to messages unless users select a secret chat option with end-to-end encryption, according to two former employees. On at least two occasions, the company has retrieved the messages of former employees, one person said." LOL, the pretend privacy branding

A new browser with a "new engine" apparently ("that being chromium, gecko and webkit" according to one comment).

Your overall thoughts on it? The video is less than 20 minutes so far. Looks 'ight so far too, afaik. But I'm no expert.

https://archive.is/c1ZIc

https://archive.is/4byIc

CANBERRA, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- Mobile phones are not linked to head cancers, a World Health Organization-commissioned review by Australian government scientists has concluded.

Researchers from the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) on Wednesday published the results of a systematic review into the potential health effects of radio wave exposure from mobile phones.

The review, commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO), analyzed the results of over 5,000 studies conducted between 1994 and 2022, and found that brain tumor rates have remained steady despite a widespread increase in mobile phone usage in the same period.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3384817

link that was attached to original post (1st ever ActivityPub), original post is linked in this post

The obvious choice for ActivityPub’s birthday would be the 23rd of January 2018 - the day it was annointed as a W3C recommendation. That doesn’t seem quite right though - its not as if the spec came into existence in any sense upon that date. In fact, Mastodon implemented it before thne.

There are several possible dates you might pick, but for me it will always be September 5th 2014 - when I committed the first sketch of a specification I called ActivityPump [github.com] and pushed it to Github

It wouldn’t be until November that I actually submitted (a revised and enhanced version of) that draft to the working group, but even then I had the very nucleus of the specification written down.

Happy 10th birthday, ActivityPub. 🍰

https://archive.is/fa2ay

This demonstrates the waning relevance of Western influence upon the world's economic landscape. The success of top-tier technology firms is now attainable without necessitating involvement within the confines of the United States marketplace.

https://archive.is/AMYV4

I hope this bubble bursts soon I'm getting real tired of it.

https://archive.ph/mnI8k

https://archive.is/q5WPL

(archive link)

The US and its CIA-controlled “soft power” arm utilized the encrypted social media app Telegram to foment riots and protest movements against foreign governments it deems undesirable, former Trump administration official and free speech activist Mike Benz has said.

These statements were made during an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson on his show Wednesday. Benz, a State Department official under the Trump administration, now runs the free speech watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online.

[...]

The US has championed free speech globally for decades, “in large part” because it allows the country to build resistance and political or paramilitary movements “in countries where the US State Department seeks political control,” the former official said. Durov’s end-to-end encrypted social media app Telegram has been instrumental in this effort, Benz claimed.

The reason “26 US-government-funded NGOs” condemned Russia for attempting to ban Telegram in 2018 was that “the US State Department was using Telegram,” utilizing its encryption and local popularity “to foment protests and riots within Russia – just as they did in Belarus, Iran, Hong Kong, and attempted to do in China,” the former State Department official stated. The app’s encryption is a powerful means of evading state control over media and allowing “US-funded political groups or dissidents to garner tens of thousands of supporters with relative impunity,” he added.

KIGALI/FUZHOU, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- It was pleasantly warm and dry in Rwanda in early August, and young farmers in Southern Province were celebrating a bountiful harvest. Their hands were not bunched with corn or rice but with mushrooms, cultivated with the help of a technology transferred from a country far away to this "land of a thousand hills" in Africa. (...) After decades of work, Lin and his team succeeded in selecting and breeding a type of high-yield, drought and salinity-resistant herbaceous plant that can be used as a substitute for wood to grow edible and medicinal mushrooms.

Throughout these years, Lin has faced gunpoint robberies, malaria, altitude sickness and long periods in remote outposts without electricity or water. Witnessing extreme poverty in developing countries further strengthened Lin's commitment to Juncao.

"We go to the poorest places with a genuine intent to help the people," Lin stated.

Lin noted that around 4,000 Rwandan households have benefited from the technology, with some experiencing their incomes double or even triple over the years.

https://www.rt.com/news/603033-telegram-founder-paris-arrest/

The founder has been arrested in Paris on charges of abetting criminals by making a censorship resistant app. He in the past claimed the west (NSA/CIA/etc) asked him to put a backdoor in his app and for what little it's worth he claims he refused.

Now with him in their custody, in their clutches, where they can sentence him to a brutal prison sentence for the rest of his life he may like many people be willing to cut them a deal on a backdoor so he can save his own life. Such a deal may not be publicly apparent and may even be carefully disguised and hidden behind a public legal drama that is fiction.

I don't think any immediate emergency action is warranted but I would encourage those using it to evaluate what this means for their continued usage and the threat it presents to them say 6 months from now.

We have to wait and see, he could be cleared and leave quickly, he could face a trial which may or may not say anything about him allowing western intelligence to compromise it. As they could try and hide the fact he cut a deal behind a public apparent defeat by his lawyers if they want to keep it under wraps to better utilize such access against Russians for example who are heavy, heavy users of the app and it could present a trove of intelligence to say nothing of abilities to compromise top Russian officials were they to get in bed with the eyes agreement agencies.

Point is they snatched him at the airport when he landed and it can't be anything but politically motivated.

At the very least I expect them to force him to submit to public censorship of "disinformation" which means the Russian perspective. Oh they'll bust a few pedophiles and drug rings as well but it's mainly about controlling yet another app that's available in the west and sticking a knife in Russia's back.

Here's something interesting from Ars:

As Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, noted tonight, "A popular Russian channel says that Telegram is also used by Russian forces to communicate, and that if Western intelligence services gain access to it, they could obtain sensitive information about the Russian military." https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/08/shocker-french-make-surprise-arrest-of-telegram-founder-at-paris-airport/

This once again shows the need for tech sovereignty among anti-imperialist nations. It's not enough to use something that's not directly controlled by the enemy because the enemy will find ways to pressure, blackmail, coerce those third parties into doing their bidding anyways. It's important for these countries to have platforms safely headquartered within one of these other friend nations that are resistant to just one person being arrested, where even someone with extraordinary access wouldn't be a threat because of security service involvement.