5·
4 hours ago“You’re not getting little rats anymore,” Charlie Wilson, 31, said as she sat on her front porch. “They’re getting cat-size.”
Birmingham foxes, owls, and badgers were enthusiastic about the situation.
- 1 Post
- 35 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
You are not logged in. If you use a Fediverse account that is able to follow users, you can follow this user.
2·8 hours agoI would like to start managing ebooks and manga properly.
I guess my question is how is everyone using these services for their own library :)
I moved away from dedicated readers. They’re nice, but I have a tablet, a phone, and a laptop. I don’t need a fourth device with me.
For me, the major selling point for dedicated readers is their insane battery life and how they work very well in sunlight or otherwise brightly-lit conditions, so you can read outside.
For comics — I don’t know if you’re only viewing black-and-white manga — my understanding is that color eInk displays have limited contrast compared to the black-and-white ones. I think that if I were viewing anything in color, I’d probably want to use some kind of LED or LCD display.
I will occasionally read content on my Android phone with fbreader. The phone isn’t really a great platform for reading books — just kind of small — but it does a good job of filling the “I’m waiting in a line and need to kill a few minutes”. With an e-reader, you need something like Calibre to transfer books on and off, but with Android, I can just transfer files the way I normally would, via sftp or similar. I don’t have any kind of synchronized system for managing those books spanning multiple devices.
I use an Android tablet sometimes, almost always when I want to cuddle up on a couch or just want a larger display or want to watch videos. Same kind of management/use case. I think I used fbreader to last read an epub thing. I’ve switched among various comics and manga-viewing software, am not particularly tied to any one. There’s a family of manga-viewing software that downloads manga from websites that host it; I can’t recall the most-recent one I’ve used, but in my limited experience, they all work vaguely the same way.
I’ve increasingly been just using GNU/Linux systems for more stuff, as long as space permits; I’d rather limit my Android exposure, as I’d rather be outside the Google ecosystem, and the non-Google non-Apple mobile and tablet world isn’t all that extensive or mature. For laptops, higher power consumption, but also vastly larger battery, and much more capable. On desktop, it’s nice to have a really large screen to read with. For comics — and I haven’t been reading graphic novels or comics in some time, so I’m kind of out of date — I use mcomix. For reading epubs, I use foliate in dark mode. I have, in the past, written some scripts to convert long text files into LaTeX and from thence into pretty-formatted PDFs; I’ll occasionally use those when reading long text files, as I have a bunch of prettification logic that I’ve built into those over the years.
I don’t have any kind of system to synchronize material across devices or track reading in various things. Just hasn’t really come up. If I’m reading something on two different devices, I’ll just be reading two different books at the same time. Probably have some paper books and magazines that I’m working on at the same time too.
Just to be clear, I’m pretty sure that they don’t have a no-DRM-across-the-board policy, though, so if you’re going there for DRM-free ebooks, you probably want to pay attention to what you’re buying.
checks
Yeah, they have a specific category for DRM-free ebooks:
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/drm-free
I’ll also add that independent of their store, I rather like their hardware e-readers, have used them in the past, and if I wasn’t trying to put a cap on how many electronic devices I haul around and wanted a dedicated e-reader, the Kobo devices would probably be pretty high on my list. When I used them, I just loaded my own content onto them with Calibre, not stuff from the Kobo store.
Will read about firejail.
It’s a single frontend to using a variety of the tools that permit for running software in isolation on a single machine. Like, you can expose only limited parts of the filesystem, have them be read-only, disallow network access, run software under Xephyr or Xnest for X11, disallow sound access, stuff like that. You set up a profile for an application, and it’ll run it with those restrictions. It comes with a very limited set of application profiles made, so it’s not just an “install it with one command and then run everything maximally sandboxed” piece of software – you gotta set up a profile for an application to choose what you want restricted.
Oh, yeah, my concern isn’t really that Florida is planning to go after instance admins — I’m just being sardonic — so much as to point out that any practical enforceability of this is going to have a lot of issues.
I mean, do you mandate that Lemmy disallow third party clients? Try to force them to detect and block encrypted messages? What happens if I start dumping big PGP messages steganographically in images and simply send those? What happens if the image I’m sending is just a link to isn’t even uploaded to pict-rs on a Lemmy instance?
I don’t need to move a whole lot of bits to send messages, and it’s really hard to block people who can send any data at all from having software send data that cannot be read by intermediaries, use the existing social media channel to agree upon out-of-band communications channels that social media operators have no control over, and so forth. Like, okay. Say I am a child-molesting terrorist drug running money launderer or whatever. I know someone who uses Facebook.
Let’s even say that Facebook does a fantastic job of detecting and blocking any E2E-encrypted communications like PGP messages of the sort I mentioned in the above comment.
Okay. Now let’s say that there is some other non-social-media system that uses OTR. I use Facebook to send someone my identity on that OTR system, as well as – which doesn’t need to be in any kind of standardized format — the shared secret OTR uses to bootstrap trust between two parties. That shared secret becomes useless after the initial handshake completes. Is Florida going to figure out everything that I’m saying, manage to break into whatever other channel I’m using, and MITM the thing? Probably not, since even if they supoena Facebook and Facebook gives them that shared secret, it doesn’t let them later MITM the OTR communications.
That sounds complicated, but from a user standpoint it’s “Let’s talk on <program X>. I’m <user>, and here’s <string>.” The other person fires up their program, pastes string in, and unless Florida have already supoenaed and MITMed that channel, at that point, the deed is done – out-of-band E2E-encrypted communications are bootstrapped, and Mark Zuckerberg can’t read them or let anyone else read them even if he wants to do so.
I remember those manuals how to run Skype and every proprietary program from a separate user, while every client in X11 can capture the whole display and see all keystrokes.
I don’t know what these manuals said, but you can run an X11 software package in Xnest or Xeyphr to functionally sandbox X11. Both of those have been around for a long time. I use firejail, which will use either to isolate software if being used in an X11 environment. That might permit for clipboard snooping, have to check, but avoids the keylogging and display-dumping issues.
It is true that X11 — not to mention most traditional desktop operating systems – were not really designed to sandbox software packages. Local stuff is trusted. Wayland improves on that a lot. But even so, Linux desktop apps in general still don’t normally run isolated. Steam games are not isolated in 2025, which is something that I’d kind of like to see.
But I’m more optimistic than I think your comment is, think that things have generally gotten better, not worse.
Go back a quarter century and nearly all Internet traffic was unencrypted; most is encrypted today. I’d trust Web browsers to reliably sandbox things today more than I did then. We have containers and VMs, which are a big improvement over chroot jails. My software updates are mostly cryptographically-verified. If you want a cryptographic filesystem, it’s not a big deal to set up these days. We don’t have operating systems automatically invoking binaries because they happened to live on something that looks like a CD drive that was connected. We’re using more programming languages that are more-resistant to some common memory management bugs that historically led to a lot of our security problems.
I agree that it’s important not to falsely believe that security is present when it’s not. But I don’t think that everything is dismal, either.
I mean, you aren’t the one breaking the law unless you’re running a social media platform. The obligation is on the operators, not on the users.
Actually, on second thought, maybe the automated in-webpage decryption via the plugin thing I stuck at the end is a bad idea if it just inserts the decrypted stuff right into the page (not sure if this is the case). Like, I bet that a malicious or compromised instance could serve up Javascript in the webpage it provides to read and send the decrypted content from the web page.
But not a problem for the approach in general, just decrypting-in-place in a webpage. Would benefit from client support in general, though.
EDIT: Also would be nice to have user profile bios have enough space to actually fit a PGP public key, if that is to be used to distribute PGP public keys (rather than keyservers or something, though one issue with using Lemmy instances to distribute them is that a compromised instance could list bogus pubkeys for users who haven’t yet obtained a local copy of the pubkey for a given user). Presently, it looks like the character limit is extremely short on lemmy.today, which is presumably using the Lemmy default; 300 characters. I’d think that it could at least be boosted to the comment length limit of 10,000 characters.
it would require “social media platforms to provide a mechanism to decrypt end-to-end encryption when law enforcement obtains a subpoena.”
Mmmhmm. Apparently the Threadiverse is about to become illegal in Florida.
First, let’s generate a strong public-private GPG keypair for myself and some hypothetical other Threadiverse user, anotheruser@lemmy.today:
$ gpg --quick-generate-key tal@lemmy.today $ gpg --quick-generate-key anotheruser@lemmy.todayAnd show the tal@lemmy.today public key:
long keyblock
$ gpg -a --export tal@lemmy.today -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- mQGNBGf6kRMBDAD3qJIznSVVQZu092nTthUt8R8DNXS6eYNqgbpYHTY+6i+RSFMe YDDnOz0cL3drxnWpNC37l9HouJGohua/Cjx2Iju/zd4A5mZkXchIt4lfZ3bbXx2k p0eC1m9+B3Dc37lSLPgEpTnfPGtMfKJU4bNVBdwkFCyS9Mxc499uIrAUpjPQLmgP 1rQ2Wk1wzGfAh3VNCxg8xsHcOHWQZqSUzsLk/PeG1QtfGTVBG44tI6msGawwQct6 XVnVOk0DfEGmoru4dGuQDk+oZRVz/O4/wLOQzfAVCzsbv/RrCzywrcQM3WAoVBDI awe9UG++Y4N6Eof46UQ1KnzA2ndkHFt35KybidaqxlWM4Sslx/Is+wCgqt+FpJRN MPLsAet6Eg6vGB6ES3Fk/IXX5OEvtWMfKKrgSP88NwoP/VFr/BU7SsJW1Opo4Ccf DDPuWlgMCmsVE9xsPS1oFMzxiHbJYj8gWgH7AOtl24NgYXVi/QdetYA6SZqonU0T xnGmEw5JdcvWdmMAEQEAAbQPdGFsQGxlbW15LnRvZGF5iQHUBBMBCgA+FiEE7S76 Je3x/gWVtrNsdlwPXPfD8YIFAmf6kRMCGwMFCQWjmoAFCwkIBwIGFQoJCAsCBBYC AwECHgECF4AACgkQdlwPXPfD8YJy+wv+JJ3MP+zZRy4pJZ+u7iiSOwVVwUboT8Pi kX7rxLl6TF9wGuLPjl/P8Cfy0WMsZQ2Ab0S/84cE2bIVbcISwqeqkMZ1Puk6y5Nn 8uHK3qHrYb1n89uOwjgeBIC3XopdJpSPtaKBWHZn/s0AYQ3suqJt/BoJo+hTv4oJ /8Rtcs2+YKnQtoLtM/0tKO3J4Qzvqrzi0F14R1Rv6kiFzePkEPQFSPN4uIR5CPJm t6HuYWYcWNKhfIkKJH08GAV0jP+qrbe/yacO0tKt8gnxKBdpXLRwLePx5sDV14ch Ay/3n1aVa7PbUGA4m51xOSl0Ro54s6K8uwJ2fz6z5fdjpOkbvDw51tPEdxQzW0JH myyaC31j4h5YwzOAfGaK6lp3pAHStDFhDJXZPLYsDlcMGSPvV+qBMAh86t8mqIqd tBPjNj60aIbps+mImBpRlO/xRvUWjjVsm1FKqxBq7QQR5SW0MLnkwvcnUMDCbOs/ wMN6ghyZp6RDhUXGgb9HJVSQhXLjaqf+uQGNBGf6kRMBDADFYNE00Rr2Ujm9+i7k LsHz49xqJUNtv3b7pHWTOZNhkSFf/OieayE45lkBMQl1ZkuY56QjmcgYZWsOf7+y kbrsQjdNE5lHl/hRAqGV13LUscTKPUCvTXnfFX+/p64Kgv1f74fAdfkQu663sGOM xbFP9/3jOQLF9dI2M8H14TPF/JDhjXDZvvoMrMBxwFlRctvwbeS6Yar+XKxKZQvh I63Ad2OyFc0p+pnJOnrWN3Q6iEqnAq0SA/EdsjVx3MWpqZW15YDyU0lIWrHAn/yD PfMaAqcgXj2LLBDziYdfm1ACBceS+WAu6w7i07xMAbdypKOsPB2cL1PlX//WEiwW 55iBTJ7oRAW7Q0LRsk2k40mq61xfOLyOBT8gHJfEb7ked9KuSXQdBn9K2hT2SH+U OT2E63ShPHL9F2F1yQSbjFbHJve2klIuqrMeJ21QtDWgz+Auzp7PPWZ59SN+XCVj qzrueXIvzsK3Shfqf636/Buj1g5heIY3nBd3dtbq4gUBO90AEQEAAYkBtgQYAQoA IBYhBO0u+iXt8f4FlbazbHZcD1z3w/GCBQJn+pETAhsMAAoJEHZcD1z3w/GCzXkL /i1k5ra/YZPpiJgCOO61x6Iog5/hyL/APhHT/CMg1ZAYObfqCD0QT0f+n0qdZXhH ALGXzCMsbFqr0oxqOFFccLGQzUxv9AkyrO94HLoL726fxi3gkF+UekHjWgcxkcXQ PHZCOdHczxyCIGRB+mKn+tGweXpCwMNkymagdoyzOs+t+5cGUTv18ceun72Mqf1H 4vCZ4LLb94NLkSJqGKeQuzjVhopDVCJ8t/exRuk2ra2SkeChKPCpq5zJP+OpzAx3 hPNSL9v8xRD6D/NKQP/zYXvry1dfQaaOYUbw+GMgSxtVNsTyGMtDg2kE8ZSuvVKq ZIoODdjZRZvTB90+UKFRF3st1MeBXGNskvcZJhit7K1eMGhUbjykNWrq0A8aoRAN P0DBRg09Uumub1GNnJlHFNxAS5e0A686YHzA6AOify+lhscdrFKiv8GRFBZGK39W vY5YDDdpY632O6w1Te1UFIhS7pIWXsm5AfffFPDc/UJd6ZaBOcnKH45R4y2qObS2 eA== =ommg -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----And then show an example of someone else importing it, pretending that they’re anotheruser@lemmy.today (though in my case, I’ve already got the tal@lemmy.today public key in my keyring):
another long keyblock
$ gpg -a --import <<EOF -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- mQGNBGf6kRMBDAD3qJIznSVVQZu092nTthUt8R8DNXS6eYNqgbpYHTY+6i+RSFMe YDDnOz0cL3drxnWpNC37l9HouJGohua/Cjx2Iju/zd4A5mZkXchIt4lfZ3bbXx2k p0eC1m9+B3Dc37lSLPgEpTnfPGtMfKJU4bNVBdwkFCyS9Mxc499uIrAUpjPQLmgP 1rQ2Wk1wzGfAh3VNCxg8xsHcOHWQZqSUzsLk/PeG1QtfGTVBG44tI6msGawwQct6 XVnVOk0DfEGmoru4dGuQDk+oZRVz/O4/wLOQzfAVCzsbv/RrCzywrcQM3WAoVBDI awe9UG++Y4N6Eof46UQ1KnzA2ndkHFt35KybidaqxlWM4Sslx/Is+wCgqt+FpJRN MPLsAet6Eg6vGB6ES3Fk/IXX5OEvtWMfKKrgSP88NwoP/VFr/BU7SsJW1Opo4Ccf DDPuWlgMCmsVE9xsPS1oFMzxiHbJYj8gWgH7AOtl24NgYXVi/QdetYA6SZqonU0T xnGmEw5JdcvWdmMAEQEAAbQPdGFsQGxlbW15LnRvZGF5iQHUBBMBCgA+FiEE7S76 Je3x/gWVtrNsdlwPXPfD8YIFAmf6kRMCGwMFCQWjmoAFCwkIBwIGFQoJCAsCBBYC AwECHgECF4AACgkQdlwPXPfD8YJy+wv+JJ3MP+zZRy4pJZ+u7iiSOwVVwUboT8Pi kX7rxLl6TF9wGuLPjl/P8Cfy0WMsZQ2Ab0S/84cE2bIVbcISwqeqkMZ1Puk6y5Nn 8uHK3qHrYb1n89uOwjgeBIC3XopdJpSPtaKBWHZn/s0AYQ3suqJt/BoJo+hTv4oJ /8Rtcs2+YKnQtoLtM/0tKO3J4Qzvqrzi0F14R1Rv6kiFzePkEPQFSPN4uIR5CPJm t6HuYWYcWNKhfIkKJH08GAV0jP+qrbe/yacO0tKt8gnxKBdpXLRwLePx5sDV14ch Ay/3n1aVa7PbUGA4m51xOSl0Ro54s6K8uwJ2fz6z5fdjpOkbvDw51tPEdxQzW0JH myyaC31j4h5YwzOAfGaK6lp3pAHStDFhDJXZPLYsDlcMGSPvV+qBMAh86t8mqIqd tBPjNj60aIbps+mImBpRlO/xRvUWjjVsm1FKqxBq7QQR5SW0MLnkwvcnUMDCbOs/ wMN6ghyZp6RDhUXGgb9HJVSQhXLjaqf+uQGNBGf6kRMBDADFYNE00Rr2Ujm9+i7k LsHz49xqJUNtv3b7pHWTOZNhkSFf/OieayE45lkBMQl1ZkuY56QjmcgYZWsOf7+y kbrsQjdNE5lHl/hRAqGV13LUscTKPUCvTXnfFX+/p64Kgv1f74fAdfkQu663sGOM xbFP9/3jOQLF9dI2M8H14TPF/JDhjXDZvvoMrMBxwFlRctvwbeS6Yar+XKxKZQvh I63Ad2OyFc0p+pnJOnrWN3Q6iEqnAq0SA/EdsjVx3MWpqZW15YDyU0lIWrHAn/yD PfMaAqcgXj2LLBDziYdfm1ACBceS+WAu6w7i07xMAbdypKOsPB2cL1PlX//WEiwW 55iBTJ7oRAW7Q0LRsk2k40mq61xfOLyOBT8gHJfEb7ked9KuSXQdBn9K2hT2SH+U OT2E63ShPHL9F2F1yQSbjFbHJve2klIuqrMeJ21QtDWgz+Auzp7PPWZ59SN+XCVj qzrueXIvzsK3Shfqf636/Buj1g5heIY3nBd3dtbq4gUBO90AEQEAAYkBtgQYAQoA IBYhBO0u+iXt8f4FlbazbHZcD1z3w/GCBQJn+pETAhsMAAoJEHZcD1z3w/GCzXkL /i1k5ra/YZPpiJgCOO61x6Iog5/hyL/APhHT/CMg1ZAYObfqCD0QT0f+n0qdZXhH ALGXzCMsbFqr0oxqOFFccLGQzUxv9AkyrO94HLoL726fxi3gkF+UekHjWgcxkcXQ PHZCOdHczxyCIGRB+mKn+tGweXpCwMNkymagdoyzOs+t+5cGUTv18ceun72Mqf1H 4vCZ4LLb94NLkSJqGKeQuzjVhopDVCJ8t/exRuk2ra2SkeChKPCpq5zJP+OpzAx3 hPNSL9v8xRD6D/NKQP/zYXvry1dfQaaOYUbw+GMgSxtVNsTyGMtDg2kE8ZSuvVKq ZIoODdjZRZvTB90+UKFRF3st1MeBXGNskvcZJhit7K1eMGhUbjykNWrq0A8aoRAN P0DBRg09Uumub1GNnJlHFNxAS5e0A686YHzA6AOify+lhscdrFKiv8GRFBZGK39W vY5YDDdpY632O6w1Te1UFIhS7pIWXsm5AfffFPDc/UJd6ZaBOcnKH45R4y2qObS2 eA== =ommg -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- EOFAnd now let’s pretend we’re anotheruser@lemmy.today and use end-to-end encryption that doesn’t have a back door, using
sedto prefix each line with four spaces so that we get nice blockquoted Markdown that we can paste into a Threadiverse comment or direct message to tal@lemmy.today:encrypting message with end-to-end encryption
$ gpg -a -e -u anotheruser@lemmy.today -r tal@lemmy.today <<EOF |sed "s/^/ /" Hello there, tal@lemmy.today! This is anotheruser@lemmy.today. I just wanted to send you a message. * Florida Man cannot read this. * Even instance admins cannot read this. EOF -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- hQGMAwk4edDpeyVkAQv+Mu6kJj1KkKs8i72YixAbAMuO+uNJDq0Vu9sz9mGUv3nG DibQTkFFz0h+IcK7/2xVrfBcf//6MDqYmlVnTlmpPcNOel4B1YbU4KpHus6ZELcy 7t0WP2IX03FWTooIBdfX7jIdH9us7PPyG2s4edTX7yD69H7oRdVJiNN6qJUbtObU sHWfmq0oQlHoevw47FuWGjAaIbA9volFV3IotEAhmTQ8cCJs2SG8bQjiJmpGE5pO xBSNtqo9X49FhQ0xoouwWil/9c76nNw7MtF/4WjU2HlzzRdFIXKeReq0ZzJ8fdkU YENYV+7lcp3jmGm91nC+E7HYTCjwy6XmMx+6wrzpCtNnLOaOL9caC7Div6ZvBtBi RVTiT1Kewth+QQvLHh2ErN0XKDzFrfFqfrZq4tX3TTn3rQkM/v0UrlR+3rr+iePX iKPmtsQBxNa81GVNxx0IR/1r+by8ELenCCRjaq2OpzfUhckqHkn1M6ycBPrwX8yR uBuIf7E65Pi2QfSoDeOH0rsBR/yGwU/h8HeEp6ChYEEEs1v+INI2dQ+zxhqaimKz vg7gTlVNplI9rpb/VLhlk8tzjCMQ4+Dqe4KeYqtvCLLJtgPFNlujMrgOEmbDL46X kQ8xQTForYFqPvODnPDUo+dbmt2UlXJGw3dyztEhQRUEqoCvUan9ERcY1gJS4mT6 WmAJKfVHfLos+UiibRZBhRzAsFCvyEPF1lOEJNVD0cz9tya2CfszNsqz+ITeHWfm HchPmmEq4pqHr1/a =PQN2 -----END PGP MESSAGE-----And let’s have tal@lemmy.today decrypt it:
decrypting message
$ gpg -a -d <<EOF -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- hQGMAwk4edDpeyVkAQv+Mu6kJj1KkKs8i72YixAbAMuO+uNJDq0Vu9sz9mGUv3nG DibQTkFFz0h+IcK7/2xVrfBcf//6MDqYmlVnTlmpPcNOel4B1YbU4KpHus6ZELcy 7t0WP2IX03FWTooIBdfX7jIdH9us7PPyG2s4edTX7yD69H7oRdVJiNN6qJUbtObU sHWfmq0oQlHoevw47FuWGjAaIbA9volFV3IotEAhmTQ8cCJs2SG8bQjiJmpGE5pO xBSNtqo9X49FhQ0xoouwWil/9c76nNw7MtF/4WjU2HlzzRdFIXKeReq0ZzJ8fdkU YENYV+7lcp3jmGm91nC+E7HYTCjwy6XmMx+6wrzpCtNnLOaOL9caC7Div6ZvBtBi RVTiT1Kewth+QQvLHh2ErN0XKDzFrfFqfrZq4tX3TTn3rQkM/v0UrlR+3rr+iePX iKPmtsQBxNa81GVNxx0IR/1r+by8ELenCCRjaq2OpzfUhckqHkn1M6ycBPrwX8yR uBuIf7E65Pi2QfSoDeOH0rsBR/yGwU/h8HeEp6ChYEEEs1v+INI2dQ+zxhqaimKz vg7gTlVNplI9rpb/VLhlk8tzjCMQ4+Dqe4KeYqtvCLLJtgPFNlujMrgOEmbDL46X kQ8xQTForYFqPvODnPDUo+dbmt2UlXJGw3dyztEhQRUEqoCvUan9ERcY1gJS4mT6 WmAJKfVHfLos+UiibRZBhRzAsFCvyEPF1lOEJNVD0cz9tya2CfszNsqz+ITeHWfm HchPmmEq4pqHr1/a =PQN2 -----END PGP MESSAGE----- EOF gpg: encrypted with 3072-bit RSA key, ID 093879D0E97B2564, created 2025-04-12 "tal@lemmy.today" Hello there, tal@lemmy.today! This is anotheruser@lemmy.today. I just wanted to send you a message. * Florida Man cannot read this. * Even instance admins cannot read this.I guess the only option will be to lock up instance admins for violating Florida law, as they’re operating a social media platform with end-to-end encrypted communications with no backdoor.
EDIT: It’d also probably be nice to have browser and client support to make this more-convenient, no copy-pasting. I haven’t used it, so I can’t vouch for its functionality, but for users using Firefox, this Firefox extension claims it can automatically detect and decrypt GPG content in a webpage; if it can pick up on encrypted, ASCII-armored blockquoted text in a Threadiverse comment, that would hopefully let one simply read encrypted messages in Lemmy or whatever without any additional copy-pasting effort (though sending an encrypted message would still require copy-pasting some text):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gnupg_decryptor/
I commented on this myself earlier. Doing the extra shipping and bare legal minimum to count as a transformative step to create a new product in some other country will increase the cost of the good relative to where it is today, so there’s still an impact, but for virtually all products, it’s going to be far less than the 145% increase that tariffs would impose on a directly-shipped-from-China product.
The purpose of the EU’s strategy is to hurt Trump’s Republican cohorts and their MAGA voter base as much as possible — without injuring European interests.
A 25 percent tariff on soybeans, the most valuable item on the bloc’s hit list, was to arrive last, giving European farmers, who use the product for animal feed, time to adapt and source their supply in Brazil or Argentina, for instance.
Over 80 percent of American soybean exports to the EU come from Louisiana, the home state of Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson — something senior EU officials have been eager to emphasize.
Honestly, I’m not at all sure that that’s the optimal strategy, if the goal is to place political pressure.
I am pretty sure that the places that Trump — not to mention Congressional Republicans — cares the most about political pressure affecting are not deep red states that would vote for a dead orangutan if it were running on a Republican ticket. The US political system renders their voices not very politically important. Rather, I’d think that swing states would be more of a concern. If people there are unhappy, that’s more-likely to alter the balance of power.
The purple states, not the red. Louisiana isn’t in that list.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/elections/presidential-election-swing-states.html
The even more-imminent pressure points, if targets are fine-grained enough, would be at-risk congressional districts in the upcoming midterms, since that’s the most-immediate issue that impacts federal power in the US.
https://insideelections.com/ratings/house/2026-house-ratings-march-7-2025
Those are the politicians whose seats are most at risk based on what people are thinking. There isn’t a single Louisiana seat on that list.
Sure, I’m personally exasperated with the “MAGA base”. But if this is about producing maximum political pressure at a minimum of economic cost rather than than revenge or suchlike, I’m dubious that they’re the correct target.
EDIT: Not to mention political enablers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch
Keith Rupert Murdoch (/ˈmɜːrdɒk/ MUR-dok; born 11 March 1931) is an Australian-born American retired business magnate, investor, and media mogul.[3][4] Through his company News Corp, he is the owner of hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, including in the UK (The Sun and The Times), in Australia (The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, and The Australian), in the US (The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post), book publisher HarperCollins, and the television broadcasting channels Sky News Australia and Fox News (through the Fox Corporation).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Ruddy
Christopher Ruddy (born January 28, 1965) is an American journalist who is the CEO and majority owner[1] of Newsmax Media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Herring_(businessman)
Robert Shelby Herring Sr. (born 1941) is an American businessman who founded Herring Networks, a media company that launched and currently owns AWE and One America News Network.[2][3]
What happens if the owners of, say, public-influencing media companies upon which Trump and associated politicians directly rely upon the support of suddenly and abruptly find that they are exposed to a disproportionate personal economic stake in Trump’s policies?
pushes rewind button
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/15/germany-trump-ttip-trade-deal
Tue 15 Nov 2016
Transatlantic trade deal ‘not realistic’ under Trump, German official says
pushes fast forward button
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-offers-trump-removal-of-all-tariffs/
April 7, 2025
EU offers Trump removal of all industrial tariffs
“Europe is always ready for a good deal,” says Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The Onion staff was fighting a valiant rear-guard action against reality, but it was increasingly clear that the odds were stacked against them.
It sounds like this is specifically in response to the aluminum and steel tariffs that were imposed by Trump back in early February.
My own impression — this from an American perspective — is that the necessity for some kind of protection for these industries is not incredibly controversial. That is, they are strategic goods, there is a positive externality on national security grounds associated with having access to secure production, and as the release above points out, prior, more-limited tariffs had resulted in Chinese producers routing goods around those tariffs. China has taken over a very high percentage of global production in past years of at least steel; I have not checked aluminum.
My guess is that, while specific levels of protection might change, the US will probably seek to ensure some level of domestic or at least secure production. There might not be specifically 25% tariffs, but some form of protection will remain, regardless of administration.
I haven’t looked at the specific countertariffs proposed being imposed by the EC, and the article does not reference them, but if they amount to being on steel and aluminum because the EU similarly wants domestic capacity for similar reasons, that probably makes sense.
Note that the Trump administration has also, more-recently, imposed tariffs on other things, and these are considerably more controversial and wide-ranging. This includes autos, for which — at least based on my past reading — claims of a national security externality are probably a lot less credible, and domestic political pressures are a lot more likely. Then, even moreso, the more-recent “all goods” tariffs, the ones with a “10% baseline”. If these last tariffs remain in place for any extended period of time, and if no form of exception is negotiated — I don’t know to what extent Musk’s mentioned “0% tariff trade agreement” is based on actual administration goals — my guess is that there is likely to be considerably broader dispute than over steel and aluminum tariffs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_the_second_Trump_administration
If you use keys or strong passwords, it really shouldn’t be practical for someone to brute-force.
You can make it more-obnoxious via all sorts of security-through-obscurity routes like portknocking or fail2ban or whatever, or disable direct root login via PermitRootLogin, but those aren’t very effective compared to just using strong credentials.
That’s frame scaling in real-time, rather than offline texture scaling.
The tech demo is part of Microsoft’s Copilot for Gaming push, and features an AI-generated replica of Quake II that is playable in a browser. The Quake II level is very basic and includes blurry enemies and interactions, and Microsoft is limiting the amount of time you can even play this tech demo.
Microsoft is still positioning Muse as an AI model that can help game developers prototype games. When Muse was unveiled in February, Microsoft also mentioned it was exploring how this AI model could help improve classic games, just like Quake II, and bring them to modern hardware.
Okay, here’s a much-less ambitious use of existing AI technology that I think would be vastly-more-useful than whatever they’re off doing: how about just going out and using existing AI upscaling techniques and limited human interaction to statically-upscale the textures by maybe 2x to 4x, take advantage of more VRAM on newer hardware?
So, one thing I’ve seen proposed is basically that Trump’s goal is to use the tariff increases as a negotiating ploy.
This is not, I suppose, completely unthinkable, from a purely-economic standpoint. That is, hypothetically one could say that a zero tariff trade agreement is preferable for the EU to a whatever-Trump-is-going-to-be-imposing scenario, but that remaining barriers to trade are the politically-sensitive ones that are unlikely to be removed, so getting to a zero tariff agreement from the status quo is difficult. If that’s true, then the right move from a US administration that does want a zero-tariff agreement is to make the choice one between high tariffs and no tariffs, to yank the status quo off the table.
I’m sure that there are more-informed-on-specifics takes that will show up if that’s the direction that the administration goes.
What I have a very hard time seeing is how this would work on the political side. Like, Trump has whipped up protectionist sentiment in the US, and done a lot to antagonize trade partners. If you create a trade agreement, you’re going to have to have to go tell existing businesses that they are going to go under, as the economic environment changes. That’s politically hard to do. In such a scenario — assuming that non-tariff barriers to trade also go away, which is something that it looked like Trump was trying to account for in his tariffs — Trump would have to go back to people like uncompetitive US manufacturers and tell them that they’d have to go under for the good of the US economy. Those also tend to be in swing states that he relied upon. Officials in the EU would have to go to, say, uncompetitive EU farmers and tell them the same, and the existence of the CAP, I think, demonstrates that that’s quite politically-sensitive. And they’d have to be doing that in a situation where they’re cutting a deal with an unpopular Trump.
If that’s what the Trump administration is actually aiming for, though, I suppose that it’ll become visible pretty soon, since it’ll start trying to negotiate trade agreements.
I personally would place a lower probability on a zero-tariff arrangement between the two under Trump than during any other time, but…¯\(ツ)/¯
If you paste the URL into archive.ph, solve the CAPTCHA, and comment with the corresponding link, you can provide a link too. There’s no magic to it.
deleted by creator