TWeaK

It’s only just about functional and clunky as fuck. But if you want to get rid of WhatsApp from your device but still need to talk to someone in it then it’s a good shout.

Probably not. Back when the WhatsApp Pegasus vulnerability happened, there was a vector on iOS, but it was iMessages.

I don’t know any first hand details, but my suspicion is that the way WhatsApp on Android worked was via Facebook system apps bundled with the phone by the manufacturer. Back in the day, Facebook itself used to be a system app on some phones (making it difficult to remove), but gradually they moved away from that to having the Facebook or WhatsApp apps be the same as the one on Google Play, but there would be a separate system app that would be much harder to remove. I suspect this system app used various exploits for further data mining by Facebook (perhaps even gaining microphone access so they can present ads based on what you say?) and that the Pegasus hack got into WhatsApp, then simply called the system app to use its established exploits. One other thing that maybe points to this: the Pegasus hack would only sometimes be effective on Android phones, and researchers couldn’t pin down why. To me, that suggests some other app or configuration variation.

WhatsApp on iOS shouldn’t have this vector, as Apple control both software and hardware on their phones, hence why the strategy was to go for Apple apps directly (as they had the direct access to system level permissions, like I’m alleging Facebook sometimes had on Android).

Like I say, the exact workings of the hack are my own assumptions, and I understand that the WhatsApp Pegasus entry vector has been patched, but ultimately I don’t think Facebook/Meta or any of their apps are trustworthy and encourage people to remove them from their devices.

WhatsApp is the big one, that shit is a proven vulnerability. It was literally the vector for zero click access to Android devices in the Pegasus toolkit.

One way around it is to have a separate device for WhatsApp itself, then use WhatsApp4Web from F-Droid. It’s basically a web wrapper for the browser version of WhatsApp, but it does run somewhat independently of the main WhatsApp device (unlike eg Threema where the website won’t work unless the device has internet).

The more I look at it I think it might be a 132kV line on a 400kV tower, with the intention to upgrade it some time in the future. I say this because the insulators aren’t actually the full length of the spacing from the tower, there’s a separator between the tower and the start of the insulator fins. This makes me think they’ve left room for longer 400kV insulators to be installed.

Saying that though I have no idea, there could have been all sorts of other considerations that led to a configuration like that.

That pun was totally intended, and I cannot fault you for it.

I was thinking 132kV, but wasn’t sure if this is Europe where you might find 100kV (although again it varies by country). In the UK, 132kV is the boundary between distribution and transmission. DNO’s (Distribution Network Operators) generally use 11kV, 33kV, 66kV (generally rare but used in some areas eg in North West England) and 132kV, TNO’s (Transmission) use 132kV, 275kV and 400kV. Although, a lot of 275kV substations are built to 400kV spec (eg in Scotland), so that they can upgrade in the future.

You sometimes get this with power lines, they might install higher voltage insulators then run it at a lower voltage until some time later when the network is upgraded. This spoils the game of guess the voltage/makes it more challenging, and you end up with really weird looking connections between large pylons and small poles.

Fun fact: You can estimate the voltage by the length of the insulators. My guess is this is around 100kV (2x 3 phase circuits), around the border of transmission and distribution voltages.

You can also estimate the capacity by the number of conductors per phase. This has a pair of lines for each phase, so a fair chunk, but not the 3 or 4 conductors you sometimes see (although maybe you mainly see that on higher transmission voltages.

I sure hope they don’t plan on having more than 2 anniversaries.

Thanks, yet another reason why my example was a bit off hah.

I said you came in to correct me but didn’t actually deliver any corrections. You just talked about the things you know.

I didn’t say the same thing you said, I provided the correction that you left out.

I dunno, allegedly people actually vote for a man named “Trump”.

Because of enshittification lol

It looks like you haven’t really digested anything of the conversation here before you came in to reply with corrections.

Not everywhere.

Previous rulings are a precedent in Common Law systems like the US, UK, Canada, or Australia.

Only Supreme Court rulings become a precedent in Civil Law systems like the EU, Russia,most of the rest of America.

Sure, but we’re talking about Brazil. You haven’t established whether Brazil is common or civil law. Also, we’re talking about a Supreme Court ruling.

Not all of the EU is civil law. Ireland and Cyprus both use common law systems.

While common law countries often have roots connected with the UK and are very similar, civil law countries are far more varied. Many civil law countries are distinctly different and arguably should be a separate class of legal structure - even ones with French roots (perhaps the most prominent civil law country).

Ultimately, though, the differences between civil and common law structures are almost entirely technical in nature. The end result is largely the same - in a common law country, case law can continue to be challenged until a Supreme Court ruling, and as such it isn’t really proper case law until such a ruling, just like in civil law countries.

https://guides.library.harvard.edu/law/brazil

Brazil is, in fact, a civil law country. However, they do follow case law from Supreme Court, which would make this ruling about requiring a representative valid case law. Which is what I said to OP.

The EU at its top level creates “Directives”

This is exactly what I said.

The EU made GDPR law (well, strictly speaking they made a directive, then member states make laws that must meet or exceed that directive)

The EU made a directive, this directive led to GDPR laws made by member states. However I was apparently mistaken, it wasn’t an EU Tribunal court case that led to cookie splash screens through case law, it was Recital 66 (lol Order 66), essentially a 2009 modification to the 2002 ePrivacy Directive, followed by roundtable discussions that heavily favoured the advertising industry over civil interest groups leading to its formal implementation into the directive in 2012.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/truth-behind-cookie-banners-alexander-hanff-cipp-e-cipt-fip-

To summarise:

• What I said at the start was right - Brazil’s Supreme Court ruling requiring social media companies to have representatives is valid case law.
• My example of cookie splash screens wasn’t ideal, but you did not give the right reasoning, or any reasoning - it was a poor analogy because it wasn’t a judge’s rulinig that modified the law but legal discussions that were prompted by public interest groups.

Like I say, it really feels like you didn’t read very far before you made your reply. Your comment reads more as a statement of tangentially related things you know with a thin veil disguising it as a correction. If you’d just made those statements without the veil, or if you’d followed through with the corrections and actually explained what was wrong, I don’t think I would have found your reply so objectionable (although I may also have woken up on the wrong side of the bed to your comment, sorry about that).

But then, I also wouldn’t have looked into the specifics of Brazilian law or the full origins of cookie splash screens, so thanks for the motivation lol.

Yes and no. It only really applies to Twitter/X and Twitter clones. You wouldn’t call a Facebook post a tweet, no matter how short, nor would you call a reddit or lemmy post/comment that.

And even then, Mastadon has its own term, toots, and BlueSky calls them skeets.

Until Twitter comes up with a new name in line with their new branding, I think the business should still be referred to as Twitter. But the business should go bankrupt before that happens, hopefully, the lenders need to call in their debts already.

Ah I wasn’t aware of that shortcut, one of the main reasons DDG wasn’t working for me was because I thought I could only do !g and then go to the Google page, and Google had been making it more difficult to go from the main search page to Maps.

Not that I’m aware of. Your best bet is to save the post and come back later, or if you’re in a browser leave the tab open in the background.

The page you link to talks about the search results that come at the top of the page, eg a Wikipedia or Trip Advisor result. The actual search itself comes from Bing, and it’s more than likely that the top page banner also is processed via Bing.

Edit: However, the Wikipedia page does provide more detail, which proves you right and my assumption wrong:

DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.

If I understand DDG correctly, they use Microsoft Bing as their backend for search results. So while they may be branded DDG, the results are in fact out of DDG’a control. It also means we are more subject to Microsoft’s privacy policy than we are to DDG’s.

This is exactly right. DDG is basically a front end that’s supposed to strip out identifying information and then submit your request to Microsoft. [Edit:] Apparently they have expanded from this, according to their Wikipedia page. [/E]

However, after seeing TV ads for DDG not that long ago I kind of lost what faith I had left in them. As a rule of thumb, I’ve never trusted products and services advertised on TV - TV advertising is expensive, and the business expects to make that expense back and then some from their customers.

DuckDuckGo is also feeding your search terms into AI development now. I’ve tried it again recently but prefer Ecosia, at least Ecosia lets me more easily get to Google Maps when I want to, rather than trying to push Apple Maps.

They have at least moved away from the twitter.com URL, up until then it was hard to argue that it wasn’t still Twitter. However, until they come up with a new name for “tweets” I think the original name should still stand.

Law isn’t defined just by legislation, it is also defined by case law. A judge’s ruling on a previous case makes that ruling law.

Now, I’m not saying this ruling is appropriate - I simply don’t know enough about how it came to be. But if Brazil made laws about social media companies and then a judge made a ruling based on that law requiring social media companies have a representative, then that absolutely is valid law.

To draw an example, the EU never made a law about cookie splash screens. The EU made GDPR law (well, strictly speaking they made a directive, then member states make laws that must meet or exceed that directive), and then a judge interpreted that law and made it a requirement to have cookie splash screens. I would personally argue that the judge was trying to shove a square peg through a round hole there, when really he should have identified that data collection is in fact a secondary transaction hidden in the fine print (rather than an exchange of data for access to the service, this isn’t how the deal is presented to the user; the service is offered free of charge but the fine print says your data is surrendered free of charge), and he should have made it such that users get paid for the data that’s being collected. However, the judge’s ruling stands as law now.