I agree with the sentiment implied by the author, but I would reword it slightly. If you don't have the freedom to share something, you don't own it.
I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically. Digital ownership is still ownership. I go out of my way to find music on Bandcamp, games on GOG, and rip movies myself using MakeMKV.
I wish I could encourage people to continue embracing physical media but most people value convenience over true ownership. And most companies value market capture and "security" over user rights. In crypto the sentiment of "not your keys, not your wallet" is held a core truth, yet people use 2factor authentication and Passkeys without respecting the same truth. I am not arguing against the use of 2factor, but at the same time certain accounts can not be logged into freely without push notifications in Duo or Microsoft. I still don't see a universal ability to export Passkeys, and I believe that's by design.
I hope laws catch up to modern technology in terms of digital goods. I can't imagine companies choosing to open up their walled gardens otherwise.
I think most small communities will stand bot-free because there's little incentive to have bot engage with it.
But I wonder if there's a size of conversation after which people will still choose AI assisted summaries. Discord had/(has?) a feature where it used LLMs summarize and then notify you about a discussion happening.
I tutor advanced math and science and so have updated my daily driver along with whatever students were most likely to come across. In the past it was a ti 84 and then ti 89 titanium. But in the last decade schools have also embraced Desmos, a simplified version is even accessible on their standardized tests now.
For personal use, I have an android emulator that runs TI 89 titanium. It hits the sweet spot for me in terms of completely covering basic and advanced features I would need from a calculator. If I need something extremely basic, I use the one built into Google search. If I ever feel myself limited by the 89, it's always been because I am trying to do something that would be better served by Excel or Desmos.
The best calculator is the one most easily available. I personally don't see value in keeping a separate device. On the other hand, I will go out of my way to make sure the keyboard I am using has a dedicated numpad. There's nothing that comes close to the efficiency of tactile keys when it comes to doing long numeric calculations.
Merry christmas y'all and happy holidays. I can't put in to words how much I appreciate the culture on HN and the conversations I've been a part of. It's the only social media site where I enjoy reading my historical messages, I can see exactly how much I have grown and learned. I am thankful for the moderation and self-moderation.
I will continuing trying to give back in a small way, what the HN community has given me. Happy holidays.
I have been struggling with my circadian rhythm and have been exploring light therapy and novel techniques that will help me wake up. I learned that a smart light I bought, from Kasa, has a solid community written python library that controls it on the local network. I made a little app that adjusts the lamp color based on sunrise and sunset hours. It's relatively simple technology wise, but it's forced me to rethink how I evaluate "smart" technology.
I am thinking of expanding it to be a notification light of sorts. Not for anything related to the internet, but for chores, like the laundry machine finishing, or reminders to take a break from work. It's helped me remember to grab lunch more than a few times this week. There's something pleasant about light notifications compared to vibrations or sounds.
I am working on making an advanced wifi enabled timer using an esp32. I love the idea of a dedicated timer, seperate from my phone, that I can use day to day. I have a basic display and webserver for scheduling countdowns/alarms, but I want to incorporate some sort of keypad and a couple input buttons. There's plenty of ways in can be improved.
I also have a first generation raspberry pi monitoring my washing machine, it sends me notifications when a cycle finishes. It uses a simple ultrasonic sensor and is hosting a web server showing a readout.
I installed an offline gallery and disabled Google Photos. For years and years Samsung android phones didn't have the option of cloud backups.
There's a very clear distinction between local and cloud, every single photo taken using any camera app is local only. Galleries, like Google Photos, and backup services like Dropbox have an explicit setting to enable cloud backup. Google Photo backup is very distinctly different from Google Drive and phone backups in general.
I use FolderSync to sync it with a self hosted NextCloud instance. If I am travelling, I prefer using Syncthing, a wifi file server running off the phone, or a physical wire to transfer photos. I know exactly what pictures are sent where and backed up with what method. I am not sure why you believe Android treats photo and file management like a black box, I don't believe Apple does either. Apple iOS devices are much more difficult to manually backup as they only allow background photo sync to iCloud, if the screen is turned off syncing to a third party will most likely fail. But there is a straightforward toggle to disable Photos backup to iCloud.
Android file management is superior to any other mobile OS. Android is file privacy first by design, as long as you are comfortable managing backup and syncing with self-hosted and self-managed solutions. I have gone the additional step of rooting my phone as well to get around any Android limitations on what folders certain apps have access to.
No one is arguing against the last point you made. No one was conflating the two.
I remember that story, I came across a post asking people to upvote the support ticket on the r/datahoarder subreddit by a fan on the 17th. I came across it and cross posted a link on hacker news on the 22nd in the evening and by the following morning the account was restored and taken care of. I can't say for sure how much posting it here helped, but based on the timeline I think it made a difference. I believe it was also one of the highest upvoted stories of that day.
What stood out to me what one of the first couple comments in the support thread was the contact information for the Museum Director of the Swedish Tank Museum.
My unconfirmed theory is that Google's OCR pdf service flagged specific text and pages in the pdf of tank plans and repair manuals as they are considered classified and shouldn't be in the public unredacted. It's historically significant and absolutely worth preserving, but I can see why it might get flagged.
This was also interesting in that it got the entire account taken down. Usually Google flags a file and disables sharing completely. Google disabled sharing backups of a recent Kanye interview that was filled with hate speech called "Kanye champs removed video.mp4". I have not watched it but it was my first time seeing something removed because it "may violate Google Drive's Hate Speech Policy. Some features related to this file were restricted."
I am not sure if it was the post to HN or various videos other made that helped, but it made me realize that the one of the best ways to get in touch with a human at Google is posting here on HN and that Google will continue to become more aggressive with scanning files.
Section 230 was modified by FOSTA-SESTA when related to hosting sexual solicitation, and EARN IT is back under review by congress which would effectively make E2EE illegal and make hosts liable for illegal content uploaded by its users.
Would scanning be okay if there is a government entity with a human you can appeal to that would override any flags made by automated systems? No corporation wants more government oversight, and the only way to avoid it is to do good faith self policing. EARN IT would receive a lot more support if the public sentiment changes to believe Google and Apple and other hosts intentionally choose to ignore problematic materials. Reddit is criticized often because it allowed problematic subreddits to grow. I am not sure where things will end up.
It's more about shareable media. Relative to your analogy, I feel storing files in encrypted containers is renting an apartment and feeling confident about the landlord not walking in. On the other hand, if you hang up an obscene image in your window of your apartment, I imagine it's understandable that a landlord would use a key and take it down. If hanging up obscene images becomes a pattern, I think the landlord would kick you out.
From one perspective, I understand that cloud storage should include certain rights to privacy. If I buy some compute time on AWS, I manage and control all flow of data. It would be a complete violation if AWS policed the kind of content I could store. I think self-managed vs company managed is what dictates my expectations. Google photos and drive, especially since most people don't pay for it, fall into the company managed category in my opinion.
In the last few years Google Drive became more strict about sharing copyright work and started flagging files, which limits the ability the "share to anyone with a link". For people who use it as a backup, the advice I started hearing was to encrypt the data before uploading. The opsec while considering nation-state level threats to privacy already recommended only using encrypted containers since the beginnings of cloud storage.
The Communications Decency Act is an interesting law that dictates the liability of online content and service providers. There is an ongoing battle to increase ISP and host liability as a way for the entertainment industry to combat piracy.
FOSTA-SESTA and the ruling on Backpage [1] made things more difficult for hosts like Google and changed the liability surrounding sexual solicitation. If a host like Google knows what's being hosted and does nothing, they get in trouble. They don't have the protections they did in the past.
It's Google's servers. I imagine every content hosting company has a heuristics based approach to detecting CSAM. Google has a habit of tuning moderation algorithms for false positives rather than missed positives.
Not having a human in the loop is terrible and a problem frequently when it comes to getting support from Google companies. That's a separate issue from Google or Dropbox being able to scan unencrypted files for CSAM. Google's policy of automating as much as it can has tons of downsides. But it's understandable when you look at the scale Google functions.
It's important to separate the policy of scanning from Google's terrible appeal process and the algorithm false positives.
I would feel differently if the story was that Android scanned an outgoing SMS or a photo saved locally. I am not sure where the balance point is to identify and report CSAM while also respecting user's rights to privacy.
Apple still scans all sent or received messages for explicit images if the phone is registered to a minor and if a specific setting is turned on by a parent. It blurs received NSFW pictures and gives a warning if sending one. This client side scanning is already implemented. Parents are no longer notified, thankfully.
I am glad the more blatantly privacy violating policy was canceled, but I can't help but be cynical. Especially as Apple has "followed local laws" when strong armed by certain governments, and a recent class action was filed for lying about if Apple tracks you ignoring explicit settings not to.
If the photos are hosted on Google's servers, they have every right to scan whatever they want. If you are privacy conscious, you can upload files you encrypt yourself at the cost of not being able to share easily. I recognize edge cases like the one in the article you linked, but I don't see an alternative. Not scanning for CSAM on your own servers isn't a realistic expectation.
That's a pretty awesome way of letting iphones start to replace POS terminals. It's been done before through add on and swiping, but the major cc companies are phasing out swiping. And the real play is introducing this into an iPad at some point. An iPhone is handy day to day and great for small run produce markets, but it's been a long while since I have gone to restaurants around my college campus that didn't have an ipad or tablet for paying.
I was in elementary school at the time 11 miles away, just across the river, in NJ. They really didn't want us to see the news so they took all of us into the main auditorium and had us just sit. A few of the parents of the other children worked in the city. They made it an early release day.
One of my parents worked close by my school and my cousin lived close too. Her house had a clear line of sight to the towers with some binoculars. I remember seeing little black dots fall out of buildings and I remember wondering if they were chairs. I am older now and understand it was people. I missed the collapse of the first tower but saw the second fall through the binoculars.
A lot of my classmates didn't show up for a few days. I didn't understand the gravity of what had happened until was quite a bit older.
I looked into syncthing and have set up a folder pair as well but does anyone run a separate additional server to do remote access of a specific file they might want to download? I am wondering if there's any clashes to let's say having something like nextcloud folders overlap with the folders used in syncthing?
I am looking for an alternative that helps bridge the gap that is Google File Stream where even in windows it mounts as a drive but streams everything in the background as needed. Plex seems like a clunky way to go about it but I am open to any suggestions. The file stream feature was mainly used to stream videos in an uncompressed way.
I mainly do local sync between android and windows and a rpi. I would love to have file streaming type support for the android and maybe an ios device.
Android has a way to do file streaming built into some of the cloud manager apps but a diy solution might not have remote access.
I am open to any suggestions, I understand that syncthing is about p2p syncing and the model is mainly for whole file copy.
I disagree with the interpretation that it needs to be held physically. Digital ownership is still ownership. I go out of my way to find music on Bandcamp, games on GOG, and rip movies myself using MakeMKV.
I wish I could encourage people to continue embracing physical media but most people value convenience over true ownership. And most companies value market capture and "security" over user rights. In crypto the sentiment of "not your keys, not your wallet" is held a core truth, yet people use 2factor authentication and Passkeys without respecting the same truth. I am not arguing against the use of 2factor, but at the same time certain accounts can not be logged into freely without push notifications in Duo or Microsoft. I still don't see a universal ability to export Passkeys, and I believe that's by design.
I hope laws catch up to modern technology in terms of digital goods. I can't imagine companies choosing to open up their walled gardens otherwise.