They have a fairly large user base.

I think this is pretty cool. You should be able to interact with minds now through nostr and a Fedi nostr bridge.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/765290

> Two years ago when I launched Exploding-Heads, Lemmy offered a way to let me play a small role in fighting back against: > - censorship > - deplatforming > - propaganda > - Big Tech tyranny, and > - to help spread suppressed stories. > > I knew Lemmy had its challenges, but I hoped it would evolve for the better. Sadly after 2 years, the culture of censorship through defederation has only grown stronger. > > Meanwhile a better alternative has sprung up in the form of Nostr: > - it lets you own your own profile - if you move to another Nostr app or site, you still keep your content and followers > - it makes censorship very difficult > - it is not perfect, but is evolving for the better very quickly. > > As a user you should not be at the mercy of instance operators who are > - petty tyrants, or > - benevolent dictators (who may turn tyrannical at any moment) > > I do not feel I can alter the tyrannical direction Lemmy is heading in and I want to dedicate my time and resources to a better alternative. > > So Exploding Heads is moving to Nostr. > > Exploding-Heads.com will go offline August 31st 2023. > > Please join us on Nostr. > > Exploding Heads address on Nostr is npub1qprptnnuwnqc6h6wxc2q07rfwcmj7cfc6g4r5dgnlkxaysmpr0mqc5365p > > Sounds complicated, but it is pretty easy. Here is what I recommend to get started > > Amethyst App > - Lets you follow people > - Lets you follow #hastags (I have been using communities as a substitute for #hashtags on Lemmy > - Has evolving support for communities > > Habla.news > - a Nostr alternative for Medium for long form content

> Damus app (Apple IOS)

> If you have any questions about getting up and running on Nostr, please ask them here https://exploding-heads.com/c/nostrblog > > In closing, I sincerely apologize to all of you who are going to lose their profiles and content (please get anything you want off by August 31st), but it proves my warning about the problem with relying on benevolent dictators. > > Please make sure to say hi to us on Nostr. > > I hope the majority of our wonderful Exploding Heads community will make the move to Nostr with us.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/739484

> Emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop show that he made continuous efforts to airbrush his image and the Wikipedia articles associated with his Ukrainian benefactors. > > The outreach by high-priced consultants making stealth edits to Wikipedia, for a period, paid off.

The tech giant had been sued for secretly diminishing the devices’ functionality to persuade customers to purchase a new phone.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/722518

> The report found that girls report that exposure to both topics is prevalent across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and even messaging apps, with more than one in three girls reporting that they “hear or see things about suicide or self-harm that is upsetting to [them]” at least monthly on all platforms, with 15 percent of girls who use TikTok and Instagram saying they come across this type of content on the platforms on a daily basis. > > The figures are even higher for those with depressive symptoms. > > Some 75 percent of the girls who reported moderate to severe depressive symptoms who use Instagram said they come across harmful suicide-related content on the platform at least once a month. This is nearly three times the likelihood of the girls without depressive symptoms who come across the content at the same frequency (26 percent). According to the report, a similar pattern emerges for TikTok users (69 percent of girls with moderate to severe depressive symptoms see the harmful content versus 27 percent of girls without depressive symptoms) as well as for the other platforms

The slump in computers and handheld devices comes as the world's biggest market for smartphones, China, is sliding into a deflationary environment that might worsen.

The technocrats love nothing more than killing two (or three) birds with one stone. In this case, said birds are:

• getting rid of gas-powered cars,
• inventing for themselves a brand-new revenue generation scheme, and
• instituting even more tracking power to make sure the peasants behave themselves.

the unnamed minor was only 10 years old when she was contacted by a first predator on Instagram and coerced into sending explicit photos of herself. He kept demanding more, leading to the child attempting suicide “in the hopes of finding some escape,”

When the family found out what was going on they reported “the exploitation to police, who informed them that Meta’s Instagram product was designed in such a way that they could not identify who was behind the Instagram account that was used to abuse her, and a case was never opened,”

In 2019, when she was 13, the child was contacted on Snapchat by a second convicted sex offender — Reginald Sharp — who knew her real age. He convinced her to send nude photos and blackmailed her, saying that he would post them online unless she met him in person.

The girl snuck out and met him and was repeatedly raped.

In October 2021, the girl was still allowed on social media apps, and the situation repeated itself with another registered sex offender, Edward “Eddie” Rodriguez, a former New Haven police officer. He was on probation for assaulting another teenage girl.

The girl met with Rodriguez and he sexually assaulted her in his car before driving her to school.

Maybe when my warranty is up i'll buy the mod chip.

In April, a landmark study called "Human or Not?" was launched to determine whether people could identify if they were talking to another person or an AI chatbot.

More than 2 million volunteers and 15 million conversations later, 32 percent of participants picked incorrectly.

There was also little difference in the results based on age categories. Older and younger adults both struggled at a similar level to discern who—or what—was on the other end of the conversation.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/675696

> August 25 is the deadline to sign up for this class action lawsuit. Apparently a settlement has been reached. Though I don't expect to receive much if any money for a long time if ever, hopefully it will hurt Facebook, so please sign up.

X, formerly known as Twitter, was fined $350,000 because it delayed producing the subpoenaed records.

The search warrant was so secret that Trump didn’t even know Jack Smith issued a subpoena for the records.

Biden’s corrupt Justice Department obtained a nondisclosure order that prohibited X from informing Trump about Jack Smith’s subpoena.

Not only is Jack Smith using every dirty trick to use secret gag orders, he is also working to silence Trump with another type of gag order so the former president cannot defend himself publicly from unprecendented abuse by Biden’s DOJ.

"You have to ask yourself why your eyes are being scanned and information gathered. What does it mean and what will it mean to you and your offspring?"

Many elite leaders of America’s most profitable corporations have aided and abetted the Chinese Communist Party’s heinous human rights abuses, including genocide,”

Testimony from human rights experts highlighted a high-profile case involving forced labor used to make Milwaukee Tool products at Chishan Prison in China. With China’s recent aggression against Taiwan and its military build-up, other witnesses testified about sales by U.S. defense giants, such as Boeing and Raytheon, to the Chinese government.

Cisco helped construct, operate, and maintain China’s so-called Golden Shield, better known as the Great Firewall of China, an Internet surveillance system put in place by China’s Ministry of Public Security for the surveillance of dissidents, human rights defenders and those practicing banned religions, such as the Falun Gong.

China then pursued large-scale detentions, torture, forced conversions, and executions of Falun Gong members, which have been well documented by the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, and many other respected organizations around the world. In 2019, the China Tribunal, a government commission in the U.K., found that forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong victims and other prisoners had taken place on a significant scale throughout China for years.

Cisco purposefully customized its router technology to allow the Chinese government to identify, track, and detain Falun Gong members. The evidence that Cisco executives specifically helped design the technology to target Falun Gong followers includes Cisco marketing material touting its highly advanced video and image analyzers as the “only product capable of recognizing over 90% of Falun Gong pictorial information.”

Cisco of providing the Chinese government with a library of carefully analyzed patterns of Falun Gong Internet activity, or “signatures,” that enable the Chinese government to identify Falun Gong Internet users; several log/alert systems that provide the Chinese government with real-time monitoring and notification based on Falun Gong Internet traffic patterns; applications for storing data profiles on individual Falun Gong practitioners for use during interrogations and “forced conversions” that included torture; and a nationwide video surveillance system which enabled the Chinese government to identify and detain Falun Gong practitioners.

An internal Cisco presentation, showed that the company’s engineers regarded the Chinese government’s extensive Internet censorship program as an opportunity to expand its business with the CCP and marketed its routers to China, specifically as a tool of repression.

More than half of 11-15 year old girls using Instagram and Snapchat in the United States have been contacted by strangers in a way that made them feel uncomfortable, according to a report by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization that reviews and provides ratings for media and technology in order to safeguard children.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/657607

> I lol'd

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/660115

> from now on you can not unlock the bootloader on new asus phones, i guess custom roms are slowly going to die. They already work on very specific phones and the custom rom support is not as good as it was back in the day.

The algorithm learns your political biases and feeds you self-validating social media posts to assist you in confirming them.

The algorithm listens to your conversations and presents you with helpful advertising to assist you in achieving your maximum consumer potential.

Don’t cover your laptop camera like some weird conspiracy theorist, the algorithm is trying to watch you masturbate.

The algorithm is always a step ahead of you.

You have never once fooled the algorithm.

The algorithm knows you act confident but secretly you fear you’re inadequate and everyone hates you. The algorithm knows that those times you quickly pause and screw your eyes shut are because you remembered something embarrassing that you did in the past.

It’s okay.

Don’t worry.

Your secret is safe with the algorithm.

It’s a private little secret just between you and the algorithm and the NSA.

“I think the legislation should go further and limit banks to closing accounts only when there is clear evidence of criminal activity.”

There have also been suggestions that the government may require banks to pledge to protect the principle of freedom of expression or face having their licence to lend in Britain revoked.

Comes with an assurance that the tool remains shielded against censorship and retains its core focus on user privacy.

“If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill. No limit. Please let us know,” Musk wrote in a post made Saturday night.

Musk further pledged that such legal battles would be carried out on a significant scale and will target not only the companies but their boards of directors as well.

“And we won’t just sue, it will be extremely loud and we will go after the boards of directors of the companies too,” Musk wrote

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/622177

> Preview: > > > Written primarily in the Rust programming language, Warp is a GTK-based file transfer app that uses the 'Magic Wormhole' protocol to make file transfers over the internet/local networks possible. > > > > All file transfers are encrypted, and the receiver must use a word-based code to access the files, preventing any misuse.

“Live facial recognition is a dystopian mass surveillance tool that turns innocent members of the public into walking ID cards,”

Across seven months, thirteen deployments, hundreds of officer hours, and over half a million faces scanned in 2023, police have made just three arrests from their use of this intrusive and expensive mass surveillance tool… Rather than promote its use, the Government should follow other liberal democracies around the world that are legislating to ban this Orwellian technology from public spaces.

Is it time to bring back Bank Transfer Day? I think everyone is pissed off at the major US banks at this point for one reason or another. Only problem is the fifth of November falls on a Sunday this year.

Consumer tech has faced scrutiny over the years around "planned obsolescence": making devices so difficult to repair that shoppers have to buy new products and toss devices sooner than they'd like. Now, one do-it-yourself-er is on a mission to prove that it doesn't have to be this way. And he's starting with the (original) Apple AirPods Pro.

Ken Pillonel is no stranger to tweaking popular designs in the name of user convenience and sensibility. We've covered other projects of his, like a $38 part for making the AirPods Pro case self-serviceable and support USB-C, and adding Apple's Lightning port to a Samsung Galaxy A51. He has also modded the iPhone to use USB-C.

Today, the technologist revealed his latest concoction: an AirPods Pro case with a user-replaceable battery, USB-C port, and open source designs.

The original AirPods Pro received a 0 out of 10 repairability score from iFixit, which at the time said: "While theoretically semi-serviceable, the non-modular, glued-together design and lack of replacement parts makes repair both impractical and uneconomical."

Pillonel's take on the AirPods Pro case, which is detailed on his YouTube channel Exploring Simulation, included him modeling each case component and putting the case together with screws and nuts, "making them easily swappable and repairable," according to Pillonel's press release.

In an email, Pillonel told Ars Technica that his design's most repairable feature is the lack of glue.

"The main difficulty with the original case is removing what I call the 'outer shell,' so the [shiny] white outer plastic. Most people end up permanently deforming it because it's just basically a ball of glue," he said.

There is a small amount of glue in his own design, though, Pillonel told The Verge. It's used to keep some magnets put, but it's "cyanoacrylate glue that can easily be removed by soaking it with acetone, unlike Apple's green glue, which feels like concrete."

By ditching most of the glue, it should be easier to open the case when it needs a new battery instead of wasting money and resources on a new case, which is what Apple has advised.

Pillonel told Ars that he chose the first-gen AirPods Pro, rather than the second-gen AirPods Pro or non-Pro models, for this project because of its popularity and because he had already studied the product to make and sell his aforementioned USB-C kit, which required modeling every single part of the case and "is a lot of work."

"I don't plan to do the same for the other models," he added. "I will just model the outer shell for the other models, which already improves repairability greatly. I do plan to do a similar project for the earbuds themselves."

The Verge quoted Pillonel as saying it's challenging to make repairable earbuds because of how small they are and what tools he currently has access to. He hasn't been able to open the second-gen AirPods Pro case without damage.

In his press release, Pillonel said his goal is to demonstrate how the AirPods Pro "could have been easily made repairable with minimal effort" and to encourage customers "to be more mindful of their choices, and to motivate manufacturers to prioritize sustainability."

As with some of his previous projects, Pillonel's latest work casts a stark spotlight on Apple, a tech conglomerate that has not, or will not, release a set of AirPod earbuds that don't require buying a whole new case when a part of eventually dies (as you knew it would).

For this particular mission, Pillonel shared the parts he used, which included pricier machines, like a 3D printer, laser marking machine, and digital camera, as well as more easily attainable ones, like a $70 PCB holder. Surely, if a YouTuber could scrounge up the funds for the tools, Apple could, too. Of course, Apple would be challenged to find a way to figure out how to make any user-repairable product at a much larger scale than Pillonel.

It's worth remembering that Apple has made some recent progress in making its products more user-repairable, including launching its Self Service Repair program in 2022, but so far, that program only applies to some iPhone and Mac models.

Pillonel has made his files available for ProtonMail users for free through his Patreon. Beware that messing with an official AirPods Pro will void any Apple warranty. And this isn't the type of project you should embark on if you're not handy or haven't engaged in self-repairs like this before.

For everyone else, or anyone just curious about what it takes to make a user-repair-friendly AirPods Pro case, you can view Pillonel's video below:

[!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWoetPBipcI)

Mexican cartels have hacked the app's security and found a way to request unlimited appointments for anyone in the world — far beyond the app's "northern Mexico" geofence.

Cartels have been selling immigrants a service that provides them with an Internet connection through a virtual private network (VPN) that is able to override a server so that the app cannot tell if the individual is in Northern Mexico.

Chase told Florida’s Voice that the accounts were closed due to the federal government’s “scrutiny” of the customer for “engaging in illegal activity” related to his products.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to Dr. Mercola Feb. 18, 2021 about Mercola Market’s website and social media. The FDA said Mercola selling Liposomal Vitamin C, Liposomal Vitamin D3, Quercetin and Pterostilbene Advanced as a way to mitigate, prevent, treat, diagnose or cure COVID-19 is in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

“We request that you take immediate action to cease the sale of such unapproved and unauthorized products for the mitigation, prevention, treatment, diagnosis, or cure of COVID-19,” the FDA’s letter said.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/550448

> The party has consistently called for the eradication of all white South Africans, though this fact often goes completely ignored by the western media.

“Sadly, what we're seeing now with NatWest and Barclays isn't surprising,” Justin Haskins, director at the Heartland Institute, told The Epoch Times.

“There is a mountain of evidence that shows many of America's largest and most powerful banks are discriminating against customers because of their ideological, social, cultural, religious, or political views.”

“Through various environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies and frameworks, banks regularly choose to screen out customers who are deemed ‘reputational risks’ or considered part of industries disfavored by elites and their powerful institutions,”

Even the rich and powerful kept the fact they had been victims of the United Kingdom debanking scandal until now, with Brexiteer-turned-bank reform campaigner Nigel Farage saying a combination of shame and fear that going public could destroy their credit rating meant until now many had suffered in silence.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/526614

> Imagine a world where the government instantly knows whenever you buy or sell something. No transaction would ever be truly private, not even your most personal or embarrassing ones. > > In addition, your money would not be truly your own under such a system. Your access to the digital currency system would be a privilege which could potentially be suspended or revoked with the click of a mouse. All of a sudden you would not be able to buy or sell anything and you would become an outcast from society. > > Under no circumstances should any government ever be given such power.

I do not think anything good for the average has ever come from anything proposed by either of these politicians.

Read the fine print carefully

Who defines "untrustworthy"?

"While the chronological feeds surfaced more “moderate” content on Facebook, researchers found that it also increased both political (up 15.2 percent) and “untrustworthy” (up 68.8 percent) content more so than the algorithmic feed."

Decentralized networks now make it such that there need not be a trusted intermediary in a digital system, so digital IDs could theoretically cut the government out entirely.

Similarly, advanced cryptographic methods such as zero-knowledge proofs allow information to be verified without the verifier needing access to the information.

Combining these two characteristics, we can create systems that grant us all the benefits of digital IDs and are resistant to surveillance. In fact, several projects already have protocols and products that operate based on these principles.

Governments, by their very nature, resist privacy and are more than willing to exploit new technologies to surveil citizens. Thus, as more states and localities choose to implement digital ID systems, it is up to the citizens to demand that those systems be built in ways that protect their civil liberties.

The technology exists. All that is left is for it to be implemented.