I'm no expert, but I don't know if I agree with the premise that Linux desktop is secure via obscurity. Linux is probably the largest effort to create a secure OS, and the Linux desktop benefits greatly from that effort.

OpenBSD has an excellent security track record and is regularly updated, I'm not sure if I believe that its security is "outdated."

Happy anniversary!

Cake Wallet has made Monero accessible to so many more people and is my mobile wallet of choice. Your passion for Monero shows, hopefully Cake Wallet and Monero will keep improving and bring cheap, trust-less, private payments to even more people.

Spotify is horrible quality for 2023

To my surprise, even Spotify's standard (not high or very high) is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible for the average consumer to differentiate from lossless (on better than consumer grade hardware). Upon hearing this, me and several friends decided to test it for ourselves by taking lossless files for several songs and resampling them to the same codec and bitrates that Spotify's standard quality uses, then ABX testing the before and after with Foobar's ABX and exclusive mode plugins (also tried the popular comparison website, but that's apparently less accurate). One of my friends had access to a college studio, I have a dac and sennheiser, and the third had sony wxm4s. To our surprise, none of us could consistently differentiate the two. Its not perfect considering we didn't grab the outputs directly from the streaming platforms, but that would've added extra variables like volume normalizing (louder sounds better).

Our conclusion is that the quality "difference" is likely placebo and probably a waste of bandwidth.

I don't think anything is "needed." Monero is a currency, ideally it will be used for everything a currency is used for.

As long as you restrict RPC on 18081 its fine to externally bind, 18089 is just an indicator that its intended for public use.

Edit: Looks like my monerod isnt letting me externally bind to 18081 like it is 18089, maybe you're right or I'm missing a command.

I agree with @shortwavesurfer@monero.town, what I need in a Monero wallet is good send/receive and maybe an optional fiat api. I feel like all the other online services might as well stay in Cake wallet with the "bloat" coins. I feel like most users that would rather use a Monero-only wallet over multi coin would agree with the sentiment.

Appreciate the work you do.

Then everyone needs to download and make an account on said app, they already exist and none are unanimous.

Everyone has a phone number that gets used for auth and other things. If that system doesn't change then RCS is way better.

Never looked into it, what's so bad about RCS besides it being proprietary? Way better than SMS in my experience.

RCS seems to be pretty openly licensed out to other OEMs, definitely a lot better than iMessage.

It's still proprietary though, a far cry from something like Matrix.

Yes, but nobody uses the alternate chains and the coins become effectively worthless.

Nice. In the rare chance that you haven't heard of GrapheneOS, now you have.

Did you get your phone from your carrier? In addition, some brands do that with cheaper phones. Can buy unlocked phones.

Maybe try Google Pixel or iPhones that have terms against pre-installing shit.

You're right about most things, and Linux/VR support is often a deal breaker for me so I rarely use Epic. But you really think its that unusable? I've heard mostly positive things from my friends. I don't care how or why they're giving out free games but its a huge plus. I just really don't understand all the hate.

What's so wrong with Epic? I prefer Steam but Epics client has a better UI, I haven't found any problems, and deals seem better than Steam, especially with free games.

Seems like they're building other things in rust, about time for the server? Seems like bloated servers are the biggest downside of matrix. Does anyone more educated on this topic know why it's not a thing?

XMPP's current server implementations may be better, but I feel like its something Matrix will match in the future. I'm not very well educated on the topic, but Element being generally user friendly and having lots of features similar to Discord brings a massive audience to privacy respecting, federated, encrypted messaging which is a huge advantage for being able to message regular people. If Matrix's server matures to the point of XMPP in the future (and clients if they're not already), would XMPP have any advantages?

Moderation might be an issue with such a platform, who's responsible for cleaning spam, csam, etc? Giving someone that power will centralize the system anyways. The current federated system works pretty well in my opinion.

Companies can choose who works there just as people can choose who to work for. If companies don't like what an employee is wearing then they can fire them, and if people don't like what a company isn't allowing them to wear they can quit.

Apparently the replacement parts for their phones are significantly cheaper than almost every other manufacturer. (I have just been hearing this so I don't know for sure if it's true, correct me if I'm wrong.)

Overall their phones seem to just be to a high standard. 5 years of support and other components that make them the choice for GrapheneOS (Privacy/Security focused rom that has greatly contributed to upstream Android)

Interesting video. One question from someone who knows nothing about Nostr: If Mastodon "banning" is a problem, how does Nostr prevent csam etc? Do you only see content from people you explicitly sub to?