Firefox, Chrome, Edge, will all warn you about self-signed certs or cert mismatches but allow you to continue. You’re completely correct that SSL/TLS needs a certificate, but it doesn’t need to be CA issued or in any way legitimate for the encrypted tunnel to be established

You don’t really ‘need to’ in a world where a good proportion of people will happily click ‘continue anyway’ when they get any sort of certificate error

Proton shilling on Lemmy is huge business. I have nothing to say one way or the other on the products but it really puts me off.

Valid, but if you get a dedicated one, you could put in a SIM from a different network that has better coverage, if one exists

A cellular signal isn’t one single thing. A GSM booster will improve the availability of a GSM signal, but that’s calls and SMS but isn’t going to do a lot to provide mobile data given that 3G coverage is basically dead and 4/5G data doesn’t operate on a frequency that the GSM booster will be doing anything for. You can get cellular WiFi hotspots that you put a SIM in and they basically become your WiFi router or just use a cellphone that has hotspot functionality

Actually being directly in a position to see how seriously this is taken by the banks, mobilizing to address the problem of staff using non approved and recorded communications is massive and doing exactly what the fine is supposed to do - motivating the companies involved to get off their arses and fix the gaping holes that allow this to happen.

Source - I’m the guy on the tech side who has to come up with solutions to allow communications with clients/peers/other firms over whatsApp, Signal, Line, SMS etc in a way that is able to be archived in line with the law

I work for a large American bank working under a consent order from the SEC to address this exact problem, and it’s my job to find and implement the solutions. I can say with absolute confidence that weakening platform integrity is absolutely not a solution being pushed for any of this - not least because the platform owners will 100% not cooperate with any attempt to do so.

So much Threads panic, yet we’re apparently willing to just believe whatever DuckDuckGo says, even though the company has a pretty terrible track record.

Go look at the permissions Threads is granted. Mine has Notifications and nothing else. Android won’t let it have access to most of the information in that list.

“Known to collect” - this app is sending data back to Facebook and we’ve made some wild ass assumptions about what that data might be in order to scare you into getting all your friends to download our browser. Worked pretty well, huh.

Agreed, but your emails actually reaching people wasn’t in the initial requirements presented 😉

Right, and that’s exactly how IE/Edge is the one globally dominant browser it is today. Oh no, wait, that’s the very standards compliant Chrome

You are. It’s just as easy now to host your own mail server as it was thirty years ago

ActivityPub is no more radical than NNTP. Lemmy is almost an exact reimplementation of newsgroups

My reading of that isn’t that Google killed XMPP, it’s that they thought XMPP would be useful for the userbase they brought in, they realised it wasn’t, and they ditched it. There’s no indication that XMPP had the userbase and lost it to Google, or even that XMPP had features that were stolen by Google

Yes exactly

Unpopular opinion but defederating Meta is a terrible idea. What are people thinking will happen? Allow them to federate and you’ll have mastodon users able to view and interact with posts from Threads without needing to be concerned about ads or tracking, without giving over any more control of privacy than they would to any other fediverse instance, and without needing to possess accounts homed within the Meta infrastructure.

Defederate them, and anyone who wants to interact with anyone on threads will most likely need to maintain a presence on both and handover more personal data to Meta than they otherwise would.

Defederating is actively hostile to fediverse users.

I have a chrome plugin to strip any Pinterest results from searches, it’s the absolute worst

The corporate web may be dying/reinventing itself. Everyone talks about FOSS and having a user driven experience.

You say that, but I would politely suggest that your use of ‘everyone’ is narrow to your personal experience, at a guess with a focus on those who are either IT professionals or enthusiastic amateurs.

90+ of the world don’t care in the least. They want the functionality to access and share information and connect with either their friends or a wider audience. They want reliable and simple functionality. Those people don’t really care if they’re playing in a corporate walled garden.

FOSS projects with user ownership are a brilliant part of the modern tech landscape but don’t be deluded into thinking they’re a vast global paradigm shift