Giver of skulls
RCS uses data channels so it won’t work if other texting services don’t work either. It may work better in overloaded networks (RCS can use a separate APN for higher priority, I believe), but it’s not like SMS (which snuggles bytes in a space that would otherwise be an empty bag of bytes that is necessary for bare minimum messaging).
SMS can’t do group texting. It can’t do images, video, or anything other than a short message (140 to 180 characters depending on your language).
MMS followed SMS and it can do group texting. However, attachment sizes are laughably small, leading to 160p videos being compressed to hell to make it across the tiny video size limits.
MMS also used to cost more in some places. My carrier simply shut it down a couple of years ago because nobody was using it (I live in a WhatsApp country).
RCS is the official next generation of SMS/MMS, made by the people who define standards like 3G/4G/5G. Basically MMS 2.0. Very few carrière launched RCS services when they rolled out 4G, even fewer phones had RCS clients, so you ended up with needing to download your carrier’s (inferior) messaging app to maybe exchange RCS messages with other people if they also downloaded their carrier’s apps.
SMS still works and has always worked.
It can work for other use cases Lemmy is proof of that. However, it’s not the main objective to be a federated Reddit.
Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, WordPress, Friendica, and Mobilzon all have different design considerations that are all equally valid. Some of the edge cases necessary to make Lemmy work well are unnecessary or even unwelcome for other designs (see: following Lemmy communities turning your timeline into an endless stream of boosted replies).
ActivityPub isn’t magic. It’s very deliberate in its push-based one-on-one entity relations (for performance reasons mostly). For social media, that works fine. The problem comes in when you get massive communities all posting in single threads, or people with thousands of followers that don’t know about each other rather than a friend group interacting with each other. Mastodon absolutely sucks for people with a large following; this isn’t something that’s unfixable, but fixes do need work and deliberation to work well.
I’d say ActivityPub works great for most social media. The biggest exception may be chat (DMs are footguns that work almost accidentally) and ranked-score forums like Reddit, which require a lot more post-processing than other social media protocols.
It should also be said that both Lemmy and Mastodon use the ActivityPub spec mostly correctly (neither is fully spec compliant as far as I know), despite using different mechanisms to achieve the same goal that aren’t always compatible. We can barely get chat apps to interoperate, it’s impressive how well ActivityPub has proven to be.
I don’t think the situation would be very different had Lemmy been based on ATProto or Nostr. Reddit is a bit of an odd duck in the social media landscape, and very few other websites share its core patterns and algorithms.
A lot of it comes down to trust. Scan downloads with antivirus. Decide how much you trust everything else. Err on the side of caution if you’re unsure.
In your example, the software you’re using seems fine to me. A simple addon with limited scope that hasn’t been updated in years, but has some good reviews.
That said, you don’t need this addon; go to your favourite Wikipedia front page, right click the search bar, and click “add keyword for this search”. If you enter keyword “wen”, you can search English Wikipedia by typing “wen <something>” in the search bar. Works for other websites too
Github releases can contain completely different code than the source code on there. Don’t trust them blindly like others might suggest. It’d be trivial for someone with bad intent to release FOSS software and include a virus. It happened to an important Linux tool not that long ago. Most code on Github is fine and most software is just out there to help you, but it’s good to he careful.
My personal process involves checking for things like “how many downloads does this have” and in the case of addons and apps “how many permissions does this ask”. Addon with a dozen downloads to change your Facebook theme that wants access to your entire browsing history? No thanks!
The biggest differentiator between virus and safe in my experience is “how legal is the thing I’m downloading”. Viruses, cracks, keygens, pay wall bypasses, that sort of stuff is full of bad shit, because whether or not there’s a virus in there, your antivirus will go off anyway and you’d assume it to be a false positive.
There are steps you can take to protect your computer, but generally “keep antivirus on”, “don’t pirate stuff”, and “when in doubt, click no” are generally good enough.
There’s a cool trick recent pro/education versions of Windows have where you can create an entirely temporary copy of Windows by simply right clicking an executable and clicking “run in sandbox” or something like that. This is great for trying out small programs that you don’t 100% trust but seem fine at a glance. Doesn’t work well for games, isn’t 100% bullet proof, but it’s an easy way to prevent unexpected infections. The only downside is that you need to get a Windows pro/education key somewhere (though those are not hard to come by). Really wish Microsoft would roll that out to home users.
That makes a lot of sense. I like the GrapheneOS approach to these things.
I hope they can figure something out that’ll be user friendly that’s also recoverable if your forget the password. Wouldn’t want to put myself in a “lost my key, guess I can never sell my phone now” situation.
Your messages won’t work right in some Office365 servers that inject the “this email came from outside of your organisation” banner into the body. Oh, and people who get notifications about your email will only see the PGP header string.
Other than that, I don’t see the problem. Just make sure not to sign any emails that you don’t mind being used against you in court, because PGP accidentally makes it possible to prove your laptop was used to send your messages.
On the plus side, the 12 people you’ll ever meet that also use PGP will send you encrypted emails. Just make sure you keep those old, expired keys around, or you won’t be able to read your old emails back.
Standard SMS/MMS are the de facto standard in the US, outside of iMessage. Hundreds of millions of people use it. It’s not “never really used anywhere”.
And you’re right, people have moved on from caveman technology; the youth is switching to iOS and iMessage en masse. That’s why people need to deal with shit like this, iOS users don’t know that the only reason they can text like normal people is because of Apple’s weird version of WhatsApp.
If iMessage hadn’t been sneaked into the iOS texting app, Americans may have moved over to something better as well, but they didn’t. They never felt the pressure to switch to texting apps because their carriers charged differently/less for texts than the ones in other countries.
And it did go somewhere. RCS is SMS/MMS for data networks. Carriers didn’t run RCS servers and phones didn’t come with RCS clients so it went nowhere. Until Google started hosting Jibe and including it in the messages client, that is.
Even RCS took some massaging by Google to make it actually usable as a texting standard, with Google making use of the freeform HTTP nature of the protocol to add some proprietary standards to make it actually usable. The first released versions of RCS were kind of terrible, basically MMS but over IP rather than weird telecom protocols.
I pity the fool trying to use RCS without Jibe. Luckily, carriers are shutting down their bespoke RCS servers and renting RCS services from Google instead. Unfortunately, that makes RCS a standard practically governed by Google, carriers from whatever countries Google isn’t permitted to operate in, and spying agencies.
Perhaps they should’ve asked for a sliver of a percentage rather than a large amount upfront, but based on their counter-offer they weren’t interested in percentual royalties.
Until the game is launched, Rockstar is operating on investment money and every component of the game is expressed in cost. Spending 1/85th of 11 years of revenue (or about a third on top of development cost) on songs upfront is hard to sell to executives. Especially when the rate is set by a small band like this.
Asking Beatles money for a Heaven 17 song was worth a try, but I don’t think they get to feel incredulous after their counter-offer was refused. Don’t high-ball offers you can’t afford to lose!
The offer was for $22.5k ($7.5k per member). Their counter-offer of $75k per member ($225k) was rejected and that’s why they went public. GTA V has 441 licensed songs, and there’s no way Rockstar is going to be paying $99 million dollars for just songs.
I’m not surprised they rejected a 10x counter offer, and looking for sympathy on social media is kind of silly. Pretty crazy that this band thought they had the negotiating power to get a 10x deal out of this.
The way you describe this, it sounds like it would need to work on trust a lot more than it already does. What if there’s a malicious instance actively circumventing bans, ignoring any pulbished banlist?
They already exist with the current Lemmy model, unfortunately. Bypassing ban lists isn’t exactly difficult unless the server you’re following does whitelisted federation.
I was talking about the scenario where you are instance A and you don’t know the followers of a user of instance B. That is not easy to keep track of, since you obviously don’t get any of the follow requests for a user on another instance.
If you don’t know who’s following who, ActivityPub still has inboxes and other collections that can contain existing posts for new servers. Server A can add their likes to the appropriate collection and any new servers can fetch that collection at the first follow of that account.
Agreed. I think that’s a shortcoming of ActivityPub.
ActivityPub has been designed as a push-only protocol as push/pull would involve too many web requests. It was designed for designs like Facebook and Twitter. This flexibility made Lemmy possible.
As for sending the post, it’s not that hard to keep track of all servers that follow a group or person or hashtag. Following people is not passive, you send a follow request which usually gets approved automatically.
Bans are already questionable. Servers choose not to forward every message (personal, group, public) to every account. There is no “themselves” in a shared server. Either the entire server gets banned, or the server is trusted to enforce bans. Lemmy federates those bans (though Lemmy and Kbin don’t always communicate right).
What if the community defederates an instance but my instance doesn’t defederate that one - will my instance send the post to the instance that is defederated by the community?
I would say “the server publishes a banlist containing *@bad-server.tld”. The defederation list on Lemmy is public anyway, but you could also argue for making such behaviour a setting, and there are probably other/better alternatives.
I think RCS comes with some autodiscovery capability (by sending a request to a magic HTTP URL over the right APN, haven’t read the spec in a while) but it does make sense that carriers push it in profiles as well.
Lemmy doesn’t do it currently. It blindly trusts communities to not lie to people. I just found out about this myself.
In theory the JSON body could include all the necessary information to validate a signature and the signature itself. Then, a simple HEAD request could validate the contents without having to re-download everything, and users’ public keys could be cached to minimise HTTP requests necessary.
ActivityPub was designed for social networks, not for forums. I’m not surprised it doesn’t work well for Lemmy.
The alternative, in my opinion, would be shared inboxes combined with adding the “public” audience to outbound messages.
Linux has support for updating various Lenovo models through a piece of software called fwupdmgr. If your laptop is support, it should show up automatically in Gnome Software or similar package managers.
For your laptop, Lenovo has a “Bootable CD” download option for non-Windows users. It’s intended to be written to a CD (but a flash drive will probably also work), for example by using one of those USB DVD drives.
If you don’t have a flash drive for some reason (and I doubt you’ll have a DVD drive in that case), you can try to make the Ubuntu bootloader boot the ISO, though that’s not something for beginners. Here are the official instructions in case you still want to try, but I don’t think I’d bother.
The easiest method may be to contact Lenovo and ask them how to do it. I think they’ll refer you to the bootable ISO. If they don’t make their updates available for anything but Linux, you’re going to have an annoying time.
Spending the five dollars on a flash drive to write the bootable CD to would be worth it in my opinion.
To answer your question: if the software manager doesn’t offer you the firmware update already, the easiest (not necessarily easy) way would be manually adding a bootloader entry to your Grub configuration to boot the update ISO you can download from Lenovos’s website.
The second easiest way would probably be to extract the firmware updater from either the Windows download or the ISO file, extracting the .efi files and the .rom files, placing them on your EFI partition, and using the boot menu to manually boot the firmware updater.
Or, to answer more succinctly: if you don’t get those updates already, there’s no easy way without a bootable medium. Sorry. Tell Lenovo to publish the firmware updates through the standard Linux channels like they do for other laptops.
I’m not sure if that’s true. From the spec:
Additionally, if an object is addressed to the Public special collection, a server MAY deliver that object to all known sharedInbox endpoints on the network.
This requires implementing sharedInbox support, but I believe this should permit federating any content of choice to any server.
But surely the receiving server could validate that signature by verifying the existence of the received activity (by asking the origin server for the object referenced and validating the signature).
If like objects are distributed in URL form, this is already how it works. The extra load wouldn’t be fun, for sure, but the lack of an embedded signature makes it very easy to falsify anything on the Fediverse.
But that’s how ActivityPub was designed? Are groups going to be implemented in Mastodon by replicating the crazy “pretend there’s an account boosting everything that’s happening on the server” behaviour?
The standard is fine: https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/wp-content/uploads/RCC.71-v2.6-1.pdf
This isn’t an Apple standard or a Google standard, it’s a telecoms standard. It’s made for everything from IoT to flip phones to tablets to smart cars.
Nobody has bothered to build an app for it, though. Well, carriers have, but nobody uses their carrier’s messaging app.