Unskilled5117

While there are a lot of critics of this, ask yourself: for how many services and apps you use (e.g. messenger, cloud storage, email, operating system, web browser…) are you willing to pay recurrently? If that answer is not for every single one of them, then this move is the answer.

The internet desperately needs a way to fund things and advertising seems to be the only viable solution on a bigger scale. And I don’t think that there is anyone better suited than mozilla for the job of pushing a privacy respecting way of doing so. Sure this needs to be done the right way, but they should be given the benefit of the doubt.

And this doesn’t mean that everything needs to be cluttered with ads. You could still pay a bit to remove them.

Even if the answer to the question above was yes, consider the masses. Other people might not care enough/have the same awareness about privacy to pay, but they could gain a lot with this. Consider people in less fortunate circumstances monetary wise. Don’t they deserve privacy if they can’t afford to pay for services?

I downloaded the mobile app (ios) and i don’t see any way to connect it to your own selfhosted server. You can only create an account with them. Didn’t look further, but it would be pretty weird to first have to create an account with them and only afterwards being able to connect to your own server.

Edit: The access is just deeply hidden. You have to tap 7 times on the login in screen in the app to enter developer settings. There you can enter your own server.

https://help.ente.io/self-hosting/guides/custom-server/

So yeah thumbs up from me!

Tldr: This is a traffic analysis attack, it exposes metadata without help or access to data from whatsapp. Other messengers are vulnerable too. It requires vast resources and access only governments have. It is not a threat model that todays messengers defend against.

The interesting part of the article ist the last one.

According to the internal assessment, the stakes are high: “Inspection and analysis of network traffic is completely invisible to us, yet it reveals the connections between our users: who is in a group together, who is messaging who, and (hardest to hide) who is calling who.”

The analysis notes that a government can easily tell when a person is using WhatsApp, in part because the data must pass through Meta’s readily identifiable corporate servers. A government agency can then unmask specific WhatsApp users by tracing their IP address, a unique number assigned to every connected device, to their internet or cellular service provider account.

WhatsApp’s internal security team has identified several examples of how clever observation of encrypted data can thwart the app’s privacy protections, a technique known as a correlation attack, according to this assessment. In one, a WhatsApp user sends a message to a group, resulting in a burst of data of the exact same size being transmitted to the device of everyone in that group. Another correlation attack involves measuring the time delay between when WhatsApp messages are sent and received between two parties — enough data, the company believes, “to infer the distance to and possibly the location of each recipient.”

Today’s messenger services weren’t designed to hide this metadata from an adversary who can see all sides of the connection,” Green, the cryptography professor, told The Intercept.

The response by the debian maintainer responsible for this change to the keepassxc developer is an actual disgrace

Request to revert change:

@julian-klode this needs to be reverted asap. This is now our fourth bug report because of the decision to neuter the base KeePassXC package in Debian. Put the base package back where it was and create a keepassxc-minimal.

Response by debian maintainer:

julian-klode commented 9 hours ago: I'm afraid that's not going to happen. It was a mistake to ship with all plugins built by default. This will be painful for a year as users annoyingly do not read the NEWS files they should be reading but there's little that can be done about that. It is our responsibility to our users to provide them the most secure option possible as the default. All of these features are superfluous and do not really belong in a local password database manager, these developments are all utterly misguided. Users who need this crap can install the crappy version but obviously this increases the risk of drive-by contributor attacks.

The whole github issue is worth a read, as it actually explains the issue with the change.

Edit: as i gave the debian maintainers view visibility i wanted to give a quick summary of the keepassxc point of view as well:

• julian-klode specifically mentions attacks by contributors of keepassxc. If you don’t trust the developers, why would you trust the minimal package which is developed by the same people?

• If the Debian packagers have good reason to believe the keepassxc-full version presents a broader attack surface, then they ought to present what they've seen that makes them feel that way, not promote baseless innuendo.

• the features are disabled by default. If you do not opt in, the code never gets executed.

• the safest version of keepassxc is the one thats tested, meaning full featured

• removing all those features doesn’t make it more secure, it dumbs it down to an encrypted spreadsheet and makes it less secure. Users should be automatically notified when one of their accounts has been breached and their password for that account has been found floating in a db dump. Users should rely on their password manager to handle logins for them, so they're less likely to get tricked into a phishing page.

• if you disagree with features in someones app you fork it. You do not change it and distribute it under the same name. A -minimal version would have been ok

• Debians own policy is to communicate with upstream beforehand before introducing changes. This was not the case, nor was there a chance to collaborate on an effective solution for both parties.

• Debian could have chosen to give users an informed choice between -full and -minimal. Instead they broke existing users installs.

• People saying it was released in Debian sid, which is meant for changes. It is also meant for Feedback, which julian-klode refuses to listen to.

I agree with you, that the future of Desktop Linux are the atomic Distros. They are more stable and require less intervention, so they can be used more easily by less knowledgeable users and users who prefer a stable OS(in the non-breaking way, not no updates). Making Linux more accessible for new users, is exactly what Linux needs.

I disagree on your view about the Fedora atomic spins, especially universal blue. Who cares if the underlying OS downloads as one big image. It all happens in the background, you don’t notice that. Everytime you reboot, you are on an updated system.

Read some of my other comments. 0-100 is more intuitive than -18-38, no? None of you have even been willing to admit that simple fact yet.

Well because it stands on a false promise. Neither 0°F = the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride nor 100°F has any „real“ meaning. The other limit established was his best estimate of the average human body temperature, originally set at 90 °F, then 96 °F . How is that intuitive.

If you are refering to negative degrees, quite useful for telling how the weather is going to be. And to prevent the „negative numbers are hard“-Argument. It seems to work for the majority of people.

For the human bodytemperature argument often throw around: they are inconsiquential numbers in both systems.

Multiple problems with you assertions.

A) Fahrenheit has an appropriate level of granularity for humans

You know that Celsius uses decimals for everything, so really not much difference. Furthermore the granularity of Fahrenheit doesn‘t have any advantages. You won‘t be able to feel wether its 70°F or 71°F outside, nor if you’ve got a fever of 101°F or 102°F. You need to look at a thermometer. And please don‘t reply saying that decimals are complicated. The majority of the planet, except certain Countries seem to manage just fine. Would be quite laughable if one certain country thinks it‘s too complicated.

B) Fahrenheit has an intuitive frame of reference for humans

Not really sure what you are referencing. I think it just stems from you growing up with Fahrenheit, so not feeling comfortable with anything else.

But Fahrenheit is the temperature scale of the proletariat, the working man, the average Joe. And I'm here for it.

I mean the “proletariat” of the majority of the world uses Celsius.

Nice work! Glad to see it improving so much over a short period. I am interested in how programms based on Qt or gtk/libadwaita will look/ be themed in Cosmic. Are there any news about that?