It’s difficult to know that for sure, which is why (e.g.) the US government wants to make sure that there is domestic chip manufacture with a completely controlled supply chain to make hardware for classified communications. It can help to consider the difference between targeted surveillance (spending millions to tap the President’s phone, to get big juicy national secrets) and dragnet surveillance (tapping everybody’s phone so that you can have dirt on Joe Schmoe if he does something interesting later, even if he is of no particular interest right now). Hardware backdoors would be used mostly for targeted surveillance.

Stuff like VPN’s and encrypted apps can be of considerable help against dragnet surveillance, which is what the civil privacy community mostly cares about. If you think you might be a subject of targeted surveillance, you have to be much more paranoid. Not just hardware backdoors in your computer, but suspicious white vans on your street, microphones in your flower pots, FBI agents under your bed, the whole bit.

There are some countermeasures you can take against hardware backdoors (electromagnetically isolate a computer from the network and transfer data from it by floppy disc or similar) but basically you’re in a different world if you’re dealing with this.

You mght like the book “Security Engineering” by Ross Anderson (older editions free online and still very good: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/book.html and scroll down). It goes into this stuff, has lots of good overviews even if you gloss over the technical parts, and will generally help you see clearly in the topic.

I use TB under Debian and there is a tray icon and an arrival notification, poll time of maybe a few minutes, seems fine. Showing the # of messages in the tray icon could be sort of handy I guess, though I had never thought about it before and didn’t miss it. Basic features = shut off the “email contains remote content” banner or “spam filter thinks this email is spam” (I can recognize spam for myself). I just want a preference that permanently disables remote content without throwing banners at me. And eliminate the client side spam filtering completely since I have that on the server side, and can manually flag any that gets through. Plus various other stuff like that. Yes, get rid of the calendar and contacts stuff. Biggest feature needing significant code changes: make message search not suck.

This doesn’t really seem like something that needed to be done. Thunderbird already has too many features. It needs less, not more. A bunch of stuff in the email client part is also badly designed. That needs fixing, preferably upstream, but I wouldn’t think of that as feature enhancement.

Check this out, it is amazing: https://github.com/nineties/planckforth

You start with a working Forth and then bootstrap, sort of like writing a C compiler in C. There is an additional trick that Forth calls metacompilation (note, that term has a different meaning outside of the Forth world). See: https://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/moving4.htm

Traditionally Forth is implemented completely in Forth. Jonesforth is kind of non-traditional in that sense, because it is in assembler.

Doing that in Java sort of misses the point? I guess the enjoyment still counts if course.

The initial post is a somewhat incomprehensible rant but I think the objection is that any number of skeezy websites all have domains pointing to the same Cloudflare IP. So when a malware app opens a TLS connection to one of those domains, the shared IP doesn’t tel you anything, and the ECH prevents you from seeing with Wireshark just whose home the malware is phoning. You have to resort to more drastic methods like intercepting DNS. Better yet, don’t run malware.

Nextcloud might handle what you want. There are a zillion places that offer hosting for it, or you can self-host it. MediaWiki is another possible choice, that despite the name is more document oriented and less media oriented than NextCloud is. Again, you can self-host, or there are commercial hosts for it. Lots of VPS providers also offer one-click installers for it. I haven’t run a MediaWiki instance myself, but am familiar with it as a user through editing Wikipedia. I’ve run Gitit, which has a similar UI, but is backed by a Git repo.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/go_one_better ?

Someone suggested AWS S3 but that is ridiculously expensive. How much viewership do you expect? Self hosting is not that expensive unless you have big volume. Or you could just seed some torrents. I would stay away from “platforms” since afaict they all have the same disease as youtube, just in its less advanced stages.

Thanks, that’s good info, though I was never really interested in the movies to begin with. I saw the first one mostly through getting dragged along by some friends. I don’t have that big a problem with deviating from the finer details of the book’s plot lines. It’s mostly that the movies couldn’t (or anyway didn’t) capture the books’ sense of grandness.

I liked this a lot, a fanfiction where Harry Potter finds himself transported to Middle Earth. There are actually quite a lot of those but this one is particularly good. Warning, it’s unfinished, though it doesn’t stop on a cliffhanger or anything like that. It captures Tolkien’s writing style and sweep pretty well.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/23628394/chapters/56706448

This one is also complete and is one of my favorites, but in a totally different style from Tolkien. It says LOTR is revisionist history / elf propaganda, and that Sauron and Mordor were actually the good side of the war. The main character is an orc:

https://archive.org/details/TheLastRingbearerSecondEdition

I didn’t see the movie but semi remember that scene from the book. Pippin saw Sauron, and seeing Minas Tirith would have revealed Sauron’s location, always good intellligence. I don’t remember what Pippin reported about it though.

The book is a momumental classic and I highly recommend it if you like reading fiction. I saw the first of the three LOTR movies and thought it was ok considering what it was trying to do. It could have been lots worse. But still, I didn’t feel particularly interested in seeing the other two movies. Maybe I’ll re-read the books sometime. It’s been ages. These days, lots of fanfics are longer than the LOTR books, since they no longer have the limitations of printing on paper.

Interesting, I’ll take a look at it, thanks., But I’ve been particularly interested in Jami because it runs on multiple platforms, is on F-droid, and is a GNU program.

I don’t know of such limitations and I’ve done some screen recording that way. But yeah the CLI options are confusing. The wiki (trac.ffmpeg.org) and libera irc channel #ffmpeg both help.

Salt Typhoon may have given them a clue.

Old joke: Conspiracy theorist Ted Tinfoil dies and goes to heaven and gets to meet God. God welcomes Ted to the afterlife and asks if he has any questions. Ted wants to know who killed JFK. God says “it was Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone”. Ted says “oh no, the cover-up goes all the way to the top!”.

I get the impression that recreating the Whisper training code is possibly doable, but the data is a bigger task.

This is a possible Whisper alternative with maybe similar issues: https://petewarden.com/2024/10/21/introducing-moonshine-the-new-state-of-the-art-for-speech-to-text/

Yes it’s nice that the phone app is free but STT is the difficult and important part. With Moonshine it might be possible to run the transcriber completely on the phone instead of having the STT on a remote server.

It’s interesting that they are able to do all that speaker distinguishing with just a single mic as found on both phones. There was a thread about phone features recently. Given this STT stuff, it could be useful to have a phone with 3 or 4 mics in the corners of the phone, like one of those tabletop conference mics, so it can figure out directionality of sound sources.

It didn’t say that on the linked page. Is the AI model and training code and data also free?

Added: it looks like it uses Whisper for transcription. So the inference code is there but it’s unclear about the other stuff.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_(speech_recognition_system)

Anyway, thanks for the update.

If your management can’t understand “I’m not an extravert”, they are the ones who lack empathy.

I’ve been around medical people a fair amount over the years. Nurses vary but yeah they do tend to be outgoing or at least solicitous. Doctors on the other hand are often total nerds, almost like the stereotype of programmers. Of course, being a programmer, that’s the type of doctor that I like. If you want to stay in the health field, maybe consider medical school for when you can swing it.

There is such a thing as empathy training: https://kffhealthnews.org/news/efforts-to-instill-empathy-among-doctors-is-paying-dividends/

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/11/feature-cultivating-empathy

https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/how-to-show-empathy-to-patients-even-when-youre-stressed

https://www.nursingprocess.org/empathy-in-nursing.html

There is a specific article I remember from one of the KFF sites and those links came up while I searched for it. Unfortunately I didn’t find the one I was thinking of, but maybe it will turn up later. What I liked about it was that it was aimed at nerdy doctors (it was from an internal newsletter for KFF workers, though on their public site), so it was expressed in precise terms. I learned useful things from it myself.

You can find plenty more with fairly obvious web searches.