By quickly skimming through the README, I couldn't tell if it supports 1on1 chats or group chats as well.
I will be able to tell you in a moment as I am installing it at the moment.
Readit NewsKorematsuFred commented on Speek – in the spirit of Ricochet: a new messenger using Tor hidden services github.com/Speek-App/Spee... · Posted by u/DoingIsLearning
KorematsuFred commented on Mozilla VPN Completes Independent Security Audit by Cure53 blog.mozilla.org/en/mozil... · Posted by u/st3fan
Mozilla VPN advantage: a company far more reputable than almost any other VPN provider for doing all the things people say they want a VPN for.
Mozilla VPN disadvantage: Mozilla is probably far less tolerant of all the things most people actually use a VPN for.
Brilliant summary. I would need a VPN mostly to visit some sites while spoofing my location, testing my competitions ux in other countries etc.
I can also see because of Mozilla's reputation employers offering these VPN free of cost to their employees.
These are precisely the areas where government has a role to play but more often than not, this is precisely where FTC, FCC and rest of the alphabet soup seems to fail.
So who is going to sit in judgement of which degrees are worthwhile and which are worthless?
If you government pays for it someone in Washington would. Ideally (and how it happens today to some extent) this much be determined by market.
PS: Note how many folks on HN are making fun of Gender Studies course. This is a great signal for any young kid not to enter that course.
Government funds university education here in Denmark. But you have to be responsible with tax payers money so the number of seats per program is determined by market demand.
I think many Americans would be offended if they woke up one day and their universities had stopped offering useless gender studies degrees.
The demand for subsidization of college education is coming from very woke academics who want more taxpayer money for their "woke programs".
College education in USA is ridiculously cheap if you are not looking at top colleges. Plenty of universities in silicon valley which can give you a wide array of useful degrees for very affordable price. Affordable = You can pay your student loans within 2 years of gainful employment post degree.
Why all of this? If K-12 is paid for by the government, why not have the government pay for college education too?
There are some very good arguments as to why government should not be paying for college education:
- Loosely speaking K-12 can be seen as a public good because of which it may make sense for the society to pay for other people's education. College education is not a public good in the same way because at any rate only few folks will go to college and it is immoral for the other people being forced to pay for college education of those kids. If college educated kids earn even more then it is even more immoral for poor people to pay for rich.
- Unlike K-12, college education involves specialization. A gender studies degree is worthless compared to say a nurse. But because education is free a lot of students might enroll in more and more worthless degrees. This will have great negative impact on productivity of US society. A lot of folks who do not have any productive skills, a lot of folks staying out of labour market in their crucial years. I will work at a local farm for a year rather than pursue some of the college degrees any days.
- When government pays for education it distorts the market. You can see it as a subsidy. But then it also means more and more worthless colleges which have more and more worthless degree programs that focus on "good life" for kids.
I always watch this video from time to time : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3-_r_t7AZU
KorematsuFred commented on India bans MasterCard from adding new customers techcrunch.com/2021/07/14... · Posted by u/Garbage
To expand on this a bit, if you want leverage over companies like MasterCard, Visa, and American Express, it definitely helps to have the data in your jurisdiction. As you noted, they will shut off mobile internet to support the state. If Visa decides that it doesn't want to give the government data on someone's transactions, it helps to have that data in the country.
"Oh, but the data is encrypted." Sure, but the country could literally seize all of the servers and shut down the payment processor. "Hey, American Express, if you don't give us the data we want, we'll simply take your whole payment network offline."
It's a lot harder to pressure a payment network when you don't have physical control - especially if that payment network can challenge you in court. It's easy for the government to shut off mobile networks that are physically present. It's harder for the government to stop traffic from routing to a payment processor whose servers are outside of the country - especially if they have a half-decent security/threat team ready to avoid blocks.
I don't know the laws of India, but it seems likely that the Executive has a certain amount of discretion that can be challenged. However, it's a lot harder to challenge that discretion if your business is offline for a year while you challenge it. Payment processors need to comply with local laws, but if you're a country where the Executive doesn't mind disrupting services, that gives them a huge amount of leverage to get your compliance beyond local laws. If the data is hosted outside of India, it's a lot easier to to simply comply with the laws rather than the laws plus whatever the Executive thinks they can claim the laws support.
Ultimately, if the data is stored within India, the Indian government can be an existential threat to their business in the country beyond what the law allows. A company will hand over data rather than seeing its servers seized for a year while a trial ensues. During that year, they'd lose all their customers to competitors and they'd be shut out of the market. Likewise, what if the government "accidentally" damages the data when they lose the trial? If you have 100M customers in a country and each is carrying a balance of $100, that's $10B that people owe. If the government has seized all those records and then damages them, your business is in a lot of trouble.
Data residency gives a government willing to bully companies a lot of power. It's simply a lot harder to access information stored abroad and you have a lot less leverage.
> Data residency gives a government willing to bully companies a lot of power. It's simply a lot harder to access information stored abroad and you have a lot less leverage.
You have no clue how much uncontrolled power Indian government has today. This law is brought in to benefit telecom companies and real estate companies. https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/hiranand...
KorematsuFred commented on India bans MasterCard from adding new customers techcrunch.com/2021/07/14... · Posted by u/Garbage
The obsession with where data physically sits at rest is so amusing to me. Not limited to overzealous governments and financial data; healthcare is singularly obsessed with this. It makes no sense whatsoever, of course. I'd much rather store properly encrypted personal information or financial data in North Korea than storing it unencrypted in my home country.
I would understand if they demanded both storage and processing be done in India. Then it's just about control, and the ability to sever MC's India operations from the mother ship in case things go really sour and the US tries to cut India off from the global financial system or something. But since it's just about data at rest, it's nonsensical.
Or am I missing something?
I have been a party to some discussion around the laws with mid level government officials and this was a bit like an episode of Yes Minister.
One of the government consultants spoke about "Data sovereignty". When someone asked what it meant he spoke for like 10 minutes without actually answering the question. "Data of Indians must belong to Indians", "Data is the gold of modern world" he then referred to various international reports without actually telling what those reports say.
"We must protect our citizens data" one official said as others nodded in agreement. What they imagined here (I think) was data sitting on a hard drive and protected by people with guns creating a parameter around it.
The files of these regulations moved across many tables and many offices. I am told the real estate companies in India had a big role and influence on these regulations.
Yes, ultimately it is a ridiculous law that does not help anyone. It does not protect anything.
KorematsuFred commented on Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit pluralistic.net/2021/06/2... · Posted by u/samizdis
Because as we all know, privatization never leads to perverse incentives and anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior. Just look at the American telecom industry, which is famous for high satisfaction and low prices with no price fixing, tying, market segmentation, or any other cartel-like behavior to be seen.
American telecom industry has done much better after US government ended government granted monopoly to bell labs. Plenty of literature on that topic actually. Same for aviation.
Whatever bad things you see with ATT and Comcast are actually a direct result of city granted monopolies which will likely be ended by Musk's Starlink sooner or later.
KorematsuFred commented on Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit pluralistic.net/2021/06/2... · Posted by u/samizdis
Given how much H&R Block and Intuit have unethically and corruptly leeched from the government and the taxpayers directly, I think the should literally be nationalized and have their tax software platforms absorbed into the IRS. Their company activities over the last few decades are so flagrantly, indisputably bad for the country. There's literally no upside, none at all. They have intentionally sabotaged tax filing and leeched off the people by corruptly inserting themselves as middlemen. At least the tax prep portions of the companies.
> I think the should literally be nationalized and have their tax software platforms absorbed into the IRS.
This is an extremist view and basically advocating theft. I do not think IRS has competence to build and run a complex software system.
> Their company activities over the last few decades are so flagrantly, indisputably bad for the country
That is debatable.
> There's literally no upside, none at all. They have intentionally sabotaged tax filing and leeched off the people by corruptly inserting themselves as middlemen
They have not inserted themselves anywhere. You are free to use CPA or do all the paperwork yourself and save yourself $70 bucks.