they could have examined some things.

I feel like they did through the tapes that Darling left behind.

It’s year 2000

and you have Server 2003? are you a time traveler?!

l∞ps within l∞ps

Ah, of course, sportsball.

People actually subscribe to Peacock on purpose?

but as previously noted I am a consumer whore!

some of these folks take themselves and their shitpost commenting too seriously

i have so many edges that im impractical to sharpen

crop the snickers part, you got it

Wet, or old dry and musty?

delicious yellow cake

A foreign government being able to disable your communication whenever they want to is already a threat to national security

Well… yes it would be, but even though we’re talking about US-based companies, the servers aren’t all located within US borders, they’re spread around the globe. Maybe the US government could force Amazon data centers within the US to stop carrying Signal data… though that in itself would be a logistical mess and I’m not sure how they would justify it legally. Even the current administration loses court battles and their actions get reversed, and at that point they’d be contending with the legal teams of both Signal and Amazon, plus probably the ACLU and EFF. Considering how few competent lawyers are left in the Trump administration, I doubt they would win that court battle.

For the servers outside the US, not only would it be a logistical and legal nightmare but I’m also not sure how it would be done in a technical sense, at least not all at once or in a time frame of less than a month. It would be very difficult to accomplish actually shutting down Signal’s operations in any practical way. You would have to exercise legal authority or physical force over more than half the data centers on the planet (AWS, Google, Microsoft).

That is in fact not a crime in the relevant country:

On June 11, 1990, the Supreme Court in the case of United States v. Eichman struck down the Flag Protection Act, ruling again that the government’s interest in preserving the flag as a symbol does not outweigh the individual’s First Amendment right to disparage that symbol through expressive conduct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_Protection_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_desecration

Flag desecration is legal in the United States and carries no criminal or civil penalties. Based on Wikipedia’s list, the US is more progressive on this issue than most other countries.

I just want to have control of my data!

Google:

And small businesses.

Yeah, just keep telling yourself that. You’re definitely proving it by making personal attacks with no arguments of substance.

In order to provide a globally accessible, reliable, and high-performance communications service for the many millions of people around the world who depend on Signal, it’s necessary for Signal’s servers to be globally distributed. Having a geographically distributed network of servers is particularly important for end-to-end encrypted voice and video calls, because latency can result in audio delays or degraded video connections that quickly make the app unusable for real-time communication.

Because everything in Signal is end-to-end encrypted, we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, and others while ensuring that your messages and calls remain private and secure. We can’t access them, and neither can the companies that provide any of the infrastructure we rent. As a small nonprofit organization, we cannot afford to purchase all of the physical computers that are necessary to support everyone who relies on Signal while also placing them in independent data centers around the world. Only a select few of the very largest companies globally are still capable of doing this, which is a hallmark of a troublingly concentrated industry.

https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/

Signal’s servers are distributed globally, but yes rented primarily from American companies. I think they would diversify this if they could, but there aren’t really other options with global presence. The only other host providers with comparable scale are Chinese ( like Tencent), but Signal is banned in China as of 2021 ( https://www.vice.com/en/article/signal-blocked-in-china/ ) because the PRC does not allow its citizens to have privacy from government surveillance at all.

There is no evidence that having Signal infrastructure hosted on US company servers provides any capacity for the US government to bypass Signal’s encryption.

To each their own. I prefer having the ability to adjust things from 1 central source. I’m prone to losing remotes.

My preference is for devices to be as simple and reliable and end-user repairable as possible. I have an aversion to any kind of appliance that might be dependent on someone else to update software or maintain a network service to keep operational. No software dependence at all if possible, just a basic microcontroller and firmware. Again, there’s nothing to this that needs to be any more advanced or complicated than the functions of a basic alarm clock like this:

Instead of setting off an alarm, we’re activating the feeding mechanism. Dead simple. Hell, you could probably make this yourself by wiring the alarm from a clock like this to a motor that moves the feeding mechanism.

Also, how would you do such a remote. You would also need a screen for feedback etc, which puts you back at square 1.

Nah, there’s no reason feeding times need to be any more granular than per-hour. You can show that with a 2x6 grid of 12 indicator LEDs, with a 13th AM/PM indicator. On lights indicate hours when feeding will activate. You could have that on both the remote and the feeder, cheap and easy. Maybe you have a 14th indicator that lights up if the food in the storage bin is low and needs refilling.

Also, a remote would be considerably more expensive than the extra cost of a ZigBee/Wifi enabled microcontroller.

Definitely not, because it’s not fair to count the cost of only the link hardware on the feeder, you have to account for the cost of the rest of the smart home system to operate it. A remote like this is dirt cheap:

You’re over thinking what this really needs to do. It’s a timer that activates a switch, that’s all.

OK, add a simple remote control with buttons for adjusting the schedule and triggering a manual feed. No need for that to be any more complicated than a TV remote from the 90s. Keep it offline, no problem.