• 3 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • I have genuinely no idea how that could work.

    I believe I get the genuine intent (protecting children) but I have so far never encountered any device or software or both that didn’t relatively easily bypass user authentication.

    The closest I’ve tried are (expensive) XR headsets like the Apple Vision Pro or the Microsoft HoloLens both thanks to eye tracking. Basically for these you have to validate you are who you claim to be when you put the headset on. If you remove it, put it back (or on someone else head) you have to do it again. Nobody else (unless you explicitly share) can then see what you are looking it.

    Every other devices I’ve seen, including mobile phones with banking apps, typically ask you to authenticate then assume than you are the one who keeps using the device. Meanwhile anybody else can grab the device from your hand and be “you”. Typically specific action (e.g. password change) do require to authenticate again but “normal” usage does not.


  • In Belgium (and quite a few other European countries) you can do payments via QR-codes on the phone in addition to NFC with phone, watches, or with credit cards and debit cards. This works with face-to-face points of sales, private and professionals other mobile phones and online Websites (which can also use a link to open the banking app itself). There are no more cheques in Belgium.


  • They pretty much all do and the Web apps typically can do everything, from account status to transfers, etc.

    Unfortunately… most of those require the native app for login. Also more and more online websites, even on desktop, do mobile payment (e.g. QRcode scanning) as an efficient way.

    So without the native app, no convenient login (if any, some still have physical card + card reader as fallback) nor convenient payments.






  • Also self-hosting is not trivial but it got way easier over the years IMHO thanks to Docker/Podman. Also I’d recommend investing time in it because… it will still be worth it in a decade!

    If you are up for it I could write few “challenges” for you and see where it leads.


  • Check my post history if you want as I did post quite a few times about my journey there but basically :

    • used Android a long time ago
    • switched to iOS due to discussions with security experts at Mozilla
    • bought and used sporadically Linux proper phones (PinePhone and PinePhone Pro) with different distributions
    • tired of iOS restrictions as a developer, switched to /e/OS last year

    The main appeal of /e/OS for me wasn’t security or privacy but rather being able to purchase a phone with the OS installed. I wanted to buy a phone, put the SIM in and be pretty much done with it. I also wanted banking apps to keep on working. I bought the cheapest /e/OS phone namely https://murena.com/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-cmf-phone-1/ then and basically I’ve been using daily since.

    Few clarifications that I believe are misunderstandings :

    • on security, yes /e/OS lags behind GrapheneOS for Android updates. If you are worried of 0-days because you are a political dissident you should probably NOT use /e/OS but get your setup reviewed by experts. You should definitely not trust randoms strangers on the Internet on that topic. It’s important to put an emphasis on the fact that even with the latest Android updates, a phone is still not entirely secure, does not matter if it’s with Googled Android, GrapheneOS, iOS or whatever other OS. It’s only the least worst known state, in theory. It’s better to follow best practices but without being either naive or paranoid.
    • on privacy, /e/OS has some defaults you might not like but they are JUST that, namely default settings. If you do not want to use a Murena account, simply do not create one. That’s it. You won’t have any call to any API, even proxied one like OpenAI. AFAICT this is also only for paid accounts so it can’t happen by mistake. Feel free to check my post/comment history on that. Again if your threat model is any information leak, might be better to use GrapheneOS but if you are fine with just avoiding the downside of surveillance capitalism, IMHO /e/OS is good enough, namely you don’t share usage data to Google, even with default settings.



  • company that we can actually choose, unlike our ISP

    Depends on locations but typically in urban areas (which is where most people live now, since the rural flight of the 20th) there are multiple ISPs to chose from. It’s typically a long tail curve with 1 ISP that is a current or historical monopoly everybody knows who laid down the physical lines then multiple large ones and finally dozens of tiny ones that might include some local non-profit. Same goes for SIM operators. Most customers are just too lazy to bother picking anything but the most popular choices.

    TL;DR: most people can actually chose their ISPs.





  • This will not be a fork of OpenRGB. While I plan to take a huge chunk of it (the reversed generiert device protocols)

    How about opening an issue on OpenRGB asking what you need and why, maybe it can be abstracted away, headless, and that architecture change could be useful for them and other projects too then?

    You can do that part yourself and let other use that new tool as their dependency but it means you’ll have to keep it up to date against OpenRGB itself as it supports more devices just because of its popularity.



  • Vibe coders want their “agents” to be able to do more. Started with tools on a computer, VMs, but recently it was payments (x402) and last it was a “social network” so this is actually pretty coherent.

    I do think it’s terrible and I hate the whole hype but it makes sense to want your “system” to have more diverse inputs (e.g. dataset) and outputs (e.g payment to get more inputs, arms or other actuators to “act” on the World and complete tasks, get more data, etc).