[How do you ensure privacy in this day and age?]

On 10/8/2019 at 5:44 AM, drobbins said:

[..] there is no substitute for critical thinking. [...] Politics is the art of getting a ton of people pissed off and then leveraging that energy -- and doing this online is known to be extremely effective. So you just have to be wary. Don't be a pawn.

W.r.t. critical thinking there is a pretty decent video series named calling bullshit, which goes into detail on how to apply it in an environment that's ever more increasing in nonsense information.

[Funtoo is now on Discord]

(Quote emphasis mine)

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For those who may not understand the embracing of next-gen communication clients... it's really not about the technology here.

That may be the case from your perspective and that's perfectly fine. The reason why I made a sad reaction to the announcement (and the update) is because mine is different.

To the best of my knowledge Discord requires sending all your voice data to their servers with only transport encryption, not end-to-end, so there's no reason to believe they aren't storing it. If you think conventional data breaches are dangerous, consider what would happen if a criminal element got access to a vast amount of such voice data (impersonation being only the most obvious one). You may call me paranoid, but in recent times this risk is unacceptable to me.

My personal issue with Telegram is one of trust in their technology. MTProto 1's numerous unexplained oddities are well known and haven't all been addressed in version 2. This, combined with the fact that the principal mind behind their design is not a cryptographer, marks Telegram as "do not touch with a ten foot pole" for me.

Don't get me wrong, I generally love shiny new technology and I do recognize the immense convenience both of these tools have for a vast amount of people, but I will not use something just because it's shiny and more convenient for other people. It also needs to not be a regression from existing technology for me, which both of these two tools are.

 

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I am very glad for Discord and now Telegram and think everyone should be too

I'm happy in the sense that more people are likely to join the Funtoo community. I'm sad that it had to be these two technologies, for the reasons I mentioned.

[Funtoo 1.4 - No update to gentoo-sources?]

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In the future are the only kernel sources that are going to be updated in the repository going to be debian-sources?

See related: https://bugs.funtoo.org/browse/FL-6035

To the best of my knowledge nothing about this has changed in 1.4. Only debian-sources(-lts) are officially supported. Unfortunately, the other sources are not masked despite being unsupported.

[Outdated Desktop Environments]

On 14/08/2018 at 8:31 AM, shadow53 said:

I notice that I could subscribe to the KDE and Qt Gentoo testing overlays, but I assume they are called "testing" for a reason and would rather not chance random breakages from unstable build scripts.

Gentoo has KDE Plasma 5.13 (and qt 5.11) in normal portage, no need to use testing.

PS: You could also use the ebuilds in my overlay, if you don't want to sync the whole Gentoo tree (they are imported from Gentoo), though they may be behind slightly in the release version (the 'x' in 5.13.x)