At first, I was wow, this sounds amazing, then I saw it’s not even available yet and due for a crowd funding campaign.
Milk-V is leaning in to the free and open source nature of RISC-V by pledging to make all hardware schematics and design files available under an as-yet unspecified open source license prior to the launch of its crowdfunding campaign
Well! Good luck to them.
Not only is the lack of a definitive fix disappointing, but the workaround isn’t great, with Microsoft stating that to “mitigate this issue, you can uninstall apps which integrate with Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Calendar.”
“Integrate with windows” is very vague. doesn’t every software on Windows integrate with Windows? ㄟ(ツ)ㄏ
Multiple, 40 sec to 60 sec ads on the first video. I knew it was bad, but that still surprised me
More people using adblocks, more ads for people who don’t. It’s simple business logic. Google is the largest advertising and analytics company. I’m sure they’ve got adblocks factored in for maximum profits.
Poor them though, I’ll probably never not use adblocks. lol
People were applauding the banning of Chinese apps (most of which were obviously malware). But they got too comfortable with their government getting authoritarian. Now, look how the turn tables.
I don’t see signal/wire/whatsapp being mentioned. why tho? because they leak metadata? or work with the government? 🤔 Comments from Element make it even more suspicious.
Element already published a statement regarding the issue explaining that they do reply to Indian government requests: “While Element never compromises end-to-end encryption or user privacy, we have been contacted by Indian authorities in the past and addressed them in a constructive fashion (typically responding same-day). Indeed our Trust & Safety team works with governments to build safer secure communications for everyone; while ensuring user privacy and protecting end-to-end encryption.”
Basically they do follow up with the government requests but that wasn’t good enough. But Signal/Whatsapp/Wire are more government friendly? Facebook obviously is, but signal is far more popular than any of the apps banned. Yet, it is not blocked.
I wonder how it works with people that speak multiple language or mixed languages. Are the thoughts in the brain language agnostic? As we imagine the same thing just in different words.
It’s very interesting research and can help people with good intentions but someone will inevitably use it for their own benefits.
A comment on this by GrapheneOS reddit account here:
NitroKey did not discover a backdoor. The post is very sensationalized and it’s unfortunate they didn’t run this by us first. The title used for the post here is editorialized and doesn’t match what the article actually states. This is not a backdoor.
XTRA (PSDS) is an entirely separate thing from Qualcomm’s IZat service. XTRA (PSDS) simply provides static downloads via HTTPS GET requests of GNSS almanac data, i.e. the predicted locations of satellites for around a week in the future. XTRA is just Qualcomm’s proprietary branding for PSDS which is also used by every other major GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, etc.) implementation including Broadcom.
IZat is a network location service similar to the Google and Apple services where devices can send a list of nearby cell towers, Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth devices with their signal strength to receive back a location estimate. It also seemingly supports other features like location sharing. IZat appears to be a fairly privacy invasive service but it’s not enabled by default and is not directly related to XTRA.
Qualcomm used to use izatcloud.net for both IZat and XTRA which are entirely separate services. They moved XTRA to xtracloud.net to make it clear that it’s a separate thing. Some devices using an older SoC or configuration may still use the confusing izatcloud.net URLs leading to people mixing up these things up.
On Qualcomm Pixels, XTRA (PSDS) is implemented by xtra-service within the OS and SUPL is implemented by the cellular radio firmware. The OS chooses the URLs used for both XTRA and SUPL. Pixel/Nexus phones never integrated IZat. We have seen South Korean Qualcomm SoC phones providing the option to use IZat and it seems like it might be widely used there. It does not seem to be widely used internationally and is not simply enabled by default without users choosing to opt into using it. XTRA is normally always used since it’s just a static download.
On Tensor Pixels, PSDS is done with the standard AOSP PSDS implementation and SUPL is done within the OS by Broadcom gpsd. We prefer the Tensor Pixel approach, but it doesn’t mean that the Qualcomm approach is less private. We just prefer having control over it within the OS.
It is possible Qualcomm moved XTRA (PSDS) handling into firmware similar to SUPL on newer devices. We haven’t confirmed that ourselves since we aren’t currently doing research and development for newer Qualcomm devices. We do prefer the Tensor platform over Snapdragon, but this is barely a factor.
There are no known backdoors in either Snapdragon or Tensor, and no one has found any evidence of any backdoors. The post title here is simply wrong. People not knowing about XTRA (PSDS) or SUPL doesn’t make them a backdoor.
SUPL is much more of a privacy issue than XTRA, since SUPL involves sending a list of nearby cell towers with their signal strength to a server which helps with accelerating obtaining a satellite-based location lock.
We document these topics here:
Doesn’t Edge send all urls you visit to Microsoft through browser.events.data.msn.com? Microsoft has been tracking every site you visit since the start.
Never take fanboy’s opinions and this guy makes it pretty obvious. Never even mentioned Firefox.
Safari doesn’t even run on Windows and Linux. If a company controlled every aspect of hardware and software, of course it will run faster. It’s 2022, isn’t technology supposed to be portable? I would take some trade off on speed for superior portability, adblock, privacy and customization over a browser that doesn’t even bother being cross platform.
this is, however, good content for sheeples
I thought it was used in piracy because rar was proprietary and antivirus scanners wouldn’t scan contents inside them or something?
it also led to a lot of malware and RAT infections because people