The entire scene is probably not meant as effective policing, but as punitive theater. This also explains why they disabled the cameras, as the theater was not intended for content reuse.

Given that, I'd assume they knew he wouldn't shoot them or do anything even remotely like that.

I think being able to align your text generators with a specific set of laws, speech codes, tonality, etc. is very useful. However, all of this should be a user choice.

Your spell checker does not stop checking your spelling just because you are describing a murder scene either.

Safety slop and boilerplating should be configurable as well.

When I want the program to reformulate a sentence or phrase, it sends the sentence to an AI that provides word or phrase suggestions. I've connected this to Tinfoil.sh (not affiliated) via API key.

Now, I have a much more private DeepL Write replacement with a snappy, consistent user experience that costs much less. Unfortunately, the suggestions are not as high quality. It's very much an 80% solution. It was still fun!

Most of the rest concerns scraping. The biggest project is an extraction tool for the German transparency register that I need for work.

The whole data structure is designed to make this easy.

I chose Syncthing for this purpose, and it is free and works flawlessly. You can even trivially disable their native sync, as it comes as an internal extension.

Mozilla could have avoided so much drama with Pocket, VPN, AI features, etc., if they just were as transparent and liberal with critical first-party services as Obsidian is.

One can reduce every tool to a toy and justify it with some hand-wavy security slop, but removing capabilities destroys use cases.

The ability to control your tools is good. You should be able to run anything on your devices. Therefore, those who propose the toyification of tools should carry the burden of justifying the change.

The same infantilization of users currently happens with Signal, where high-level decision makers are asked by strangers to share their deepest secrets. Since these strangers introduce themselves very nicely, users start blurting out their secrets. ... now everyone is pretending this is a Signal problem. It is not. The world is not a kindergarten and people have agency.

A good compromise is to set a safe mode as the default and include an option that lets users confirm they know what they are doing. Obsidian already does this. Given that, I do not understand why anyone would demand to make the entire tool worse.

I wonder: What level of user effort would make you comfortable with users exiting safe modes? Would you want users to be able to run software with full permissions at all?

I use Obsidian because it does not treat me like a child. They can add more nags and banners for normies, but the capabilities should remain.

The victims may well be those who are potentially endangered by the leakage of information caused by the decision maker. Regardless of that hypothetical, the person responsible for the leak is not the victim.

If you deal with highly confidential information in your day-to-day work, you should be held accountable for keeping it confidential. This is nothing new in the corporate world, so I don't see why public officials should be held to different standards.

Remember: It was apparently a phishing attack. Someone literally asked her for her credentials. It is within the capabilities of an adult to refrain from handing out important information when asked in a no trust environment. If that's truly beyond their capabilities, they should consider another profession.

I'm not arguing for a witch-hunt or anything against this specific person. Learnings should be constructive and this could have happened to many other public officials. Just, maybe.. if you or I breach protocol, let's not call us the victims.

Media education would be a great start.

I expected something that would increase lock-in. Maybe a more capable version of their AI feature. I'm not sure. There is also AFAIK no success story for monetizing messaging yet, beyond what Telegram is doing.

I'm no expert in the UAEs data protection law, but I did not immediately find any reference for a mandate for government backdoor access to encrypted content.

Also: compromising endpoints obviously does not require zero-day exploits. Otherwise, I'd assume, the services of the surveillance industry (Pegasus, Cellebrite, etc.) would be far more expensive.

There is probably no large conspiracy where Meta breaks E2E for a government and nobody involved ever leaks it. The more traditional threat is probably service blocking where users get pushed to less secure alternatives that the government can more easily monitor, like Russias new government messenger.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47831987

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

From my experience, the no-advertisement claim is untrue. I've used WhatsApp with several users in the UAE. The end-to-end encryption notice appeared on my side (as always in user-to-user communication).

> All chat apps that operate in the UAE need to store data locally with full access given to the UAE's Telecom and Interior Ministries.

Do you have a source for that claim?

Compromised endpoints, monitoring accounts or unencrypted cloud backups are far more likely to be the source than hidden deals or large conspiracies where many people need to keep a secret.

'Extrajudicial killing' is just an apologetic euphemism. An indirect term, since murder is usually considered to be a bad thing.

Of course, whether or not to use a VPN always depends on the specifics. (threat model, circumstances, VPN provider, etc.)

I am with the biggest telecoms provider in Germany, and I trust them about as far as I can throw them.

They are known for censoring their DNS servers, being opaque about government requests, and creating artificial bottlenecks to extort money from companies in order to avoid throttling.

Implementing end-to-end encryption on relevant communication services could mitigate many risks that come with hosting user content.

It would protect users from Big Tech spying and still allow affected users to report if something sketchy is going on. Best of both worlds.

In any case, it would be a good start.

Anyone who’s ever been unable to dismiss a nag and forced to defer via "Ask me later" knows the feeling of powerlessness and disenfranchisement deliberately planted by those making UX decisions. .. or the EU constitutional framework.

I do not think our parent is suggesting otherwise.

AFAIK Motorola and GrapheneOS are not merging, they are getting into a partnership. They do not have to think or do exactly the same.

Apple can comply with both CCP and US demands at the same time without a problem. I am sure Motorola can adjust their services to the markets they are working in, as well.

In regulated industries, like finance and taxation, regulators deliberately assign responsibility to individuals, so misconduct doesn’t get lost inside the company or within its corporate stakeholder network. That removes a lot of friction once you want to hold someone liable.

I've read our parents comment as an implicit proposal to establish similar structures in tech.

Since rare handles can generate high prices and are returned to auction once the buyer fails to meet their obligations, Twitter has a strong incentive to increase the number of handles in its auction pool.

The relevant product manager has probably ranked existing attractive handles according to their expected mobilisation/outrage potential and started confiscating handles from the bottom of that list.

This is probably also why you won't be notified about their auction of your handle, even though you'll receive email alerts for irrelevant stuff all the time. The process looks designed to be stealthy.

Money really is the trivial Occam's razor explanation here.

The EU just managed to postpone chat control for a bit, and my own country has found a renewed passion for punishing expression crimes (so-called "Äußerungsdelikte") through various legal and pre-legal means.

Social, legal or technical centralization is not a solution to any issue related to public discourse, and Euro-nationalism is not a wise concept. It will simply make us another economic bloc, just with an older population than the others.

Contrary to the current zeitgeist in the EU, power should be dispersed as much as possible. We should embrace global open-source initiatives and work towards a European Union that open-source projects (and tech companies!) want to organize under because of our superior regulatory frameworks, not subsidies, legal pressure, promised government service demand or political initiatives.

We already have a lot of failed political initiatives, so why not try the organic, good governance approach for once?

Instead, we just create more bureaucracy and red tape. This absurd CRA nugget is a good example for our european style tech regulation for open source: https://cra.orcwg.org/faq/stewards/

(rant over)

edit: A good - allthough unfortunately German - recent essay on the German speech issue might be: https://netzpolitik.org/2026/grundrechte-wie-polizei-und-jus...