the guy in the middle is a pro at photobombing

🖖

also: username checks out

the metadata isn’t

Python does have a year option that they are not using.

No, it doesn’t:

Help on class timedelta in module datetime:

class timedelta(builtins.object)
 |  Difference between two datetime values.
 |
 |  timedelta(days=0, seconds=0, microseconds=0, milliseconds=0, minutes=0, hours=0, weeks=0)
 |
 |  All arguments are optional and default to 0.
 |  Arguments may be integers or floats, and may be positive or negative.

Authorities don’t need to ask Signal for metadata; Signal promises they don’t log any themselves and that is probably true.

But, they outsource their server operation to Jeff Bezos, and then they do some absurd security theater to pretend that cryptography makes it so that the server (Amazon) couldn’t possibly log metadata - which is obviously false.

today: “Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov told parliament that the Commission president’s plane had not been disrupted but had only experienced a partial signal interruption, the kind typically seen in densely populated areas. […] But just hours later, the government again changed its position, with Zhelyazkov holding an impromptu news conference early afternoon to revert the official line to the electronic warfare happening in Ukraine once again.”

Thanks for pointing this out. Looking closer I see that that “journal” was definitely not something I want to be sending traffic to, for a whole bunch of reasons - besides anti-vax they’re also anti-trans, and they’re gold bugs… and they’re asking tough questions like “do viruses exist” 🤡

I edited the post to link to MIT instead, and added a note in the post body explaining why.

This blog post has some details about the bad reporting around this story (claiming they used paper maps, and that they were circling for an hour) but it ultimately does agree that the “some issue with the GPS” reported by the pilot (the post includes radio recordings from the air and again from the ground after landing where the pilot says “GPS issues”) must in fact be some type of GPS interference.

Meanwhile flightradar24 says “Yes, and we’re also saying there is no evidence of spoofing. There are numerous issues that could have affected the crew’s ability to perform a GPS-based approach that aren’t related to jamming or spoofing.”

🤷

ADS-B is quite far away from GPS frequencies, so yeah.

ADS-B packets include coordinates from GPS as well as several values related to the estimated accuracy of said coordinates (which is how flightradar24 is reporting that they had good GPS signal throughout the flight).

We Need To Talk About “Authoritarianism”

with BlueSky I’d have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes

I think this is a common misconception based on some critics’ incorrect assumptions and back-of-the-envelope math. See the atproto overview for the different components involved, and then this post (from a BlueSky employee) “A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month” for some numbers.

If I understand correctly, to run a “full nework relay” does mean to consume all of the text posts from all known servers, but not necessarily all of the media, and not necessarily to keep data you aren’t interested in for any long period of time.

Also, you can run your own PDS and/or App Views without running your own relay at all. And, you can also use multiple other people’s relays.

Disclaimer: I’m not an atproto expert, and I haven’t set any of this up myself.

Flight24 indicates that there was a strong GPS signal throughout the flight. Is there some other type of signal which you think they jammed instead of GPS?

you’re suggesting they jammed the pilots’ GPS but not the transponder’s?

The blog post also says this:

There is one other thing which Bluesky gets right, and which the present-day fediverse does not. This is that Bluesky uses content-addressed content, so that content can survive if a node goes down. In this way (well, also allegedly with identity, but I will critique that part because it has several problems), Bluesky achieves its “credible exit” (Bluesky’s own term, by the way) in that the main node or individual hosts could go down, posts can continue to be referenced. This is possible to also do on the fediverse, but is not done presently; today, a fediverse user has to worry a lot about a node going down. indeed I intentionally fought for and left open the possibility within ActivityPub of adding content-addressed posts, and several years ago I wrote a demo of how to combine content addressing with ActivityPub. But nonetheless, even though such a thing is spec-compatible with ActivityPub, content-addressing is not done today on ActivityPub, and is done on Bluesky.

My comment should have been clearer; what I meant when i said it is more “decentralized architecturally” I was referring to the data model part of the architecture as opposed to the physical server infrastructure currently operating it. The latter is obviously quite centralized still, but the former is designed for resilience against nodes unexpectedly (and permanently) failing.

Flightradar24 says “The aircraft’s transponder reported good GPS signal quality from take-off to landing” 🤔

(via)

ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀

It’s a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.

otoh, atproto’s PLC DID method is also not really decentralized… but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.

To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).

Makes me curious as to what happened here

You can see the deleted comments in the modlog. There is also a thread for discussing the deletions in this thread here.

i looked into other services with did got an llm to put those ideas in the required format for the issue. Can you please point out the hallucinations in the issue so i can go and fix them

No. Asking other people to read (and now also to correct!) your LLM slop is extremely inconsiderate. Please don’t do that again.

No evidence of this happened. Blocked.

lol what? it is a pretty well-sourced article, with the main source being remarks in a video which it helpfully links to.

it is 10h long but on youtube one can search the transcript and easily find the parts that form the basis of this article: here are Secretary Burgum’s comments and here is Porat referencing them later.