Given the situation with TikTok—marked by censorship and the app's recent control by MAGA-aligned interests—I checked Reddit to see what TikTok users are saying. It turns out many are asking for alternatives. Most replies suggest other proprietary apps, and I haven’t seen any recommendations for decentralized platforms like LOOPS and others from the Fediverse.

In my opinion, we now have a small but critical window of opportunity to introduce people to the Fediverse. We need to go where young people are—Reddit, Instagram, or whatever platforms they use—and explain the basics of decentralization and why choosing another proprietary app will only lead to the same outcome. LOOPS is easy to join and feels exactly like Tiktok.

I had the chance to discuss this topic with my college students just last semester. Young people are not the “imbeciles” mainstream media often portrays them to be. They see what’s happening and want to participate in change. I am firmly convinced that they are a key component of the social revolution we need, and that with their help, we could dismantle the GAFAM economy in just a few weeks.

So I believe we have to seize this moment: share, explain, and promote the Fediverse wherever you can—especially in the coming days—because every invitation is a step toward a truly free and user-owned internet.

Um... thanks?

As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed "courageous whistleblowers" who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user's messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app's end-to-end encryption. "A worker need only send a 'task' (i.e., request via Meta's internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job," the lawsuit claims. "The Meta engineering team will then grant access -- often without any scrutiny at all -- and the worker's workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user's messages based on the user's User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products."

"Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users' messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required," the 51-page complaint adds. "The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated -- essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted." The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42299124

#1

my most recent example is a Macbook Air 13 that I chimera'd out of three different machines; awesome that 2012-2017 models have interchangeable parts. was lucky and one of the boards had 8 GB RAM, a rarity back then. alas, the only battery I got has barely 60% capacity and zillions of charge cycles and I ain't too keen on spending money on a replacement.

ok, so shit autonomy, be happy you got a workstation for like $15 in total and run it thusly. except, this one shuts off even if there's like 70% remaining and subsequently won't power on without a charger - kinda big deal for a laptop. I imagine not all its cells are up to spec so when it reaches a threshold it cuts out. under macOS, the SMC lets it sip power and when you attach a charger it just wakes as you left it. linux ain't that cool, when you connect power - all your unsaved work is gone.

what linux does have is intel-undervolt. just a smidge of -50mV was enough to remedy the issue. after a coupla days, moved it to -75mV, still perfectly stable; at -100mV it occasionally KPs.

so a thing that was unusable away from a charger is again a mobile device, netting me 4+ hours of light use and almost a week of standby!

#2

eons ago I had a Thinkpad W520; at least I think that was the model - a 15.6" with the chunky, 7-row keyboard sans numpad. lenovo stabbed me in the heart when they decided that all subsequent models must rock the annoying numeric pad, making you type off-center and... anyhoo, the one I got, had a partially damaged screen, about 100ish pixels wide and super irritating, flashing constantly. replacing it wasn't in the budget and relying on an external monitor was a no-go...

hello xrander! that thing allowed you to cut off a part of the screen and that's what I did - converted the 16:10 to something more like 4:3. not only that, a friend taped over the busted part with some carbon-like decal making it look super sick! I'm still trying to find a picture from way back when but no luck so far...

not only did I get a super usable machine, it was the coolest workstation by far - maxed out RAM, three SSD/HD in there... well, as cool as those things can be, anyways...

#3

a few years back, I got a 13" Yoga, forgot the model, for pocket change. dual-core i5 and soldered 8 GB RAM, gorgeous screen, awesome battery - but it constantly blue-screened. break out the mint USB with memtest, and yepp - errors. dogdamn, no way can I afford to fix this thing and if I try desoldering those things, Imma burn the house down. and break the thing even further...

enter GRUB and its BADRAM feature! you can exclude arbitrary region(s) of RAM and the OS that boots after it will be none the wiser - it just uses the rest. and verily, it worked without issues, used it for years and I believe it still works to this day with his current owner.

#4

got a kernel-panicking Macbook Pro 15 Mid2010 for next to nothing. those things died en masse, the issue was a capacitor that drove the Nvidia chip. any strain or excess power consumption and the thing gave out and the OS crashed. the fix was/is simple - disable the Nvidia chip via EFI variable and use just the Intel HD graphics. you lose display out but gain a cooler machine, longer battery life, and you get zero issues with linux.

having fixed it, I installed linux and wanted to upgrade the RAM to 8 GB. alas, no sticks I found would work in the thing. turns out, the fucker only takes 1066 MHz RAM. I totally lived with the conviction that if you stick faster RAM into slower hardware, it'll run it slower, but apparently that ain't so. so tried bartering with junkers, I'll give you my 1333 RAM, you gimme yours - no takers. buying stuff for something that cost me less than $10 was out of the question...

turns out, you can use linux to reprogram the SPD data on the RAM module! you change its identifier to 1066 and the macbook recognized it as such. furthermore, you don't need to patch both sticks, if one is 1066 it can run the other at 1066 as well - so you can run 'em slower! no idea if this is an apple thing or its widely present, but I got a functioning workstation for free!

#5

finally, the Dell Latitude 5285. that's a 2-in-1 tablet with detachable keyboard that I got without the battery. it had okayish specs, the i5-7300u is nothing to get excited about but it had 16 GB LPDDR3 soldered on. the touch display is beyond gorgeous - 400-nit 1920x1280 IPS and the intel graphics shipped the full 4K @ 60 Hz to my monitor via DP-Alt. the only problem - the fucker won't boost past 400 MHz without the battery! buying the thing is out of the question (y'all notice a pattern here, right?) so what are we to do...

thankfully, we got msr-tools. the thing can patch CPU's registers and en/disable some things, and one of them is BD_PROCHOT. that signal makes the CPU throttle on account the heat, it's also triggered if anything is amiss - touchpads disconnected, battery not present, etc. what's needed is read out rdmsr 0x1fc if memory serves correctly, and then you add one bit to the read out state and write it back with wrmsr 0x1fc 0x1xxxxx et voila - speedsteps up to 2.7 GHz, a quick systemd script to make it permanent. it won't turbo, to 3.3 GHz or sumsuch, but this was more than enough for everyday use.

thanks for reading! y'all got any stories how linux can save your ass without spending money? share it with the class!

• Steam
• Website

Original title: Here's why OnePlus bricked your phone when you tried downgrading it

OnePlus statement:

To further strengthen device security, we’ve temporarily paused the ability to downgrade from 16.0.2.50x software builds to older builds. We will be restoring the ability to downgrade software builds in our next routine software update, but in the meantime customers looking to downgrade their build can contact OnePlus after sales channels directly.

Article also speculates about the reason for the temporary measure:

"prevented firmware downgrades due to a vulnerability that could allow a stolen device to be wiped clean and sold as a fully functional phone"

Whatever the reason, I'm glad they reversed course.

https://mecha.so/comet

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mecha-systems/mecha-comet-modular-linux-handheld-computer

Et il y a un module de téléphonie.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34586015

Curious on suggestions for airtags, or similar, for tracking important things on flights or other cases where losing the specific item would be too much of a financial / sentimental loss. Anyone doing this from Linux, or from graphene? How is it?

I know lots of you have grown with it so that's just the way it has always been for you and you are used to it, but older gamers, why do you need a launcher?

I've started PC gaming in the mid to late 90s but only when visiting cousins and friends. Got my first PC in 2001. I have some original games but I'm like 99% pirate, especially for "newer stuff" (read: anything that came out in the last 20 years lol). Modus was always the same: run the installer, click the shortcut, play.

I created a Steam account sometime in the late 2010s, I remember I did because I saw they were giving Metro games for free and I wanted to play them, and I started collecting free games that looked cool, but it really really bothered me that I needed to open their store to install and play the games. Even if I made desktop shortcuts their program would run in the background, and usually complain if I was offline... I just found everything so useless... run software to run the software I want to run, why not skip the middleman? Also I have always been on shitty hardware and I didn't like that extra RAM consumption going on in the background.

Eventually I stopped using Steam, deleted my account, and went back to piracy, but with the loss of some trusted trackers and stuff, and me starting running banking and other important shit on the same PC, I decided to start buying games, and then I found GOG, and what a godsend store! When I buy the game I get the installer so I can do whatever I want with it, and I don't need any third party application to install or run them.

I see a lot of people saying they don't buy games from other stores because their launchers are shit... but what do you even need a launcher for? Not having a launcher is my requirement to buy a game lol