That page (and the rest of the book) is far less pornographic than the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to, and regularly shared between ourselves, and is incredibly tame.
I also find it very telling that you'd consider what is on page 168 pornographic in the first place, sexually explicit maybe, but it is not intended to arouse or cause sexual excitement, it's meant to portray a lived experience.
The sexual repression in the United States is part of the reason why so many people grow up with the wrong ideas around sex and why teen pregnancy is such a big thing. Open discussion about these things (including gender and gender identity in that) is the best way to allow kids to grow up to be functional adults that are well informed and able to have critical thought about how and what they do and are far less likely to fall prey to predators and people who want to do them harm due to their lack of experience.
> That page (and the rest of the book) is far less pornographic than the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to, and regularly shared between ourselves, and is incredibly tame.
So your argument is school libraries should have Playboy and Penthouse on the library magazine rack because you had access to a Hustler? Softcore porn is "incredibly tame" compared to hardcore porn, therefore softcore porn belongs in schools?
That's an insane argument. The pornographic-ness of "the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to" has no relevance to decisions about what to put in a school library.
You sound like you aren't really reasoning, rather you're just coming up with justifications only in the context of achieving a particular result, and not considering other implications.
Sex education and access to educational material around sexuality is inversely correlated with teen pregnancy. The page in the book you mention has a non-detailed cartoon depiction of a teenager giving someone a blowjob for the first time, as part of a plot of them figuring out their identity (which is given far more page time). Especially taken in view of the larger work, I argue this does belong in a school and is categorically different from Playboy and Penthouse.
So your argument is basically that more teenage girls should get pregnant? While it makes sense that the current administration would take this step, considering the President's numerous attempts at teen pregnancy have been a contentious issue, what's your motive?
You sound like you aren't really reasoning, rather you're just coming up with justifications only in the context of achieving a particular result, and not considering other implications.
> The page in the book you mention has a non-detailed cartoon depiction of a teenager giving someone a blowjob for the first time, as part of a plot of them figuring out their identity (which is given far more page time). Especially taken in view of the larger work, I argue this does belong in a school and is categorically different from Playboy and Penthouse.
That's a different argument than the one you made.
But your opponents still have a point: imagine an encyclopedia with an entry on pornography, where they included a full-color, photograph of a page from an old Playboy (perhaps one where they didn't actually show any of the naughty bits), purely as illustration. It hits all the criteria you mention, but the photograph is still inappropriate for school and superfluous. It's legitimate for the school, school board, or whoever is funding the library to refuse to pay for such an encyclopedia, on a account of that photograph. It was a poor choice by the publisher.
And the encyclopedia isn't "banned," you can still get it yourself somewhere else, the school or whatever just made a choice about what to carry or what not to carry which they do all the time and will always do.
> So your argument is basically that more teenage girls should get pregnant?
No, obviously not. And that you went there shows pretty flawed reasoning. You didn't seem to understand my comment, and you seem to be responding to a character to a drama you've got going in your head.
My argument was what you said didn't make sense: I already summed it up: "the pornographic-ness of 'the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to' has no relevance to decisions about what to put in a school library."
> But your opponents still have a point: imagine an encyclopedia with an entry on pornography, where they included a full-color, photograph of a page from an old Playboy (perhaps one where they didn't actually show any of the naughty bits), purely as illustration. It hits all the criteria you mention, but the photograph is still inappropriate for school and superfluous. It's legitimate for the school, school board, or whoever is funding the library to refuse to pay for such an encyclopedia, on a account of that photograph. It was a poor choice by the publisher.
I would have absolutely no problem with this existing in a middle or high school.
> you seem to be responding to a character to a drama you've got going in your head.
I was just applying the same false dichotomy and "so your argument is" logic you've been applying to others in this thread. I was wondering whether it would 1) appeal to you, 2) make you realize the error of your approach, or 3) reveal hypocrisy. Now I know.
> I was just applying the same false dichotomy and "so your argument is" logic you've been applying to others in this thread. I was wondering whether it would 1) appeal to you, 2) make you realize the error of your approach, or 3) reveal hypocrisy. Now I know.
No, it's option 4: you didn't really understand the narrowness of my point (which I was really explicit about), and kinda aped bits of the structure without really getting it. The proof is how you want on about teen pregnancy in response to me, like that had anything to do with what I was saying or where I was coming from.
>That page (and the rest of the book) is far less pornographic than the actual porn I and many other kids I grew up with had access to, and regularly shared between ourselves, and is incredibly tame.
And you'd be ok with federal funds to be used to purchase "actual porn" and place it in schools?
The bill is about not using federal funds for this material.
Great, you've identified how people who want books for children to include porn can include that porn without getting in trouble for it. Just need 167 pages of filler.
>Cool. So if those mythical people actually exist and do so, we can address it if it ever happens.
My original comment that you and others replied to gives the name of the book, the author, the name of the site you can view the book for free, and tells you which page to turn to. It's not mythical, I all but deep-linked to it.
There is no baby in the swampwater you peddle. You probably don't have a baby and never had a baby... I have children. This is actually important to me.
The book you linked to is not pornography hidden behind 167 pages of filler. It is appropriate content for teenagers and I have zero issue with it existing in a public school.
I do have kids, and I don't appreciate the harm you are trying to do to the environment they are growing up in.
> The messages are mine, not theirs, and yet they refuse to allow me to handle them how I deem fit.
"They refuse to allow me" meaning "they don't add the features I want for free to the app they provide for free, so I complain".
The messages are yours, of course. But don't forget that you use their work for free. If you're not happy, go use the free work of someone else, I guess?
They are somewhat correct though, Signal has written code explicitly to prevent iOS users from including Signal data in Apple’s encrypted local and/or cloud backups.
Allowing encrypted backups was free for Signal, but they spent time and money to prevent it for iOS users.
Part of the code the wrote to prevent backups in question:
Lot's of people have requested justification in related Github issues there, but Signal has not given a clear answer. If there was a security problem with the encryption process I believe a CVE or similar would have been in order because it would affect millions of users.
We are unfortunately rehashing the same arguments from Github, nothing prevents Signal from distrusting Apple by default.
But there is also nothing (except for some secret reason they refuse to elaborate) that prevents them from allowing users to actively chose to trust Apple. Except for their own internal reasons, that is.
It's the user's data after all. The user should be able to control and access it. Sensible defaults makes sense, but the outright refusal to explain why they prevent it is very odd. I have a decent "IT hygiene", I keep my operating system updated with patches, I don't download pirated/cracked software, I have hardware-enabled encryption on my storage devices, I have a good password for my local account, I encrypt my local iPhone backups.
Why should I not be allowed to include my Signal chats in those local backups? Signal has never answered that question, which is very strange.
Same as I said above: you are asking for a new feature. Their default is those 20 lines that "protect" the files. If they want to offer you a way to still enable it, someone has to do it. Someone has to work on the UX of it, maybe there is a need to explain to the users why it is less secure when this feature is enabled, and then there is work to do with the criticisms that will come next time someone shoots themselves in the foot because of this feature (because "Signal shouldn't have allowed that in the first place").
I know, you will say "it's not much". But everybody asks for their "small feature", and projects generally can't do everything that everybody asks them to do (and usually for free).
I find it totally valid if they choose that they won't offer features to lower their security, and instead they will work on features having sufficiently good security. Which in this case is the secure backup.
I think we have vastly different definitions of what is a "new" feature. This is not about adding a new feature, but removing an old bug.
> If they want to offer you a way to still enable it, someone has to do it.
They can just use the iOS system settings to allow users to enable/disable backups. This would be zero code needed. Zero maintainability problems. Zero UX. Zero unexpected data loss for customers. The settings for this is for all sane apps at Manage Storage > Backups > [Device Name] > [App Name].
> I know, you will say "it's not much". But everybody asks for their "small feature"
It's less than anything, it's removing a "feature", which should make things easier to maintain.
Signal _added_ the "feature" to disable the default iOS behaviour that user data can be backed up securely. This caused, in many users life, a bug of unexpected data loss. Signal caused that bug and that data loss by introducing this "feature".
Again, fixing this bug would not require a new feature to be added, but rather an unwanted bug to be removed by removing code needed to maintain it.
> I find it totally valid if they choose that they won't offer features to lower their security, and instead they will work on features having sufficiently good security. Which in this case is the secure backup.
Not a single argument has been given why this would be more secure than the locally encrypted backup you can do yourself in iOS. In fact, it would be sane to suggest that any newly introduced claimed secure system is insecure until tested.
I understand that you are frustrated. And I understand that if you were to write Signal, you would do it differently.
Still, those 20 lines don't look like a bug to me. And Signal does not benefit from pissing you off. I was just trying to say that maybe, just maybe, there is a valid reason behind this.
The bug is not in the detailed implementation of the code logic per se, the bug is that it causes unexpected data loss because iOS users expect all their data to be backed up when they back up all their important data.
As an example, a piece of code sending authentication credentials in plain text across the internet might in isolation be considered free of bugs. But it should never do that to begin with, it should have been designed/architected quite a bit differently.
You are free to carry water for Signal while they repeatedly refuse to even explain why they consider this a valid approach to handle the users data.
"I consider it a bug because I really want this feature" does not change the fact that it is a feature.
> As an example, a piece of code sending authentication credentials in plain text across the internet might in isolation be considered free of bugs.
This is not a good example. It's almost certainly a security issue. Unless you have a threat model where you absolutely don't give a shit about it, but we're not in 2010 anymore. Let me try to make another one:
As an example, a messenging app sending encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted messages over a server may be considered free of bugs. Adding end-to-end encryption to it would be a new feature, and it may well be out of scope for that particular app (ever heard of Telegram?).
Today I learned that some people consider unexpected data loss a feature, and that removing such a "feature" is in fact the same as adding a new feature.
It's newspeak all in the software world. A first for everything I suppose.
> I was saying that maybe, Signal did not want to push their users to trust the Apple backup by default.
The gap in understanding here is that Signal already trusts iOS by providing an app. It trusts it even more by providing notifications (with sender and content) that go through Apple’s systems. It integrates with CallKit to work with the Phone app. Putting iCloud alone in a separate bucket doesn’t make sense. They could’ve done this same backup with a 64 character recovery key and stored the data in iCloud. Signal made an intentional choice not to allow backups on iOS.
One can only hope that the point about supporting other backup endpoints/storage gets implemented sooner rather than having to wait several more years.
> They could’ve done this same backup with a 64 character recovery key and
Again: they could have, but it would have taken time and resources. The complaint here is not that Signal doesn't want to allow backups: they are just announcing a secure backup feature.
The complaint is that Signal did not do it earlier, and instead decided to prevent what they considered an insufficient solution.
> Putting iCloud alone in a separate bucket doesn’t make sense.
Of course it makes sense. What you say is akin to saying "end to end encryption makes no sense, because if you have to trust iOS anyway, you may as well trust the server".
Because I trust Android and run Signal there does not mean that I want it to auto-upload my messages to Google Drive. I don't see what makes it so hard to understand.
> One can only hope that the point about supporting other backup endpoints/storage gets implemented sooner rather than having to wait several more years.
Yes, I hope that too. On top of hoping, one could donate, to slightly contribute to paying the developers that work on it.
Their first cut at "working on it" is to require that we pay Signal to store our backups for us (45 days of media and 100MiB total is not a useful free tier; I have more than 1 GiB of messages/media spanning years), when that's an entirely unnecessary restriction.
I don't know what you do for a living but it's very common when writing and releasing software to do it in phases. Earlier phases have a restricted feature set and feedback from the field/customers/users experiencing earlier phases informs choices in later phases.
Unless you have direct insights into their dev process, your claim that the restriction be "entitely unnecessary" seems overly strong.
True, that would be preferable, but alas Samsung is bent on making their products as big of a pain in the arse as possible.
At least with my Samsung soundbar, the remote can change the volume, the subwoofer volume and change between modes (standard, surround, game). But if I want to enable night mode, I have to use the SmartThings app. There's no way to enable it using the remote. What's worse, the app often hangs when connecting to the soundbar, requiring me to force stop and restart it. So sometimes toggling a feature that should be a single button on the remote takes me over a minute.
Samsung is right next to HP on my list of brands I will never ever buy in my entire life.
Hue bulbs currently are stock standard Zigbee compatible light bulbs. You can pay them into ZHA/Z2M without any issues and control them without any Hue hub or app.
If Hue were to suddenly switch to something proprietary their existing bulbs will all continue to function without their app or hub.
The bulbs are ok but I tried moving my Hue motion sensors over to my main Zigbee network and they were terrible, constantly dropping offline and needing reset.
Luckily Hue is made by Philips who I'm pretty sure aren't going anywhere.
I moved my Hue sensors to my primary Zigbee network and left the bulbs on the hub, especially since I have some of the gradient strips that don't work unless they are on the Hue hub, and my motion sensors have been rock solid.
That was the main reason why Europeans were forced to switch to a passport with biometric data (some fingerprints and photo) on a chip more than a decade ago.
People from (all?) visa waiver countries have their fingerprints taken when entering the US, in addition to having to submit an ESTA[0] application before arrival. Last I checked, it still asked for all your social media handles (although you're not required to provide them).
I've seen it while returning from a trip to Taiwan recently, via JFK. They took fingerprints from non-US passport holders at Customs, I think; they didn't take mine.
Yeah all non-citizens have to do that. If and when you become a citizen you won’t have to. It’s crazy how much nicer entering the country feels after that lol
Not resolving 127.0.0.1 or RFC1918 addresses or even ULA for IPv6 is done to avoid DNS rebinding attacks. For most end users that is probably the correct move.
My home router even seems to inspect any UDP/53 traffic and redact any responses containing local/private A entries, so not even switching to a public resolver bypasses the protection.
In case you want to look into it further: My router actually allows adding exemptions to this policy on a per-hostname basis!
Sometimes I wish it would allow wildcards, but honestly that's probably just another way for users to shoot themselves in the foot (e.g. by adding '*').
pfSense for example uses unbound, and while it doesn't have a switch for disabling rebind protection, it does allow injecting arbitrary unbound config, which can disable rebind protection for any depth of a DNS zone or IP space. E.g.:
There are some people that like the stability of staying in a single branch for a longer period of time. Same as for example people staying on RHEL 8 vs RHEL 9 or Ubuntu 22.04 vs 24.04
Not recommended. We have backwards compatibility but not necessarily forwards compatibility within a stable branch; running a 13.4 userland on a 13.3 kernel could break horribly.
(My guess is that it's probably fine, simply because not much has happened on stable/13 in the last 6 months. But it's not uncommon to have e.g. new syscalls MFCed.)
I never said that it's recommended, just that you could do it.
Actually I completely agree with what you say. I've been forced to try at work a few times though, due to stupid reasons, it has worked out every time except once. Exactly due to what you mention.
The one time it didn't work out things exploded beautifully, so the stupid policy that we can't reboot is now scrapped. :-)
Anathem was almost unreadable due to the aforementioned world building but also apparently needing to redefine every single last word in the dictionary.
But Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash and REAMDE were amazing.
I also find it very telling that you'd consider what is on page 168 pornographic in the first place, sexually explicit maybe, but it is not intended to arouse or cause sexual excitement, it's meant to portray a lived experience.
The sexual repression in the United States is part of the reason why so many people grow up with the wrong ideas around sex and why teen pregnancy is such a big thing. Open discussion about these things (including gender and gender identity in that) is the best way to allow kids to grow up to be functional adults that are well informed and able to have critical thought about how and what they do and are far less likely to fall prey to predators and people who want to do them harm due to their lack of experience.