fabio

fabio , 12 hours ago to Random

I'll never get how people can get used to living in America, let alone like it.

I asked my wife's aunt how to get to the nearest supermarket, and got an "oh, it's just 3 miles away, you'll be there in a blink of an eye".

Only 3 miles to get to the nearest grocery shop?? You know that I could be on the other side of Amsterdam if I drove 3 miles from my home - and on the way I'd bump into at least 30 different grocery stores?

And I've heard folks say "my office is actually quite near, just a 30 miles drive". If I drove 30 miles I'd be nearly in Belgium or Germany! I guess I'll make sure not to get lazy anymore about my 5 minutes cycling commute to my office...

And the state of public transport is something indecent even for a developing country. I've seriously seen better train and bus connectivity in Bangalore and Kyiv than between San Jose and San Francisco.

And let's not even get started with the cycling infrastructure. Sometimes you see these barely 1 meter wide bike lanes pop out of nowhere, and disappear a few meters later, and on the way they may be dangerously crossed by turning lanes for vehicles. No wonder that I haven't seen a single cyclist so far.

And how can you ever get used to having your neighbourhood's mall as the only place to go and meet people, with no parks, bars or public spaces within a walking distance? I've asked some friends where they usually like to hangout with their mates, and got answers like "we like to go to this place 15 miles from here". That's approximately the distance between Amsterdam and The Hague! I can't even imagine having to pick up a car and drive so long just to have a beer with friends.

And let's not forget kids. Most of the cities in Europe have a playground or park within 500 meters, anywhere you are. It's quite common for kids to walk or cycle there on their own. But those are apparently rarities on the other side of the pond. Kids apparently need to be driven around for all of their childhood, they are forbidden in most of the cases even from walking alone in their own neighbourhood without either being hit by a car or some zealous neighbour calling the cops for minor abandonment. And then people wonder why European kids are generally more independent?

Sure, there are exceptions too. Namely, downtown Manhattan, San Francisco, Washington and Boston. But those are all cities built before 1900 and the car tyranny. Everything else is just so badly designed, so badly isolated, so dull and so alike, and every place requires to replace your legs with wheels and tires, that I really struggle to see in suburbia anything that even remotely resembles an American dream.

I've never paid much attention to these things before, but my 3-year-old kid on his second trip to America has been quite an eye-opener. When asked by my mother what he saw in America, he candidly said "lots of cars and roads".

fabio , 2 days ago to Random

I administer ~100-200 domains, and I've never had certificate issues in the past years. certbot runs in a cron and it does all the job for me.

It appals me that the 2nd most valuable company in the world struggles so much with certificate renewals instead - a problem largely solved even for small administrators.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/28/microsoft_security_certificate_expires/

fabio , 9 days ago to Random

A brief summary about the EU Chat Control:

• End-to-end encryption only works if nobody other than the two parties in a conversation (including the government and the provider of the service itself), under no circumstances, can ever decrypt the encrypted traffic.

• You can't violate encryption only for a handful of use-cases without weakening it for everyone. Anyone who tells you otherwise, and tells you that a government backdoor or private keys signed by government agents are safe, is either a complete ignorant about math or technology (or both), or is acting in very bad faith.

• If you break end-to-end encryption for one use-case, you break it for everyone. It's like leaving your house key in the fob of your door and expect only your trusted friend to use it.

• Every time someone says "but it's to protect the kids" / "but it's to protect you from terrorists", be aware that they're using an over-abused argument to convince you that degrading privacy for everyone is a requirement to keep you safe. And it's a shitty argument because if I say "actually I'd rather keep my conversations private, without the government or companies with a business model based on surveillance snooping on them", then someone will promptly react with "then you don't want to protect the kids / then you support terrorists?"

• The first time a government tried to make the argument that end-to-end encryption is a crime was in 1991, when Zimmermann first developed PGP and gave military-grade encryption to the masses. Not knowing what he should be incriminated for, the US government prosecuted him for terrorism and arms trade. These arguments have remained nearly the same for the past three decades.

• "The government needs to protect you from criminals and abusers, and in order to protect you it needs to be able to access everybody's digital content" is an argument as weak as "the police needs to protect you, and in order to protect you it needs to get a copy of everyone's house keys".

• Just like police forces have many means to investigate criminal activities other than breaking into everybody's houses, they also have many ways of investigating online crime without breaking everybody's privacy.

• If you say "I've got nothing to hide" about unauthorized actors spying into your email and messages, would you also say the same about strangers breaking into your house without your authorization? Privacy is all about deciding what you share with others.

The simple truth is that governments don't like encryption in the hands of citizens, they've never liked it, and they've spent the past three decades looking for ways of breaking it.

The persecution against Zimmermann and Snowden, the NSA backdoors, the deals under the table with the developers of large tech products, the anti-encryption legislation regularly pushed "to protect children from potential abusers" / "to protect citizens against terrorists", are all actions that point to one single, simple truth: governments think that it's their right to spy into everyone's lives, and will keep fighting for that right, and they'll keep trying to make you believe that it's for your own good.

The EU Chat Control may have been temporarily withdrawn, but it's far from dead. It'll go through another round of consensus-seeking negotiations. And in July Hungary will start its 6 months turn at the head of the EU Commission. Orban is a deeply illiberal and despicable human being who would love to snoop over political opponents, and he's already made it clear that he'll try to get the Chat Control draft approved whatever the cost.

It's our job as European citizens to keep protesting against this awful piece of legislation, to invite everyone to join the fight, and not to cast our vote for anyone who doesn't explicitly oppose widespread institutional surveillance.

Sign the petition here https://stopchatcontrol.eu/ and keep applying pressure on our elected representatives.

If a legislation like Chat Control were to be approved, I'll be more than happy to start publishing guides on how to use alternative methods to still get end-to-end encryption - the takeaway is that WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc. would no longer be safe, and you'll have to get back to emails signed with PGP keys generated by yourself.

https://stackdiary.com/eu-council-has-withdrawn-the-vote-on-chat-control/