BaseballPhysics

> Even if it was, that isn't a critique of the comment's argument.

Yes, it is.

The core of their comment is "oh noes western values will be lost!" (Or as they put it: "the global West has values worth preserving for the future").

My point is, no, they won't, because fertility is dropping everywhere. We're not that special. And that this purported fear is simply rooted in age-old racist tropes of a loss of cultural identity to scary foreigners, nothing more.

> I believe thinking too much about kids is a trap. Basically you should have them if you can.

I cannot think of worse advice.

Congratulations to you that you found a life that works for you.

But the idea that people should just stop thinking and start procreating is absurd. Kids are a gigantic decision, the biggest one a person will ever make in their life. To not carefully consider that decision is utterly irresponsible, and to tell people to thoughtlessly have children without considering those consequences is equally so.

So, to be clear, I spent my time reverse engineering software rather than the hardware itself. That said, my observation is that a lot of hardware reverse engineering is software reverse engineering since the software helps you understand how the hardware works (the Asahi guys literally built a hypervisor so they could watch macOS interact with hardware).

And software reverse engineering is just grunt work. I'd start with a very well known existing hardware platform with a very simple CPU design--the GBA is actually a really nice platform as the ARM has a very sane ISA and it's all memory mapped I/O--and get a devkit and start experimenting by writing software to run in an emulator so you can get a feel for how the hardware works.

Absolutely.

And the other thing I love about it is the communities are typically super open and collaborative. I remember back when I first got into GBA development, there was a ton of docs, tools, libraries, and other things that folks had put together and then shared with one another. It's a lot of very passionate people sharing some very niche interests, which can be incredibly fun (of course it can also be a drama filled nightmare but such is life with passionate people).

Yes, just hacking nights and weekends. I've done my fair share of console reverse engineering, developing software for console devices (mostly GBA and NDS development, but a fair bit of SMS and Genesis reverse engineering), etc, and it's seriously some of the most fun I've had as a developer. But it takes an enormous amount of tenacity to push through the inevitable challenges.

> Jit.si must not care about privacy or they'd have other OAuth options from the start.

Such as? What provider would you be comfortable with?

If they took away the code or relicensed it so you couldn't run it yourself I'd have a lot more sympathy.

Yup, very true.

Shame the dream of multicast died...

ffs, they're OAuth providers. It's not like they're passing the video streams over to Google and Facebook so they can mine them for PII. All they'll learn is that a user with an identity on their platform is using Jitsi. So what?

Meanwhile, the vast majority of users around here will have a GitHub or Google account, and probably Facebook as well. This is hardly much of an inconvenience.

And if the complaint is that now Jitsi can tie back activity to a durable identity: yeah, that's the entire point. They're fighting abuse. At some level, to prevent that abuse, they need some form of trustworthy authentication. That, by definition, means to some extent piercing the veil of anonymity.

It's also why running their own auth doesn't fundamentally solve the problem, as anonymous users creating their own accounts on their platform is a minor speed bump to folks who would use the service for nefarious activity. For that auth to be worth anything, they'd have to engage in their own forms of user verification, and that'd be no more privacy protective, and frankly probably less so since you'd have to trust their security posture.

The fact is they simply cannot run the service in a way that's both perfectly anonymous to Jitsi themselves and simultaneously resistant to abuse (thereby protecting them from potential liability).

Look, I get it, I'm not a fan of the big tech providers, either. But the claim that this somehow crosses the privacy rubicon is a massive overreaction. And the software itself remains as Free and Open Source as it ever was.

No, this is like a restaurant giving you free food, and then when they change the recipe, you saying "WTF, you changed the food and now it's too salty, I hate it. Yeah, I could cook my own meal, but screw that, I demand you fix it!"

> but we badly need more options just as accessible- what other E2EE anonymous web-browser accessible tool is as available to the masses, that they can be convinced to use?

Just stand up your own instance and make it available to the anonymous public?

Jitsi itself isn't going away, just their anonymously-accessible instance.

By all accounts it's very easy to operate and requires very little in terms of resources. Hell, DO even has a droplet available.

So what's the problem?