I think I know who killed him.

By 11, he was programming on his own—a skill he used to playfully torment his friends. One remembers Balaji’s idea of a middle-school prank: writing code that deleted a friend’s Skyrim save file.

but if they do it’s a scandal waiting to happen

That was my line of thought. If you pay for failed captchas, there are a few websites using it that’d deserve a bot failing them constantly.

I use Pixel with GrapheneOS as my phone, and I just have a separate profile that only has WhatsApp installed and nothing else. Since the profiles are completely separated, it doesn’t have access to anything else I do on the phone and it’s not running in the background (the profiles are basically sandboxed fresh slates, and switching it can be set-up to behave in a same way as basically turning off the phone as far as the profile is concerned).

When the bridge asks me to log in again or refresh a session, I simply switch to the second profile for a minute and re-log in. I’ve heard iIt might be possible to set up an emulator and leave it running on the server, but that felt like too much effort.

Do you pay for successful verification only, or even for failed ones?

Isn’t the OpenAI one they offer the same one as the one provided at https://chatgpt.com/ without login? So probably something not as impactful.

Or do they share their unlimited subscription?

That’s only for the 200$ one, and if you use it constantly, no?

lol, I love it. I’m thinking about paying for DeepSeek even though I hate AI bullshit, just to spite all the panicking AI tech scammers. This has seriously made my week, the amount of copium they are inhaling is insanely funny :D

Yeah, that’s my experience as well. In addition to being lazy with updating, so if some kind of supply chain attack happens, I usually sorts itself out before I get to updating :D

But I did limit my browser extensions, after I a cause with Nano Defender taught me a lesson - it was a mildly popular anit-anti-adblock killer that worked where other adblocks were detected, but the developer sold the extension to a company that turned it into a info-stealer malware and pushed an update through chrome store, which got accepted and propagated, and some of my social network sessions got compromised. So, I just stick to more popular projects where something like this shouldn’t happen, and don’t use random extensions.

Yeah, that part about WhatsApp is annoying. I just have a spearate profile on Graphene that has only WhatsApp installed, and whenever it wants me to refresh a session I just switch to the profile and log in.

There is, but it requires you to log into the app every two weeks to maintain a session. You can setup a emulator to do it for you. I just have a separate profile on my Graphene with Only WhatsApp that I switch to and login whenever I get a warning.

I’ve been using it for almost a year by now, and so far I didn’t have any problems. I’ve not considered that problem though, so it might be happening and I was just lucky.

WhenI was setting it up, it took me only like two hours tops. The ansible project is well documented, has a clear setup guide, and the process is really just getting server with ssh access, changing DNS, changing around 5 values in the ansible config and running it.

As far as I know the Discord bridge has some limitations, the major one being that IIRC it doesn’t atually support calls. But just for chatting across servers it has worked well for me.

There’s also the fact that you have to either trust the project with your password (as in, the the bridfe adds a matrix bot that runs on your server, but needs your pssword), since I think it uses the web version in the background (but then you can also use it for DMs and any server), or set up a bot on the discord server you want to bridge, which obviously cant be done if you’re not an admin. It’s a foss project, but there’s always a small risk of it gping rogue.

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Its pretty well documented and easy to follow, it took me only like an hour to setup.

I’m hodsting my own Matrix server with WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord (you don’t need a bot for that, you can just share your login with the bridge) and Messenger bridge. I have all my IMs in one app, don’t have to install spyware on my phone, and I can make bots that troll annoying people that message me on any platform.

Hosting it was super simple, thanks to the Ansible project that’s extremely robust and well done, I literally just got a hosting, domain amd changed like 5 config values to enable the bridges I wanted, gave it an IP and ssh key, and ran it. And if I need to update, I literally “just update” (it’s all wrapped up into “just” tool), and it eve handles cases where I didn’t update for a while, failing graciously and telling me what I need to do maually, usually just rename some config values.

I wholly recommend it. You probably wont convince your friends to switch from <insert app here>, and this is the best compromise.

I’m using a small instance on Hetzner, for 6$ a month. You could in theory get a free oracle cloud instance for it, but I didn’t manage to get one.

And you can easily share it with anyone interrested, make them an account, so they can also consolidate their DMs. I’m sharing it with a few friends and colleagues.

I’ve seen this warning in a lot of apps, like Teams, Messenger or some authenticators, and some of the time I could simply ignore it and continue using the app. I think some of apps simply use it for push notifications that I can get by without.

Not all, though. Sometimes it simply doesn’t work.

I tried it like a year ago, maybe more, and it wasn’t ready for that. The battery life was awfull (which was a SW issue of the OS not being able to stand-by properly), and accepting calls wasn’t really reliable. It’s more of a gimmick and great as a side-phone, but I wouldn’t use it as a daily driver.

But the situation might’ve changed.

I can do that and more on my Pinephone running Kali Nethunter. While it’s mostly a gimmick with awfull battery life, I’ve already used it a few times mostly in regards to wifi pentesting for my cyber-sec job, i.e when going to lunch onsite and you notice a new wifi AP you didn’t see when inside the office you’re working on.

And since it has an USB-C, I can simply plug in a dock with two USB-As, Ethernet, PD and HDMI, to turn it into a full-fledged Kali desktop.

It works simillarly to an IRC. You have a server, that server can have channels, I think it can even do voice. But, unlike IRC, you can also use your server to talk to people on other servers, similar to how Fediverse works - if I have a server hosted on myserver.com, and someone else has a public room on server otherserver.com, I can either join the room@otherserver.com or message person@otherserver.com, all from my account on myserver.com.

And bridges are basically just bots that run on your own server, and by scraping websites/using API of the service your bridging they create a private room i.e Messenger@myserver.com, with subrooms per chat, and the bot then sends every message it recieves signed into your messenger account to the room, and vice versa - anything you send there will it forward to the real messenger, basically allowing you to chat with people on messenger through your matrix server. Which solves the problem of “Each of my friend is using different messaging service, can I have them all in one app? (The app being Matrix client)”.

I’m a fan of self-hosted Matrix server. You can get a dozen of bridges for those stubborn people that refuse to leave messenger/whatsapp/telegram (at a loss of encryption, and they still get your convos, but at least you don’t have their spyware on your mobile and you can have everything in one app), while also being decentralized.

Self-hosting a server is actually really, really easy. It took me like half an hour, because there is an amazing Matrix Ansible Deploy script, that has a pretty easy to follow documentation, and is also one of those super-rare projects that just works. Even if I forgot to update my server for several months, I could literally “just update”, and the script is clever enough to figure out what changed, tell me what I need to update in the config files (which are still only like four rows of stuff I needed to setup), and it is a really smooth experience. Even when you want to set up some bridges, for most it’s literally just adding “<service>_bridge_enabled: true” to the ansible yml config file. I’ve already set up Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord and Messenger this way, and it was effortless.