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Monomate

Monomate@lemm.ee
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This article only mentions old quotes from develpers. Nothing new to see here…

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That’s an awful decision by Twilo. I deliberately only install Authy on my Desktop computers because they’re always at home and cannot be easily stolen/lost like my phone.

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WhatsApp was not created by Facebook. It used to be an independent company which major selling point was offering free encrypted messaging to the masses, which was mostly relevant to non-US users as they’re charged for SMS usage more directly (it doesn’t come free and unlimited on most plans).

It was bought by Facebook in 2014 and by 2016 they implement end-to-end encryption. There’s already various cases of courts around the world trying to compel WhatsApp to hand over messages but they didn’t because they simply don’t store the messages on their servers, and when the messages pass through their servers they’re encrypted by design.

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They’re just shutting down their local offices in Brazil, which are primarily used to represent X legally.

This is happening because a Supreme Court judge is conducting an inquiry to persecute those he deems propagators of fake news. In most legal systems, it would be considered highly illegal for a judge to conduct an investigative inquiry. It is also illegal in Brazil, but the other members of Supreme Court authorized this inquiry (“in the name of democracy”) and turned a blind eye for all its absurd consequences.

This judge doesn’t need the prosecutor’s office or any private individual to initiate the proceedings. The scope of this inquiry is very broad (fake news as a whole) and has no expiration date, making it potentially eternal. In some cases, he himself is supposedly a victim of fake news, which means this judge potentially occupies three roles: judge, prosecutor, and victim. As a result, ordinary citizens in Brazil can be “summoned” to the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction immediately if the accusations are connected to this Fake News inquiry. Since the Supreme Court is the final jurisdiction for appeals, people unfortunate enough to get caught in this arbitrariness lose the right to appeal the decisions of a judge that is also the de facto prosecutor.

A few days ago, there were some leaks showing this judge’s assistants being asked to write reports against some individuals and news organizations that the judge wants to prosecute. In one instance, where there was no wrongdoing to report about a certain right-wing newspaper, the judge replied to his assistant: “Just look for some spicy allegations and be creative”. So this judge is using his superpowers to direct the investigation to serve his own ends, which mostly involves silencing critics of the Supreme Court and himself.

His most recent power trip involves sending secret orders to X’s Brazilian legal offices, demanding some accounts be blocked, and asking for all information related to these accounts. The judge stipuled daily fines for disobedience. But X’s Brazilian workers don’t have direct control of which accounts are blocked or not, so they tried to appeal to the full Supreme Court judges (which so far has not responded), and no account was blocked or doxxed. The judge then raised the daily fines further and threatened to jail X’s chief lawyer in Brazil, even though this lawyer has no control over what happens to X’s accounts. It’s as if he were threatening to arrest a lawyer for the supposed crimes of his client. To protect these workers from unfair arrests, Elon Musk laid off all workers from X’s local offices in Brazil, effectively closing all operations in the country.

The site and the app will continue working until the judge comes up with some bullshit reason to order all Brazilian ISPs to block access to X’s servers.

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Ironically, the link to this as article is offline for me. “Cached” surely would solve my problem.

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I’m not the OP, but I suspect Reddit may ban/shadowban any post promoting a reader app that doesn’t use the official API. Or maybe he posted there already and wants to spread his message on Lemmy too. As for RedReader, I use it occasionally, but I stopped posting and commenting on Reddit since the API exodus.

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To be fair, if the mother/daughter communicated through WhatsApp they’d not be caught, because it’s an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform. But as they chose FB Messenger, they got vulnerable to a court order forcing Facebook to hand over data.

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Yeah, Dark Reader is a godsend. I just got tired of all the light mode webpages and took matters into my own hands.

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63 points

This is extremely true for modern social media sites. Normal news sites used to push their apps too, but I guess this fad has passed.

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