Most smartphones encrypt the majority of their storage these days.

This means there are two states the phone can be in.

BFU, or Before First Unlock, is the most secure. When you power on the phone it has just enough software in unencrypted storage to come on, initialize its hardware, start some background processes, and display an unlock screen. This is the most secure state for the phone. When you type in your password, the password itself decrypts the actual key which is used to decrypt the main storage. Without that password, the data is essentially useless as it cannot be decrypted. Also, most phones are now set up so that if you try the wrong password 10 times, it will erase the main storage encryption key which means the data is completely unrecoverable forever. In general, it doesn’t matter what you can exploit BFU because there’s very little running to exploit and the storage encryption key is usually stored in a secure enclave, that is a special part of a chip that is designed to resist tampering.

Once you type in your password the first time, the phone is AFU, or After First Unlock. The key to access main storage is held in memory, it is being actively used to read and write from that storage as software is running on the phone like email, background apps, etc. The prompt to unlock the phone looks exactly the same, but in reality the phone is in a much less secure state. There’s plenty of software, both system and apps, running for you to try to exploit.

The point here is that if you set the phone to regularly reboot, or to reboot if you haven’t logged in in a day or two, each time it reboots it switches back to BFU state.

And so if some government agency has arrested you and seized your phone, you want that reboot to happen because if the phone automatically reboots before they manage to get into it, it becomes much much harder for them to get in.

I saw a meme recently- WinRAR is more profitable than OpenAI. Kind of funny to think about

This court has the right idea.
A company illegally ‘shares’ your information with another, they are saying you have been injured by this and deserve compensation. Asking (not forcing) the other company to delete the data is not enough, especially if that data has then been resold to others.

So come up with some value for that injury and multiply it by the number of Facebook users at the time and you have an astronomical number in the tens of billions. Court looked at that and (correctly IMHO) said ‘sounds about right’.

The WWW was built for everyone.

We let rich assholes steal it out of laziness.

Take for example, Facebook vs MySpace or similar. Making a Facebook is instant, making a MySpace took effort. Setting up a subreddit is instant and free and gets you an immediate registered audience, setting up a vBulletin or similar forum is time-consuming and costs money and getting any traffic is an uphill battle. Same thing with posting- on Reddit just mozy on over to that sub and hit post, on a forum you have to register. Or you want to make videos? Gotta pay for a decent web hosting plan, lots of bandwidth, and deal with encoding, playback scripts, etc. Or just make a YouTube and hit ‘upload’.

So we let big platforms take over the Internet. We gained a fuckton of features and convenience. We didn’t consider what we lost- creativity, and the independence of not having to make everything advertiser-friendly.

Monetization is the other frenemy. It’s great that creators can get paid for their work easily. But what we lose with that is every creator pandering to the algorithm, every video begs ‘like comment and subscribe!’, videos shy away from advertiser-unfriendly topics, and the kid filter brainrot is starting to infect common lexicon (‘my brother got caught watching corn and now he’s gonna unalive himself with a pewpew’ type nonsense).

For that reason I think decentralization and federation are the way out.

Look at forums for example- one of the biggest barriers to entry was registration, getting people to care enough to bother registering. Lemmy fixes that, and you can still make a community as closed and private as you want.

I’m hoping a new group of websites will spring up from this. My only fear is they will all drown in a sea of AI slop.