but I don’t need to provide my own analysis to point out the false assumptions you’ve made in yours

I’ve made NO false assumptions, there’s nothing FALSE about me taking the numbers that the article gives and doing basic math with it to try and find what the real value of the service is. The numbers given show results so woefully weak that it doesn’t matter if you 8x the results I got, which I’ve already outlined. I am not showing something in any light other than how it was presented to me, if you don’t want it in that light then you need to yell at the article writer for doing a piss poor job.

when in reality you didn’t realize that those calls aren’t the sole responsibility the group has.

So when I said “even if you 8x”… I didn’t account that there could be additional workload? Not at all! Oh boy I must be fucking retarded then cause I swear that’s what I read in my post. I guess words just don’t have meaning.

Taking even your infographic where they claim that they’ve done 3296 calls (both diverted calls and other sources) in Sep 2023. That’s still REALLY bad. 30 day month where you’d expect workers to work about 20 of those days. 3296/130/20… a mere 1.27/working day/worker AT BEST. Or an average case load of 6 hours and 18 minutes per case. Do you think that it takes 6 hours to drive out to a house/apartment and conduct a welfare check (keep in mind that a good amount of these calls will be non-issues where they walk up to the door, knock, talk to the person for 10 minutes and leave)? Adding more information narrows down your argument that I don’t have sufficient information, therefore it must be good! Yet we still come up with REALLY BAD numbers as it gets adjusted with your moving goalposts.

You seem to be completely misunderstanding my point. That’s on you.

As I said. I’m all for it. But it needs to do better if it’s going to stick around.

Taking some good news and immediately trying to portray it in a bad light is not exactly the way to push society forward.

Taking “good” news and assuming that it’s always good even ignoring obvious problems is also a bad thing.

Actively looking to portray the start of such program

So how long then until it’s allowed to be evaluated? It’s already been 4, 3, or 2 years. Does it need 100 years before it can be analyzed? The fact that you think we can’t look at something because it’s “new” is stupid. And I didn’t start my day thinking “I’m going to dunk on this program!”. Instead I ran into the story saw the pure blinded “positivity” with NO evaluation of any possible negativity. I’m only offering a more realistic view of what this actually is. I never once said it’s a bad program in of itself. It’s clearly a beta of sorts and there’s shit to work out. Claiming that it’s all roses is bullshit.

which is a shame especially if the analysis wasn’t fully informed.

Until you can provide something more substantive… the “analysis” which wasn’t much of one seems to have been dead on with everything I’ve seen thus-far, including your new document which I find dubious anyway… since it claims yet a DIFFERENT starting date than ANY other source I’ve seen.

Cool. Then you can give me a better figure or statistic? I mean even if we make the 33000 representative of 1 year (giving them either 1 or 3 years of ramp up time) it’s still not even close to good. .24 cases A DAY is so bad that even if you 8x it it’s not good.

Cops and community members have to know it is an option and utilize it.

Read the article. They divert calls to 911. This has nothing to do with cops/people knowing it’s an option but the department diverting calls to themselves rather than taking up 911/police/other first responder duties. I would not suspect that it takes 2-4 years for a team that is directly tied into the system, monitoring and diverting 911 calls to establish themselves… and if they do. Then they are VERY ineffective.

I would say percentage of police calls diverted would be better.

I would agree to some extent… So how come they didn’t provide those metrics? I’m left to only evaluate based on the ones they decided to provide. But a reason %diverted is bad, if 10 calls come in and they diverted 8 of them, 80% is great! except… that 130 person team only doing 10 calls per day seems quite underwhelming. So I would actually much rather the raw number of how many calls occurred during the same 2 or 4 year period overall to compare diverted/overall and make an actual fair assessment there.

Edit: I decided to do their job for them a little bit. Pesky Journalists…

https://www.abqjournal.com/clickable/its-911-new-mexicans-call-emergency-number-48-more-than-new-yorkers/article_0c465702-d507-11ee-a46d-071047195f95.html

A study found between 2019 and 2021, New Mexico residents called 911 the most out of all 50 states with 1,169 calls per 1,000 residents, according to a news release.

So Albuquerque has a population of 558,736 currently according to some random site. I’ll just assume that number for 2020-2024 statically.

so 558736*1.1693 (annual), 653330 calls / year. over 4 years… 2613320

So they took 33000/2613320= 1.26% of calls over the 4 year period… double that if it’s really 2 years.

Albuquerque created its Community Safety department in 2020.

with 130 employees.

the Albuquerque Community Safety (ACS) department has diverted more than 33,000 calls

So 33,000(cases)/130(workers)/4 (year)/260(~ work days a year)… each worker handles 0.24 cases a day… And that’s “unignorable proof” that it’s working? No offense, but this screams TSA levels of incompetence to me if we’re talking about results.

But the article confuses me. It says that ACS was created in 2020, then referenced “since it started 2 years ago” (2022, article was written 2024)… the number could be 0.48 cases a day/employee… which is still very very little. By that metric half the days people are at work, they’re not active on any case… at best.

I’m wholly on-board for a non-police response to some calls, or I guess in a more perfect world a social worker embedded police presence (since you just never know… a social worker on every call a police officer goes on could be interesting overall. Most cops are solo these days anyway). But this article is easily ignore-able if you’re just looking at the numbers of what’s being discussed.

Edit: Formatting.

and will just pop off fast solutions to things like the deep human need for connection like “use zoom, duh.”

There are other needs as well. Like not being imprisoned. And thinking about why you fled from the country in the first place and searched for additional citizenship might have helped make such a decision to not find yourself in such a situation.

I love that you glossed over the actual argument though! All while assuming that you were right. You don’t know why she was there… But assuming that telecommunication wouldn’t have been sufficient in order to maintain her freedom… That’s just silly.

Stopping processes is actually a user space action.

Now you backpedal and say

Pretty much all code is making requests to the kernel.

But I don’t know what I’m talking about? Sure. We’ll go with that if it makes you feel good. I only literally taught it at a post-grad level at an R1 institution, but what do I know.

It’s side stepping the kernel. That’s the whole point.

You’re getting it! Kind of at least. The anti-cheat actually modifies the kernel (in an extension kind of way, like drivers do). That’s the point though. Which seems to have repeatedly whooshed over your head. But I can only say it in so many ways and be ignored. Good luck. Hope I don’t run into your code.

Stopping processes is actually a user space action. You can do it without admin rights btw. Even if it popped the admin screen that’s still not a kernel level action.

Absolutely not. Task management is the job of the operating system/kernel. You can request to end a job/task. The kernel will do it on it’s own time. UAP prompts are attempts to elevate permissions so that you can access higher kernel calls.

https://linux-kernel-labs.github.io/refs/heads/master/lectures/syscalls.html#linux-system-calls-implementation

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/111625/how-does-linux-kill-a-process

You can make requests the to the kernel. If you have permission/ownership to the process the kernel will work through the sigterm/sigkill to meet your request. It is not a user space action at all to kill a process, you make requests to the kernel to do it. Hell in linux it’s even more obvious as you can instruct the kernel on HOW you would like to kill the task and even then it may not follow your direction. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/kill.1.html with kill being a kernel tool. If you spawned the process, then you have permission/ownership to the process. But my point in the previous post was that anti-cheats can reach into the system, reading dlls and such that are absolutely NOT user space to begin with, require elevation beyond user space to install.

Yeah that it’s considered malware. I did Google it and there’s nothing saying that.

Seriously? You can’t find anything? You sure about that? Cause I can literally pull up thousands of articles and forum threads by literally typing “is vanguard anti-cheat malware?” or “is easy anti-cheat malware?”

https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/288793-easy-anti-cheat-launcher-detection/

Heuristics detect these things for what they are. Anti-virus software have to whitelist them because people choose to play the games anyway.

https://www.techguy.org/threads/is-valorant-vanguard-a-malicious-rootkit-or-not.1267682/

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-controversy-over-riots-vanguard-anti-cheat-software-explained/

The name is appropriate, because Vanguard doesn’t just sniff around for cheats when Valorant is running: It starts up with Windows and keeps an eye on other processes whether or not you’re playing Valorant at the time. […] Vanguard detects software with vulnerabilities which could be exploited by cheat makers, and blocks some of it.

https://www.sp-cy.com/article/is-valorants-anticheat-spyware/

Vanguard cannot be easily fully disabled since after manually quitting the process, a system reboot will be required to be able to open Valorant again.
The EULA prevents any legal recourse against Riot Games.
Valorant/Vanguard sends encrypted data to Riot. Which is Chinese owned by a giant corporation called Tencent.

Let’s attack this question from another perspective. Do you trust a games developer to properly develop kernel code? Most people BARELY trust Microsoft to do it these days. And you can’t review/evaluate it yourself at all. You have no fucking clue what they’re doing and never will. We’ve seen what happens when random companies inject shit into the kernel like crowdstrike did. You think that these anti-cheat softwares are acting in your interest when they’re being implemented and paid by a corporation? How can you look at these anti-cheats that have made backdoors on systems, cause people everywhere unstable kernels/BSODs, send data about your system without permission, interacts with software on your system that isn’t their code, etc… and say they’re not malicious?

Visiting family perhaps? Oh well then I guess she deserves it for having the audacious stupidity to visit her parents in a shitty country where shitty things happen?

Honestly… Yes. You left the country. Obtained a second citizenship. And donated to the opposing side of an active war. If you have something in between your ears you stay out of the country. I’m not here to victim blame at all. If you need to see family, I get it… but Zoom exists. You can’t argue

There are also family, professional opportunities, and cultural ties to consider.

While in the very next sentence identifying that she did exactly that and moved anyway.

but so far at least I’m happy with the bandwidth.

Oh for sure, it’s boatloads and I love it… but I’m in the market for a /28. I want to hand them like $40 extra a month. LET ME PAY YOU QUANTUM/LUMEN/CENTURYLINK/LEVEL3. It’s effectively free money as once it’s setup there’s nothing that changes or goes down. There’s so little maintenance/upkeep cost to it that I just don’t understand why they don’t want to print free money.

This is already a risk whether via the existing thumbnail storage

Not anymore. You can opt out of it for the most part.

# Leave images unchanged, don’t generate any local thumbnails for post urls. Instead the the
# Opengraph image is directly returned as thumbnail
“None”

Yeah that was 19.4. It’s doesn’t proxy everything unless explicitly set to. Just thumbnails I believe. But I could be wrong. And many instance owners would be allergic to that as it leaves them on the hook for storing content. For example… someone posts CSAM… a copy of that is now on your server. You get police raided and you’re fucked.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/705e86eb4c0079d0775f0c1490968f1183095fcc/config/defaults.hjson#L51

Actually going over it briefly looks like it has a few available options for what it will cache…

I refuse to enable it myself for the above reason. I would venture 99% of instances out there would also refuse for liability and bandwidth costs.

Can you see which communities I follow?

Wouldn’t need to see it directly. If someone was to tag enough posts they could deduce it over time. Eg, I could post on every community on every lemmy in the fediverse and over time I can be reasonably sure which communities you follow as you’d see these post in your feed and tracking images would populate your view of them as you scrolled. Would take very little automation to do it.

Which feeds I watch (and when I do that)?

Yes… because it’s possible to use “normal” images to track who’s downloading those images, what addresses/user agent/referrers over time is powerful. After enough time, it’s entirely possible to deduce which feeds/communities you’re watching. Eg, if I post 10 different items, and 3 of them come back to your specific IP address, I would have a really good estimate on which feeds you’re likely on. Do this at scale and I bet you could deduce it completely and probably with much less time and hassle than you’re thinking. Hell because of my reverse proxy I can see EVERYONE who loads my profile picture. I see ALL the users to run into my posts on complete fucking accident. Lemmy loads /inbox to pull that data.

Hell this is the core reason why everyone pushes back on 3rd party cookies these days. It made this tracking trivial. Tagging every page with some image or asset that forces a connection is effectively the same thing.

Who I interact with through DMs?

I’ve already stated clearly that this would be the hardest thing. Just because there’s one or 2 things that would be hard or impossible to obtain (even over time) passively or as a complete outsider doesn’t make the rest of the argument wrong. All it would take is either site operator to leak the data, any type of MITM, etc… to leak the plaintext content of your DMs. Hell federation leaks where it sends data outside of the expected subscribers has happened. Then you have to also realize that many instances use services like Cloudflare or other WAF solutions to stop DDOS’s and such… Those nodes can read the plaintext DMs and all federation data. Any malicious actor that manages to break any single part of the chain has access to it all… and it can be quite trivial in many instances to do so.

The Lemmy system is not “secure”. It’s not meant to be. Everything on the fediverse is public and all of your actions here are trackable by many parties in many ways even outside of the operators of both ends of the federation action itself. Including how you’re connecting and using the system.

DMs alone, and actual hashed passwords are not really needed for a third party threat to act malicious and get all of the aggregated data they’d ever want. You pointed out specifics, I answered those specifics. Then you pivoted to other shit that I ALREADY outlined. This argument is super disingenuous.

Source for what in specific?

That stopping processes is a kernel action? Go ahead. Open powershell and ask it to close some other system process… The UAP prompt (if you’re on windows, linux will just fail silently most of the time unless you sudo or are root) that shows up is the kernel validating that you even have permissions to do that. The kernel handles ALL task scheduling/management. When you close something you’re asking the kernel to do it. The kernel also handles ALL file management and driver management (drivers being extensions of the kernel). So the fact that it can read other active DLLs and such hooked into other processes (say your graphics drivers) is literally proof.

That industry agrees that it’s malware? Depends on which part of industry I suppose. But if it’s able to do all these actions at the kernel level, and attached itself it to other software to install, often doesn’t uninstall when you remove the game it was attached to, AND gets flagged by anti-viruses that don’t have it whitelisted yet… It’s definitionally malware. Go search for “Is <insert anticheat> malware”. Very few people will argue that they’re not.

Hell it’s possible for anti-cheats to write to UEFI if they really wanted to. There’s no legitimate reason for that level of access, 0, none.

I’ve addressed the points you’ve brought up. I run my own instance. I can collect just about everything in the DB tables I’ve seen without being logged into the instance with some external work.

Are you trying to get my point? If you have a specific item that you believe is stored on a lemmy server that you think isn’t possible to obtain. I’m all ears. otherwise I think this conversation is done. This kind of response is pointless and I’m not interested in continuing if you’re going to act like that.

The hardest thing to collect would be private messages, and login information (which is hashed btw, so even your server operator doesn’t really know it). But messages are plaintext and openly federated. All the other information is really really easy to collect through other means.

They have kernel access… They can control anything since they’re in the kernel. And yes, I’ve seen it.

If you remember back in the late 2000’s early 2010’s there were a boatload of apps that would hook into games to do things like display overlays for chats (Teamspeak for example, overwolf as another.) some kernel anti-cheats would stop those processes from starting up.

But don’t take my word for it.

https://www.pcgamer.com/according-to-experts-on-kernel-level-anticheat-two-things-are-abundantly-clear-1-its-not-perfect-and-2-its-not-going-anywhere/

I’m less worried about developers abusing kernel access, and more concerned with potential vulnerabilities introduced for third-party actors to exploit. Rigney cited two examples: the infamous Extended Copy Protection (XCP) from Sony, which bad actors used to compromise affected systems, as well as a backdoor vulnerability introduced by Street Fighter 5’s kernel level anticheat. In 2022, a ransomware developer also took advantage of Genshin Impact’s kernel level anticheat to disable antivirus processes.

Introduces backdoors to be used by malicious actors.

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-controversy-over-riots-vanguard-anti-cheat-software-explained/

Vanguard detects software with vulnerabilities which could be exploited by cheat makers, and blocks some of it.

Blocks external softwares that it deems “vulnerable”

https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/xf1cwr/the_insanity_of_eas_anticheat_system_by_a_kernel/

This is far from the first time that boot level firmware or kernel mode code inserted via patches or drivers have been used to install spyware, but every time I see it happen I want to warn users about the consequences, and provide some information about the danger.

Kernel devs beg users to not allow this shit.

Just look it up. All sorts of articles and experts have spoken on it.

Taking kernel level actions to stop processes on YOUR machine is absolutely taking control of the system.

Kernel level anti-cheats meet every requirement. Just because you think there’s gymnastics going on doesn’t make it so. It’s actually well established in the security field that they count.

I’m not sure that Nintendo has any pull in any Middle Eastern country or China.

But all of this is moot as the lawsuit is in the US… And Nintendo would just tell the streaming services to ban them over and over again.

that kind of threat doesn’t work when they can just tell your country to arrest you for breaking the law.

That assumes the country gives a shit. Many countries simply do not care about what Intellectual Property you “own” or created in some other country.

but that instance owners have even more, probably more valuable info, like IP addresses from which not just geolocation but also wake times, device usage patterns and other gnarly stuff could be extracted, that could - together with other personalized surveillance info (like the usual adware stuff) - be aggregated to give a bigger picture.

I have IP behind the geolocation. How do you think that I know the geolocation? It’s an IP lookup. My interface that I shown in the image just doesn’t publish it because I don’t care personally. What I use that service for is simply to track where sensitive emails/documents go. Not to track lemmy. I don’t need specific resolutions. Just to know if they leak outside of what I expected.

Device patterns? The app you use is the app you use. That would be given away via your browser header. I also collect that with the tracking image. Just once again. Not shown in the graph cause I don’t care to track it personally (I’m only doing this as an example, not to actually aggregate data).

If you use lemmy over the web browser, browsers don’t really give up that much information unless you’re google themselves. In which case apparently chrome gives up a boatload of information to google’s domains.

not-so-public information

You’d have to give me an example of any of what you’re referencing. I can collect IP, web headers, access times, and if I tag enough pages or mark the image as non-cacheable could even see multiple views/accesses (you see views higher than actual visitors) I can track your movement across all of the fediverse.

that one can get some info about me through my (public) actions

Simply “viewing” the page (which pulls the image and is not necessarily “public”) is a direct rebuttal to obtaining data that isn’t “public”.