• 8 Posts
  • 243 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • phoneymouse@lemmy.world
    cake
    toMalicious Compliance@lemmy.worldWork from home
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    11 hours ago

    Yeah and they want to install some profile that gives them access and puts your internet connection through their VPN. My coworkers look at me like I’m crazy because I carry a work device and a personal device. Like, why would I give my employer access to all of my web traffic on my phone? You’re crazy if you don’t carry two devices.







  • If you watch WWDC, they shared how it works. They have a private cloud that does not persist data on it, only processes it. Also, it’s audited by a third party and there is a cryptographic mechanism that will not allow your request to be accepted unless the server software has been publicly signed by the auditor. At least, this is my best understanding of it from what I remember.

    Also, in the same presentation they announced that you can now lock your Apps and hide them, which will keep its data out of the OS search results. I am fairly certain this also means it’s opted out of ML/AI processing given that any LLM would rely on the same search index.








    1. Takes a bit to get set up with something passable. The default Lemmy UI is kinda shit and you have to figure out which apps to use to make it work for you. It can feel a little unpolished initially.
    2. Niche communities just aren’t there yet. There is a lot of effort in creating them, but low engagement. It also doesn’t help that federation can mean communities on one topic are divided.
    3. Content can get a bit stale. I feel I see fresh content for about an hour a day and then have to wait another day before the next batch. When I browse throughout the day I start to notice the same stories popping in my feed over and over. Sometimes this happens for days on ended with one story just kinda coming back.



  • This is a pretty extreme view. Individual USAID contractors are not the scum of the earth. Most are well-meaning people who truly care about helping others, which is why they signed up to work in international development to begin with. A good portion are returned peace corps volunteers, or even immigrants to America from these developing countries. The idea that someone becomes an expert in maternal health in order to siphon off foreign aid money is kind of laughable.

    That said, the industry that has formed around foreign aid is largely there because of the way the government has chosen to distribute aid money. A lot of this type of work was at one time done by the government, but the government has switched to a model where it uses the private sector to compete for technical work and because congress believes the private sector can be held accountable in a way the government can’t be. These companies are highly regulated. The amount of profit they can make is controlled by the government, and is typically only about 2-3% of the price of a contract. From that profit, they are liable to pay for any waste, fraud, or abuse if it is discovered.

    The alternative some suggest would be to hand out millions of dollars to developing countries governments. Let me tell you from personal experience, most of these countries don’t have controls in place to appropriately manage this money. If we gave this money directly to developing countries, a good portion of it would end up misused. So, the government hires an American company to run projects and programs for it. Within these projects, typically all but one or two of the staff are host country nationals. That means most of the staff are locals, with just a few expats / Americans there.