VLC was never great in its own right.
If there is something historical to talk about, it’s how shit Windows was for both not providing basic functionality in a minimally serviceable media player. And worse, how it couldn’t get the basics of OS-ing right in being susceptible to DLL hell and other similar issues.
In other platforms where such inadequacies were never present, VLC never became a big deal, because…VLC was never great in its own right.
Signal has been questionable for years. The way it’s been pushed hardly, and how Moxie is emeritus, while much more questionable people are in control, doesn’t fill one with confidence, and does ring some alarm bells. The relative proximity to some in the US establishment should be enough to do that. And the way some have been designating anyone who questions Signal as “Russian Propaganda” and immediately deflecting about how Telegram is bad, is even more curious.
Frankly, I would trust something like Wire more than Signal. And there are other options too.
Ideally, something with good security/privacy and is fully P2P would become popular. But those apps/networks never make it mainstream, which is unfortunate.
This is like the worst example possible, considering Aaron himself was rich, which should tell you the obvious, that being rich was never a sole differentiator.
But that might be too disruptive to the current echo chamber.
There is a manifesto that is literally titled the “The Post-Meritocracy Manifesto” which a lot of people unironically agreed with, at least when those were hot topics a few years ago.
So any attempt at pretending that there isn’t an anti-meritocracy angle to this would be disingenuous to say the least.
That same person behind the manifesto is a primary figure in introducing CoC’s to software projects btw.
The biggest problem with these cameras would be the fact that they are probably relatively easy to hack, especially for other enemy state actors, although none of them specifically comes to mind 😉🤐
And despite the negative context, and possible usual fabrication involved, the only surprise in that farcical reporting for me was how the BBC let slip the fact that the Taliban are providing power and water services to the population at a level that is functional and beneficial enough for the supposed threat of withholding them to be seen as of consequence.