Yes, I assume so.

Yes it’s called metadata. I don’t know why they want it.

I don’t know, are they? As far as we know they could only get unsent notifications, which are obviously still with Apple/Google because the target phone is offline and so they couldn’t be delivered yet. Which would explain why they only got thousands of them, not billions.

You are trying to read what isn’t there. Push notifications just don’t contain any messages, at all, in any form, whether you want to call it data or metadata. They are just telling the Signal app to wake up, and then it securely checks with the server what’s up.

The only think authorities are getting then, is the fact your Signal app was told to wake up at time X. Not whether you actually received a message, let alone any information about any messages.

It is confusing the system is called “push notifications”, because it has nothing to do with the actual notifications you are seeing on your phone. It’s just a mechanism to wake up sleeping apps so that they can check up with their server.

A push notification, from a technical standpoint, is just a way to wake up an app. It doesn’t have to contain any information.

So when you get a message, the messaging service sends a push notification through Apple/Google, which is a way of saying “Hey messaging app, wake up”. The app then starts running in the background on your phone, connects to it’s server, asks if there is anything new to know about, and the server tells it about a new message, if any. This can then generate a notification on your phone, but importantly what you are seeing in the notification did not come through Apple/Google, all that did was the “Hey messaging app, wake up!”.

If authorities then request this data from Apple/Google, all they can see is the times at which your messaging app was asked to wake up. Not whether any message was actually received, or what it contained, or from who. Because all that never touched Apple/Google’s systems, not even in an encrypted form.

That being said, some data can be sent directly through the Apple/Google system along with the wake up message, so it’s not impossible that some apps include some metadata there. In theory they shouldn’t. For example simple marketing notifications or ads often are just included with the push, because it’s simple to do.

Says “up to”. It will probably come with 2TB, but they are happy to put in more if you want to pay for extra. But 40TB is when they start to refuse your unreasonable requests.

The joke goes rm -fr, which stands for “remove french”. Yours has double “remove” and is less believable.

Exactly what I thought of

Sell it to who? Is this a game of hot potato?

Nothing about the app is secret, Google openly advertises it

It’s for E2E encryption in chat apps.

Let me try: Lmao. Uses a computer, still does stuff the slower way because learning new things is too difficult.

To be serious, I am looking for the best solutions for my use cases, not adequate ones. Yes dd works perfectly fine and as you noted doesn’t take long to use anyway. But just because it’s fine doesn’t mean other approaches aren’t better.

A GUI tool can offer or take a list of download URLs for common distros so downloading isn’t a separate step, it can check if the target device is a flash drive and not a hard drive by mistake, it can automatically choose the optimal block size for the device, it can verify the process by reading it back from the device, can show you the current filesystem, label, and usage of the target device to confirm, it can handle flashing to multiple devices at the same time with separate and total progress bars.

If I wanted to do all that on the command line it’d be quite a lot of commands or a sizeable script to write. Or I can use a simple dd command and lose out on all of the above. Either way it’s a worse option. I will only use dd when a GUI tool isn’t installed, or when I’m on a system without a DE.

It’s faster to drag and drop a downloaded ISO and choose the target from a dropdown, than do it on a command line. And get a progress bar. As much as command line is usually faster, it isn’t in this case.

Yes you can also get a progress bar on the command line but it’s more typing again, and realistically you need to look the option up every time if you use dd once every 3 months.

Oh? And you’re the authority on that?

Well yes, I am the authority on my opinions, just like anyone else is on theirs.

I do agree though that its not necessarily the same league as the others.

That’s what I mean, I don’t think it belongs next to Matrix or 12 Monkeys. It’s a run of the mill Tom Cruise action film. Very enjoyable, but it doesn’t break any new ground, in my opinion.

Oblivion? It was all right, and I recommend it, but I wouldn’t call it a mandatory watch, it didn’t have any special message

It’s a thought experiment. Of course such a stick wouldn’t exist. OP’s question is what laws of physics prevent this theoretical scenario from working.

That’s the point. There is nothing strange or shady about the fact that things you type into DeepSeek.com are sent to DeepSeek.com. Obviously keystrokes you submit to a website are submitted to the website.

I’m just explaining how people end up with high uptimes despite not keeping their computer on all the time. There is no purpose to “padding your uptime”.

When you hibernate, “uptime” counts it even though the computer is off, as it’s more of a “time since cold boot”.

So I turn off my computer every day, but have an uptime of weeks now.

Every time I saw someone I know built a PC, they reused the license key from their previous one. And the first one was a free key from their university.

It definitely happens though!