I'm finding the results are not helpful as they used to be and sometimes way past the topic I'm searching. This is very prevalent when I'm searching for pirate sites. I'm falling back to Searxng whenever this occurs.

Has anyone noticed it too? Has DDG upped their moderation?

Chatcontrol is once again stopped. Good work again everyone who stood up, this is once again a win everytime it is a win.

Next country that is up for Presidency is Poland 🇵🇱 who are anti-chatcontrol.

Patrick Breyer website

chatcontrol timeline

StopScanMe

For instance, People I know that are using Eventbrite for private event registration. To sign up for the event with or without an account, you have to write and confirm your email in the boxes, I did some looking up to see if hosts can see the email. I didn't find any answers so I made a Reddit post asking, and got a reply saying "No, they can't. Eventbrite deletes them as soon as you submit the form." I wanted to be sure so I created a private test event and registered for it in a private window. I then went to my event dashboard and clicked on the ticket # where I can in fact view it (the email shown is made up).

I only asked Perplexity after trying to find out myself. It did in fact find the answer (link #8: View your Attendee Summary report): "Review attendee purchase details like email address ..." I've found LLMs and search tools like Perplexity to be unreliable for answering questions like this for websites, as well as software. Which means I may not turn to them in cases where they actually would help. It's too bad they hallucinate a lot too.

On linux, this is trivial. I have my private subnet over Wireguard and hosts with static IPs all on the 10.79.x.y subnet. All other traffic goes through my commercial VPN provider.

Problem is, ya cain't do that on Android, as it supports exactly one VPN connection at a time. The best you can do is white/blacklist traffic to either go through the VPN, or not.

Do how do I achieve this? My commercial VPN provider will not nest and route on their end; I could route all traffic through my VPS servers, but that's a lot of traffic for my little VMs. It may, however, be my only option:

1. Phone is connected to my VPS over WG VPN
2. VPS is connected to internet via commercial WG VPN
3. Routing tables on VPS send 10.79.x.y to destinations over the private VPS
4. Public destinations get sent over commercial VPS

Am I missing an easier, more efficient work-around for Android's utterly stupid networking limitations?

An international law enforcement operation has taken down Matrix, an encrypted messaging service used by criminals.

French media mainstream relay the propaganda of the cops, telling that the interception has been made with "innovative technology", but without any details. They also telling that :

European authorities have dismantled Matrix, an encrypted messaging platform made by criminals for criminals. https://cybernews.com/cybercrime/authorities-take-down-matrix/

An expression found in other media; it may be communication from cops.

Do you have any idea how that has been possible ? Do you think they may be issue with matrix or some of the softzare that implement it ? Or do you think that cops compromise terminal (phone or computers) ? I'm more and more suspicious with open network, that let organization enter into the federation, and let it intercept communication.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22814154

Germany and Poland may say yes to chatcontrol!

Take Action! Send email your politicians now! Links: patrick-breyer.de Permanent Representatives Committee

Does anyone maybe have a template? I don’t plan to store any cookies and I won’t run any analytics. I want it to be not invasive and it should just say that I’m not storing any more data than necessary to keep your session and I won’t ever run any analytics. I hate these things and I hate tracking cookies but I have to put something there.

Nobody on my post asking for controversial privacy topics asked this question, but I feel I should cover it anyways. People sometimes assume that software is safe simply because it is open source. That is a misconception, and I would like to cover that in this post.

What does "open source" mean?

When software is "open source," it means that the developers have made the source code for the software public and allows anyone to help contribute to the code, or create their own versions of the software based on the source code. By contrast, proprietary software is software that has not made the source code visible to the public. There are similar terms to open source, such as "source-available," "open-core," and "libre," which I won't cover in this post. For the sake of simplicity, any source-available software will be called "open source," since the specifics don't quite matter for the majority of this post.

What are the benefits open source software?

Open source software provides many benefits over proprietary software:

Code auditing: Because anyone can inspect the code, anybody can look for vulnerabilities or invasive code to make sure that the software is safe. With proprietary software, the developers would have to hire a third party auditor to inspect the code. That means you have to trust the auditor, and you have no way to verify first-hand that the code is safe.

Bug reporting: While both open source and proprietary software have bug reporting systems, open source software tends to have more thorough and transparent bug reporting. Bug reports are generally on a public issue tracker such as GitHub, which can also help prevent duplicate bugs from being reported. Having these reports public also makes the next benefit easier:

Bug fixing: Anyone can contribute to open source software, which means the workload is distributed. Instead of a small team of developers being the only ones working on the software, anyone can look at the public issues and code their own fixes for the software.

Resurrecting projects: Both open source and proprietary software can one day stop being developed. Even big companies such as Spotify can retire software, which can lead to hardware devices becoming unusable or insecure. (The code for Car Thing has been reconstructed, by the way.) Open source projects that fall out of development can easily be forked and maintained by a new developer. It's rare to see proprietary software handed off to a new owner.

Accountability: Open source projects hold the developers directly accountable for any vulnerabilities or invasive code, meaning the developer's interests are aligned with its users and not malicious purposes. This also incentivizes creating code without paywalls, since anyone could release a version of the code with the paid features "unlocked".

However, even with all these benefits, open source software isn't perfect.

Why has proprietary software become so popular?

Since ads and paywalls can generally be removed from open source software, it doesn't make it a very appealing choice to for-profit organizations. Generally, these organizations want to monetize and control their software, which means injecting ads, paywalls, and other invasive elements. This is done most easily if the software is proprietary.

It's also rare to see open source software becoming so popular, because generally open source software receives its funding from donations and doesn't have the budget to advertise the software. There are exceptions, such as OBS Studio or Blender, which have mostly become the most popular software in their categories.

Is open source software safe?

There is another downside to open source software that many people don't talk about: it is much easier to exploit than proprietary software. Because all the source code is visible to the public, it makes it easy for malicious parties to craft vulnerabilities. Proprietary software is generally a stab in the dark until a vulnerability is found, since you can't see exactly how it was coded.

Software being open source does mean that it becomes more likely to find and fix vulnerabilities, but being open source doesn't automatically make software safe. Which device do you think would be more likely to obtain a virus, a device running (stock) Android or a device running iOS? You're most likely more inclined to say the device running (stock) Android is more likely. Android at its core is open source. While correlation is not causation, and there are other factors at play, it's much easier for someone to try to craft a malicious app for Android than for iOS because of its open nature.

Proprietary software isn't automatically safe, either. It can be just as vulnerable as any other software. However, open source software has the potential to become much more secure than proprietary software, simply because more people can find and fix vulnerabilities. That's probably why Apple open sourced their Private Cloud Compute code before launching a bounty program for it.

Anyone can code malicious open source software. It's riskier, since it's more likely to be noticed, but it's still possible. Microsoft could open source Windows one day, and it wouldn't make it any more safe until somebody identified and fixed the issues. Open source software doesn't automatically make something private or secure, but it does provide integrity, because the developer is showing that they will be accountable for any malicious or vulnerable code, and that anyone is free to look through the code.

Final notes

I hope this gives you a better idea of what it actually means if something is open source. Even unsafe proprietary software can be run safely under the right conditions. If your threat model requires you to use as much open source software as possible, I made my own list of open source software called Open Source Everything that you can look through. I hope you enjoyed reading this!

- The 8232 Project

It seems that YouTube is killing them all but I don't know the technical details, via FreeTube I noticed, from this link (https://api.invidious.io/), that there are very few left and they require signup, and probably financial support from users.

from the better-late-than-never dept

EDIT: sorry for the rambly post here's a quick clarification I wanted a decentralized/open source variant of something like NordVPN etc.

Crypto-based options I found: Sentinel, Mysterium , Orchid All of those are on the Blockchain and use their own coins as a payment system, both to pay usage fees and to pay out node-hosts. Not sure if that's my jam.

I tried to use the search and came up short - so point me elsewhere if there's already a discussion.

Let me preface this by saying I'm pretty green when it comes to a lot of the deeper aspects of FOSS privacy tools. Meaning that i'm probably more clueless about this topic than I realise.

Had a bit of a shower thought moment earlier and googled if decentralized VPNs are an option for the occasional torrent.
Did a bit of a google and came up with a couple of options, seemingly all tied into a blockchain with their own coin for payments - either using or hosting a node.

I'm a bit allergic to cryptobros and their blockchain-everything-mentality but I suppose it's not a terrible system for the usecase?

So are there people on here who have hands-on experience with this? Is it a valid tool for safer browsing and torrenting?

Are there any obvious alternatives I should look into?

Are there any obvious risks I'm not aware of?

Is the concept flawed altogether?

In my post on why mass surveillance is not normal, I referenced how the Wikipedia page for the Nothing to hide argument labels the argument as a "logical fallacy." On October 19th, user Gratecznik edited the Wikipedia page to remove the "logical fallacy" text. I am here to prove that the "Nothing to hide" argument is indeed a logical fallacy and go through some arguments against it.

The "Nothing to hide" argument is an intuitive but misleading argument, stating that if a person has done nothing unethical, unlawful, immoral, etc., then there is no reason to hide any of their actions or information. However, this argument has been well covered already and debunked many times (here is one example).

Besides the cost of what it takes for someone to never hide anything, there are many reasons why a person may not want to share information about themselves, even if no misconduct has taken place. The "Nothing to hide" argument intuitively (but not explicitly) assumes that those whom you share your information with will handle it with care and not falsely use it against you. Unfortunately, that is not how it currently works in the real world.

You don't get to make the rules on what is and is not deemed unlawful. Something you do may be ethical or moral, but unlawful and could cost you if you aren't able to hide those actions. For example, whistleblowers try to expose government misconduct. That is an ethical and moral goal, but it does not align with government interests. Therefor, if the whistleblower is not able to hide their actions, they will have reason to fear the government or other parties. The whistleblower has something to hide, even though it is not unethical or immoral.

You are likely not a whistleblower, so you have nothing to hide, right? As stated before, you don't get to make the rules on what is and is not deemed unlawful. Anything you say or do could be used against you. Having a certain religion or viewpoint may be legal now, but if one day those become outlawed, you will have wished you hid it.

Just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean it is justified to share everything. Privacy is a basic human right (at least until someone edits Wikipedia to say otherwise), so you shouldn't be forced to trust whoever just because you have nothing to hide.

For completeness, here is a proof that the "Nothing to hide" argument is a logical fallacy by using propositional calculus:

Let p be the proposition "I have nothing to hide"

Let q be the proposition "I should not be concerned about surveillance"

You can represent the "Nothing to hide" argument as follows:

p → q

I will be providing a proof by counterexample. Suppose p is true, but q is false (i.e. "I have nothing to hide" and "I am concerned about surveillance"):

p ∧ ¬q

Someone may have nothing to hide, but still be concerned about the state of surveillance. Since that is a viable scenario, we can conclude that the "Nothing to hide" argument is invalid (a logical fallacy).

I know someone is going to try to rip that proof apart. If anyone is an editor on Wikipedia, please revert the edit that removed the "logical fallacy" text, as it provides a very easy and direct way for people to cite that the "Nothing to hide" argument is false.

Thanks for reading!

- The 8232 Project

I already know that it's spyware but in the case that I need to use it for work and school on my Linux laptop, do I need to worry about configuring something so that it won't have access to my whole system like it does on Windows? I'm on ZorinOS/Ubuntu. Thanks in advance

No matter what browser I use, every time it states my browser has unique fingerprint for Mull with uBlock and Badger installed and "randomized" with Brave. I don't even know if there are any other than unique or randomized. It will be more of an OPSEC post rather than referring to Cover Your Tracks in particular.

I got the worst results in

1. Screen size and colour depth

• one in 92k with Mull
• one in 200 with Brave and Vanadium

2. Http_accept headers

• one in 3k with Mull
• one in 6k with Brave
• one in 2,1k with Vanadium

3. Language and time zone (target's community is located in the same country as mine, so score above 200 doesn't bother me much)

4. Touch support

• one in 143 with Mull
• one in 4.35 with Brave and Vanadium

5. User agent

• one in 151.26 with Mull, probably bad, cause Chrome and Chromium browsers have nearly 70% market share in my country.
• one in 44 with both Brave and Vanadium

6. WebGL Vendor & Renderer

• one in 8.58 with Mull
• one in 314 with Brave
• one in 604 with Vanadium

7. Hash of WebGL fingerprint

• one in 8.81 with Mull
• one in 3.27 with Brave
• one in 939 with Vanadium

The rest of categories has score <10. If you think others will be crucial in my case, feel free to ask what score they got. The post would get too long if I were to list all results.

Device:

• Pixel 6 Pro with GrapheneOS
• Optionally I can look up for my good old Oppo A52 (slow af but has OEM Android 12 if remember right)

Browsers I tried:

• Vanadium 131.0.6778.104
• Mull 132.0.0 with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger
• Brave 1.73.91, Chromium 131

Is there any way to make sure I am not recognisable by my browser data? I can't block every single cookie or data requests, as I am sure too many rejections of them will probably result getting flagged as a shady user, then admins will personally inspect fingerprints of all my accounts. This is just a downward spiral to me getting banned for making multiple accounts (my target). The goal is not to make me as anonymous as Snowden, but to spoof my fingerprint so good to get unrecognisable from the typical mouth-breathing internet users who don't give a flying fuck about so called, broadly understood online privacy. Ironically, that's pretty much reverse goal than when I was installing GrapheneOS.

Threat actor: discussion forum with invite-only registration. Something like Reddit, but they take multiple account prevention seriously. I am 99,9999% sure they ban all access via VPN, proxies and TOR in advance, so those are out of discussion. Burner SIM cards with internet access are the solution here, both for getting unique IP from LTE provider and for SMS verification during registration. Furthermore, different providers will probably give every single account's fingerprint a pinch of uniqueness (if admin staff has any way to see which mobile comm provider I used)

There's a catch: if I switch my SIM card to another one and the second one will get the same IP address as the previous one - I have to get in radius of another BTS and get different IP, or It will look like one person is using the 2 (or more) accounts. The inviter and all his invitees will get banned. Tbh I don't know how big chance there is for this making happen.

from the no-disassemble dept

Archived, if you prefer that: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/Bif16

"Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives."

One of these good examples of failed privacy, have fun...

So many people seem to recommend this app, but its obviously not open source and requires an email to signup, which seems unnecessary. Are there any good open source alternatives that are a one-stop-shop of sorts rather than a bunch of mottled scripts?

https://redact.dev/

from the the-real-agenda dept

Hi guys As title says there is no add Button or anything. How can i add hidden items?