Privacy

31975 readers

671 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Is there a FOSS/privacy oriented IoT community? (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Is there a community specific to FOSS or just general privacy oriented IoT? With plenty of hardware discussion along with software. Routers, piholes, Meshtastic, anything IoT but open source. If it touches a network but you want it to do something it doesn't. Flashing a doorbell camera with FOSS firmware. Hosting media servers on your phones Hotspot. Loading gcode to a printer from anywhere. There are so many things and possibilities.

If there isn't someone should start one, OpenIoT or something catchy and relevant.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

There is an entire ecosystem of open SoC devices, code, platforms, development boards, etc. One of the most popular is the ESP32/8266 boards, which is a pretty good place to start.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I know, Meshtastic is almost entirely built on esp32 devices. Where is the community for this ecosystem? If there isn't one on a widely federated instance there should be.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Matrix(#meshtastic:matrix.org) and their forum

Also, meshtastic is not only esp32, but also nrf which is really cool

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

There's also [email protected], but it's inactive at the moment.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

A Chinese WiFi chip with binary blobs is about the farthest you can get from privacy, though. Or free software.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

That's fair, since it's possible these chips have some backdoored bootloader or something, I've never personally analyzed them with an electron microscope, but the architecture and wire traces are published, so you could start a chip fabrication plant and roll your own silicon.

The actual running code on them is usually GitHub hosted though, or you can write it yourself and just import the libraries you need, again usually from GitHub or the platform specific repositories.

If you're worried about Chinese chips in your open source though, I have some real bad news for you.

If you're using FOSS specifically as a control against Chinese spying, and not analyzing the commit logs of every package you download, I have more bad news for you.