It's not about anti-censorship (making your VPN traffic look like regular traffic) it's about the IP address at the end of the VPN connection. They have a list of known VPN provider IP ranges and block those. If you run a proxy server or VPN on a your own private VPS for example, then it won't be detected.
Synnr
joined 1 year ago
They started also blocking OLD.reddit.com this week. I made a comment a couple months ago alluding to old.reddit.com still working even though they were blocking tor and known VPNs on www.reddit.com. I'm sure about 10,000 other people figured it out at the same time as me, since it was such a simple bypass, and I'm surprised it took this long to fix.
There are still at least 2 other unpatched ways.
See also: NSA PRISM
Member when all the companies listed released a PR statement within 24 hours of each other, all very basic and denied allowing the NSA direct access to their users?
I member.
Huh?
We're just curious behind the causation for the tweet. Why won't Apple and Microsoft allow them to update? Is it DRM? Security? Fear?
User asked why they never see &si= on their links on Android. @Synnr said they may be copying the link from the browser, which suggests they don't even have the YouTube app installed, as it 'never happens to them.'
As a google user, what... what am I doing ~~wrong~~ right?
Using a browser instead of the YouTube app?
Unless you're talking about Google links then yes. Amazon too, along with many other services. There's a ClearURLs Firefox add-on to remove them automatically.
But it's insidious with YouTube because people are much more likely to share YouTube videos on a public forum, and they just randomly started doing it one day.
You know that ?si= at the end of the YouTube URL that is copied when you share a video from within the YouTube app?
That's an individual tracking ID specific to you. So if you've ever shared a YouTube video on lemmy, reddit, Facebook, tiktok, or anywhere else without removing that code one time, anyone at Google with access to the ID system can now link you to that account with your real name, IP address and time accessed, device name, etc.
You're not wrong. Lokinet and Session are both products from the same parent company. Lokinet was renamed to the Oxen protocol, and they run all the servers AFAIK, so it would be like tor, if tor ran every guard, entry, and exit node. AKA worthless. So you're spot on, it's a joy to the intelligence community and after the Encrochat debacle and Session stopped using Signal's encryption algorithms and code, I would suggest no one use it for anything sensitive.
Session does use the Oxen network which is the renamed Lokinet, unless they made a change I'm wholly unaware of.
The Y2K38 Epochalypse bug hit 2 years early due to Microsoft's rushed implementation of Windows Subsystem for Linux under CEO Elon Musk, causing all newer systems running Windows to combust due to a combination of the bug, and a cyberattack on Musk's new chip fab plant in the state of Mexas. The only widespread choices after that are WacOS and Ubuntrue, both parent companies owned by Elon Musk after winning in his presidential prelection in 2026 and removing all antitrust legislation. However there is a hobbyist Unix distribution still being passed around called Briarch that fixed the 2038 problem in 2025 when development started, but you have to be in close proximity to someone with it to get it, which is easy in the country of California but not as easy east of the Nutah border, you really have to trust someone to even ask if they have it.
I posted this down below in a comment thread but I'm afraid it won't be seen and not enough people know about this.
Session was at first a fork of Signal without usernames.
Now by design it uses their own custom tor-like service (instead of just... using tor) and does not support forward secrecy or deniable authentication, so anyone who collects the messages in transit can either find a vulnerability in the encryption scheme, or spend enough GPU resources to crack it, and they have confirmation of who sent and received the message and what the contents of the message are. And is headquartered in Australia, which is 5EYES and much more against encryption than the US. Oh, and the server is closed-source.
Regarding Australia's 2018 bill...
The Australian Parliament passed a contentious encryption bill on Thursday to require technology companies to provide law enforcement and security agencies with access to encrypted communications. Privacy advocates, technology companies and other businesses had strongly opposed the bill, but Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government said it was needed to thwart criminals and terrorists who use encrypted messaging programs to communicate.
Regarding the 'vulnerability or cracking them later' bit...
Messages that are sent to you are actually sent to your swarm. The messages are temporarily stored on multiple Service Nodes within the swarm to provide redundancy. Once your device picks up the messages from the swarm, they are automatically deleted from the Service Nodes that were temporarily storing them.
From Session's own FAQ:
Session clients do not act as nodes on the network, and do not relay or store messages for the network. Session’s network architecture is closer to a client-server model, where the Session application acts as the client and the Service Node swarm acts as the server. Session’s client-server architecture allows for easier asynchronous messaging (messaging when one party is offline) and onion routing-based IP address obfuscation, relative to peer-to-peer network architectures.
I wouldn't touch it with a 12ft ladder.
Based on this interaction alone and his dad deciding the price for him, I'm going to make the wildly assumptious assumption this is a 20s/30s(/40s?) unemploymed guy living at his dad's house rent free.
If my assumptions are incorrect, sorry mate, you did not win the dad lottery.