utopiah

chromium being poisoned last year

Can you please expand on that? I don't use chromium except when I have compat tests to run but still curious.

Depends against whom you are protecting yourself. If it's against

• your younger sibling then it's probably sufficient
• some script kiddie or scammer running scripts against the most typical setups, might be just obscure enough
• a proper targeted attack, then it will depend on which zip software you are using. Most likely the stock one that might (I didn't bother checking) relying on something that is far from the state of the art in terms of encryption. In that case it will most likely not be secure.
• a proper attack but you use something like 7z with encryption that is relatively resilient, then most like if you are not facing state actors with huge amount of resources to try to crack it, most likely secure

Note I'm NOT a security expert so... don't believe me.

Indeed, thanks for the mention because I wanted to go back on this. I wouldn't quality any of this as evidence of Sync sharing usage data. Everything else is still correct, i.e defaulting to Google as search engine, some analytics, etc but it's still unrelated to Sync. I don't see how other browsers are relevant. It looks like they and OP are trying to show that Mozilla is not perfect, that they make money and share some private data and thus assume that any data used on any Mozilla product is shared with 3rd parties, including Alphabet, without providing any evidence for that. I'm not sure arguing more will help.

Are you saying Firefox shares data to Alphabet beyond Google as the default search engine? If so and if it applies to Sync (as if the question from OP here) can you please share sources for that?

Don't get stuck into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness or perfectionism! So :

• every step counts
• even if you are not entirely private in anything you do, you can still be more or less exposed
• you are not alone in that struggle, we ALL are, from CEOs to politicians to random folks, we are all threatened and must help each other
• alternatives DO exist (as a personal example, I don't use Google, WhatsApp, TikTok, etc) and enjoyable
• it's not just technical but also psychological. If you focus on the technology it can be daunting, if you focus on usage it gets easier, ideally you combine both while insuring you don't burn out.

You can do it, WE can do it! :D

IMHO it'd be worthwhile to investigate which one actually did leak it without your consent. It might be pointless for your current address but surely would be for the next one, and everybody else.

More pragmatically even though it's wrong I'm not sure how impactful it is. Namely you can receive spam regardless of where you live. What's worrisome is arguably when companies know more about you, e.g tastes, political leaning, sexual orientation, etc. This is a lot more than a name on an address. I believe this is harder to get, especially if you are mindful of what you share. So... is it bad? Sure, is it lost? IMHO no.

It's a bit of a shortcut, it's still up to the services one chose to use. Typically if one does pay for services and it's GDPR compliant there is a non-zero probability they might not sell your data. So the vast majority for people who do not know or prefer not to care, yes, but everything is misleading IMHO. Better avoid fueling self helplessness. It's not because it's not the de facto standard that it's impossible.

I already have few RPis at home and a NAS so when I'll change my desktop my "old" 32Go 2080ti Corsair will go to the basement, headless, and serve models using Dockers and HTTP endpoints, a continuation of https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence

Right now to be honest unless there is a desktop VR game that truly needs it, e.g a successor to Half-life: Alyx I'm in no rush. Kind of excited by the project though.

Well, as somebody working on this I can tell you it's up to you what you decide to use. Of course you can rely on Meta or Google but there are alternatives like Monocle or Lynx XR with software (not AGI... not even going to address that, assuming it's a joke) that is also open-source and self-hostable e.g GraphHopper for directions, Mistral or LLaMA for LLMs and countless others.

So... can you use self hosted AI with open-source hardware today? Yes.

Will most people decide to do so? Sadly not.

Are we trapped? Absolutely not, in fact I suggest you help on either or both side, open-hardware, open-source software and open models.

Please don't fuel fears.

That's not how I interpret the meme. The way I understand it is rather

• we Google/Meta harvested already every source of information you share willingly with us
• actually nearly all of them, we are not actually searching through your trash
• the person is uncomfortable with this because they understand it might be a problem for their privacy, imagining anything they be might ashamed of
• in turn they ask for some kind of security
• the garbage puts a hood which absolutely changes nothing but give a false sense of privacy
• the person still willingly yet awkwardly hand away their trash, as if they learned absolutely nothing for the years, if not decades, of such practice

So I interpret this is as surveillance companies be ready to go through absolutely anything, even something literally dirty, i.e trash, in order to get yet more information about people. People knowing it's problematic and yet relinquishing even the modicum of privacy they had until then.

So... IMHO it's not about the garbage itself, rather garbage is meant as a provocative metaphor to mean literally anything and everything.

Being able to developer a personality, your personality, yourself basically.

IMHO Shoshana Zuboff explores this quite well. Imagine all the time there was an entity who was able to watch over everything you do, all the time, and could act on it, either by telling your government or companies, would you truly do everything you want to do? Note that this doesn't mean anything illegal or immoral, especially as a young person when one does not even know what that means. I also would link that to the chilling effect, for example if one does truly believe Google or Facebook can know a lot about you and if say you want to reach a position of power, say become a politician, would you dare criticize them knowing they might give information to your opponent?

So... IMHO some of the perceivable benefit of being private is that you can become an individual, not a transparent clone of what some commercial actors of society today expect you to be. That is particularly important in a democracy where we collectively decide what is right or wrong and how we define our own future.

Please stop using questionable logic to promote large companies, they do not need your free help for more marketing. There is even research showing it's false https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/when-31-4-the-effect-of-gift-salience-on-employee-effort-in-an-online-labor-market in many ways https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672231159781

There is no correlation between pay and quality work. I'm genuinely shocked this is even an argument held on a platform running on FLOSS.

Some might be more "convenient" on having an easier on-boarding, and even that is questionable, but regardless that's not the same as "better quality".