I've never been super-impressed by Rob Braxman. I mean he's never truly wrong in what he was saying in his Youtube videos, but his explanations are over-simplistic, a bit of a shortcut (but fair enough to reach a wide audience I guess), and mostly designed to sell his meh deGoogled cellphones and equally meh privacy services. But all in all, he's somewhat watchable and sometimes informative after I'm done watching all the new videos from the other, more interesting channels I follow.

But lately, his videos seem to have shifted markedly toward unhinged rants and sensationalist conspiracy theory. His latest video for instance is utter nonsense:

Skynet 2024: The Infrastructure is Complete!

I mean yeah, okay, technically he's talking about a real thing. But Skynet? And doomsday Terminator imagery from 1984? Really?

I'm pretty sure the man doesn't have all his fries in the cone anymore. This can't possibly be a conscious strategy to win more Youtube subscribers: this sort of video is going to lose him the part of his audience that has a genuine and technically-informed interest in privacy, and I doubt he's ever going to become a favorite of the sort of crowd who likes conspiracy theories.

Either that or Youtube is a lot stupider than I thought and he noticed an uptick in subscribers when he makes videos like that. At any rate, I really hesitate to click on any of his new videos now.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14393091

NSA ’just days from taking over the internet’ warns Edward Snowden

Internet-scraping outfit Spy.pet claims to have harvested more than four billion public messages made by nearly 620 million users on more than 14,000 Discord chat servers – and is selling access to this trove.

The website presents the data it's collected in several ways. Each known user has a profile, which contains all known aliases, pronouns, connected accounts to other platforms such as Steam and GitHub, Discord servers joined, and public messages. If you wanted to quite literally spy on a Discord user or users, Spy.pet lets you do that, for a fee.

https://f-droid.org/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/

Anyone using it?

If you’re in the US, now’s a great time to contact your Senators. You can either call the Congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 or use the Senate directory to look up your legislators’ contact info.

“Stop the FBI from expanding warrantless surveillance of innocent Americans. The House reauthorization contains the largest expansion of FISA Section 702 since it was created in 2008. Please oppose it -- and please oppose any attempt to reauthorize FISA Section 702 that doesn’t include warrant requirements, both for Section 702 data and for our sensitive, personal information sold to the government by data brokers.”

Is it even possible on android? Is there a FOSS dialer to optionally encrypt some phone calls (non voip) using a pre-shared key with other party?

I'd like to be able to contribute financially to people/communities who run infrastructure, such as nodes, for layers like I2P and Freenet. Where do I find them, and does contributing directly to the projects themselves help in this regard?

Thanks!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14368233

Noob here (and I posted some of this already as a reply o an older post: https://lemmy.world/comment/8190997 )

I actually just installed HeliBoard through Obtainium, and have a bunch of questions.

First of all, I’m confused – I installed HeliBoard_1.2-release.apk . I didn’t really know how HeliBoard_1.2-debug.apk and HeliBoard_1.2-nouserlib.apk were different.

Also, I just installed that and nothing else. It’s giving me suggestions, but no corrections. Is that because I didn’t install any dictionaries? If so, how do I install one – do I just click on the download icon here https://codeberg.org/Helium314/aosp-dictionaries/src/branch/main/dictionaries/main_en_us.dict ? And what do I do then? Sorry, noob here.

On the other languages and autocorrect issues discussed here: https://lemmy.world/post/12769494 – it sounds like it used to have the equivalent of GBoard’s globe icon you could click on to switch languages but not anymore? You have to go to settings and uncheck English and check whatever other language you want to use?

And, it seems like I can do the equivalent of Shift + key on a standalone keyboard (for example, to get 1 instead of Q), but I don’t know how to, or what that’s even called.

Thank you!

Has anyone tried this?

Given the extistence of technologies like Monero and SimpleX chat, I wonder if it is possible for a truly anonymous content sharing platform to exist? And does it?

Use cases:

• sharing pirated content without a link back to you
• journalists or political activists not wanting to be found or caught by a government

The platform should not allow the following to know the details of what you do on this platform:

• users on the platform: should not know the identity of a poster unless they disclose it
• the host of the platform: should not know which content belongs to who, or be able to deduce it via traffic logs
• Intermediates like the ISP, DNS, or your router should not be able to link any content to you. However it is okay if they know that you use the platform at all, just not what you do with it.

Does something like this exist?

Context: my gf mentioned getting a vpn for privacy, and I tried to explain that it "does" help, but it's more like type of windows on a house. It certainly can be part of the package, but it's no where near the foundation.

So i tried to explain the best that i could That if she was worried about online privacy the first step wasn't to mask traffic, but to not submit personal data to anything online like FB, not use Google services that package everything on you together to sell to advertisers, and to limit phone apps to essentials.

But I'm curious on what other steps you guys would consider the "foundation" of online privacy that should be prioritized before a vpn. Any thoughts? Or am I way off base?

Note: this is in context of vpn for privacy. Using vpn to avoid Geo blocking and censorship I see as incredibly valid for those that need it.

I'm taking a long biking trip soon and want to share my live location with my boyfriend in case something happens. Any recommendations for privacy-focused apps that can accomplish this? I'm on Android, he's on iOS.

Under the proposed order, filed by the Department of Justice upon notification and referral from the FTC, Cerebral will also be required to pay more than $7 million over charges that it disclosed consumers’ sensitive personal health information and other sensitive data to third parties for advertising purposes and failed to honor its easy cancellation promises.

• I make websites
• If someone is banned twice (two accounts) I want it to take them more than 5min and a VPN to make a 3rd account
• I'm okay with extreme solutions, like requiring everyone to have a Yubikey-or-similar physical key
• I really hate the trend of relying on a phone number or Google capcha as a not-a-bot detection. Both have tons of problems
• but spam (automated account creation) is a real problem

What kind of auth should I use for my websites?

Is it fairly easy? Seems useful for a public site like Lemmy and the fediverse

https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

https://decrypt.co/203153/ai-prompt-data-poisoning-nightshared

Today I was contacted by someone at work. She graduated school with me and our 20 year reunion was coming up. Why did she contact me at work? It was the only way they were able to track me down. I was included in promotional material by name. She told me I "was the hardest to track down"and I had to smile.

This is just a small anecdote about privacy practices and their real life impact (and how your employer can undo all of it, I guess)

Hiya, so quickly wondering wether you have enabled this or not. Obviously it's not great for privacy, but it also seems very nice to have for image cloud solutions, so that images can be sorted based on location. Are there any good solutions for this? I'd like have it enabled, but also afraid of sharing images with sensitive metadata in them.

Summary: Simplex Chat uses a bit of battery and doesn't have a way to visibly see a contact has changed.

Has anyone ever done this by going to the website of a data broker and using their opt out form?

Obviously to do this they ask for information so they know what not to include, but it feels like I'm just giving my data to them or confirming what they already have.

Just wondering what other people think since I haven't heard anyone talk about this yet.

Now that we can create and delete usernames at will, do people have any concerns about giving people they meet their Signal ID? I have no fears of it. In fact, my Signal is oozic.35 if anyone wanta to message me.