let me save you the hassles of self-hosting nextcloud 😂 however it's a pretty small company so don't be surprised that hosting on their stuff is overpriced. nextcloud has free open servers, this doesn't. then again nextcloud's encryption is more fake than matrix

To my understanding, Signal requires that you have a physical phone to use the desktop version. Is there any way to scan the QR code without a physical device? I'm trying to make an anonymous Signal account.

My idea:

1.) Set up Android VM on Linux laptop

2.) Use laptop camera to scan the QR code on my desktop

Youtube has added a new "feature" that blocks users with adblockers from viewing videos. How do I get around this while still blocking ads? I currently use uBlock Origin on firefox.

💯

Google fulfilled an Immigration and Customs Enforcement subpoena that demanded a wide array of personal data on a student activist and journalist, including his credit card and bank account numbers, according to a copy of an ICE subpoena obtained by The Intercept.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson had attended a protest targeting companies that supplied weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair in 2024 for all of five minutes, but the action got him banned from campus. When President Donald Trump assumed office and issued a series of executive orders targeting students who protested in support of Palestinians, Thomas-Johnson and his friend Momodou Taal went into hiding.

Google informed Thomas-Johnson via a brief email in April that it had already shared his metadata with the Department of Homeland Security, as The Intercept previously reported. But the full extent of the information the agency sought — including usernames, addresses, itemized list of services, including any IP masking services, telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers — was not previously known.

Afternoon, y'all! It's been a week since I took the plunge into Graphene OS. I wanted to present my thoughts as a free flowing dialogue and hopefully encourage others to delve into the joy that is GOS.

So, I started using the web-based installer. I have Debian 13 and Chromium, so I didn't need any extra steps. Unlocking the bootloader was a blast of nostalgia to me. Brought me right back to the days of bouncing between AOKP and CyanMod. The installation process was honestly easier than anything I could have imagined. I booted up into GOS and locked everything back up and I was ready to go.

Beforehand, I had backed up all my app settings, and since I was already using FOSS apps it was relatively painless. I spent the next couple hours installing everything and importing settings. I'm using the fossify apps in place of the standard AOSP apps GOS provides. I have no idea if this will fuck me over, but I'm willing to find out. I ended up losing some SMS messages as the backup file corrupted, but I'm not that brokenhearted about it. But I went to bed at about 02.00 happy with my new phone.

Throughout my daily use, I noticed something peculiar. I was using my phone less and less. Inherently, becoming less reliant over time. It forced me to use my computer increasingly for things such as banking and social media.

Quick side note: I had Instagram installed and sandboxed, but it was killing my battery, so now I just use the website, which is actually kinda nice.

But the thing that stood out to me most was, I was using the phone for it's intended purpose; telecommunications. I chatted with people, answered some e-mails, did some daily games, browsed Lemmy a bit. But my screen time was significantly less. I read more, I'm more intentional about tasks and hobbies. It seems I had signicantly more damage to my brain from doomscrolling, than I had previously thought.

Overall, it made me feel like my phone, was my phone. I've not worried a bit about my privacy, I've been able to live in ease and a lot happier. I also use cash and interact with people more and more, because there's more personal connection in transactions and interactions now. (Why do so many businesses have an app?) I highly recommend it. The joy, the freedom 🇺🇲🦅🍔🛣️🛢️🏈, and the comfort is something I'll never give back. GOS for life, now.

Thank for reading my, probably, incongruent thoughts about GOS. I appreciate this community and the folks around Lemmy for helping and encouraging me. This place has been a nice reprieve from the waking nightmare of the current state of the world. I'm sorry if I didn't get to your comment on my previous post. I didn't expect it to blow up the way it did. I really appreciate it and I'm gonna hang around and see if I can also help and encourage folks.

Peace and cheers, with all my love.

Russian authorities have begun restricting access to Telegram, one of the country’s most popular social media apps, as the government continues to push everyday Russians toward its own tightly controlled alternatives to foreign tech platforms.

On Tuesday, the government said it was restricting access to Telegram for the “protection of Russian citizens,” accusing the app of refusing to block content authorities consider “criminal and terrorist.”

Russia’s telecommunications regulator Roskomnadzor said in a statement that it would continue to restrict the operation of the Telegram messenger “until violations of Russian law are eliminated.”

Update: I wanna thank everyone for the advice, I'm shipping the bunk phone back for refund today and ive got my eye on a few from swappa and back market for when I get the money to buy.

I'll probably try out graphene but after looking into crdroid I'm pretty stoked about it having all the customization I've been wanting for ages. Which ever feels cleaner to manage and easier for the family to pick up will probably be the go to.

So I fell for the classic blunder and ended up with a pixel that's not OEM unlocked despite being advertised as such. After a few hours of searching it looks like the only way I'm getting an OEM unlocked pixel is full price from Google itself. I don't have $400 for a new phone, I bought the one I have for $150 in 2019.

Are there any cheaper ways to get control of my phone?

Australia's Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind determined in 2024 that Bunnings breached privacy laws by scanning hundreds of thousands of customers' faces without their proper consent.

A review of that decision by the Administrative Review Tribunal of Australia has now found the opposite

The retailer did not break the law by scanning customers' identities, but should improve its privacy policy and notify customers of the use of AI-based facial recognition technology, the ruling said

Petty typical stuff by this point. The privacy-invading company wins, pissweak government makes a few privacy "recommendations" but stops short of enforcing anything

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/63572900

I've recently been working on scraping the app api for instagram for a project, and I'm surprised at the amount of data it sends that it shouldn't need. I knew it did a lot of tracking already, but after looking at what it sends, I am never installing that app outside of an emulator.

When you login it sends:

• How many sim cards you have installed
• Whether you have whatsapp installed
• whether you gave permission for: call logs, contacts, answer phone calls
• Timestamps for when you opened the app and when you clicked any component.

On most requests, it sends:

• Your connection type (WIFI/mobile data)
• Your connection speed
• Whether google play attestation is working
• If your phone is foldable or not
• Whether you have dark or light theme enabled
• What device you are running instagram on
• The components you clicked on to navigate to whatever page you are on, as well as timestamps for when you clicked them.

When loading your timeline, they payload contains:

• Whether instagram has permission for your camera
• Your battery level
• Whether your phone is charging
• The time you opened the app at.
• Whether you used pull to refresh to load your feed.
• Your volume level
• Your timezone offset.

For every useful request it sends about 2 to /logging_client_events, which has a binary, encoded as base64 payload.

Hey y'all, was considering giving Zulip a try. I've got a group of friends that do everything from play games together, share memes, and organize medium-ish sized events that require a fair amount of coordination.

I was considering doing a self-host and was curious if doing this through a VPS service would work?

I was also maybe wanting to host somewhere I could also do a CMS and maybe a foundary instance.

As far as the CMS goes it would be a simple blog for sharing music and things.

Foundary is a VTT similar to roll20.

Thanks in advance!

On a Linux, you can securely erase data or hide erasure after the fact by overwriting the affected location on disk with new data. This new data could for instance be all 0s or randomly generated numbers. There are several programs that can do this on Linux.

I always wondered how to do this on my Android phone without accidentally f*cking up my data because of how Android partitioning works. I mean... Have you seen an Android block device list? (This is NOT critique! Android's partitioning methodology is one of the reasons for it being so secure an OS, apart from process isolation/containerization. I think they call it "siloing"? Android devs/enthusiasts, please correct me!)

Then I discovered Extirpater. Check it out and let me know what you think! It was archived not too long ago. https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/extirpater

I will be upfront with this, and say that I've never been a huge fan. But I did reinstall a Matrix server, and some clients to see if it'd gotten better in the year or so since I've last used it.

This just... Kind of feels like a more centralized XMPP with group chat folders that sort of function? The spaces feature is neat, but I've tried 4-5 clients, and every single one of those throws all of them into the same screen as the DMs by default, and I can't find a way to change that.

Am I missing something here? Like. I want to at least see what people like here, I just can't.

I have never had a LinkedIn account, both out of general anti-data-vacuuming-social-media, and specifically anti-whatever-the-fucking-corphead-psychos-are-doing-on-LinkedIn tendencies, and managed to find a decent job out of uni just fine (software field). I'm now looking for a job again and the number one piece of advice I'm being given by concerned parties is "get on LinkedIn".

I'm curious how many people into the whole "privacy" thing have had to make this choice, and which way you went with it.

Do the advantages (which it seems mainly boil down to "networking") outweigh the icky feeling I'd get making an account? Of course only I can actually answer that question, but it sums up my conundrum.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55042223

Getting pixel 9, graphene?

Hey y'all! So we are changing phone providers and they are forcing us into getting a new phone. I have an s23 which I hate anyway, and can get a pixel 9 or 10 now. I want the 9 since it seems better for me.

My question is, should I install graphene on it right away? I don't wanna have to reset it again down the road. And I don't care about warranties, if it dies I can afford another one.

Graphene seems to support the 9 and 10 from what I'm seeing

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55057321

Hey yall

Had to get an all new furnace and heat pump installed. I opted for the Honewell thermostat. I don't want this thing on my wifi. I don't need to have it connected right?

“They” are saying it has to be on wifi so it can see the outdoor temp to talk to the heat pump. Bullshit i say.

Curious what everyone here uses for their weather app or website of choice ?

Every morning, I do a multiple DNS Leak test just as a precaution. Today, I did the leak test and all my IPs were different. They were the same IP block, just different. This made me suspicious and I set about trying to track the problem down. Turns out, there was a misconfiguration in the VPS. Worked yesterday, different today. I guess it was ghosts or gremlins in the machinery.

I got to thinking, for you guys who download a lot of Linux ISOs, might be a good idea to check daily. Even though you are setting behind a VPN, it's still worth the minute it takes to fire off multiple DNS Leak checks just for a sanity check.