I’d like to process some Microsoft Word documents on my android tab. Do you have any recommendations on FOSS word editors that work with .doc and .docx on android?

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8330182

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/44825

military contractor Palantir is helping the IRS analyze dozens of different data sets on Americans to investigate a broad range of financial crimes, according to records shared with The Intercept.

Since 2018, the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division has used Palantir’s Lead and Case Analytics platform to aggregate and analyze a sprawling list of sensitive federal databases and data sets.

Public records detailing Palantir’s IRS contract, obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight and shared exclusively with The Intercept, reveal the immense volume of data plugged into the military contractor’s software. The LCA uses both Palantir’s Gotham and Foundry applications to facilitate “analysis of massive-scale data to find the needle in the hay stack,” the contract paperwork says.

Documents indicate the IRS has paid Palantir over $130 million for these services to date.

Palantir’s LCA is ostensibly directed toward cracking down on fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes. According to a 2024 agency privacy impact assessment, IRS “Special agents and investigative analysts … utilize the platform to find, analyze, and visualize connections between disparate sets of data to generate leads, identify schemes, uncover tax fraud, and conduct money laundering and forfeiture investigative activities.”

[

Related

Trump Wants to Put You in a Massive, Secret Government Database](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/17/government-surveillance-centralized-database-privacy/)

The IRS use of the software, launched under Trump’s first term and expanded under Biden, is now in the hands of an IRS Criminal Investigations office that has drastically scaled back its pursuit of tax cheats and pivoted, under Trump’s direction, toward investigating “left-leaning groups,” the Wall Street Journal reported in October.

“The real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency — especially one built and operated by a contractor like Palantir, whose business model is premised on integrating data and expanding surveillance capabilities,” American Oversight director Chioma Chukwu said in a statement to The Intercept. “Its platforms have been used in deeply troubling contexts, from immigration enforcement to predictive policing, with persistent concerns about overreach, bias, and weak oversight.”

Palantir did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the IRS.

“The real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency — especially one built and operated by a contractor like Palantir.”

The contract documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that these “disparate sets of data” are vast. Palantir’s LCA allows the IRS to quickly search and visualize “connections from millions of records with thousands of links” between databases maintained by the IRS and other federal agencies. According to the contract documents, this data includes individual tax form and tax returns as well as Affordable Care Act data, bank statements, and transactions, and “all available” data compiled by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Its view apparently extends to cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple. “The application would sit on top of a singular repository of identified wallets from seized servers utilizing dark web data obtained from exchangers such as Coinbase,” the documents note.

The program places an emphasis on mapping social relationships between the targets of an investigation. That includes analyzing a “network of people and the relationships and communications between them,” such as “calls, texts, [and] emails events.” The use of “IP address analysis” within LCA allows the IRS to “Identify suspects more easily” and “Establish (new) relationships among actors.”

These investigative functions are continuously updated, the materials say, through ongoing close work between Palantir engineers and IRS personnel.

[

Related

Palantir Will No Longer Profit Off of New Yorkers’ Health Data](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/24/palantir-new-york-city-hospitals-contract/)

The intermingling of sensitive data on millions of Americans comes at a time of increased global skepticism and opposition toward Palantir, which, despite its military-intelligence origins, has a thriving business with civilian agencies like the IRS. The use of Palantir software at the U.K.’s National Health Service, for example, has created an ongoing political controversy across Britain, while a similar contract with the New York City public hospital network was recently canceled following public protest.

The contract is also active at a time when IRS Criminal Investigations has been coopted to aid in the broader Trump administration’s aggressive agenda. In July, ProPublica reported that the agency was working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide “on demand” data to accelerate deportations. Last year, the New York Times reported that Palantir, founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel, was central to an administration effort to increase data-sharing across federal agencies.

“The question isn’t just what it can do — it’s who it will be used against.”

The company’s right-wing politics and eagerness to facilitate U.S. and Israeli military aggression abroad, NSA global surveillance, and ICE deportations has also made many weary of its access to incredibly sensitive personal data. A recent post on the company’s Palantir’s X account summarizing a book by CEO Alex Karp triggered an immediate backlash from those unnerved by the manifesto’s fascistic bent. The bullet points extolled the virtue of arms manufacturing, argued the Axis powers were unfairly punished after World War II, called for a reinstatement of the draft, condemned cultural pluralism, and claimed that wealthy elites are unfairly persecuted.

“When the government can map relationships, track behavior, and generate investigative leads across data sets at this scale, the question isn’t just what it can do — it’s who it will be used against,” Chukwu said. “Entrusting that infrastructure to a company known for opaque, security-state deployments only heightens those risks.”

The post Palantir Is Helping Trump’s IRS Conduct “Massive-Scale” Data Mining appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

Let's say, I sit down in a mall, open my laptop and connect to a secured mobile hotspot. Then I do it again next week after a reboot. What information would a nearby shop or a passive malicious hacker be able to find about my device? Does my device send out identifying information before joining, like a MAC address? Is this persistent, or randomized?

I intentionally haven't specified a distro, so if something only applies to some network managers, give some details.

Bonus points: what about Android phones?

Hi,

I have developed a foss program that ciphers data. Target audiences are groups of non-tech savvy activists, not able or not willing to use programs such as Kleopatra or Veracrypt, that need to protect highly sensitive data that needs to be accessed after an unknown amount of time (could be weeks or months, i.e. only in case of emergency). An example are antirepressive files in case of arrest, that provide the arrestee's colleagues with instructions on the arrestee's needs (medication, pets to take care of, lawyer to contact etc.). In this example, threat actors are primarily authoritarian governments.

The program consists of a serverless HTML file intended to be used in Tails in the Tor Browser, and it offers a symmetric and an asymmetric cipher mode, and an asymmetric cipher mode that includes Shamir's secret sharing for the decipher key.

It also has some extra features such as the option to export and import data from/to QR codes, and set default text fields (among other). The collective asymmetric cipher mode (the one with Shamir's secret sharing), as you can see in the docs, is made to target the threat vector of police infiltrators or collaborators.

I have detailed the cryptographic processes as diagrams and other info in the repo:

https://0xacab.org/gilare/cinf/-/blob/no-masters/docs/asymmetric-collective.md

https://0xacab.org/gilare/cinf/-/blob/no-masters/docs/asymmetric.md

https://0xacab.org/gilare/cinf/-/blob/no-masters/docs/symmetric.md

The program is meant to be used collectively: e.g. a group of activists manage their files through a single key pair.

It would be awesome if somebody could take a look at the cryptographic processes and provide feedback, last thing I want to do is provide insecure software to my friends and other activists, and I want to make sure I have not made a mistake somewhere. This is not the first review iteration, but I just want to be completely sure before I mark my software as production ready.

If you know somebody that has the needed knowledge to review this I would greatly appreciate it if you could ask them to take a look <3

A demo: https://gilare.itcouldbewor.se/cinf/

What the actual fuck. How can we trust any third party app ever? I guess we can’t.

hello,

TLDR: just enable DoH

Today, my friend and I were talking about SNI and deep packet analysis shit done by the government. I insisted that since they do this kind of shit they can block access to certain sites like TPB and other freedom websites. he suggested that I just enable DoH in firefox and see the magic happen. I didn't believe him until I enabled DoH and magic. I can access every censored website.

so just saying that sometimes the bypass is much simpler than we think!

also I am thinking that even if the DNS request is encrypted cant they see the TLS client hello message and block it? or is it impossible?

Hard to believe it's real, but it is. Developed at MIT.

From the company's website: "Your thoughts stay private. AlterEgo only responds to intentional, silent speech. Your private thoughts stay private, and you direct every interaction."

But that assertion assumes people can fully control their thoughts.

There are "neural rights" privacy experts who are heavily debating this tech. The nation of Chile went so far as to protect neural rights in their constitution.

https://www.alterego.io/

https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/alterego/frequently-asked-questions/#faq-how-does-the-system-work

Learned about this app today. Anyone tried it? What do you think?

We have just shared our Spring and Summer 2026 roadmaps, outlining our commitments for improvements and new features across the Proton ecosystem. 

Here is a summary of planned updates:

Proton Mail

• Introduction of a category view to automatically sort emails by type
• Multi-inbox management, including sending and receiving Gmail messages within Proton Mail
• Improved mobile search with full email body indexing performed on-device

Proton Calendar

• Complete rewrite of the application
• Planned support for offline mode and a modernized user experience
• Proton as your default calendar on Android
• New foundation to support additional features

Proton VPN

• New WireGuard-based codebase to improve speed, stability, and anti-censorship capabilities
• Beta rollout planned for Windows and Android, followed by macOS, iOS, and Linux
• Updated Linux interface and support for Stealth protocol
• Connection preference exclusions planned for Windows

Proton Pass

• Introduction of folders for organizing passwords, notes, and aliases
• SSH agent support for simpler authentication in developer workflows
• Improved autofill with enhanced URL matching and iFrame support

Proton Drive

• Performance improvements have already been deployed for shared file downloads and uploads
• Additional speed improvements planned
• macOS document and folder synchronization
• SDK rollout across platforms
• Our Linux application will be worked on during this period too

Proton Docs and Sheets

• Ongoing usability and collaboration improvements
• Table of contents and other requested features for Docs
• Expanded functionality for Sheets
• Shared Drive for teams

Lumo AI

• Planned update with improved memory and customization options
• Desktop application in development, a central hub for Lumo
• Lumo API planned for organizational use

Read more: https://proton.me/blog/2026-spring-summer-roadmaps 

Everything we've released in the last year, including our new products and every new feature for our core services, has been possible because of your support. 

As an independent, European alternative to Big Tech, we see building a private ecosystem of apps as a reclamation of our rights to privacy on the internet and a reminder that there's a better way to build tech: for people, not profit.

Your investment in our mission is what helps us make better products. Feedback is invaluable to our teams, so let us know on Discord, X, Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, Telegram, Reddit, and UserVoice, or leave us a review in the App Store or Play Store. 

Thank you for helping us build a more private internet, and we'll see you in the fall for our next roadmap updates.

Stay Safe,
Proton Team

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/38803374

I can't. I just can't.

School computers are riddled with spyware & proprietary software, the fact that they use windows is bad enough, but then you are forced to use edge or chrome and other proprietary software and often you are blocked from installing open source alternatives like librewolf or duck duck go may be blocked.

What I am asking is, how can we get around this, do i just need to bring my own laptop using FOSS privacy respecting software. or is there another way around this. Thanks for the help.

Any good Music Identifiers that respects users privacy?

Sometimes I hear a song, like it but have no idea what it's called

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/46090636

How FB wiretapped millions with a VPN

I didn't post what their Twitter post on their points or commandments or whatever were that espoused hard power and techno slavery and white supremacy.

Link to the bitwarden post https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-statement-on-checkmarx-supply-chain-incident/96127

This read is interesting and makes me wonder how can we fight back. I don't undrstand much of this but what i have figured out is that its based on tracking phone IMEI. Presumably OSs like GrapheneOS cannot spoof the IMEI because its used to route traffic to your phone isn't it? I know it can use a different MAC for different eifi connections, trace reducing the footprints you leave behind but i guess it can't do this for IMEI?

I’m going to do my best to word this question carefully. I’m not privacy expert and maybe no more than an idiot. I do want to protect myself online.

Which led me to privacy focused cloud based premium solutions. The idea is you can pay for a service so they don’t need to serve ads and scan your data for profit. Services like Kagi , Proton among others offer services for a fee. These services let you pay with a credit card .

My question is , are these services really that private if they have your payment information ? Does it really make sense to pay to not be tracked but still have your information on file and linked to you ?

Is this more of an argument of privacy vs anonymity? Am I looking at this wrong ?

I understand the ultimate privacy is self hosted but for some things like search that limits options. I understand there is crypto for some of these options. But bitcoin isn’t cheap.

Curious to get others thoughts on this ? Please be respectful i am trying to learn…

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45982891

The government has big plans for Mark Zuckerberg’s pervert glasses!