LWD
@LWD@lemm.ee
- Comment on Awesome Privacy - A curated list of services and alternatives that respect your privacy 2 days ago:
- To play to your interests: I’m sure Monero has been instrumental in plenty of direct, Israeli money laundering too.
- And if that’s not enough, cryptocurrency broadly is beloved by many venture capitalists and private equity ghouls. It doesn’t need evangelism, which only benefits its investors
Regarding Matrix: it’s like you’re applying the “One Drop” rule. To address misinfo in two places:
Amdocs was divested from Israeli private ownership since the 80s, funded by Bell, and headquartered in Missouri for decades before Matrix began development, Matrix’s team split off entirely a couple years later, and they’re in the UK: they’re a descendant of a diaspora company.
- Comment on Awesome Privacy - A curated list of services and alternatives that respect your privacy 3 days ago:
We all have different priorities, I guess. You might be okay with aiding American money launderers, but draw the line at anything that might have touched Israel.
(PS: It didn’t. Matrixis several degrees of separation from anything Israeli, let alone any government, so you might want to edit that comment.)
- Comment on Awesome Privacy - A curated list of services and alternatives that respect your privacy 3 days ago:
Potentially helpful extra context that makes me extra suspicious when somebody evangelizes it all the time
Monero users can and have been deanonymized by the police. Monero also acts as a de-facto tumbler, meaning by using it, you’re money laundering for criminals as a matter of course.
- Comment on Introducing Privacy Pass authentication for Kagi Search | Kagi Blog 1 week ago:
If you think this is worthy of sharing, please, feel free to share it! Just mention me so I can take a look :)
- Comment on Introducing Privacy Pass authentication for Kagi Search | Kagi Blog 1 week ago:
Frustratingly, doing a search on that Changelog page for sources is mostly full of stuff not relevant to my search.
I did find a different post on Lemmy that talks about it, though. This post is incredibly thorough, and does an excellent job of undoing Kagi’s attempt to memory-hole the information about which sources they use.
This makes it all the more frustrating that Vlad refuses to re-add them, instead asking to know why we would care. Here’s a link to that conversation, which is on a platform controlled by Vlad, which appears to be resistant to archiving services that attempt to fetch those particular comments. Also for posterity:
slamor
Oct 27, 2024
help.kagi.com/kagi/…/search-sources.htmlThere is really no proper information about search sources. We need to know what resources are used and at what rate.
Please make a more detailed and clear edit.
Vlad
Oct 29, 2024
[@]slamor Is there any particular reason you are asking for this? More context will help us better understand the need.slamor
Nov 2, 2024
[@]Vlad why not?Searching through kagi.com for “Yandex” yields a lot of dead links. The one living link is the Changelog, which says they added Yandex to their image search, back in December 2024… But that’s hardly a revelation. The changelog doesn’t go back very far either, AFAIK
As for the other links: Google says these links used to contain it the word, but I don’t know why. Maybe this one was for raised sites, maybe it was for lowered sites, which would at least give a little insight into whether users loved or hated the domain…
url: europe-west2.kagi.com/stats?sd=asc&st=percentage
text: yandex.com. zlibrary.to. androidcentral.com. answer-all.com. baijiahao.baidu.com. cbc.ca. developer.apple.com. eightify.app. github.getafreenode.com. gitmemory …Another result seems to suggest Yandex Images served up a photo of Steve Jobs in a demo search, but that is no longer the case. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.
url: kagi.com/images?q=steve+jobs
text: 564 x 318 yandex.ru. 20 Steve Jobs Quotes: Wisdom from the Apple Co-Founder 20 Steve Jobs Quotes: Wisdom from the Apple Co-Founder. 696 x 418 cioviews.com. 75 … - Comment on Introducing Privacy Pass authentication for Kagi Search | Kagi Blog 1 week ago:
Kagi has been criticized for removing their list of partners - originally, they admitted to partnering with Yandex, but they recently hid that partnership after receiving backlash. I’m not sure if the changelog will reflect that information, but I am curious to check now.
- Comment on Mullvad has partnered with Obscura VPN 1 week ago:
From a tech perspective, it looks promising. In theory, your privacy will be, at very worst, only as bad as the most private actor in a two-hop chain.
In practice, though, Mullvad seems relatively okay with offering a white label version of its services to anybody who asks. And there’s a plus side there, because it means anybody who subscribes to that other service will be part of a larger crowd of Mullvad users in general. And blending in with the crowd is a good way of staying obscured.
- Comment on I Tried CalyxOS For 3 Months (So You Don't Have To) 2 weeks ago:
Seeing the perspective of somebody who’s not particularly well versed in Android forks is interesting, though.
I found the part around 2:45 to be interesting, where the YouTuber says the thought of the OS getting compromised was scary. This is a sort of privacy paradox where Calyx looks worse than other, less honest, alternatives.
Could a rouge employee compromise Calyx? I guess, but Calyx has the best possible setup to avoid it. And Android itself is basically compromised by default, which should be far more concerning. The biggest reason people aren’t concerned is because Google understands PR, and they know how to spin things in the most positive light possible.
- Comment on Reminder for Bitwarden users: Starting in February, users without two-step login (2FA) enabled will need to enter a verification code sent to their email when logging in from an unrecognized device 3 weeks ago:
This sounds like a good change! It’s bound to be frustrating to a lot of people, but it’s good to see protecting your passwords on their servers is the number one goal of this company.
- Comment on Signal will finally let you transfer your encrypted chat history to new linked devices 3 weeks ago:
I don’t see how enabling federation will fix the problem of not knowing what is running on their servers. You’ve just introduced a new problem: other servers, with their own rules, which may also be peppered with requests for data and gag orders.
- Comment on Signal will finally let you transfer your encrypted chat history to new linked devices 3 weeks ago:
This change will impact how you set up Signal on your desktop computer. Previously, after linking your desktop to your phone, you would be presented with basically an empty window.
This change will allow you to, optionally, synchronize your message history from your phone to your desktop, filling it with your previous messages, making it much easier to pick up where you left off with your conversations.
Pictures and videos that were sent will also synchronize, as long as they are from the past month and a half.
- Comment on Privacy Guides Hires Three Staff Members 4 weeks ago:
fake news drama storm
Uh… No?
Proton’s CEO just hijacked the company account, wrote a bunch of stuff that said “Our team” at the beginning. Then he claimed he had accidentally used the wrong account and accidentally spoken for the entire team.
I could have been 100% on board with everything the CEO said, but then his rapid denial of obvious facts is a huge deal in itself. Proton’s entire existence exists upon being trustworthy, and if somebody’s going to clearly lie, trust gets broken fast.
- Comment on Mozilla Firefox removes "Do Not Track" Feature support: Here's what it means for your Privacy 2 months ago:
The linked Global article makes Global Privacy Control sound like DNT… and less global than the label suggests.
Global Privacy Control (GPC) operates as a Do Not Sell mechanism in some US states, such as Colorado, California, and Connecticut. The feature can also indicate an opt-out of targeted advertising or a general request to restrict the sharing or sale of your data.
When you enable the feature, the GPC sends a signal to the websites you visit about your privacy preferences. This signal is intended to give users more control over their data and how the companies can use them online.
This signal is sent via a special HTTP header called DNT: 1 (Do Not Track)
Now I’m about as confused as when Firefox rolled out Total Cookie Protection and it was not particularly total.
- Comment on New website shows you how much Google AI can learn from your photos: Your photos reveal a lot of private information 2 months ago:
That’s an interesting detail!
I’m not surprised this tagging system is imperfect, but in a broader context – that a company like Google probably has something a hundred times more powerful and more accurate, and it’s scanning through people’s whole photo libraries, really adds to their creepy factor.
- Comment on New website shows you how much Google AI can learn from your photos: Your photos reveal a lot of private information 2 months ago:
Well, was the picture at least taken on a Xiaomi? Or is the AI hallucinating metadata now too
- Comment on How Do I Protect My Privacy If I’m Seeking an Abortion? 3 months ago:
Set up a new email on Gmail or Proton Mail
Two words. They could have removed two words and made the instructions infinitely better.
And this is on the web page where, if you tap on it three times, it instantly exits out and goes to DuckDuckGo. Which is pretty neat.
- Comment on Seeking feedback: how should lemm.ee move forward with external images? (related to frequent broken images) 3 months ago:
after many months, and being blocked by more and more external servers, it is clear that image proxying is seriously degrading the user experience
By “external servers,” does that mean external to the Lemmy network itself?
I’m interested how Mastodon handles this, since it is a much more active social network that also encourages media sharing.
- Comment on Google looks to be fully shutting down unsupported extensions and ad blockers in Chrome – which might push some folks to switch to Firefox 4 months ago:
…For now. Looks like they’re going to get rid of it too (which makes sense, because they copy Chromium’s codebase).
- Comment on Google looks to be fully shutting down unsupported extensions and ad blockers in Chrome, such as uBlock Origin – which might push some folks to switch to Firefox 4 months ago:
I think that’s the point: Google has been shutting down Manifest V2 extensions one step at a time, and it’s been experimenting with anti-ad-block tech on YouTube with one user group at a time.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
If a company is unethical, they will ignore the Mozilla standard. If a company is ethical, they don’t need the Mozilla standard, as they can adopt their own tracking-free methods of serving ads.
I have been told repeatedly by Firefox advertisement advocates that PPA only affects people that don’t use ad blockers, so it allegedly only affects people that are already blasted by tracking networks to the fullest extent possible, while people who use ad blockers wouldn’t see the supposedly less invasive ads anyway. So it’s either 100% tracking to 110% tracking, or 0% tracking to 0% tracking. Seems like a lose-lose scenario for both sides of the equation.
- Comment on Improving online advertising through product and infrastructure | The Mozilla Blog 4 months ago:
With all due respect, Mozilla is now (and, for a while, has been) an ad company. When an ad company tells you ads are necessary, you should not trust them. Plenty of lousy things have been entrenched as social norms, but it is the job of the entrenchers to justify their existence… Which Mozilla is definitely not doing here.
- Comment on The Tor Project merges with Tails, a Linux-based portable OS focused on privacy 4 months ago:
Well, I don’t foresee any downsides. Hopefully they can continue making an incredible browser and operating system respectively.
- Comment on If you use Simplelogin with your iCloud email, how has your mileage been? 6 months ago:
Depending how deep you are into using the service, this might be an indicator to start shopping around for other options, as there are some that provide multiple domains and unlimited aliases for the cool price of $0 versus whatever Proton charges you…
…Especially if iCloud makes the other side of the equation difficult.
- Comment on "Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again 7 months ago:
Please explain to me how sending additional data from your private computer to Mozilla servers gives me more privacy and not less.
- Comment on Proton launches privacy-focused Google Docs alternative: Docs in Proton Drive is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted collaborative document editor 7 months ago:
In addition, a lot of Proton services are overpriced compared to third-party offerings.
- Comment on Proton launches privacy-focused Google Docs alternative: Docs in Proton Drive is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted collaborative document editor 7 months ago:
Maybe they could even stop charging subscription fees for client-side features for the people who self-host…
- Comment on Firefox version 126 introduces the collection of search data telemetry. 9 months ago:
Tor is Firefox, why are you calling it “a shit-quality browser” while defending Mozilla so hard
- Comment on Firefox version 126 introduces the collection of search data telemetry. 9 months ago:
It looks like they’re just searching for people who will respond positively to their foregone decision to add the Shopping tool. I don’t know how else to read that post, especially with how the team is interacting with the responses.
(Is that AI-generated spam in the replies too?)
- Comment on Interesting new data on Lemmy instance federation with Threads, ordered by Active Users descending. 9 months ago:
You’re right, it was a mobile UI issue with the columns/column labels.
- Comment on Interesting new data on Lemmy instance federation with Threads, ordered by Active Users descending. 9 months ago:
Any idea why pravda(.)me, with 33 users, is listed as the 4th biggest Mastodon server when I sort by users on that site?