LWD
@LWD@lemm.ee
- Comment on How Do I Protect My Privacy If I’m Seeking an Abortion? 4 days 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) 4 weeks 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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? 3 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 3 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 4 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 4 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. 5 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. 5 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. 6 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. 6 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?
- Comment on PSA: Nova Launcher has been owned by analytics company Branch since 2022 6 months ago:
I can’t type right to save my life. If I want Boost it’ll either come up “Voist” or “Boat” depending on whether I tap or glide. (And switching to a private keyboard has made this more of an uphill battle for me.)
You’ve got me dead to rights about forgetting where things are (besides the home screen), which is why I’m glad my launcher of choice has things organized not just in the Apps drawer, but in folders within them.
I appreciate the insight though. Not everybody’s workflow is going to be the same, and needing X apps at a certain distance will affect different people different ways.
- Comment on PSA: Nova Launcher has been owned by analytics company Branch since 2022 6 months ago:
I’m not really a fan of “clean” and “minimalist” launchers when they get to the point of impeding my productivity. And keeping a curated list can tap into muscle memory, improving speed further.
For example:
I’ve got 13 apps I can launch with a single tap, 13 more one extra swipe away (unless you count the swipe into my app drawer, which would bring it up to ~32 more).
Just something to keep in mind when looking for a launcher: you might want to find your definition of fast. If KISS works for you, all the more power to you. But I lament the lack of FOSS launchers that are more Nova-esque.
- Comment on Are you running a Tor Relay? 6 months ago:
Correct. This is one article that goes over a multi-hop VPN that’s sort of relevant regarding how you, as somebody in the middle of this process, would not see what is being relayed even if you’re closer to the end-user.
(Obviously this isn’t quite as far as Tor goes, but at least it explores the principle.)
- Comment on Are you running a Tor Relay? 6 months ago:
All you need is a web browser running Snowflake to help people connect to Tor!
- Comment on EU tells Meta it can't paywall privacy 6 months ago:
gives us the choice to either pay that or to pay with targeted ads,
Facebook never offered that choice. The only options were
- Free: All of your data gets and used sold (and you get ads)
- Paid: All of your data gets used and sold (except for the stuff that would usually be used to show ads)
- Comment on YSK : Dark patterns among large companies are becoming more mainstream 6 months ago:
How long until that sort of thing goes the way of Bibliogram/Barinsta?
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
Discord communities are inherently gated, Lemmy ones intentionally have everything publicly exposed. A better comparison would be between Discord and Matrix rooms, where privacy expectations could potentially vary tremendously.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
In the US there are several laws about providing abortions to women. If one such group existed on Discord, it could be used by legal, extralegal, and extremist interests to target those women.
Trans people just aren’t official targets of legal discrimination across every US state.
Yet.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
That phrase is more often used as a post-hoc justification for harm, or to gloat, than as a legitimate warning.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
I really don’t like seeing people gloating about harm just because it doesn’t affect them negatively, or treating it as justified because the victims were too stupid to know better.
And this “good” is not correct because the data isn’t for you, even if it was from those projects.
- Comment on Standard notes: what about don’t put all your eggs in one basket rule? 7 months ago:
I bring up “the email incident” because it’s a reminder that Proton may record stuff that’s not encrypted, which includes the vast majority of emails.
And it’s not to say that you wouldn’t trust it with one individual service, but whether it’s wise to trust it with so many services at once, from a security, privacy, and even monetary perspective.
Not every concern is FUD, and I think you’ll start seeing diminishing returns every time you repeat it.
- Comment on Standard notes: what about don’t put all your eggs in one basket rule? 7 months ago:
There’s a lot of metadata Proton passes around, and two of their oldest flagship products (email and VPN) require you to put a lot of trust in one company. For email, you trust them to encrypt them without snooping. For VPN, you trust them to not collect logs about where you’re going.
And in the former case, they were compelled to give up at least a little data in the not-so-distant past.
- Comment on Standard notes: what about don’t put all your eggs in one basket rule? 7 months ago:
Bundles in general are not great…
Companies and businesses benefit from the bundling bias, which usually is an indication that consumers are losing out. By creating bundled packages that people do not fully take advantage of, businesses are getting more money than they usually would and reap a greater profit.
And that’s before we factor in whether it’ll keep people from searching out alternatives thanks to convenience:
The successful deployment of a platform expansion strategy requires leveraging a customer group (composed primarily of end consumers) from one interaction to another, which would entail multiple contractual and technical tactics that differ in their degree of interference with customer choice. The more coercive these tactics are, the more they will resemble the effect that tying and bundling practices have on consumer behavior and thus the more likely to trigger competition law scrutiny.
Companies like Apple also keep people in their ecosystem by offering nice things upfront and then introducing sunk cost issues.
- Comment on Video chat options? 7 months ago:
They posted a reason, but unfortunately the reason was it was getting abused.
But I did discover something: the list of alternative servers, which might not have been very up-to-date anyway, has vanished from their servers sometime after February.
- Comment on Video chat options? 7 months ago:
If you’re looking for something professional, Jitsi is open-source and only requires one person to have an account to use it… You might have a better experience if you self-host or find someone who does.
