Atemu

Atemu , 24 days ago

Your browser cannot block server-side abuse of your personal data. These consent forms are not about cookies; they're about fooling users into consenting to abuse of their personal data. Cookies are just one of many many technological measures required to carry out said human rights abuse.

Atemu , 26 days ago

Do you have a better source than a 5 y/o comment in an issue?

Atemu , 27 days ago

If you're worried about that, I can recommend a service like Tailscale which does not require permanently open ports to the outside world, offering quite a bit more security than an exposed traditional VPN server.

Atemu , 27 days ago

It's a central server (that you could actually self-host publicly if you wanted to) whose purpose it is to facilitate P2P connections between your devices.

If you were outside your home network and wanted to connect to your server from your laptop, both devices would be connected to the TS server independently. When attempting to send IP packets between the devices, the initiating device (i.e. your laptop) would establish a direct wireguard tunnel to the receiving device. This process is managed by the individual devices while the central TS service merely facilitates communication between the devices for the purpose of establishing this connection.

Atemu , 27 days ago

TS is a lot easier to set up than WG and does not require a publicly accessible IP address nor any public whatsoever. It's not really comparable to setting WG up yourself; especially w.r.t. security.

Atemu , 28 days ago

Good luck packaging new stuff

Packaging is generally hard on any distro.

Compared to a traditional distro, the packaging difficulty distribution is quite skewed with Nix though as packages that follow common conventions are quite a lot easier to package due to the abstractions Nixpkgs has built for said conventions while some packages are near impossible to package due to the unique constraints Nix (rightfully) enforces.

good luck creating new options

Creating options is really simple actually. Had I known you could do that earlier, I would have done so when I was starting out.

Creating good options APIs is an art to be mastered but you don't need to do that to get something going.

good luck cross-compiling

Have you ever tried cross-compiling on a traditional distro? Cross-compiling using Nixpkgs is quite easy in comparison.

actually good luck understanding how to configure existing packages

Yeah, no way to do so other than to read the source.

It's usually quite understandable without knowing the exact details though; just look at the function arguments.

Also beats having no option to configure packages at all. Good luck slightly modifying an Arch package. It has no abstractions for this whatsoever; you have to copy and edit the source. Oh and you need to keep it up to date yourself too.

Gentoo-like standardised flags would be great and are being worked on.

good luck getting any kind of PR merged without the say-so of a chosen few

Hi, one of the "chosen few" here: That's a security feature.

Not a particularly good one, mind you, but a security feature nonetheless.

There's also now a merge bot now running in the wild allowing maintainers of packages to merge automatic updates on their maintained packages though which alleviates this a bit.

have fun understanding why some random package is being installed and/or compiled when you switch to a new configuration.

It can be mysterious sometimes but once you know the tools, you can directly introspect the dependency tree that is core to the concept of Nix and figure out exactly what's happening.

I'm not aware of the existence of any such tools in traditional distros though. What do you do on i.e. Arch if your hourly shot of -Syu goes off and fetches some package you've never seen before due to an update to some other package? Manually look at PKGBUILDs?

Atemu , 28 days ago

;)

Atemu , 27 days ago

As it says on the website, this is still in development and not actually ready for use by mere mortals quite yet. It hopefully will be at some point though as that is its explicit goal.

Atemu , 29 days ago

more and more customary that (for some reason) they want your photo

Gotta keep the people with different skin colour out

Atemu , 29 days ago

What does this have to do with privacy? It's just a userscript to modify the regular Twitter website with all its human rights abuse.

Atemu , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

They're in the middle of a rollout of a rewrite and have promised to publish the source soon.

Atemu , 28 days ago

Right from the horse's mouth ;)

https://mastodon.social/users/protonprivacy/statuses/112162248226735964

Atemu , 1 month ago

Yes, yes they will. If you're the sole user, they'd identify you from your behaviour anyways.

I don't think internet proxy won't help very much w.r.t. privacy but it will make you a lot more susceptible to being blocked.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Usually, fundamental rights cannot be "sold"

It's really quite perverse if you think about it.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Pretty sure it's even inside a secure element; inaccessible to even the OS.

Atemu , 1 month ago

I used to not but I wish I did. I want to know where pictures were taken. Photo album software like Immich can also make cool maps out of your photos this way and group photos by location.

As long as you're not sharing the pictures with anyone, there is no loss of privacy whatsoever in doing this. I don't see any reason to generally label it as "not great for privacy".

When sharing publicly, you need to be careful of course and run the images through an EXIF metadata stripper.

Atemu , 1 month ago

They should register a trade mark.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Typing anything in another window that is not my browser

Which windows exactly? The apps you're typing things into might be spying on you.

M$ and their 738 parters really value your privacy, so if you're typing things into Excel...

copypasting the words "trans" and "talking"

What applications were running on your computer while you did this? Any of them could be recording clipboard history; it requires no special privilege.

Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Windows itself was recording this and sent it to daddy M$ to train LLMs and maybe sell it as a little multi-billion side hustle.

transgender videos about "How to change your voice" start popping up in my feed. Please know I have zero interest in transgender politics/culture/anything, it is not something I have ever searched for or engaged in online.

Maybe Google knows something you don't? JK.

A more plausible explanation is that Google knows that you're in the Fediverse (ever Googled it?) which has a far above average concentration of queer people.

What is also plausible is that someone living with you (i.e. your family) or a friend is trans and you're obviously associated with them.

Google doesn't recommend queer content because they think you're queer but because it's what their data-defined statistical algorithms (""AI"") predicts you are likely to be interested in and therefore watch ads for. If you know a queer person or are often in contact with them, you are simply quite a bit more likely to be interested in queer people than the average and therefore more likely to click on queer content.

Possible that Youtube is reading my clipboard? Reading my keystrokes?

Youtube itself? Near impossible.

Other applications? Possible but likelihood unknown.

Listening to an album via VLC, while Youtube is open in my browser. Suddenly, more tracks from that album start showing up in my suggested feed. Possible Youtube is reading the titles of other apps current open on my machine? (VLC changes its active title to the name of whatever file is currently open)

Again, Youtube itself directly isn't doing anything like this. If that album is related to what you were listening to on YT or is even simply also popular with people who listed to the same things on YT as you do or are just generally similar to your person; that's all it takes for YT to attempt to show it to you.

Also note again that any application on your Windows or Linux PC can read the window titles of any other application or even simply scan your media library or other files.

Discord does this for instance for their rich presence function for instance and I would again not be surprised if there was a little multi-billion side-hustle going on.

I use Youtube all the time as my personal version of Spotify.

If you're not reliant on YT's recommendations, I'd recommend you to download the songs you want to listen to and listen to them on a local player.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Then for a day and a half after I was working on that spreadsheet, it showed up at the top of the suggested videos.

Again, which applications had access to your clipboard and user files at that time? If any of the applications running on your computer was stealing your data and selling it for financial gain, Google would likely be buying it and obviously using it against you.

You also have to consider side-channels. Were you or your friends talking about that spreadsheet project via Discord or some other known abuser? Did you talk about it with a person in your room while daddy Google or Amazon were listening? (Alexa in the room, Google assistant on your phone etc.)

in short: years of nothing, nothing, nothing, TWO DAYS OF TRANS VIDEO SUGGESTIONS, and then since, nothing, nothing, nothing.

This might simply be expectation bias. You may have been shown such suggestions in the same pattern before and simply didn't notice because, contrary to the present, the topic wasn't on your mind and simply forgot about it because you're being shown irrelevant suggested topics all the time.

Even after reading a lot of people telling me that it is just The Algo^TM^ at work, that incident seems so razor specific to activity I was simply doing on my computer at the same time Youtube was open rather than anything that could be related to my personal interests.

That's how "The Algo^TM^" works. Google gathers data on you directly through its applications, from 3rd parties selling data they stole from you and indirectly through the same process from people you associate with.
It's even possible that some data broker simply made up the fact that you're trans. Google could have then assumed it's true because you associate with trans people here. I could very well see that happen in an enshittified system such as Google.

Atemu , 1 month ago

And a ton of historical content.

Atemu , 1 month ago

You activated my trap card!

It's entierly based on the excellent org-mode for Emacs.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Edge is so privileged you can't remove it... well, you kinda just can't remove it..

That will have to change with the DMA becuase otherwise M$ will get ...a really big slap on the wrist or something.

Atemu , 1 month ago

internet chromesplorer

I'm stealing that.

Atemu , 1 month ago

That whole situation was such an overblown idiotic mess. Kagi has always used indices from companies that do far more unethical things than committing the extreme crime of having a CEO who has stupid opinions on human rights.
I 100% agree with Vlad's response to this whole thing and anyone who thinks otherwise should question what exactly it is they're criticising.

I don't like Brave (super shady IMHO) and certainly not their CEO but I didn't sign up for a 100% ethically correct search engine, I signed up for a search engine with innovative features and good search results. The only viable alternatives are to use 100% not ethically correct search indices with meh (Google) to bad (Bing, DDG) search results. If you're going to tell me how Google and M$ are somehow ethical, I'm going to have to laugh at you.

The whole argument amounts to whining about the status quo and bashing the one company that tries anything to change it. The only way to get away from the Google monopoly is alternative indices. Yes those alternatives may not be much more ethical than friggin Google. So what.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Your search results look very different to mine:

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/01eae1b8-2367-4533-a739-a59b944b4946.png

Did you disable Grouped Results?

All the LLM-generated "top 10" listicles are grouped into one large block I can safely ignore. (I could hide them entirely but the visual grouping allows for easy mental filtering, so I haven't bothered.) Your weird top10 fake site does not show up.

But yes, as the linked article says, Kagi is primarily a proxy for Google with some extra on top. This is, unfortunately, a feature as Google's index still reigns supreme for general purpose search. It absolutely is bad and getting worse but sadly still the best you can get. Using only non-Google indices would just result in bad search results.
The Google-ness is somewhat mitigated by Kagi-exclusive features such as the LLM garbage grouping.

What Google also cannot do is highlighted in my screenshot: You can customise filtering and ranking.
The first search result is a Reddit thread with some decent discussion because I configured Kagi to prefer Reddit search results. In the case of household appliances, this doesn't do a whole lot as I have not researched trusted/untrusted sources in this field yet but it's very noticeable in fields like programming where I have manually ranked sites.

Kagi is not "all about" privacy. It's a factor, sure but ultimately you still have to trust a U.S. company. Better than "trusting" a known abuser (Google, M$) but without an external audit, I wouldn't put too much wight into this.
The index ain't it either as it's mostly Google though sometimes a bit better.
What really sets it apart is the features. Customised ranking aswell as blocking some sites outright (bye bye pinterest and userbenchmark) are immensely useful. So are filtering garbage results that Google still likes to return.

Atemu , 1 month ago

I personally have not found Kagi’s default search results to be all that impressive

At their worst, they're as bad as Google's. For me however, this is a great improvement over using bing/Google proxies which would be the alternative.

maybe if I took the time to customize, I might feel differently.

That's the killer feature IMHO.

Atemu , 1 month ago

I think you're underestimating how huge of an undertaking a half-decent search index is, much less a good one.

Atemu , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Whether this is bad depends on your threat model. Additionally, you must also consider that other search engines are able to easily identify you without you explicitly identifying yourself. If you can't fool https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/, you certainly can't fool Google for instance. And that's even ignoring the immense identifying potential of user behaviour.

Billing supports OpenNode AFAICT which I guess you could funnel your Moneros through but meh.

Edit: Phrasing.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Is "Grouped Results" disabled in settings?

Atemu , 1 month ago

Non-android mobile Linux is not mature enough yet.

Atemu , 1 month ago

By the fact that none of the apps I use day-to-day on my Android phone have viable alternatives on non-Android Linux.

I'd have to run Android inside a container on the mobile Linux which isn't the best experience and if I need to have Android running anyways, might aswell use regular android.

While it'd be cool to have, I don't really need a proper freedesktop userspace on my phone if I'm honest.

Android is also simply leagues ahead in mobile UI things.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Exodus shows all permissions the app could use or request. You have denied all of those.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Note that the web clients are all GPLv3: https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients

It's only the mobile apps of the auxillary services (drive, pass etc.) that are proprietary. And I don't get why either because it wouldn't hurt them one bit.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Oh, indeed! They're under different orgs; that confused me.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Mine stopped working.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Security knowledge and ethical concerns are two separate things. Whether we like it or not, we pay online creators through private data we must give to entities who will use it against our best interests.

Atemu , 1 month ago

What a great argument! You didn't even read the first sentence...

It isn’t an ethical concern and hasn’t been since the 90s.

You'll have to explain to me how not compensating someone for their work has been ethical since the 90s.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Cool story bro but you clearly still didn't even read the first sentence of what I wrote.

Atemu , 1 month ago

Yes and that's precisely the point. You can make the decision not to pay and there are good reasons to do so (I do so too) but you must recognise that someone is still not getting paid for their work.

Atemu , 1 month ago

To the person receiving the money, it is worth it. Else they wouldn't be doing it.

Atemu , 1 month ago

I do like the idea of using USB drives for storage, though…

I wholeheartedly don't.

Atemu , 1 month ago

You don't use HTTP or SOCKS proxies to proxy internet traffic these days but VPNs. The effect is the same but it's a shiny new name to market. If you're talking to a normie (i.e. Google), you're looking for "a VPN".

This space is quite crowded as it's a super simple service to offer and is insanely profitable. You're basically being resold datacenter bandwidth with a profit margin of at least 90%.

What you're likely looking for (given the community) is a proxy to pseudonymise your internet traffic such that neither data brokers nor governments can trivially get access to this information.

Given the insane profit margin, there are tonnes of unscrupulous "VPN services" that stab you in the back and double dip; selling your traffic data to the highest bidder. If you want one who doesn't do that, you must pay and even then you have to be extremely careful in your selection. Unless proven otherwise or very implausible, assume any VPN proxy provider stabs you in the back for even higher profits.

The only exception I know of is ProtonVPN which offers limited free servers. The free tier is effectively a free trial with some limitations, namely that it's only a handful of countries and that P2P is blocked. I've used it for years and IME speed has almost always been absolutely fine.

Whether you trust Proton is up to you to decide. IMV the company does not appear to be in this primarily for enrichment but because they actually care about privacy. They offer quite a wide range of other services that they built from the ground up and largely open sourced. The raison d'être for their free VPN proxies appears to be customer aquisition and I guess it worked on me because I'm now a paying customer of theirs, though primarily for their email services.

Note that they comply with (Swiss) government orders (as any sustainable business must) but I trust them to not sell my data to the highest bidder or governments which is what I care about. If you're doing shit bad enough that could get someone to convince the Swiss government to go after you, they will not shield you (but also just.. please don't).

Atemu , 1 month ago

Well that depends on how you define malware ;)

Atemu , 1 month ago

They are quite solid but be aware that the web UI is dog slow and the menus weirdly designed.

Atemu , 1 month ago

There's a large difference between surrendering massive amounts of highly critical metadata aswell as some data* to a known abuser vs. an entity that prides itself in not abusing your data and which even takes specific technological measures to make it as hard for them as possible (zero access encryption at rest, automatic key discovery).

(* Partial social graph, interaction timestamps, political interests, health, hobby interests and much of that usually even in plain text data form when receiving email; stored in in plain text forever.)

Atemu , 1 month ago

Thanks for the answer :)

Google play appears to be delivering the 4.0.6 (8308) update to me already, is that intended?

Atemu , 1 month ago

Just try a default Firefox. Though if you want to use TOR anyways, why not just use TOR browser? It's the only browser where the starting conditions are reasonably anonymous.

Atemu , 28 days ago

The writer will need to tag things down, to minimal details, for the sake of languages that they don’t care about.

Sure and that's likely a good bit of work.

However, you must consider the alternative which is translating the entire text to dozens of languages and doing the same for any update done to said text. I'd assume that to be even more work by at least one order of magnitude.

Many languages are quite similar to another. An article written in the hypothetical abstract language and tuned on an abstract level to produce good results in German would likely produce good results in Dutch too and likely wouldn't need much tweaking for good results in e.g. English. This has the potential to save ton of work.

This issue affects languages as a whole, and sometimes in ways that you can’t arbitrate through a fixed writing style because they convey meaning.

The point of the abstract language would be to convey the meaning without requiring a language-specific writing style. The language-specific writing style to convey the specified meaning would be up to the language-specific "renderers".

(For example: if you don’t encode the social gender into the 3rd person pronouns, English breaks.)

That's up to the English "renderer" to do. If it decides to use a pronoun for e.g. a subject that identifies as male, it'd use "he". All the abstract language's "sentence" would contain is the concept of a male-identifying subject. (It probably shouldn't even encode the fact that a pronoun is used as usage of pronouns instead of nouns is also language-specific. Though I guess it could be an optional tag.)

Often there’s no such thing as the “default”. The example with pig/pork is one of those cases - if whoever is writing the article doesn’t account for the fact that English uses two concepts (pig vs. pork) for what Spanish uses one (cerdo = puerco etc.), and assumes the default (“pig”), you’ll end with stuff like *“pig consumption has increased” (i.e. “pork consumption has decreased”). And the abstraction layer has no way to know if the human is talking about some living animal or its flesh.

No, that'd simply be a mistake in building the abstract sentence. The concept of a pig was used rather than the concept of edible meat made from pig which would have been the correct subject to use in this sentence.

Mistakes like this will happen and I'd even consider them likely to happen but the cool thing here is that "pig consumption has increased", while obviously slightly wrong, would still be quite comprehensible. That's an insane advantage considering that this would apply to any language for which a generic "renderer" was implemented.

---

It ends like that story about a map so large that it represents the terrain accurately being as big as the terrain, thus useless.

As I said in the top, you’ll end with a “map” that is as large as the “terrain”, thus useless. (Or: spending way more effort explicitly describing all concepts that it’s simply easier to translate it by hand.)

I don't see how that would necessarily be the case. Most sentences on Wikipedia are of descriptive nature and follow rather simple structures; only complicated further for the purpose of aiding text flow. Let's take the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on Lemmy:

Lemmy is a free and open-source software for running self-hosted social news aggregation and discussion forums.

This could be represented in a hypothetical abstract sentence like this:

(explanation
 (proper-noun "lemmy")
 (software-facilitating
  :kind FOSS
  :purpose (purposes
            (apply-property 'self-hosted '(news-aggregation-platform discussion-forum)))))

(IDK why I chose lisp to represent this but it felt surprisingly natural.)

What this says is that this sentence explains the concept of lemmy by equating it with the concept of a software which facilitates the combination of multiple purposes.

A language-specific "renderer" such as the English one would then take this abstract representation and turn it into an English sentence:

The concept of an explanation of a thing would then be turned into an explanation sentence. Explanation sentences depend on what it is that is being explained. In this case, the subject is specifically marked as a proper noun which is usually explained using a structure like "<explained thing> is <explanation>". (An explanation for a different type of word could use a different structure.)
Because it's a proper noun and at the beginning of a sentence, "Lemmy" would be capitalised.

Next the explanation part which is declared as a concept of being software of the kind FOSS facilitating some purpose. The combined concept of an object and its purpose is represented as "<object> for the purpose of <purpose>" in English. The object is FOSS here and specifically a software facilitating some purpose, so the English "renderer" can expand this into "free and open-source software for the purpose of facilitating <purpose>".

The purpose given is the purpose of having multiple purposes and this concept simply combines multiple purposes into one.
The purposes are two objects to which a property has been applied. In English, the concept of applying a property is represented as as "a <property as adjective> <object>", so in this case "a self-hosted news-aggregation platform" and "a self-hosted online discussion forum". These purposes are then combined using the standard English method of combining multiple objects which is listing them: "a self-hosted news-aggregation platform and a self-hosted online discussion forum". Because both purposes have the same adjective applied, the English "renderer" would likely make the stylistic choice of implicitly applying it to both which is permitted in English: "a self-hosted news-aggregation platform and online discussion forum".

It would then be able to piece together this English sentence: "Lemmy is a free and open source software for the purposes of facilitating a self-hosted news-aggregation platform and online discussion forum.".

You could be even more specific in the abstract sentence in order to get exactly the original sentence but this is also a perfectly valid sentence for explaining Lemmy in English. All just from declaring concepts in an abstract way and transforming that abstract representation into natural language text using static rules.