Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

LWD

@LWD@lemm.ee

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

How to sign up services without phone number?

Hello all, recently wanted to signup for temporary permanent legit emailmid in gmail. It was asking me Phone number in process, i tried to use multiple numbers from regular online resources ( more than 30) but nothing worked. I don't want to give my personal phone number in real life to someone's unless Its I want to....

LWD ,

The email masking is free and pretty solid, I use it for many/most of my accounts.

The phone number making is all right and has worked well enough for me to pay for premium a couple times.

The card masking is too pricey and complicated for me, so I generally don't use it unless absolutely necessary. There are better options.

LWD ,

Wouldn't this also cause them to charge more to make up for lost paying customers? 🤔

LWD ,

So either Mullvad told a fib and got the email thing fixed within 24 days, or they actually were working on it earlier. Either way, not bad.

Inside the shifting plan at Elon Musk’s X to build a new team and police a platform ‘so toxic it’s almost unrecognizable’ (fortune.com)

Inside the shifting plan at Elon Musk’s X to build a new team and police a platform ‘so toxic it’s almost unrecognizable’::X's trust and safety center was planned for over a year and is significantly smaller than the initially envisioned 500-person team.

LWD ,

I trust Linda to run Twitter the same way I trust Ashley to run Vought: responsibility and without deference to a creep with a god complex

LWD ,

These days, several tiny PCs have prices that compete with the Raspberry Pi, and significantly beefier specs. Of course, by that point, we're talking about things that run around $100.

LWD ,

Is this Facebook?

LWD ,

I guess I appreciate that there's a "reject all" button and it's not grayed out... Not sure if it's because they were required to not hide it, though.

LWD ,

I'm just surprised it's not obscured by a dark pattern (making the opt-out button "less eye-catching" to paraphrase a different article)

Zuckerberg Brags About How Your Facebook, Instagram Posts Will Power His AI (gizmodo.com)

Instagram and Facebook have addicted users for the last 20 years, making sure to monetize us through advertisers every step of the way. Now, they’re revisiting your old posts, your special moments, and your big life updates, and using it to create billion-dollar AI tools. Zuckerberg’s braggadocious claim about Meta’s very...

LWD ,

Probably 20% faster at figuring out the meaning of phrases like "kill you in Minecraft", minus the ability to understand the context of a joke

LWD ,

The hardest selling point of the Fediverse regarding AI is that it is the most scrapable form of social media. To companies like Facebook and Twitter, it offers up its data on a silver platter with well documented and limitless APIs.

LWD ,

They're reselling it for $13.99/monthly or $107.88/annually.

So it's cheaper if you buy it for just one month at a time, but more expensive for the annual subscription... And there are other alternatives besides.

LWD ,

The CEO is making an inordinate amount of money. $6.9 million is excessive.

You can argue that Mozilla should be held to the same low standard as every other corporation, but if you do that, you have to take into account that the Mozilla CEO got a huge pay raise in a year where other CEOs got less money.

LWD ,

A $2 million raise just made the CEO worse at running Mozilla. Honestly, if you think the company should hemorrhage money that rapidly, who's the one that hates it?

LWD , (edited )

The price isn't unheard of, but it's got plenty of competition. A few competitors from AlternativeTo:

Service price/year
EasyOptOuts $19.99
Optery $39.00 - 249.00
PrivacyHawk $74.99
Incogni $77.88
OneRep* $99.96
Mozilla $107.88
DeleteMe $129.00
PrivacyBee $197.00

* Mozilla is selling a repackaged version of OneRep, charging more per year but a little less per month

Mozilla also has at least one product in their toolbelt that gives them the ability to resell private data to ad brokers, and it's managed by the same DPO as other Mozilla products...

Category of data Mozilla sells to...
Browsing history Advertising partners
Search history Advertising partners
Your device's precise location Advertising partners
Records of personal property, products or services purchased, obtained, or considered Advertising partners
Other purchasing or consuming histories or tendencies Advertising partners
Inferences drawn from other personal information to create a profile Advertising partners

I wonder... If you sign up for this service, will Mozilla opt you out of these sales?

LWD ,

Sometimes, sticking to just one or two apps might be better. I was thinking of posting this 2019 article about Private Internet Access, but decided against it because it was a little outdated and somewhat well-known... But a comment can't hurt, right?

Kape Technologies was originally found under the name of Crossrider in 2011 developing advertising apps until they changed their name in 2018. However, their software was treated as malware by companies such as Malwarebytes and Symantec begging one to ask, how can such a company despite rebranding itself change the shoddy culture that it had?

But the connections don’t end there. The very first CEO of Crossrider, Koby Menachemi, happened to be once a part of Unit 8200 which is an Israeli Intelligence Unit in their military and has also been dubbed as “Israel’s NSA “. Teddy Sagi, one of the company’s investors was mentioned in the Panama Papers which were leaked in 2016.

https://www.hackread.com/private-internet-access-pia-vpn-sold-israel-privacy-concerns/

LWD ,

I was in the same boat as you, I bought it before they sold out... But obviously you can't return it at that point

LWD ,

Simple Mobile Tool

A group of simple, open source Android apps without ads and unnecessary permissions, with customizable colors.

From the Play Store, emphasis mine.

LWD ,

If possible, F-Droid could/should be used as your first stop for looking for a particular app or type of app. Obviously you won't find Tumblr on there, but it's got you covered for replacement apps for things like SMS messages, a photo gallery, a calculator, flashlight, notepad, file editor... You get the idea.

LWD ,

Based on that one Senate hearing, it looks like big companies like Facebook, Discord and Twitter are aiming for the maximum percent of false positives and false negatives when it comes to CSAM.

The only thing I know about that screenshot is that it used to say "show results anyway" which is probably worse in most cases

LWD ,

Unfortunately, I don't think so. Most of the politicians were virtue signaling, asking questions that were impossible and demanding timetables that they weren't going to get anyway. One woman actually had some half decent data prepared, but I don't think anybody else was really taking it seriously.

Now if there was some legislation passed, specifically stuff that wasn't KOSA, that would be something else. KOSA seems prepped to simply destroy free speech on the internet, and it would mostly harm smaller social media networks that don't have lawyers and around-the-clock moderators to police every single comment and post.

LWD , (edited )

The first version of Opera was shareware (i.e. paid and free)

Edit: AtariDump is a troll, but to people who aren't:

The old adage "If you don't pay for the product, you are the product" is often true.

LWD ,

Does this comparison actually take into account whether you are using the same tabs on both browsers and keeping them in the same state?

I've noticed, for example, that in chromium, I can permanently increase CPU usage just by opening a console in a tab and leaving it alone in the background, even if the tab itself is doing nothing.

If both browsers have the exact same number of tabs open, I would question why one has around 40 processes and one has around 20. That number should correspond roughly to the number of tabs/extensions you have open.

LWD , (edited )

You serious?

NCSA Mosaic, free only for personal use. Dominated the market.

Netscape Navigator, cost money for personal use. Dominated the market even longer.

Netscape Navigator costing money -- $60 worth originally

And if we look past you being wrong, I don't even know what point you're trying to make. Microsoft Internet Explorer was free in the '90s, and it was due to Microsoft trying to wipe out the competition through monopoly.

LWD ,

I'm glad to hear you figured it out. I was also curious about tab suspension, a feature that's built into Chrome and similar browsers, but it sounds like you figured out the biggest issue

LWD , (edited )

Couldn't be bothered to read a couple more sentences?

However, two months later, the company announced that only educational and non-profit institutions could use version 1.0 at no charge.

Or if you're more of a visual learner...

Update: and then AtariDump dishonestly changes the timeline and the goalposts. Glad I wasted my time on the troll

LWD , (edited )

Couldn't be bothered to read a couple more sentences?

Nope

Oh cool. You're a troll.

LWD , (edited )

Troll.

LWD ,

There definitely was some feature in Element Web that didn't work and told me to use Desktop instead, unless I'm imagining things now.

It's search.

Even in Element, last time I checked, search was incredibly half-baked and mostly useless.

I know you don't want to use Signal, but it actually has searches that function.

LWD ,

What do you mean by "independent clients" - multi device login?

There's Wire, but it still resembles Signal more than Slack. But apparently they've put some work into making it self-hostable.

https://docs.wire.com/versions/install-with-poetry/index.html

Matrix is still probably the closest thing to Slack, Discord etc that actually has functioning E2EE, but also includes cloud synchronization when people can remember their keys.

LWD ,

Signal on the desktop does work even if the phone client is off, FWIW. This might have been true at one point, or at least for other apps, but it's no longer the case.

ETA: you can even use the desktop app without a smart phone, although the setup not for the faint of heart... Just illustrative of how you shouldn't need a smartphone (at least, not one that's even turned on more than once a week) for Signal to work on the desktop.

LWD ,

Looks a little newer to me

https://github.com/wireapp/wire-desktop/releases

But the project has definitely slowed day down since when they started it.

LWD ,

Strange reply.

  • Read the post, the use case doesn't require public groups.
  • Read the messages above, I was talking specifically about search
  • Does this mean that Telegram (the messaging app) is closer to Element (the Discord-like app) than Signal (the messaging app), because it has channels?

Etc

LWD ,

Sounds like you might want to look into why the desktop client isn't working, especially if you aren't trying some strange, unconventional setup for getting it that way.

LWD ,

More weird assertions.

Signal has groups.

And I asked, is "Telegram (the messaging app) is closer to Element (the Discord-like app) than Signal (the messaging app), because it has channels?"

LWD ,

There's pretty much no reason this has to be done on the cloud. For one example, just download a tab tree sidebar for Firefox. Either the stuff you see in it will be managed by the browser itself, or by something as simple as an extension.

Even calling this feature AI seems rather disingenuous on the part of Microsoft. It looks more like a way to grab data about you and about non-consenting websites...

LWD ,

Edge is also pulling in tabs from other browsers unprompted. How convenient.

https://www.theverge.com/24054329/microsoft-edge-automatic-chrome-import-data-feature

LWD ,

FLoC was never designed to make you more private, just for Google to monopolize data collection. Anything that contributed towards privacy was mostly undone, and mostly unintentional.

LWD ,

Tor Browser is to LibreWolf as Tails is to...?

Community, I'm really asking here.

LWD ,

That's an interesting point. One company, like Reddit, might see human beings as nothing more than content mills, but that created incentives to be a little private at least.

Lemmy servers are run by anybody, including Facebook, and you don't even have to accept someone else's server rules for your data to transfer onto it. The process occurs passively.

LWD ,

It all depends on context, but as one example this guy
Pepe sweating
(aka Poggers) is part of Twitch chat culture.

And Twitch doesn't slouch on extremist content. They banned this emote
Pogchamp guy
because the guy who made that face was supporting Jan 6.

LWD ,

A widely used meme and crypto bros

https://twitter.com/FortuneMagazine/status/1420803860336152577/

LWD ,

The data is already public.

A descriptive statement.

Why only allow the bad guys to access it and not everyone?

Why assume that's the only option? We can also strive to improve Lemmy, as it is (allegedly) run for the users and not for corporate anti-privacy interests.

LWD ,

It was the time of each of the downvotes. I'm pretty sure the behavior was done by a bot, because there were way more downvotes across a bunch of unrelated posts.

I have way more data than my own, and there's a few users I've identified who appear to be botting other users aggressively. Not sure where to drop that data set, but it'll be funny.

LWD ,

Off day 😉

I should have been more specific when I said website, as... If you scan my other comments, you might have the hint that I have access to one such Lemmy instance. And they federate with minimal effort. I don't know how to automate it yet, but it wasn't hard to do so manually.

LWD ,

Can you be more specific? I might be able to hunt down answers.

Recently, federation vulnerabilities got exploited by an ex-Truth Social employee who apparently believes consent is only when someone shouts "no" at him, so pretty much anything is possible (without even going through the effort of spinning some kind of proxy server, if I'm reading this correctly).

LWD , (edited )

"Indirect federation" (what I ended up eventually trying to find info on) appears non-existent.

That answered the question, I think, but it caused me to ask a few more, like this one:

What happens if a community is on Server A and Person C wants to check out how Person B is interacting on it. I think, in that case, that Person C can check out Person B's profile and see comments left on a Server A community, but they cannot navigate to the post itself because Server A would not send the content to their server.

It's relatively easy to switch servers, by clicking the little rainbow icon next to a particular comment to see the server where it would have been viewed in Person B's context, but servers on their own are not running around scraping missing data... At least, not as they are currently designed.

ETA: More background on the major defederation in question (mostly political, not technical)

LWD ,

There is none

Yeah sure lol

LWD ,

Their new shopping toolbar is coming next. At least Pocket was universal. The Shopping Toolbar will only be for three websites:

Amazon USA
Walmart
Best Buy

You know, the biggest brick and mortar monopoly, the biggest online sales monopoly, and the biggest tech chain.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • incremental_games
  • meta
  • All magazines
    •