heavyboots

heavyboots , 20 days ago

BitWarden provides some encrypted storage on their paid tiers. I think it's very small, like 1GB, but it's E2E.

Apple iCloud storage is actually E2E too if you turn on Advanced Data Protection. (Note that not all iCloud features are E2E, like email, for example.) And the price is pretty comparable too. Naturally this works a lot better if you're on a Mac, but just FYI.

heavyboots , 2 months ago

So obviously not to everyone's taste but if you have access to iCloud+ email, your mail isn’t scanned for sale (as per their US privacy agreement anyway), you get randomized email addresses available to give to places that you think might be spammy and you can link a domain to your account, although you’re only allowed 3 email boxes per user in your family per domain. Works well for me so far. Mind you because of photo storage size and devices backups I’m up to $3/ month from the original $1/month when I started.

Plus with Advanced Data Protection a lot of iCloud info is E2E encrypted. (Not email tho.)

heavyboots , 2 months ago

That’s how you know the privacy protections are working. Meta won’t let you in if they can’t identify you well enough to sell your data.

heavyboots , 3 months ago

OS 9 on macOS did me dirty when I tried to delete it for the final time. The OS X operating system folder is named System. And the OS 9 folder is named System Folder.

So I typed rm -rf System and then tried to type the \ character so I could put in the space between the two words. Which is right above the Return key. Guess what I hit instead of \…

I hit control-C almost immediately but it still got through C inside the System folder. Apparently nothing absolutely vital lives in the A-C folders, btw. I was able to even reboot and it all came up normally. Only thing was I couldn’t run any Carbon apps (which was kind of crucial at the time) so I still had to do a reinstall of the OS.

heavyboots , 3 months ago

Pretty much agreed, except iCloud allows full E2E encryption if you enable Advanced Data Protection…

Siri is maybe a different story, alas. But at least you can disable the always listening feature if you want.

heavyboots , 3 months ago

Lol.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/advanced-data-protection-for-icloud-sec973254c5f/web

heavyboots , 3 months ago

Well, it would most likely show up in the network traffic if they were doing that for starters. And no one doing security analysis on iOS has ever mentioned that AFAIK. And since Apple bases about 90% of their marketing on protecting your privacy, that would be very bad for them as a company.

I mean, what’s stopping someone poisoning a library on open source? That’s actually provably happened.

Which is not to ding open source, which I quite like too. Just saying you are running certain risks no matter what you choose and in a phone OS, if you just want it to work and not think about it, I personally feel like Apple is a decent risk still.

heavyboots , 3 months ago

*blink blink*

Scan private iCloud images? What part of the E2E did you miss? Also, if this is the plan I think you’re talking about for CSAM, they actually abandoned that, even though it was a pretty decent plan…

heavyboots , 3 months ago

Everything you’ve said aside from the CSAM scan doctor thing has absolutely nothing to back it up so far. (And for the record, I absolutely agree CSAM scanners can be wrong—a human needs to be involved at some level, which they were in the system Apple devised. At any rate, I guess this convo is over as we obviously inhabit very different worlds.

heavyboots , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Blasting a bunch of bad guys in Rainbow 6: SMOL…

heavyboots , 4 months ago

I would fucking rather pay not to have AI in my browser, FFS…

heavyboots , 4 months ago

There is no such thing as a good AI engine… all I really want from any AI engine is the ability to watermark everything it outputs as generated by an AI so it can later be filtered out when it's discovered to be inaccurate or just simply plagiaristic.

heavyboots , 4 months ago

Honestly, a search engine companion is probably its least offensive case, you're correct. Mostly, it makes me so mad because they are polluting our entire collected knowledge base, because there is no way to watermark anything as AI-generated (especially when it's text, not images) which means that every search you make from here on out returns worse results. It's like being forced to share the road with self-driving Teslas because the self-driving car companies (especially Tesla) have made us all involuntarily part of their beta test.

The "screw everyone else trying to use the same public resource" mentality is out of control.

heavyboots , 4 months ago

Yeah, but that's unavoidable. Whereas, Tesla and Waymo, etc getting to use our roads for self-driving testing is just our government not doing their job to protect the roads adequately, IMHO. This is veering way off topic, but I just recently watched a video that had stats on Teslas and the fact they're like 8.2x more likely to be in a crash than a standard level 2 car driving system.

heavyboots , 7 months ago

The big box store chain esthetic. Ostensibly about passing value onto the customer (we put a roof over the products, what more do you want?) but probably more about maximizing shareholder value.