No, there are free VPN out there where you don’t need an creditcard (Windscribe, Proton, Calyx…), even if not, it can be a child on the PC from the parents. Anyway, age verification has only one reason, access and control of user data, nothing else. The resposability of the children is by the Parents and not by webpages or services, apart impossible to control the access by childrens, when they use the PC of the parents to websites which already have the ID from the adults. Nobody else as the parents can control it. Apart it isn’t a rule which is worldwide, with countries without age control in their server, easy accesible from everywhere but out of the control by goverments.

Steganographic messages are pretty save, not so because they are very difficult to reveal, but if they see an innocent selfie, a photo from a kitten or an mp3 from a famous song, they don’t think tat it can be a hidden message and don’t cause further interests, like an encrypted unreadable message do. Snowflake is another thing, often used by journalists in totalitary countries. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/bocovich

You can’t escape when you currently appears life in one of the millons cams anywhere and even with this life in YouTube, additional to the surveillance of big corporations, banks and the own ISP. Privacy nowadays is relative, you can only patch the biggest holes. 100% privacy is stay at home and reading a book with the smartphone turned off.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=live+webcams+around+the+world

https://www.earthcam.com/

https://www.skylinewebcams.com/en/webcam.html

https://worldcams.tv/

etc… adding millons more used by police and govs with face recognition soft.

Snowflake or steganographic comunication, works even in North Corea, encrypted messages are not a solution, because they always cause suspicion in countries with strong surveillance and censorship. VPN are not the solution either, even in occidental coutries, there are a lot of webs which are not accesible with a VPN or Proxy, mostly streaming sites, eg. Rakuten and others.

Also devs want to eat sometimes and for services there are few possibilities to create incommings, turning it in a paid service, put ads or using afiliate links which ay an revenue if the user use these. A no go are selling private user data which are the methodes of big corporations, this is the real problem. But it isn’t avoidable, when you block these that also those which use ethical methodes are affected. The solution is only a clear legislation making it illegal to sell private user data to third parties, out of control how these use or protect these. There isn’t any other. Privacy is a basic right, period. Traffiking with user and metadata is a crime.

Ads are needed to create incommings needed by an service, but legit are only contextual ads, but not personalized ones results of surveilance and profiling, worst if also used with tracking and metadata logging. This is the main reason why the use of adblocker and other filter measures are mandatory, sorry for those which use only contextual banners to create some incommings.

Updates are needed for security and not a problem in a gutted Windows 11 (mine use <700 MB RAM), with third party privacy tools, like Portmaster, blocking not needed telemetries and unwanted traffic. Updates almost security patches and Defender definitions

Fingerprinting isn’t allways synonym of the lack of privacy. But there are differences between fingerprinting for tracking and profiling reasons, which certainly is needed to block or to spoof, and tecnically data needed to show correctly the content of a page, eg the first public IP numbers to show the content in your lenguage, the fonts used, screen resolution, OS, browser engine…, all data which are the same for millon other users. We can block por complete the fingerprinting, but than we’ll see that half of the pages are not shown correctly or don’t even work. It’s always an commitment to set the fingerprint blocking. VPNs add an privacy layer, but dont avoid fingerprintings, used as extension can’t avoid that the browser connect first to the ISP before the VPN can create the tunnel, with which it may serve to skip country restrictions, but you are still seen by your ISP. It don’t also blocking the fingerprinting, except the IP. To stay private depends more on other measures, DNScrypt, not to use apps, search engines and services which logs/share our activity, using ad/trackerblocker… and the most important, common sense, not a tin foil hat. PEBCAK

I’ll never enable it precisely because I understand the security and privacy implications. Windows would be a nice OS without all this crap, bloatware and services to “improve the user experience” and which nobody needs.

This always happens when those who create laws are senile old men who confuse a remote control with a mobile phone or corrupt politicians, paid by lobbies, instead of experts in the corresponding subject.

No, with this to what you say yes or no, you can set it in the browser instead in this Pop-up. All what you don’t want get blocked. This way you set it one time in your browser for all pages you visit. instead ov everytime in each page. The result is the same, but without annoying consent nags. With the GDPR all pages are forced by law to ask for your consents, before with this pop-up, and now following the consent settings in the browser. This is the only difference, less nags for the user. With the page permission settings and the adblocker, this crap anyway get blocked. So this consent window in any case is useless.

Short answer: Yes

It’s not gutting it, it’s changing the system with same result. Instead of annoying cookie consent pop-ups, a setting in the browser with admissible cookies (same as in the pop-up) this way the unwanted cookies are blocked from the browser itself (apart of those which anyway get blocked by the adblocker and privacy settings). With this there isn’t needed anymore this pop-up. It’s a good idea, I think.

The Vaticane don’t fullfit the conditions to be an EU member, they have not signed the Declaration of Human Rights, nor have they officially condemned torture and the death penalty.

Tuta

Murena Workspace

A browser is only a secudary problem in privacy, if you use another than Chrome or Edge, it’s mainly the search engine you use the problem, the sites you visit, the mail you use, the data you publish, your common sense online, there are the main privacy holes.

Well, it’s not in the Eurozone, but it’s strict with the EU Privacy laws, in Europe it’s only the Vatican out of the EU, only in the Eurozone for practical reasons.

Aprivate tab protect nothing, it only prevents that other with access to your PC see which pages you have visited, the web pages see the same with or without privat tab. It’s often misunderstood what private browsing mean. If you want to browse private, there isn’t any other as using an Proxy or VPN, using Portmaster, Glasswire or Pi-Hole on desktop, adjust the site permissions in the privacy settings in your browser, than you can browse more or less private, if you also use an search engine which don’t log your activity. You can visit Browserleaks, there you can see how private you are.

Any webservice, like mail, cloud services and social platform, as even eg, Lemmy and other online platform, is forced to reveal the user data they have, if there is an court order a cause of an criminal investigation. Proton can’t in this case evade the info they have, it is the IP and the account data, content of the mail is encrypted, so they can give only encrypted data in this case.

This has nothing to do with privacy rights, this protect the privacy only from access of private data without an court order in the EU. In the same case as with this activist, also Tuta, Murena and any other private mail service would have done exactly the same thing as Proton.

If you are searched by law, never is a good idea to create an account anywhere. Drug barons use pen and paper for communication because of this.

It depends, AI is good as tool to help in your researches and tasks, but bad to substitute your researches and tasks with it. The trustworth of AI is always more or less limited and always a big mistake to use the results as is, without contrasting it, which is done too often.

I checked Proton Lumo, it’s private, but not very good, answers mostly BS, AI is not a strong side of Proton. DuckAI is a nice and usable one, Brave not so.

Download an AI isn’t a so good idea, because to be reliable, it need a huge amount of data and processing power, which a normal PC don’t have. Downloaded AI which work locally are by definition very basic and limited. When selfhosted versions use online sources, they need a huge amount of bandwith. An reliable AI need an huge datacenter and webaccess, because this, the question for the user is the privacy of the AI service. The mencioned Apertus fullfit all the aspects of reliability and privacy. History of questions and results are stored locally, easy to delete, answers by own knowledge base or by permitting web access, with answers including the links of sources. 100% free to use and EU made.

Swiss PublicAI by Apertus, FOSS, made by the Swiss National Supercomputer Centre (CSCS) also used by the CERN. Possible selfhosting (~90 GB basic Data), up to 70 billion parameters, trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages. Strict privacy centred.

Fuck US AI

https://www.swiss-ai.org/apertus

https://publicai.co/ (free account to be able for customize it, plug ins (nick, mail))

https://github.com/swiss-ai/

https://huggingface.co/swiss-ai

Andisearch and Startpage, both use random-proxie search.

Well, until now almost all articles I read in AJ are well contrastable, less biased as much other western media.

I never trust what people say about what they are or what they are going to do, only what they really do. But I think that Mamdani is an advance and better as Rpublican alternatives. Despite this, as Major he is very limited to do anything with a whole country gov, media and corporations against him.

The word National Socialism is misleading, it was invented by Hitler, which has nothing to do with socialistic philosophy, it’s the idea of an society of the elite, the most extreme version of capitalism neo-liberal, feudalism 2.0. If it had something to do with socialism, big corporations and billonairs wouldn’t foment and support it. Trump give the best example of National “Socialist” policy, emulating step for step the policy of Germany in the 1930th, cooking the frog with propaganda and misinformation, until it was and now it is almost to late to change. Even when Mamdani honestly try to change something, he has to defeat first all the media, judges, police forces full in the hand of these nazis, with a huge support of stupid (and armed) MAGA hillbillies, yihaaaa. That he won the ellection as Major are good news, but he’s alone against a country, even with people of the own party against him. Hard times with a little sparkle of light at the end of the tunel.

I remeber an eyeball on a stick, used in some movies for biometric scans.

Naturally, because it isn’t encrypted, not so good for sharing sensible information, that is the only risk. Despite that you see my message in your console, it isn’t possible for me to access through this to your PC, nor that you can access to my data with it, apart of the sended text, which can see anybody with the finger link. But it’s a curiosity and the ancestor of the P2P, nice to prank your friends and for fans of vintage computing, because it’s way older as the internet we know. Apart it’s so old, that it isn’t anymore in the focus of govs and hackers, it’s like sending messages with Morse or with an FAX.

P2P don’t need really an server or selfhosting, content’s are pointing direct to the user devices. The drawback is that your device must be online when the receptor want to retrieve the content. There is nothing which store the content in between. The advantage, more privacy impossible, out of the reach of any third parties, not even the ISP.

There is also something similar, like eg. Croc, which allows even the transfer of any content this way, full encrypted like the others, same as the others is download and use it.

P2P is always the safest form to communicate and share content, as it was since the beginning with the paleolytic finger command from 1971, which still can be used for text transfer (most Linux, Unix like Mac and Windows)

Eg, write in your command line finger zerush@happynetbox.com

See https://happynetbox.com/

There is also Chitchatter, an encrypted P2P communication platform, ephimere, no account, similar Otr

The simple way is an cheer bot without net access and only basic AI. I had one of this for ~100 bucks, which did his work, but I gave it to my sister-in-law, because I was faster sweeping the floor with a broom.

Version alpha

Wrong, they spread less dust as an vacuum cleaner do. because a vacuum cleaner suck in one end and blow on the other. After some uses this thing begin to spread a lot of the dust in the whole air. The little dust spreaded by an broom is only very limited locally.

I use a broom, faster than any of these bots, cheaper, environment friendly and 100% private.

Short answer: Yes

It’s nothing new, steganographic encryption is used as long I remeber, to hide messages into texts, images, videos and even music. There are a lot of tools out there which everyone can use. The advantage is, that an normal encrypted message can cause suspicions, but not so an inocent selfi from the beach, a cat photo, an mp3 of an summerhit, or an “unencrypted” text message, all these can be a container for hidden messages. It can also be used for invisible watermarks for an copy protection, but also for evil uses in autoexecutables malware in images or mp3 files, as seen in the past.

https://stegoshare.sourceforge.net/

https://github.com/Jpinsoft/DeepSound

https://github.com/syvaidya/openstego

https://www.ssuiteoffice.com/software/ssuitepicselsecurity.htm

https://github.com/KuroLabs/stegcloak

https://github.com/fabienpe/MP3Stego

and several more, I listed only the free and OpenSource apps

Well, one thing are TV sats and way other communication and military sats. That you can have hundreds of TV channels for free with an cheap sat reciever and parabolic is certainly nothing new

I wonder, if hackers with scarce means were able to access the communications, how much could the hackers and secret services do that did not warn of this breach?