If they don’t use a bank, how are they pulling money out for it to be tracked?

One example I mentioned in my comment you’re replying to is check cashing services. Millions of people in the US receive money via things like check or money order and need to change it to cash despite not having a bank account to deposit it in; this usually involves identifying themselves.

See also payday loans, etc.

See, none of it makes any sense lmfao.

I assume you didn’t click (and translate) the link in the comment prior to mine which you replied to?

If you do, from there you can find some industry news about Serial Number Reading (SNR) technology.

I don’t know how widely deployed that technology is, but there is clear evidence that it does exist and is used for various purposes.

I ONLY give other people cash, all my other purchases are debit/credit.

If you always use card payments whenever it’s possible, it obviously isn’t necessary to analyze your cash transactions to learn where you are because you are already disclosing it :)

Like MOST people and stores since Covid

There are close to 2 billion unbanked people in the world. In the US, it’s less than 6% nationally, but over 10% in some states.

Many people who are not unbanked also often avoid electronic payments for privacy/security and other reasons.

The cash serial number tracking being described in this thread is useful for locating the neighborhoods frequented by someone who (a) avoids using electronic payments, and (b) maybe obtains cash from an ATM (or perhaps check-cashing service, in the case of an unbanked person) in places other than the neighborhoods they live in or frequent.

At launch (in 2021) the FireTV was not on the list of Sidewalk-enabled products, but given the fact that Sidewalk was enabled without user consent on many existing devices (and has been found to re-enable itself after being disabled) combined with the fact that FireTV devices all have at least the necessary bluetooth radio (even if not the LoRA part, Sidewalk can use both/either) and thus could become sidewalk-enabled by a software update in the future… I would still say that Sidewalk is a reason (among many) to boycott FireTV along with the rest of Amazon’s products.

The takeaway that Amazon built their own mesh network so that their products in neighboring homes can exfiltrate data via eachother whenever any one of them can get online is not false.

Social graph connections can be automatically inferred from location data. This has been done by governments (example) for a long time and is also done by private companies (sorry I can’t find a link at the moment).

The text of the new Texas law is here.

I wonder if this will apply to/be enforced on FDroid and Obtainium?

copying my comment from another thread:

“App store” means a publicly available Internet website, software application, or other electronic service that distributes software applications from the owner or developer of a software application to the user of a mobile device.

This sounds like it could apply not only to F-Droid but also to any website distributing APKs, and actually, every other software distribution sysem too (eg, linux distros…) which include software which could be run on a “mobile device” (the definition of which also can be read as including a laptop).

otoh i think they might have made a mistake and left a loophole; all of the requirements seem to depend on an age verification “under Section 121.021” and Section 121.021 says:

When an individual in this state creates an account with an app store, the owner of the app store shall use a commercially reasonable method of verification to verify the individual’s age category

I’m not a lawyer but I don’t see how this imposes any requirements on “app stores” which simply don’t have any account mechanism to begin with :)

(Not to say that this isn’t still immediately super harmful for the majority of the people who get their apps from Google and Apple…)

you have posted only two comments on lemmy so far, and both are telling people to buy this phone. do you have any affiliation with it, and/or are you planning to continue using your lemmy account solely to encourage people to buy it?

also, since you seem to know about this, i am curious if you can enlighten me: are there any benefits of iodéOS compared with LineageOS which it is a derivative of? i didn’t find a comparison between them on the website.

the metadata isn’t

Makes me curious as to what happened here

You can see the deleted comments in the modlog. There is also a thread for discussing the deletions in this thread here.

regarding metadata on Signal

fyi, Signal’s servers are hosted on a mixture of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

they were suggesting a solution, this proof-of-work web firewall: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

For chat, something with e2ee and without phone numbers or centralized metadata. SimpleX, Matrix, XMPP, etc - each have their own problems, but at least they aren’t centralizing everyone’s metadata with a CIA contractor like Jeff Bezos like Signal is.

For email, I’d recommend finding small-to-medium-sized operators who seem both honest and competent. Anyone offering snakeoil privacy features such as browser-based e2ee is failing in at least one of those two categories.

No, it isn’t about hiding your identity from the people you send messages to - it’s about the server (and anyone with access to it) knowing who communicates with who, and when.

Michael Hayden (former director of both the NSA and CIA) famously acknowledged that they literally “kill people based on metadata”; from Snowden disclosures we know that they share this type of data with even 3rd-tier partner countries when it is politically beneficial.

Signal has long claimed that they don’t record such metadata, but, since they outsource the keeping of their promises to Amazon, they decided they needed to make a stronger claim so they now claim that they can’t record it because the sender is encrypted (so only the recipient knows who sent it). But, since they must know your IP anyway, from which you need to authenticate to receive messages, this is clearly security theater: Amazon (and any intelligence agency who can compel them, or compel an employee of theirs) can still trivially infer this metadata.

This would be less damaging if it was easy to have multiple Signal identities, but due to their insistence on requiring a phone number (which you no longer need to share with your contacts but must still share with the Amazon-hosted Signal server) most people have only one account which is strongly linked to many other facets of their online life.

Though few things make any attempt to protect metadata, anything without the phone number requirement is better than Signal. And Signal’s dishonest incoherent-threat-model-having “sealed sender” is a gigantic red flag.

more important than expecting ip obfuscation or sealed sender from signal

People are only expecting metadata protection (which is what “sealed sender”, a term Signal themselves created, purports to do) because Signal dishonestly says they are providing it. The fact that they implemented this feature in their protocol is one of the reasons they should be distrusted.

imo you should not promote signal, proton, or tuta for various reasons including the ones i mention in those three links.

machine translation of a paragraph of the original article:

The police’s solution: It’s none other than a Trojan. Unable to break the encryption, they infect the traffickers’ phones with malware, subject to judicial authorization. This way, they gain full access to the device: apps, images, documents, and conversations. Obviously, GrapheneOS isn’t capable of protecting itself (like any Android) against this malware.

🤔

in other news, the market price of hacked credentials for MAGA-friendly social media accounts:

📈

were you careful to be sure to get the parts that have the key’s name and email address?

It should be if there is chunks missing its unusable. At least thats my thinking, since gpg is usually a binary and ascii armor makes it human readable. As long as a person cannot guess the blacked out parts, there shouldnt be any data.

you are mistaken. A PGP key is a binary structure which includes the metadata. PGP’s “ascii-armor” means base64-encoding that binary structure (and putting the BEGIN and END header lines around it). One can decode fragments of a base64-encoded string without having the whole thing. To confirm this, you can use a tool like xxd (or hexdump) - try pasting half of your ascii-armored key in to base64 -d | xxd (and hit enter and ctrl-D to terminate the input) and you will see the binary structure as hex and ascii - including the key metadata. i think either half will do, as PGP keys typically have their metadata in there at least twice.

how did you choose which areas to redact? were you careful to be sure to get the parts that have the key’s name and email address?

TLDR: this is way more broken than I initially realized

To clarify a few things:

-No JavaScript is sent after the file metadata is submitted

So, when i wrote “downloaders send the filename to the server prior to the server sending them the javascript” in my first comment, I hadn’t looked closely enough - I had just uploaded a file and saw that the download link included the filename in the query part of the URL (the part between the ? and the #). This is the first thing that a user sends when downloading, before the server serves the javascript, so, the server clearly can decide to serve malicious javascript or not based on the filename (as well as the user’s IP).

However, looking again now, I see it is actually much worse - you are sending the password in the URL query too! So, there is no need to ever serve malicious javascript because currently the password is always being sent to the server.

As I said before, the way other similar sites do this is by including the key in the URL fragment which is not sent to the server (unless the javascript decides to send it). I stopped reading when I saw the filename was sent to the server and didn’t realize you were actually including the password as a query parameter too!

😱

The rest of this reply was written when I was under the mistaken assumption that the user needed to type in the password.

That’s a fundamental limitation of browser-delivered JavaScript, and I fully acknowledge it.

Do you acknowledge it anywhere other than in your reply to me here?

This post encouraging people to rely on your service says “That means even I, the creator, can’t decrypt or access the files.” To acknowledge the limitations of browser-based e2ee I think you would actually need to say something like “That means even I, the creator, can’t decrypt or access the files (unless I serve a modified version of the code to some users sometimes, which I technically could very easily do and it is extremely unlikely that it would ever be detected because there is no mechanism in browsers to ensure that the javascript people are running is always the same code that auditors could/would ever audit).”

The text on your website also does not acknowledge the flawed paradigm in any way.

This page says "Even if someone compromised the server, they’d find only encrypted files with no keys attached — which makes the data unreadable and meaningless to attackers. To acknowledge the problem here this sentence would need to say approximately the same as what I posted above, except replacing “unless I serve” with “unless the person who compromised it serves”. That page goes on to say that “Journalists and whistleblowers sharing sensitive information securely” are among the people who this service is intended for.

The server still being able to serve malicious JS is a valid and well-known concern.

Do you think it is actually well understood by most people who would consider relying on the confidentiality provided by your service?

Again, I’m sorry to be discouraging here, but: I think you should drastically re-frame what you’re offering to inform people that it is best-effort and the confidentiality provided is not actually something to be relied upon alone. The front page currently says it offers “End-to-end encryption for complete security”. If someone wants/needs to encrypt files so that a website operator cannot see the contents, then doing so using software ephemerally delivered from that same website is not sufficient: they should encrypt the file first using a non-web-based tool.

update: actually you should take the site down, at least until you make it stop sending the key to the server.

When it’s libre software, we’re not banned from fixing it.

Signal is a company and a network service and a protocol and some libre software.

Anyone can modify the client software (though you can’t actually distribute modified versions via Apple’s iOS App Store, for reasons explained below) but if a 3rd party actually “fixed” the problems I’ve been talking about here then it really wouldn’t make any sense to call that Signal anymore because it would be a different (and incompatible) protocol.

Only Signal (the company) can approve of changes to Signal (the protocol and service).

Downvoted as you let them bait you. Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.

I don’t know what you mean by “bait” here, but…

Escaping to a phone-number-requiring, centralized-on-Amazon, closed-source-server-having, marketed-to-activists, built-with-funding-from-Radio-Free-Asia (for the specific purpose of being used by people opposing governments which the US considers adversaries) service which makes downright dishonest claims of having a cryptographically-ensured inability to collect metadata? No thanks.

(fuck whatsapp and discord too, of course.)

it’s being answered in the github thread you linked

The answers there are only about the fact that it can be turned off and that by default clients will silently fall back to “unsealed sender”.

That does not say anything about the question of what attacks it is actually meant to prevent (assuming a user does “enable sealed sender indicators”).

This can be separated into two different questions:

1. For an adversary who does not control the server, does sealed sender prevent any attacks? (which?)
2. For an adversary who does control the server, how does sealed sender prevent that adversary from identifying the sender (via the fact that they must identify themselves to receive messages, and do so from the same IP address)?

The strongest possibly-true statement i can imagine about sealed sender’s utility is something like this:

For users who enable sealed sender indicators AND who are connecting to the internet from the same IP address as some other Signal users, from the perspective of an an adversary who controls the server, sealed sender increases the size of the set of possible senders for a given message from one to the number of other Signal users who were online from behind the same NAT gateway at the time the message was sent.

This is a vastly weaker claim than saying that “by design” Signal has no possibility of collecting any information at all besides the famous “date of registration and last time user was seen online” which Signal proponents often tout.

False.

edit: it’s funny how people downvoting comments about signal’s sealed sender being a farce never even attempt to explain what its threat model is supposed to be. (meaning: what attacks, with which adversary capabilities specifically, is it designed to prevent?)

You can configure one or more of your profiles’ addresses to be a “business address” which means that when people contact you via it it will always create a new group automatically. Then you can (optionally, on a per-contact basis) add your other devices’ profiles to it (as can your contact with their other devices, after you make them an admin of the group).

It’s not the most obvious/intuitive system but it works well and imo this paradigm is actually better than most systems’ multi-device support in that you can see which device someone is sending from and you can choose to give different contacts access to a different subset of your devices than others.

You can just make a group for each contact with all of your (and their) devices in it.

Messages are private on signal and they cannot be connected to you through sealed sender.

No. Signal’s sealed sender has an incoherent threat model and only protects against an honest server, and if the server is assumed to be honest then a “no logs” policy would be sufficient.

Sealed sender is complete security theater. And, just in case it is ever actually difficult for the server to infer who is who (eg, if there are many users behind the same NAT), the server can also simply turn it off and the client will silently fall back to “unsealed sender”. 🤡

The fact that they go to this much dishonest effort to convince people that they “can’t” exploit their massive centralized trove of activists’ metadata is a pretty strong indicator of one answer to OP’s question.

StartPage/StartMail is owned by an adtech company who’s website boasts that they “develop & grow our suite of privacy-focused products, and deliver high-intent customers to our advertising partners” 🤔

They have a whitepaper which actually does a good job explaining how end-to-end encryption in a web browser (as Tuta, Protonmail, and others do) can be circumvented by a malicious server:

The malleability of the JavaScript runtime environment means that auditing the future security of a piece of JavaScript code is impossible: The server providing the JavaScript could easily place a backdoor in the code, or the code could be modified at runtime through another script. This requires users to place the same measure of trust in the server providing the JavaScript as they would need to do with server-side handling of cryptography.

However (i am not making this up!) they hilariously use this analysis to justify having implemented server-side OpenPGP instead 🤡

Tuta’s product is snake oil.

A cryptosystem is incoherent if its implementation is distributed by the same entity which it purports to secure against.

If you don’t care about their (nonstandard, incompatible, and snake oil) end-to-end encryption feature and just want a freemium email provider which (purports to) protect your privacy in other ways, the fact that their flagship feature is snake oil should still be a red flag.

https://digdeeper.club/articles/browsers.xhtml has a somewhat comprehensive analysis of a dozen of the browsers you might consider, illuminating depressing (and sometimes surprising) privacy problems with literally all of them.

In the end it absurdly recommends something which forked from Firefox a very long time ago, which is obviously not a reasonable choice from a security standpoint. I don’t have a good recommendation, but I definitely don’t agree with that article’s conclusion: privacy features are pointless if your browser is trivially vulnerable to exploits for a plethora of old bugs, which will inevitably be the case for a volunteer-run project that diverged from Firefox a long time ago and thus cannot benefit from Mozilla’s security fixes in each new release.

However, despite its ridiculous conclusion, that page’s analysis could still be helpful when you’re deciding which of the terrible options to pick.

short answer: because nobody flagged that other one. (it is deleted now too.)

re: riseup, is it even possible to use their VPN without an invite code? (i don’t think it is?)

in any case, riseup says clearly that their purpose is “to provide digital self-determination for social movements” - it is not intended for torrenting, even if it might work for it.

feel free to PM me if you want to discuss this further; i am deleting this post too. (at the time of deletion it has 8 upvotes and 33 downvotes, btw.)

he’s not been going around spouting stuff about people’s races making them superior or inferior to others

you mean like this? https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-white-supremacy-racehorse-theory-1064928/

some of the privacy messengers here (like Briar) have blogging/forum features

many people incorrectly assume briar aims to provide some sort of anonymity, because it uses tor onion services and is a self-described “secure messenger”. however, that is not the case:

https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ#does-briar-provide-anonymity (answer: no)

tldr: briar contacts, even when only actually using onions, exchange their bluetoooth MAC addresses and their most recent IPv6 link-local address and last five IPv4 addresses briar has seen bound to their wlan interfaces, just in case you’re ever physically near a contact and want to automatically connect to them locally.

fun fact: Phoenix was the original name of the browser we now know as Firefox

Those instructions will likely still work, but fwiw MotionEyeOS (a minimal Linux distro built on buildroot rather than Debian) appears to have ceased development in 2020.

The MotionEye web app that distro was built for is still being developed, however, as is Motion itself (which is packaged in Debian/Ubuntu/etc and is actually the only software you really need).

CSI camera modules can be a pain; it’s easier to use a normal USB webcam and have more options for positioning it.

Also, you don’t need to limit yourself to a Raspberry Pi; you can use any single-board computer - hackerboards.com has a database of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge’s_law_of_headlines

he wouldn’t be able to inject backdoors even if he wanted to, since the source code is open

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