NoScript is duplicative with ublock medium mode, I am amazed people are still using it. It hasn’t been relevant for 5+ years by my estimation. Why use two addons when one you’re already using does it better?

https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode

Roughly similar to using Adblock Plus with many filter lists + NoScript with 1st-party scripts/frames automatically trusted.

It might be 1000% more confidential, but is it effective? Anecdotal evidence doesn’t count. For all we know AI therapy could be actively harmful to certain conditions. I’m not sure there’s any published studies on this.

Might be an 18.1 or 18.2 feature

I’m not pretending to understand how homomorphic encryption works or how it fits into this system, but here’s something from the article.

With some server optimization metadata and the help of Apple’s private nearest neighbor search (PNNS), the relevant Apple server shard receives a homomorphically-encrypted embedding from the device, and performs the aforementioned encrypted computations on that data to find a landmark match from a database and return the result to the client device without providing identifying information to Apple nor its OHTTP partner Cloudflare.

There’s a more technical write up here. It appears the final match is happening on device, not on the server.

The client decrypts the reply to its PNNS query, which may contain multiple candidate landmarks. A specialized, lightweight on-device reranking model then predicts the best candidate by using high-level multimodal feature descriptors, including visual similarity scores; locally stored geo-signals; popularity; and index coverage of landmarks (to debias candidate overweighting). When the model has identified the match, the photo’s local metadata is updated with the landmark label, and the user can easily find the photo when searching their device for the landmark’s name.

It’s not data harvesting if it works as claimed. The data is sent encrypted and not decrypted by the remote system performing the analysis.

From the link:

Put simply: You take a photo; your Mac or iThing locally outlines what it thinks is a landmark or place of interest in the snap; it homomorphically encrypts a representation of that portion of the image in a way that can be analyzed without being decrypted; it sends the encrypted data to a remote server to do that analysis, so that the landmark can be identified from a big database of places; and it receives the suggested location again in encrypted form that it alone can decipher.

If it all works as claimed, and there are no side-channels or other leaks, Apple can’t see what’s in your photos, neither the image data nor the looked-up label.

This one?

Boarding a plane by scanning a QR code off my watch stills feels pretty cool even though you’ve been able to do it for years now.

That’s not the point I’m making. You should disable your cars modem if it has one, but you still should have no expectation of privacy. Thinking you can have anonymity with a license plate displayed to everyone is foolish. It’s like asking how to be anonymous while wearing a name tag and the same clothes every day.

I reconstructed my comment. I believe people thought I meant disabling the modem is pointless due to ALPRs, but that wasn’t what I was trying to communicate.

Let me try this comment again.

There is no driving with privacy or anonymity unless you’re on private land.

Anyone got tips for how to anonymize their car?

Remove the license plate. You will rarely have privacy driving a car on a public road. You should disable the modem, of course, but you’re still not going to be driving anonymously or privately. Automated license plate readers means your travels are going into databases that very well could be breached at some point in time.

Law enforcement use of ALPRs is rapidly expanding, with tens of thousands of readers in use throughout the United States; one survey indicates that in 2016 and 2017 alone, 173 law enforcement agencies collectively scanned 2.5 billion license plates.

According to the latest available numbers from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, 93 percent of police departments in cities with populations of 1 million or more use their own ALPR systems, some of which can scan nearly 2,000 license plates per minute. In cities with populations of 100,000 or more, 75 percent of police departments use ALPR systems.

Despite this expansive data collection effort, many departments have not developed a policy to govern the use of ALPR technology, or provided privacy protections.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/automatic-license-plate-readers-legal-status-and-policy-recommendations

The point I was trying to make is driving a car is inherently not private due to license plates. Of course license plate readers can’t get information directly from the ECU, but thinking you’re going to be driving privately because you don’t have a modem in your car is naive, IMO. Car privacy is shit even if you disable the modem, which I wasn’t recommending against. Of course you should disable it. It’s still a very public activity you’re doing that’s likely being tracked by license plate readers.

Your global systemic hypotheticals are flawed in that they don’t match what actually occurred. Every electronic system didn’t crash. Using cash to buy things was still possible at many places, while people who only had cards couldn’t.

That’s not what I witnessed recently. Payment processors went down but local POS was fine. Inventory didn’t matter with the short duration of the outage. This is one of the reasons going cashless is a bad idea. Far from the only one, but it’s a factor, and I experienced it. Going cashless reduces diversity in payment options and makes the system more vulnerable.

When the payment processor goes down, I can buy my groceries/gas/weed with cash, not by flossing my teeth. I don’t follow the point you’re making. Going fully cashless is a bad idea, and the recent outage didn’t affect every system used. I don’t see how having multiple methods of payment is possibly a bad thing. I’m not advocating for only cash.

Using cash won’t prevent this from happening.

I mean yeah, that’s why I said both, not just cash. I carry some cash on me because you never know. I’d also like to see less monopolization of just about everything because it makes for single points of failure. Diversifying your payment methods by including the potential for cash also helps.

…why not both?

That’s the one I’ve heard bad things about.

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/mozilla-ditches-privacy-partner-over-conflict-of-interest

That’s becoming less feasible with every day that passes.

Regular people sure, but this is Lemmy. The nerd concentration here is significantly higher than average. I dunno, just thought it was fairly common knowledge in tech literate people that wireless G is outdated, AX is current, things like that. I can’t imagine spending money on a router without knowing the basics, which I’d consider the G/N/AC etc standard to be the minimum you need to know for making a decent purchase.

Fair enough. I thought it was just as common knowledge as wireless cellphone standards. Kinda surprised to see most people on Lemmy don’t pay attention to these, lots of the kinds of people who wouldn’t use the ISP supplied router / AP are here. Or so I thought.

I don’t know the 802.11 specs at all, but I know enough to purchase a router that won’t be outdated quickly.

You’re kidding, right? Wireless G, N, AC, AX etc are commonly printed all over the boxes of routers and is the main way to talk about their speed and how new they are. Do you not buy your own router? It seems as common to me as 3G/4G/5G but for a different kind of wireless.

I wouldn’t expect my mom to know it, I would expect most people on Lemmy to know and most somewhat tech familiar people to know. Not deep into the specs, but knowing AC is faster than N.

I think the idea is to create a ton of noise in the 2.4GHz band which is commonly used to control drones. It’s not going to “cook” a drone at distances further than a few feet, you’d need a maser (microwave laser) for that.

This isn’t unlock as in PIN unlock. This is a carrier unlock so you can use it on any network.

I understand your frustration, but what they did isn’t evidence of a dystopian situation IMO. I wouldn’t expect a carrier to unlock a phone I didn’t buy from them, and as far as I know it’s always been this way. This also isn’t forced arbitration.

Getting a second hand phone that’s carrier locked doesn’t make sense to me. The original owner didn’t unlock it? Usually phones are carrier locked because you’re financing the phone through the carrier, but that wouldn’t apply to a used phone.

Sounds like you encountered an anti theft process. What would keep people from just taking a stolen phone to t-mo to have them unlock it without this? Sure you could give them a receipt or print out the eBay listing etc. but those are easily faked. Nothing seems out of the ordinary with regards to what T-mobile did to me. You need to make sure the phone is unlocked before you buy it. It’s been this way since I was selling phones at RadioShack in 2006.

There isn’t a good app ecosystem for arm on osx either? What’s your point?

Did you forget what you said? This is what I’m responding to.

macOS (not osX for many years now) has a healthy app ecosystem, unlike windows for ARM.

And you can load Linux and Windows on all Mac’s.

just install windows

My point is “install Windows” isn’t a valid option for anyone with an ARM Mac, so suggesting it is silly. Mac hasn’t made an x86 computer in a couple years.

Exclusivity isn’t the point. A healthy app ecosystem is what we’re discussing, which ARM on Mac has. It wasn’t great for 6 months or so, but it’s quite good now.

You’re incorrect. Tons of apps are native ARM on Mac now, also rosetta2 emulation is really fast. Obviously not as fast as native ARM but it surprised me.

NextDNS. Pretty cheap and supports DNS over HTTPS.

Can’t do that on ARM. Windows on ARM sucks and there isn’t a good app ecosystem.

I use DNS level blocking for blocking ads on iOS devices.

Take a look at this documentation, it’s pretty good.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-quick-guide

Not sure if it’s the archive link or what, but there’s nothing to that article but a paragraph and a ton of ads.

NextDNS, been using it for a year and a half now. I like the ease of use and privacy/ad block filter options.

I currently use NextDNS, it’s cheap and works great. You can basically set it up like a pihole, so I have ad/tracker blocking across all my devices and anything on LAN.

Makes me cringe thinking of all those years I was using Google DNS, back when I believed that “don’t be evil” shit

Not in my experience, and they’ve improved the error correction / prediction logic quite a bit with iOS 17.

Why don’t you just respond why you think Signal is a better choice? Comments here won’t help regular people get with encryption.

I also don’t see how this relates to anything specific to gen z as I see the exact same behavior in my gen x / millenial peers.

Every TV is a dumb TV when they’re not connected to the internet, no?

That’s fine, they’ll lose my traffic.

So many people are acting like they have no choice, like you absolutely have to have everything that everyone else has. You’re obligated to use such and such platform.

Try suffering for what you believe in over convenience for a bit. Things might just change if you give up some things because they’re shit