I was a user for a while. Never did figure out if they were just a small team of well-meaning people who didn’t know how to run a business properly, or a front for something. Good prices though, and reliable service for the time I was there. Their web page seems to indicate they got acquired by Malwarebytes, I’m not sure if that makes them less trustworthy, or more.

Firefox (with good settings, or Librewolf) + uBlock Origin + Decentraleyes + NoScript (with default permissions removed) is probably > 80%.

I had that problem when I used whatsapp five years ago. Amazing that they still haven’t fixed it.

Non-google android is the way to go unless you’re looking to be even more adventurous. Which phone you should look for depends which of the OS options you prefer. No pixel means no grapheneOS. LineageOS is the one I chose, runs on quite a few mostly older phones. There are many others.

The “you’d have to prove to someone that you’re an adult” is where we disagree. I was talking about parents setting a “user is a child” flag on the devices they let their kids use. They already know who their children are, no proof is necessary. The device can then send an http header to websites for example indicating that it’s a child user. That part could be mandated and standardized by law. It’s 99% of the problems solved (in legal theory; obviously not every website and app in the world will choose to participate in any of these schemes) with 1% of the dangers.

So long as they don’t go overboard with misguided efforts to make it impossible for children to defeat the thing, it seems fine. It’s dismaying that all the proposals end up with all these ridiculously dysfunctional ideas instead.

When I hear about “device-based verification” what comes to mind is a device that can be put into some kind of child safety mode, by parents who want to give their children phones or whatever. The device then “knows” whether or not its user is a child without any kind of biometrics or identification.

It has some problems and could case a lot of harm if it’s badly designed, but it’s the only method that seems close to workable in any conceivable form. Why is it never even talked about in these discussions?

You seem to have javascript disabled. Please note that many of the page functionalities won’t work as expected without javascript enabled.

Fortunately, the page did its job just fine and was able to tell me to use javascript blocking without needing javascript to do it.

This helps protect our community.

Ah, so it’s not you coming up with the stupid excuse that they have legit reasons to think the user might be a nefarious “bot”, you’re just passing along the stupid excuse as you interpret it from the meaningless message direct from Google. That explains where you got the idea that “viewbots” had anything to do with it, I guess.

It’s not just you. I’m tired of the whole team of people who are always standing by to bring out similar excuses any time someone decides that in their quest to stop invidious from existing — or whatever google is actually aiming at — it’s acceptable to just mass-block all the VPN users as collateral damage.

I suspect the VPN was used to bot

There are plenty of sources, including even in this thread, indicating that that this is not the problem. Quit making excuses for them.

That’s generous of you. If I’d mistakenly bought one that wouldn’t work without ever having a network connection, I’d be returning it and demanding my money back. Hasn’t happened yet, though.

They are presumably referring to SimpleX. Although I don’t actually see anyone blaming it for the existence of Nazis.

Wait, what? You think they’re not planning on getting paid for providing this data to advertisers?

P.S. It looks like Mozilla’s Data Privacy FAQ is going to need updating. It doesn’t even mention this stuff. As the noyb complaint points out:

20. The Respondent does not provide any information at all in its privacy policy with regard to “PPA”. Neither in the general privacy policy (enclosure 9) nor in the privacy information for Firefox (enclosure 10) is any relevant information apparent.

21. The last update of the Firefox privacy policy took place on May 13, 2024.

I would say it’s more of a desperate attempt to continue the current paradigm of online advertising which deems indispensable the kind of data about conversion rates to which the industry has become accustomed, despite the recognition that their current means of collecting it must come to an end.

But either way, it’s incompatible with the principles of free software. Users are not meant to put up with features that are there for the sole benefit of someone else; someone they might normally consider an adversary. The only incentive we’re given to participate in this scheme is one that resembles blackmail. Except it isn’t even advertisers saying “do this, or we’ll spy on you like usual” — it’s Mozilla saying “do this, and maybe we can persuade a few of them not to spy on you as much, and to give us a cut.”

They are selling behavioural data about their users to advertisers. People are not going to be happy with that no matter how they try to spin it.

They added a feature to track conversions among Firefox users for online advertisers. Selling it as a “paradigm-shifting boost to online privacy” while accusing others of pushing a misleading narrative is absurd.

There certainly are many people who seem suspiciously eager to find fault with Firefox. But it’s not really a surprise when its authors do things like this. They chose not to make this feature opt-in because they know that nobody in their right mind would opt into it. There is no benefit to the user in it, only risk. Mozilla seems to be leaving us to go off and join the advertising industry instead. People feel betrayed, and it feeds the cynical nihilism that comes so easily to social media users under the conditions of late capitalism.

Self-censorship working a little too well.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/06/msg00041.html

I was wrong, it’s 1024 not 256. It’s a soft limit, so easy to adjust once you’re aware that you need to.

I would certainly advise everyone to choose a phone with that in mind.

The desktop client is not great, but it works. There certainly are things Signal could do better. Its phone-centric nature is ridiculous and I have no idea why they cling to it. But it’s easier than trying to get everyone to use Matrix or whatever — mainly because more people have heard of it.

Be paranoid in your estimation of how much privacy you have, but diligent in your efforts to get more of it for everyone.

Yeah, Signal is good enough. If people use shitty operating systems like iOS or Google’s version of Android that’s another problem and not really one that it’s my job to care about that much. What matters is the network effect and every user who moves moves from Whatsapp to Signal is one more person who gains the freedom to easily improve their digital lives further if they someday choose to do so without it costing them the ability to chat with all their friends.

Added a warning that appears in Proton Log for systems that have low file descriptor limit

I’m glad to see that. There are reasons why debian didn’t choose to increase their default limit beyond 256, but some games require it and if you happen to find one it can be tricky to figure out what went wrong.

What they need to do: Ban the practice of showing ads to people based on surveillance data, for a start.

What they will do: Demand that more data be collected to determine which users are children and therefore worthy of protection.

It might contribute in some small aesthetic way to deterring them, which seems a much better ambition.

If that is a big problem, one alternative is to get a post office box.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b4/Doorbell.JPG/500px-Doorbell.JPG

1984 was written in 1948, after fascists had already demonstrated that capitalism is quite compatible with totalitarianism.

Larry “privacy is dead, get over it” Ellison.

It’s interesting to see that Linux has gotten popular enough that a few of the most user-hostile devs are going out of their way specifically to stop people using it. Other than ignorance it’s unclear what their motivations could be. I for one will remember the names of the studios that do it and try my best never to buy or talk about their games.

Aside from not wanting to rely on the same one as everyone else in the world, setting up port forwarding on proton looks unreasonably complicated.

Currently on Azire. There aren’t many left and I wanted to support one of the slightly less well-known ones. It works well enough.

In my years of using mullvad (before they took away port forwarding) I found probably half a dozen websites that blocked me based on that but it may be more common now. Often I found it was easy to get around it using Tor. Some of the smaller and better-run sites might fix the problem if you report it to them through the proper channels.

You can launch non-steam stuff through it by adding the .exe to the Steam client

ohhhh so that’s how normal people do it. I sort of felt stupid for not figuring out the easy way when I wrote an overly-complicated shell script for it.

Do they have the slightest idea how much damage it would do to the international reputation of Europe if they were to make e.g. Signal illegal? I suppose some of them do, which is why it hasn’t passed before.

It has been falsely claimed that the measure undertaken by MCMC is a draconian measure

While it may be unclear exactly what kind of Internet traffic laws Draco would’ve written, allowing only the major landowners to run DNS servers does seem to be in keeping with the spirit of “aiding and legitimizing the political power of the aristocracy and allowing them to consolidate their control of the land and poor” as his laws are said to have done.

If you have time for an answer in audio form the CBC has some ideas.

They remove telemetry, such as the kind of telemetry causing the problems reported in this thread. They do not remove OCSP, safe browsing, Sync, and other things that connect to outside servers and therefore leak information about user activity. They do enable about:config so that those which are unwanted can be disabled.

Fennec F-Droid suffices to remove the telemetry.

Oh, that makes sense. Setting it to “strict” mode may be the thing I vaguely remember doing to make sure it was active in 2022.