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Joined 1Y ago
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Cake day: Jul 12, 2023

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In Spain at least I have two small alternatives to this:

  • Paypal (I don’t like it too much, but it works fine).
  • A prepaid credit card offered through my bank. Good for sites that don’t look too trustworthy but I need to buy from. I just activate it, load it with whatever amount I need, I make the transaction, then disable it again. Even if it gets leaked no one can take any money out.

For everything else I have a virtual credit card number that’s not dynamic, but at least it’s something I use exclusively for online stuff.


Here you get a debit card by default with your bank account, and that one’s free. You might get a credit one, but credit limits are typically low. I lived in Canada for 9 years and by the time I left I had a CC with a limit of 26k CAD. Here my Spanish credit card has a limit of 1.2k euros, and I’ve had it for quite a long time.

In Spain at least there’s quite a lot of confusion with this. People call any card type a “credit card”, even debit ones.


I’ve been using Fastmail for a few years and I’m quite happy with the service. Being a semi-large organization I expect their security to be OK, but if anyone has comments on that aspect I welcome them.

As for privacy, I always consider e-mail to be a postcard. If I want to encrypt something, I use GPG locally.


In Spain (not sure about Europe in general) things are slightly different.

I have been living in Canada for 9 years, and there if you see a transaction you don’t recognize in your credit card statement you phone your bank and they take care of that.

Here in Spain you need to go do the police, file a report, then talk to your bank, then they’ll think about it.

So when I came back I was talking with some guys I know and they convinced me that, at least around here, it’s still a good idea to use Paypal. You also get faster refunds, etc (and that could be due to some European regulation, not sure).



>Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He’s never been responsible for an accident. > >So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor. > >LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a “Risk Solutions” division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl’s request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page “consumer disclosure report,” which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act. > >What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn’t have is where they had driven the car. > >On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking.
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Also, some (most?) RSS readers don’t need the path to the feed directly. You give them the regular URL and they’ll figure it out. TinyTinyRSS does it.


I wish I had known about Power Delete Suite. I nuked my posts / comments by hand :-(

In case it’s useful to more people: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite


>Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.” > > The long-awaited S-1 filing reveals much of what Reddit users knew and feared: That many of the changes the company has made over the last year in the leadup to an IPO are focused on exerting control over the site, sanitizing parts of the platform, and monetizing user data. Posting here because of the privacy implications of all this, but I wonder if at some point there should be an "Enshittification" community :-)
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Yes, these things are never dead. They just come back under a different name / pretensions until they pass.


I created an account a few months ago but I’ve barely used it. DDG provides pretty much everything I search for. This might be because I don’t typically do very “esoteric” searches, but for now I don’t see the need for a paid service. Most of the times, tweaking the query so that it looks for a specific source is good enough.

I’d love if DDG had a system to remove entire domains entirely from the results, though.


Came here to post a similar comment zedeus made in another thread:

Nitter is dead.

I still checked some Twitter accounts from people that were interesting to me and didn’t migrate to Mastodon. One less thing to worry about, I guess.


Where’s that? I just ran a test search but I can’t see it :-?


Yes, I’m aware those filters exist, but I’m asking about the practical implications of the set up I mentioned in the post.


Accept cookie banners with third-party cookies rejected
Hi, In Spain (and probably other places in Europe) we've recently seen a deluge of cookie banners that offer you the option to reject tracking cookies for a fee. The regular GDPR forms are therefore slightly broken, as you get several options: accept, reject (which doesn't work in most cases), and buy a subscription to reject. Consent-O-Matic, for example, is having a hard time. I don't doubt it'll get corrected in time, but I want to talk about something tangential. Cookie consent has (at least) two layers: the browser layer (where we might delete cookies, reject third party cookies, etc) and the site UI layer (where we're presented with an option when we load the page). This means we can reject third-party cookies at the browser layer and then accept whatever form at the site UI layer. With the set up mentioned above, is there really any difference between accepting cookies and rejecting cookies? No tracking cookie are going to get installed in my computer anyway. This, combined with an ad blocker, makes the browsing experience exactly the same whether I accept or reject the cookie form. Is there anything I'm missing here?
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Europe’s hidden security crisis [PDF]
Real-Time Bidding (RTB) allows foreign states and non-state actors to obtain compromising sensitive personal data about key European personnel and leaders. Key insights: * Our investigation highlights a widespread trade in data about sensitive European personnel and leaders that exposes them to blackmail, hacking and compromise, and undermines the security of their organisations and institutions. * These data flow from Real-Time Bidding (RTB), an advertising technology that is active on almost all websites and apps. RTB involves the broadcasting of sensitive data about people using those websites and apps to large numbers of other entities, without security measures to protect the data. This occurs billions of times a day. * Our examination of tens of thousands of pages of RTB data reveals that EU military personnel and political decision makers are targeted using RTB. * This report also reveals that Google and other RTB firms send RTB data about people in the U.S. to Russia and China, where national laws enable security agencies to access the data. RTB data are also broadcast widely within the EU in a free-for-all, which means that foreign and non-state actors can indirectly obtain them, too. * RTB data often include location data or time-stamps or other identifiers that make it relatively easy for bad actors to link them to specific individuals. Foreign states and non-state actors can use RTB to spy on target individuals’ financial problems, mental state, and compromising intimate secrets. Even if target individuals use secure devices, data about them will still flow via RTB from personal devices, their friends, family, and compromising personal contacts. * In addition, private surveillance companies in foreign countries deploy RTB data for surreptitious surveillance. We reveal “Patternz”, a previously unreported surveillance tool that uses RTB to profile 5 billion people, including the children of their targets. * Our examination of RTB data reveals Cambridge Analytica style psychological profiling of target individuals’ movements, financial problems, mental health problems and vulnerabilities, including if they are likely survivors of sexual abuse. * Real-Time Bidding's security flaw is a national security problem
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I moved back to Spain after 9 years abroad. I discovered this country runs on WhatsApp. Not a chance this will change in the short term.



This is what I do: I have 3 KeepassXC databases (regular passwords, “security” questions, TOTP tokens) each with a different password.