Well, I was thinking more of the kind of anonymous comments you get on message boards like some of the *chan ones.

I don’t think deleting old posts or comments can really be relied on to hide your data. Once it is out there it ends up in search indices, web archives,… so while it is a good additional safety mechanism it shouldn’t mean that you should freely post personal stuff.

You could argue that content (as opposed to person) focused forums or message boards that allow anonymous posts are probably the closest to private social media.

Let me put it another way. You are much more likely to get responses that fit your use case if you put in more than half a sentence worth of effort into describing what you need.

I know this is a privacy community but you don’t have to keep the details of your use case and your reasons for not wanting WiFi quite this private if you want useful responses.

Governments won’t scan all your pictures to figure out who you are, they are just going to ask (read: legally force) the website/hoster where you posted that picture for your IP address and/or payment info and then do the same with your ISP/payment provider to convert that into your RL info to figure out who you are.

And you might not be worried about your RL friends or coworkers but what about people you meet online? Everyone able to see your post on some social media site?

Nobody is going to scan all the pictures you post for some information that is going to be valid for a long time after it is discovered once. Governments and corporations have had the means to discover who you are once for a long time.

And you misunderstand my point, it always has been a way to compromise your privacy. Privacy matters most in the individual case, with people who know you. If you e.g. share a picture taken at your home (outside or looking out of the window in the background) with a friend online you always had to assume that they could figure out where you lived from that if there were any of those kinds of features in there.

Sure, companies might be able to do it on a larger scale but honestly, AI is just too inefficient for that right now, as in the energy-cost required to apply it to every picture you share just in case your location might be useful isn’t worth it yet.

It might be easier to train the AI to the specific things Geoguessr players have collected as signs that give away a location instead of letting the AI figure all those out again.

It really isn’t that hard if anything like a silhouette of mountains are in the background and you have a couple of rough hints that give you an idea where to start or how to narrow down possible locations, no AI needed.

https://www.youtube.com/@GeoWizard has a couple videos in a series where he guesses historic photo locations quite accurately too.

Even if the mirrors are all hosted by the same admin team that doesn’t mean that they will sync at exactly the same time and that they will serve the exact same content at the exact same second. Mirroring download servers do not use distributed transactions.

VPNs seem a fairly common reason. I am mostly curious how you came to the conclusion that Linux use was a factor since that is not a common ban reason.

Do you have anything more than assumptions to go on for the reasons? If you only assume those are the reasons you shouldn’t announce them as a big headline item.

What is it with all kinds of companies building https://haveibeenpwned.com/ clones into their products lately?

But if someone sent a threat using their platform all that is really required is the information who owns the account that sent it which is information that should still be available even with an end-to-end encrypted service.

It would literally be easier to add that capability to your own custom DNS server software. After all it is literally an “if query.name in blocklist then drop connection”. Even replacing results would be simple as long as DNSSEC is not involved. You wouldn’t have to add it though since all major DNS servers already include it because it is so simple and has legitimate uses, such as blocking malware control server names or ad blocking.

Making a DNS server not respond to queries for a specific name is trivial for any DNS provider to implement, this is not a situation where they would have to develop months worth of new features to support that if the government asked.

Usually those are the ones all those companies and organizations are using who have their files encrypted by malware.

I thought the Microsoft technologies designed to allow anyone to access your servers were called Exchange and Active Directory.

You are naive if you think paying them prevents them from getting more payments by selling your data wherever they can get away with tricking you into consent.

I mean the whole “put something in your profile/in a post” part that is pretty flimsy.

Also, non-techy people will not be able to use PGP at all, much less anything building on it that requires understanding of the trust relationships. Hell, even in a tech company we are having a hard time getting people to generate keys every couple of years.

only reason it’s not exploited more is Linux Desktop is not as lucrative target as Windows

It would be much more lucrative to exploit the Linux servers, Android (based on Linux) phones, embedded Linux devices,… than that tiny niche of Windows desktops could ever be.

Writing code in private and then throwing it over the wall to the public is usually a pretty huge red flag with projects that are already public.

I don’t think it will take just one of those, it will take both.

It seems completely pointless to be honest.

Who are you going to prove your cryptographic identity to? Why not just use that same (pretty flimsy) verification method they use directly with that person?

As opposed to whom? Are investors in VC startups less compromised or more? What are the incentives in either case? Who do you trust to be competent and/or incompetent enough to compromise it without you noticing it? Who is likely to change a project that was well intentioned first after the fact? In what ways?

I would argue that advertising is not just a privacy concern or a nuisance, it often also influences people to make decisions that are highly damaging to their health, the environment, democracy in their country,…

Technically you aren’t required to mark your products at all for legal purpose, certainly not in a highly visible way unlike e.g. the small print that describes voltages and similar stuff on a usually hidden bit on the bottom of the product.

But wouldn’t that mean if someone writes to your desktop profile you can’t respond on mobile and vice versa? And you would have to be added by everyone else twice too?

Ah, must have missed that one, though

Using the same profile as on mobile device is not yet supported – you need to create a separate profile to use desktop apps.

is a pretty major downside.

Seems like another one of those mobile only messengers, not really interested in those to be honest.

It will resolve the issues Instagram has with successfully invading your privacy. It never said anything about resolving the issues viewing the page.

Paying for services and still not getting any privacy is largely a result of the equally naive attitude that a paid product is superior to a free one.

In reality neither free nor paid is an indicator of quality and a lot of the time enforced regulations are the only thing that can really prevent a company or organization from putting its own self-interest over that of the customer whenever possible (even though some companies and organizations might do so even without being forced to).

The main advantage of Gmail at the time was honestly that they did away with tiny mailbox sizes and attachment limits.

Element X is a client.

Docker changes nothing about the performance characteristics of a service. If anything back then a full server dedicated to it wouldn’t have been enough.

There is no such thing as a “VPN block”, only individual VPN protocols being blocked. “All of these protocols implement VPNs” is not something that can be recognized automatically by software. Conversely there is no such thing as a mechanism to prevent all kinds of detection of VPN traffic since it is bound to be noticeable that most of your traffic goes to a single or a small number of recipients.

Did they rewrite that crappy Python server in something with better performance by now? I tried self-hosting Matrix a few years ago and gave up after the one room I joined hadn’t finished syncing after a whole day (admittedly it was their main matrix chat room with lots of members but still).

Isn’t Mumble just a voice chat software? I don’t think that is the main use case for Discord for most people.

DNSCrypt has been working pretty well for me.