See my earlier answers. I’m not justifying any of that infrastructure or behavior, only trying to highlight that this information, namely that OP is walking around the neighborhood, where and when, is already available to numerous of the actors including :
- neighbors, just visually seeing him with their eyes
- mobile operator via their 5G/4G towers
- mobile OS via their positioning data
- WiFi hotspots
- ISP via WiFi hotspots
- any app with geolocation tracking and any of their commercial partners purchasing that information
- connected devices via BT scanning potentially sending back data to their manufacturer, assuming most are connected
- governments with abilities to get information from ISP, mobile operators, mobile OS maintainers
So… the question IMHO is : is there are NEW data with or without the camera network? I’d argue marginally more.
Sadly not the only one https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx23ke7rm7go
Related article https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx23ke7rm7go on how such glasses are actually used, sadly.
Ugh, hopefully they fix this. Or maybe then don’t and the whole glasses get banned, I’m fine with that.
That being said, as I mentioned in my other answer building such glasses is pretty trivial. Sure it might not look as inconspicuous as the Meta ones (or at least popular… which might lead to people better identifying them in fact) but recording covertly is indeed now trivial.
It’s wrong though and AFAIK in the EU at least it’s illegal without consent, you can’t publish the recording so the technical implementation is not really the problem, it’s the usage.
If at any point it seemed like I justified the usage of such glasses for covert filming let me clarify : no, it’s wrong, regardless of how technically feasible it now is, without or without Meta.
In fine it is about the threat model, always.
That being said I never said “I have nothing to hide” nor do I believe we as a society should accept the permanent surveillance of civilians. In fact I do believe the opposite and that the chilling effect, as highlighted here by OP, does have a toll on everyone.
Neat, did you write a short blogpost about it? I’d be curious to learn about the pitfalls, if any, and good things onboarding for somebody without prior experience went.
I’m particularly interested to see if my own open source project (VR for pedagogy) should stick to what I know well (e.g. Docker/podman) but isn’t very practical for newcomers, to something more inclusive like YUNOhost.
Edit: eh… ssh to a remote server? Damn sure that’s correct but I wouldn’t expect somebody with no self hosting experience to manage that https://doc.yunohost.org/en/admin/get_started/install_on/remote_server did I miss a step?
Sure, I’ve even made my own with a RPi0 and 3D printed frames at home https://twitter-archive.benetou.fr/utopiah/status/1449023602079240194/ so my point isn’t that Meta is fine (it definitely is bad) or that finding workarounds isn’t easy, solely that they seem to legitimately try to prevent circumvention measures despite picking bad designs, like removing a flashing red LED lights like ALL cameras did until now.
Goes against https://duckduckgo.com/privacy which is basically also their main selling point. If they don’t have that, they have nothing. So… FUD until you do have data. You clearly did run an experiment, show us the proof.
I’m not saying that it’s not feasible, I’m saying the hardware changed since those first “hacks”.
Are you saying you tried on the latest version and covering the light sensor within the LED allow recording?
Because my best is that the videos are showcasing this on older models which precisely did not included that sensor. Here is a 404 episode on that https://www.404media.co/how-to-disable-meta-rayban-led-light/
Behaviors changed a lot but even then according to
that’s an incorrect stereotype. According to this dataset for example since 1990 to 2021 France always had lower share of deaths attributed to smoking than e.g. the US.
Source https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-deaths-smoking from broader https://ourworldindata.org/smoking
you might be used to that as a European
FWIW really depends where in Europe, in France and Belgium at least the law radically changed where
- you can’t smoke in a restaurant, bar, club (that’s been for a while now)
- you can’t smoke in FRONT of a place (like you need to be far from the exit)
- you can’t smoke even outdoor in a public place (e.g. train station by the tracks, beach in France)
- advertisement is forbidden
- cigarette packs have absolutely disgusting warnings (e.g. lung cancer, throat cancer) with graphic photos
… so yes there are still some people who smoke but it’s a LOT less public, in Western Europe, than just a couple of years ago.
To be clear some people still ignore those laws but if you compare to just a decade ago it’s radically less popular.
there’s a good chance they’re smarter than you.
Not really BUT they are definitely more specialized and have a lot more dedicated resources, including other dedicated people, who are paid to get information on you and your behavior. One does not have to be “smart” to excel in security compared to a normal user who cares very little.
That being said, no matter how smart and how much resource they have, they also can’t break encryption. They can though ask a cop to come to your place and incarcerate your regardless. So… do with that what you will.
Written in jest and yet using CV at scale on GPUs initially used for LLMs make sense.
Yet… why do so? As I wrote just minutes ago in https://lemmy.ml/post/41546700/23280257 there is already very high quality signal that requires nearly no compute : your wireless trace. Google/Apple and your mobile provider or ISP and thus the government hosting it already know 24/7 where you are, how active you are, etc solely from your 5G/4G signal. Well OK for activity it’s with the IMU but the point is this is basically computationally free.
You move around,
- your mobile phone scans for 5G signals,
- login in a nearby tower via its SIM/eSIM
- and voila, you are there. It’s basically few requests on some databases and it’s instantaneous.
compare this with
- your identity with facial features (lots of photo) is store in a large DB
- there is no known location so a network of thousands if not millions of cameras have to be queried to try to match your facial features again the last frames, so that’s ~gigabytes of data to send somewhere or query all those cameras with setup locally
- there is a match! then repeat this locally for the next cameras, maybe just hundreds
- light change or hoodie on, no match, restart process
this is ridiculously expensive to run. I’m not saying it can’t be done (it’s been done and it’s not hard to setup) but… WHY would one do so when the first setup works more reliably and is orders of magnitude cheaper?
Obviously both can be combined but also both can be bypassed conveniently and extremely cheaply (leave your phone home, wear sunglasses and a hygiene mask) so even though a realistic scenario I’d argue it’s not rational to not just rely on what already works for the vast majority of situations.
You are right to be wary of that behavior as it is spreading.
That being said I believe it’s good to be mindful of the “paranoid privacy nut” in the sense that… WHO are you concerned might have WHICH information about you?
I don’t know you but… if I were to find your name I could find your address or at least roughly where you live. In fact depending on what you post one could potentially know your neighborhood without even knowing your name. Now I didn’t know you had a pet, now I do. That being said even without a pet… if you live somewhere you are expected to walk around your neighborhood. It might be to go buy milk, help neighbors, drop mail, etc. There is relatively no new information there. Your neighbors might know you are around, their doorbell cameras might have footage of you doing so… and what? How is the confirmation that a perfectly average behavior is indeed coherent? What also NOT having that footage bring? Maybe you are traveling and thus not with your pet but maybe you also are sick.
So… I agree with you that all those cameras with footage are not healthy but also what do they genuinely add or remove? I would argue in principle a lot but in practice not so much. I would even argue to biggest impact is unwarranted stress and concerns, the chilling effect.
Walk freely however you want, it’s your neighborhood, ignore the cameras.
PS: as someone already pointed out, one does not need video cameras to track your movement and patterns, using wireless signal (5G/4G, WiFi, BT) on your phone is enough.
Why would you feel bad, the interview is a 2 way process. They are evaluating you but YOU are also evaluating them. It’s actually VERY costly to you too if you start working for the wrong company. If you realize after a week or a month that truly the culture, the tooling, etc basically anything but the pay does not match YOUR needs, whatever they may be, they you HAVE to pull out.
You can be polite about removing your application, as you were, but you should not feel bad. It is precisely WHY there are interview. Candidate think about it as only them being evaluated and that’s very wrong. As your title says clearly it is about self respect but not just during the interview, the whole time. If you are not a match sure it does suck, for both, but that’s again better than a forced match that will bring both down over time.
Finally regarding your last part, I recommend you edit your post to put your precise skillset and experience there. Hopefully someone can refer you to the right place.
IMHO the key aspect isn’t where you host things but rather understanding how hosting itself works.
To me the most challenging aspects are how to :
- route traffic
- start a service
- backup your data
and also ideally
- have more than 1 service on a single machine
- restore your data
- restore your entire setup
For that very first step I would say having a machine directly exposed to the Internet makes it easier. I don’t know what ISP you use but at least in Belgium where I’m currently located all ports are closed and IP are dynamic. That means if you want to show your freshly started Apache Web server to your mother in law it will challenging.
Meanwhile if you do manage to get to the last step, namely restore your entire setup, then restoring to a cloud service or a RPi is the same, you transfer your data, start your services and voila, you are back either LAN only or on the entire Internet via a cloud provider.
So autonomy isn’t as much as to where things are physically hosted and by whom as in the actual capacity to able to host there or elsewhere.
Finally if you are using a commercial ISP, as opposed to having your own AS, are you really self-hosting?
That’s actually my recommendation yes.
If somehow after a month you feel like you do want this “lifestyle”, are comfortable with setting up a VPN (if you need external access) THEN spend more and get your a SBI like a RPi and have it at home. If that’s still not enough then go up to a proper server you host, use a non commercial ISP, etc … but IMHO don’t start with a server at home if you are not familiar with all this, it’s counter intuitively harder and definitely more expensive.
Also FWIW you should still have an offsite backup regardless of how you do it.
Sure, rent a cloud server for $10/month, install Docker/Podman then all self hosted services you need. Invite people on your Jitsi Meet server, publish your videos on PeerTube, work via NextCloud, etc. It’s not easy the first time but with each (well documented) step it becomes easier. Most important : backup your data.
Honestly I don’t mind that, at all. What I mind is if it’s mandatory and only through proprietary applications.
WiFi, BT, Zigbee, Z-wave etc are not per se a problem. The question instead is who practically owns the device. If the behavior is force on you as a customer, then it’s easy, it’s not YOUR device. Consider then buying OSHW or whatever alternative you need, including potentially non connected devices that you yourself connect on your terms.
Edit: check which devices are compatible with GadgetBridge and/or HomeAssistant then reviews from actual customers. That should help you find out which devices can match your requirements.
dumb shit like system updates
You can’t do that, if you allow that then how can you be sure the next “update” won’t make your experience worst? Optional update controlled by the user is great, mandatory ones mean “your” hardware is actually not yours.
For hardware that does insist on connection and even enable mesh networks, it’s safer to not buy those.
Right, Betamax much? It doesn’t really matter if one technology is objectively “better” on all aspects than another if the strategy to make it popular outpaces the other.
To be clear I wish you were right (even though I don’t find open source models to be free of problems) but I think the conclusion is a wish, not a logical one.
No.
Not because it’s not technically feasible but rather I would psychologically not manage to make money knowing my portfolio, either directly or via EFTs, makes me money by profiteering of BigTech or surveillance capitalism.
Full disclosure : I did have Apple and NVIDIA stocks and I did sell them not because they were not making money (there sure were) but because I felt disgusted by HOW they made money.
PS: KYC and related laws in a lot of countries demand you use your real information and declare your earnings, so again it’s not a technical problem, it’s at least ALSO a legal problem, and arguably a moral one if you believe KYC kind of laws help to curb money laundering.
A good rule of thumb is : does any of the participant maintain the backend?
If not then you are dependent on at least a 3rd party. If that 3rd party is not entirely open, meaning at least
- standards for the protocol,
- open source for the backend and frontend,
- alternative clients,
- alternative backends,
- both can be actually used (not just in theory because the protocol has been published)
then basically you should consider that this 3rd party owns your group, there is no expectation of privacy in it, it can be closed in an instant, messages can be modified without you knowing it, etc.
TL;DR: bad.
What software?
Anyway you can use QEMU https://computernewb.com/wiki/QEMU/Guests/Windows_11 or rent a VPS for the duration of your testing, assuming there is hardware related.
Apple still has the most reliable out of the box experience for hardware.
Out of curiosity, did you try an equivalent, e.g. Framework or Tuxedo or a SteamDeck, or only generic hardware, like a PC, then slapped on it a random distribution?
I don’t want to presume of your experiences and only to highlight that Apple out of the box experience better be flawless precisely because they have very limited hardware to support. In fact I would argue any distribution, even an obscure one, could fare very very well if it only had well known hardware (even if hundreds of them) supported, as opposed to an open and thus endless ecosystem.
It sure is possible to embed invisible information into videos and images, it’s called metadata. Now you might think of other techniques, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography but most if not all are, AFAIK (and I won’t pretend I know the state of the art in the domain) if they are within the data itself (thus become data, not meta-data), e.g. a visible stamp in an image, are made to remain visible. Compression codecs are specifically targeting the visible or audible spectrum. One of the most basic way to “compress” lossy information (as opposed to lossless) is precisely to remove the ends of the spectrum that is not perceived by the average human audience.
So… AFAICT it’s either visible and thus can be spotted (and thus can be removed, even if by adding a black mark over) or not visible but then most likely will be removed by basic compression codecs even without trying to do so.
TL;DR: no and I wouldn’t be until I see this in the wild (not a research paper claimed it’s technically possible).
When you generalize your position about your available time and technical knowledge as the limiting factor for everybody you are not saying it’s impossible for you, you’re saying it’s impossible for anybody and everybody. That’s the problem. It’s like saying “I don’t like this food” versus “It tastes bad!”. For you they are equivalent, for others they are totally different. I’m not saying you, or anybody else, should learn about self-hosting (federated) social platforms then set some up, what I’m rejecting instead is giving up pre-emptively on the behalf of others because it’s giving power back to BigTech.
To clarify I listed here behaviors that I believe is common. I’m NOT listing behaviors that somebody privacy conscious is. That same person could around the neighborhood with a hoodie, glasses, hygiene mask just the same way.
What I was trying to highlight wasn’t extreme behavior, one way or another, but rather typical ones.