As Telegram ads are getting more misleading and dangerous than ever (specially crypto ads) just wanted to know is there a way to block them? I'm mostly worried for my more elderly family members getting affected

I'm looking for an article I either read or heard about during a podcast fairly recently. It stated someone's kid on vacation visited home, used their parents car, connected their phone to the infotainment system, and since it had access to their phone's data was able to see who the kid was and increased the parents car insurance policy as their kid was driving their car.

I've tried searching the internet for key words unsuccessfully. Does anyone else know what I'm talking about and can provide a link?

According to software engineer and blogger, Paul Biggar, however, one key detail on the methods employed by the Lavender system that is often overlooked is the involvement of the messaging platform, WhatsApp. A major determining factor of the system’s identification is simply if an individual is in a WhatsApp group containing another suspected militant.

Aside from the inaccuracy of the method and the moral question of targeting Palestinians based on shared WhatsApp groups or social media connections, there is also notably the doubt it brings to the platform being privacy-based and guaranteeing “end-to-end” encryption for messages.

Stating that WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, makes it complicit in Israel’s killing of “pre-crime” suspects in Gaza, Biggar accused the company of directly violating international humanitarian law, as well as its own public commitment to human rights.

These revelations are the latest evidence of Meta – formerly Facebook – aiding in the suppression of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, with the platform long having been criticised for taking significant steps to shut down dissent against Israeli and Zionist narratives. Those measures have included permitting adverts promoting a holocaust against Palestinians and even attempting to flag the word ‘Zionist’ as hate speech.

Questioning the accuracy of the report, a WhatsApp spokesperson told MEMO: “We have no information that these reports are accurate. WhatsApp has no backdoors and we do not provide bulk information to any government. For over a decade, Meta has provided consistent transparency reports and those include the limited circumstances when WhatsApp information has been requested. Our principles are firm – we carefully review, validate and respond to law enforcement requests based on applicable law and consistent with internationally recognized standards, including human rights.

So I joined a new gym last year and was pleasantly surprised. They gave me a smart card to get in and out, that's it, no app, no accounts, no nothing. Well, today I got to the gym and saw the announcement that they are phasing out the access with the smart card and starting to use, you guessed it, an app.

Now, I know this is not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But I'm just tired of this trend of replacing perfectly functioning systems with apps (public transport tickets come to mind). Just more ways to harvest people's data, I guess...

Ah and by the way, in my previous gym they not only required an app for accessing the place, they also incentivized people to track their workouts, meals and bodyweight using the gym's app (of course I never used any of these features).

I want to hear your opinions on the technical changes of the new Notesnook update.

Hello fellow privacy enthusiasts!

I created DiscordCleanse to ease out the message deletion in case you want to delete messages before deleting your account or for whatever reason your want to delete messages.

This program is similar to Undiscord but instead of relaying on Discord's search API it gets the message IDs from Discord Data Package that you can request from Discord.

Also to note you have to have access to the channel you want to delete the messages from otherwise it won't work.

I've been recently looking into watching my weight and diet again. I had used Noom in the past and really liked their services, but then it came out that they were essentially wiretapping everyone. It seems like every health focused app is selling health information now.

Does anyone know of any good privacy focused health services? Currently I think my only options are logging my calories in a paper book lol.

The app seems fairly small in size compared to orbot which is really old and also invizible pro seems to do a ton of things that including firewall vpn etc . So does it connect to tor network properly and pass all your traffic through it as good as orbot and completely block internet acces to not whitelisted services as good as rethink do ? Or does it cut cornors and do all the things but do all of them horribly ? Is it audited or atleast watched by enough people to be secure ? Anyway share your thoughts .

I think if the app does everything it boasts to do perfectly its one in a kind and unmatched and probably would make any android really really safe but i'm really skeptical . I have tried it out a month ago but ditched it after reading that its firewall does not work that well but idk if that is true or not anyway share your thoughts .

VLC's is broken atleast for me and i would like to know if any of the other video player from fdroid's main repo jad a good subtitle browser/downloader inbuilt . Searching got me nowhere and I'd rather not download try uninstall every video player from fdroid . So if anyone uses any do recommend as there is a fuckton of video players and i really can't download and test each and every one of them .

Maybe not the appropriate sub or c or whatever but i know mx player has one and I'd rather not turn to it (or anything outside fdroid) and i hope this post is alright here if not feel free to reach me about removal or if any mod wants to remove it also feel free . But just incase that i could get some answers don't down vote anyway cheers .

Started using xmpp recently because messaging apps sucks . I want to see if anyone use this thing .

I have a specific issue I want to solve right now, but the topic is phrased more generally as I would love the answer to this as well. But this might be an XY-problem because of this, so here's the actual problem I want to solve:

I am using LibreWolf as my main browser, and it has WebGL disabled by default to avoid fingerprinting. I would like to keep it this way, but I am currently also making some internal tools for myself that requires WebGL (map renders with Plotly in Dash).

Is there a way to tell LibreWolf to enable WebGL only for specific sites, so that I don't have to manually toggle this when I want to look at my maps? My initial thought was that this could be solved with a site-specific about:config.

from the passcodes-ftw dept

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/9850201

Late January, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a notice of proposed rulemaking for establishing new requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers (IaaS) . The proposal boils down to a 'Know Your Customer' regime for companies operating cloud services, with the goal of countering the activities of "foreign malicious actors." Yet, despite an overseas focus, Americans won't be able to avoid the proposal's requirements, which covers CDNs, virtual private servers, proxies, and domain name resolution services, among others.

It finally happened. My 'dumb' TV died for good. Looking for recommendations on a new TV. I'll be hooking it up to a media PC anyway, but I still want a TV with a good panel and absolutely no microphones, cameras, or baked in ads (Looking at you roku). If anyone knows any good 'dumb' TV's too, I'd be very interested in looking at those.

Banks, email providers, booking sites, e-commerce, basically anything where money is involved, it's always the same experience. If you use the Android or iOS app, you stayed signed in indefinitely. If you use a web browser, you get signed out and asked to re-authenticate constantly - and often you have to do it painfully using a 2FA factor.

For either of my banks, if I use their crappy Android app all I have to do is input a short PIN to get access. But in Firefox I also get signed out after about 10 minutes without interaction and have to enter full credentials again to get back in - and, naturally, they conceal the user ID field from the login manager to be extra annoying.

For a couple of other services (also involving money) it's 2FA all the way. Literally no means of staying signed in on a desktop browser more than a single session - presumably defined as 30 minutes or whatever. Haven't tried their own crappy mobile apps but I doubt very much it is such a bad experience.

Who else is being driven crazy by this? How is there any technical justification for this discrimination? Browsers store login tokens just like blackbox spyware on Android-iOS, there is nothing to stop you staying signed in indefinitely. The standard justification seems to be that web browsers are less secure than mobile apps - is there any merit at all to this argument?

Or is all this just a blatant scam to push people to install privacy-destroying spyware apps on privacy-destroying spyware OSs, thus helping to further undermine the most privacy-respecting software platform we have: the web.

If so, could a legal challenge be mounted using the latest EU rules? Maybe it's time for Open Web Advocacy to get on the case.

Thoughts appreciated.