Is there a community specific to FOSS or just general privacy oriented IoT? With plenty of hardware discussion along with software. Routers, piholes, Meshtastic, anything IoT but open source. If it touches a network but you want it to do something it doesn't. Flashing a doorbell camera with FOSS firmware. Hosting media servers on your phones Hotspot. Loading gcode to a printer from anywhere. There are so many things and possibilities.

If there isn't someone should start one, OpenIoT or something catchy and relevant.

Hi, I have noticed for three days now not being able to post comments from my Lemmy.world account while connected via Tor (I was left waiting for a spinning wheel )! I thought at first It might be a problem with LW servers but after three days, I concluded they are banning Tor and VPN users from posting, I Have found a user post on their help community about VPN and tor ban.

then I tried signing-up to lemm.ee but was greeted with a couldflare of non ending page reload after solving captcha. so I created this account hoping to test this instance and ask Lemmy users with privacy concerns about where this is headed and should we expect the rest of Lemmy instances to go the way of reddit and entirely ban users behind proxies ?

The fact that very big instances hold the majority of the communities and discussions on lemmy and the fediverse in general is concerning. and adopting tactics like shadow banning and dark patterns is concerning as well. I dropped reddit for the same practices and I will drop Lemmy if it carries on like this.

As a medical doctor I extensively use digital voice recorders to document my work. My secretary does the transcription. As a cost saving measure the process is soon intended to be replaced by AI-powered transcription, trained on each doctor's voice. As I understand it the model created is not being stored locally and I have no control over it what so ever.

I see many dangers as the data model is trained on biometric data and possibly could be used to recreate my voice. Of course I understand that there probably are other recordings on the Internet of me, enough to recreate my voice, but that's beside the point. Also the question is about educating them, not a legal one.

How do I present my case? I'm not willing to use a non local AI transcribing my voice. I don't want to be percieved as a paranoid nut case. Preferravly I want my bosses and collegues to understand the privacy concerns and dangers of using a "cloud sollution". Unfortunately thay are totally ignorant to the field of technology and the explanation/examples need to translate to the lay person.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11962108

What to do now?

Don't trust corporations, especially those where one egomaniac has all the power. Use open-source and community driven solutions if you can (like Mastodon).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11998237

The IT ministry has reportedly decided to issue an order blocking end-to-end encrypted email service ProtonMail. According to a report in Hindustan Times, the government is planning to block the email service at the request of the Tamil Nadu police over a hoax bomb threat sent to at least thirteen private schools in Chennai on February 8. The report says that the decision to block ProtonMail was taken at a meeting of the 69A blocking committee on Wednesday (February 14).

A Proton spokesperson told the publication that the company has received the request from MeitY “a few days ago”. “We are currently working to resolve this situation and are investigating how we can best work together with the Indian authorities to do so. We understand the urgency of the situation and are completely clear that our services are not to be used for illegal purposes. We routinely remove users who are found to be doing so and are willing to cooperate wherever possible within international cooperation agreements,” the spokesperson said.

Another post made me wonder if there is some kind of wiki or website for android packages with descriptions that can/should be removed via adb. Back when I had a bloated phone, about 3 years back, I remember how much of a pain in the ass this was and had to go through XDA developers and reddit posts just to get the info on which to not remove. Has this process changed since?

There is no option for deletion for this app. Its draining my battery, and I read various posts they said that this app spy location and do lot of other stuff. I'm really confused after noticing it and reading such stuff. What should I do, I tried to disable it but it again activates when I restart phone?

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/10063199

Proton's mission, funding sources, independence, and community are some of the reasons we're more resilient than other privacy-first companies.

Hello folks. I want to hear your opinions about the advances in AI and how it makes you feel. This is a community about privacy, so I already kind of know that you're against it, at least when AI is implemented in such a way that it violates peoples' privacy.

I recently attended a work-related event and the conclusion was that AI will come and change everything in our field. A field which has been generally been dominated by human work, although various software has been used for it. Without revealing too much, the event was for people who with texts. I'm a student, but the event was for people working in the field I plan to work in in the future. The speakers did not talk about privacy concerns (not in detail, at least) or things such as micro work (people who get paid very little to clean illegal content in AI training data, for example).

You probably can guess that that I care about privacy: I'm writing this on Lemmy, for a privacy community. I'm a Linux user (the first distro I used was Ubuntu 10.04) and I transitioned to Linux as my daily driver in November last year. I care about the Open Source community (most of the programs I used on Windows were FOSS). I donate to the programs I use. I use a privacy-respecting search engine, use uBlock and Privacy Badger on Firefox. I use a secure instant messenger and detest Facebook. But that's where it ends, because I use a stock Android phone. But at least I care about these things and I'm eager to learn more. When it comes to privacy, I'm pretty woke, for the lack of a better word.

But AI is coming, or rather, it's already here. Granted, people who talked at that event were somewhat biased, as they worked in the AI industry, so even if they weren't marketing ChatGPT, they were trying to hype up the industry. But apparently, AI can already help so called knowledge workers. It can help in brainstorming and generating ideas. It can produce translations, it can summarize texts, it can give tips...

The bottom line seems to be that I need to start using AI, because either I will use it and keep my job in the future, or I will not use it and risk being made redundant by AI at some point in time.

But I want to get other perspectives. What are your views on AI, and has it affected your job, and if so, how? I know some people have said here that AI is just a bunch of algorithms and that it's just hype and that the bubble will burst eventually. But until it does, it seems it'll have a pretty big impact on how things work. Can we choose to ignore it?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called on the Ninth Circuit to rule that California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) violates the First Amendment, while not casting doubt on well-written data privacy laws.

The project announced today the introduction of a new feature called “Sync & Backup,” which allows users to import bookmarks, passwords, and personal settings from other browsers to DuckDuckGo. Moreover, it enables users to move that data from one device to another or restore it on a new device in case they lose their original device.

DuckDuckGo’s announcement declares that the new feature can do the following:

Privately sync and access the bookmarks and passwords saved in your DuckDuckGo browsers – including any you’ve imported from other browsers – across multiple devices.

Back up passwords, bookmarks, and favorites in case your device is lost or damaged.

Migrate your bookmarks and passwords to a new device.

Sync your Email Protection account between devices.

I use Firefox whenever I can.

On first install of the browser I usually end up following a hardening guide which includes stuff like blocking cross site cookies, setting a few things in about:config to disable Pocket/etc, and installing uBlock Origin. I've taken what I consider a relatively balanced approach, I don't use anything like noScript, uMatrix, etc that ultimately just cost a lot of time fiddling to get the 10th website of the week working.

I've been more or less fine browsing the web this way for years, but around the start of 2024 I've started seeing way more "Access Denied" pages than I used to. I think part of it is Cloudflare or similar, but I don't know exactly what's changed or what's triggering it to occur.

It usually goes away and I can re access the site in 10-30 minutes as usual, but I've had it occur in really weird instances, such as trying to change my Minecraft skin and getting blocked by the website. The server block often goes away immediately if I switch my user agent, so I know that it has something to do with how I've got everything set up.

Not sure what anyone else's experience with this has been. I'd like to hear some of your thoughts and tips

The whole article's a great read, but here's a fun excerpt=

To be perfectly blunt, AI girlfriends are not your friends. Although they are marketed as something that will enhance your mental health and well-being, they specialize in delivering dependency, loneliness, and toxicity, all while prying as much data as possible from you.” --Misha Rykov, Researcher @ *Privacy Not Included

I've read many posts asking users to download Firefox but when a noob like me goes to google play store, it shows Firefox collects user activity, location and other data but for Brave it says that Brave doesn't collect any data or share any data. A company like google must do a thorough investigation before putting an app of their play store. Experts who hold degree in computer science, data science etc and are privacy advocates please explain me why not to use Brave?

It seems like all it took was the right amount of cash for privacy not to matter anymore.

This is the just-released unclassified version of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board's December 2020 classified report on the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) use of XKEYSCORE, an intelligence analysis tool.

However, this bug caused some DNS queries to be sent to the DNS server configured on the computer, usually a server at the user's ISP, allowing the server to track a user's browsing habits.

I'm running out of mullvad in 23hr, and I'm excited to have port forwarding back! Hit a small snag though: I have the acct and have Eddie running on my phone as I type this, however when it comes to my Fedora install I'm paralyzed by choice.

Should I install:

1. Eddie GUI,

2. Eddie CLI,

3. both those,

4. or "Suite - based on our own AirVPN OpenVPN 3 library?"

I'm pretty comfortable with CLI especially if there's docs (actually prefer it typically), so that isn't really my concern. I'd like wireguard though which I'm not sure if "suite" yet supports, and port forwarding is the most important (slsk) so that would sway my decision as well (if it's only working on Eddie gui or something, for instance.)

My other main concern is I want the ability to auto connect to the VPN during the bootstrap, which "Suite" says it can do with bluetit, but idk if eddie CLI or GUI can do it. Would it be worth it to ditch wireguard until Suite supports it in favor of the bootstrap connection?

Any info at all that y'all have on these clients would be much appreciated, thank you.