So I have a job that will be getting me out of the US. For most things I’m not to worried, except for my computer. What would be the best way to securely move it and also not potentially worry about damaging it?

It’ll be a given that I have an encrypted off-site (cloud) back up, but I’m torn about removing the drives to hand carry and then shipping the chassis. My only worry about that would be customs stopping me because of carrying hard drives… more specifically 3x M.2, which I’m not as worried about and 4x 2.5” SSDs

Thoughts?

What do you run; Opnsense, pfsense, Smoothwall, maybe a WAF like wazuh?

Today was update/audit firewall day. I'm running a standalone instance of pFsense on a Protectli Vault FW4B - 4 Port - Intel Quad Core - 8GB RAM - 120GB mSATA SSD with unbound, pfBlockerNG, Suricata, ntopng, and heavily filtered. I did bump the swap to 8 GB as I've previously noticed a few 'out of swap' errors under load.

Before I signed off, I ran it through a couple porn sites to see if my adblocking strategy was working. Not one intrusive ad. Sweet!

Show me what you got.

Five hours after Charlie Kirk was shot this week, an Atlanta man got a phone call from an Illinois police officer asking about a photo he shared with a couple of close friends on a private Discord chat. The Atlanta man, who asked not to be identified, says the post was merely a confirmation that he had purchased the same T-shirt that the accused killer wore (from an Illinois-based online shop).

Social media companies are generally forbidden by law from divulging users’ private communications to the government without a traditional legal process (e.g., court order). But there’s an exception: in perceived emergencies, social media platforms can proactively and “voluntarily” hand over private messages in response to what’s called an “emergency disclosure request” (EDR).

Discord, I am told, did not respond to any EDR here; but when I asked them directly if they’d provided law enforcement with information to traditional legal process, they declined to respond on-record.

The FBI, or the intelligence community, evidently is monitoring Discord private messaging, even from people who have broken no law.

Full blown Orwellian world. Run for local government and stop this shit.

The largest populated areas are left leaning. If they ae controlled by democratic socialist, we can restrict this shit. Just by pure numbers.

Given that EM serves as a lense into our homes, would this provide an effective counter measure??

Sometimes I think, I have learned a lot about this issue and I'm well aware of the fact the whole world is going towards a state of surveillance that no one can escape, I have done everything I could to ensure my personal privacy, but what about others?

the majority of the world population does not even care about this matter, and they might even see it as a normality, the people might even know that they are being watched/listened to/surveilled, and they don't do anything to prevent it neither individually or collectively.

I also believe that protecting the individual privacy automatically contributes to the collective privacy and vice-versa, but seeing how the world is heading towards extreme surveillance that is practically impossible to resist (eg.. face recognition, chat control law), I ask, what is the point of all of this? how can i live peacfully knowing that i can be suspected of anything just because i made a joke here or said something there?

and I'm not talking 100% privacy or anonymity, i'm just talking peace of mind and well-being.

So, it's probably hard to believe this, given my user name, but sometimes I want to be sober instead of wasted or possibly overdosing... I do not consider myself to be in recovery or have a drug problem, but today is a bad day, and I feel like sobriety may be a better option than the alternative.

There are generally two options when it comes to recovery from drugs. One is Narcotics Anonymous and one is Smart Recovery. The difference is Narcotics Anonymous involves "high powers" as a step, which I view as religious baloney. Since I hate religion, but also want to be sober, Smart Recovery is the main alternative.

Both of these websites have canvas fingerprint tracking in them.

This is incredibly irresponsible and selfish and dangerous and either is a result of extreme technological ignorance or just willful disregard of people visiting those sites.

Smart Recovery seems to be much worse than NA in terms of data privacy because Smart Recovery is loading up things from content delivery networks and lots of external scripts, none of which likely care about the privacy of someone not wanting to be tracked.

Yes, it's "great" that NA and Smart Recovery can take a browser fingerprint of users and sell that to Meta who will then market this information to Rehab Facilities. (I'm not sure if that is what they do, but it wouldn't surprise me.)

But this information also is likely getting sold somehow to data brokers and that information could end up being looked at by a variety of people, including potential employers. If a large employer is looking at a potential employee, they can and often do get detailed information from data brokers. People are incredibly naive as to how much data brokers store about people. It's irresponsible and certainly not anonymous for these sites to track people like this, claim to be anonymous, and not even warn users prior to fingerprinting their hardware and identity.

Additionally, because na.org and smartrecovery.org are not hospitals or medical providers, this information is likely not HIPPA protected and certainly even if it were we have no way of knowing what data brokers do with these canvas profiles, which almost certainly link to real KYC canvas fingerprint profiles of naive users. And most users are naive users.

It's also so frustrating because many of these meetings are being done on zoom, so accessing the meeting is done by going to the website and visitors or former addicts or people attending meetings are getting canvas fingerprinted every time. It's disgusting, appalling, and another example of why it's just better to keep an addiction secret, try to detox on your own, and try to sober up on your own and stay sober if you can.

It's just infuriating. Thanks for reading my rant. And you can go to these sites yourself to check out the scripts in them. If I am misstating the privacy risks involved, I'd be happy to be told so.

Well I'm definitely not going to a meeting. Perhaps I can stick with coffee, although it's pretty late for coffee?

Post reads: "❓ Do you know who are the inventors of the hardware-level kill switch for smartphones?

🤫 Stay tuned! We’re teaming up with them to offer you more privacy.

👇 Share your ideas in the comments! "

Hello all,

I am currently looking for a privacy respecting alternative for the medication tracking app I currently use. Apple's native health app seems to be decent privacy wise, but it lacks the ability to input my current capsule inventory and set a reminder at a certain amount of pills so I can refill them on time. (I should also note that I have an older phone so I'm running iOS 18.6? I'm not sure if the app has changed on iOS 26.)

Thanks for reading and I look forward to your recommendations. ^-^

A court ordered Google to pay $425 million after finding the company misled 98 million users about data collection through its "Web & App Activity" setting[^1]. The case revealed Google continued gathering user data via Firebase, a monitoring database embedded in 97% of top Android apps and 54% of leading iOS apps, even after users disabled data collection[^1].

Google's internal communications showed the company was "intentionally vague" about its data collection practices because being transparent "could sound alarming to users," according to district judge Richard Seeborg[^1].

This ruling adds to Google's recent privacy settlements, including:

• $392 million paid to 40 states in 2023 for location tracking violations
• $40 million to Washington state for similar location tracking issues
• $1.38 billion to Texas in 2025 over location tracking and incognito mode claims[^1]

Google plans to appeal the $425 million verdict, with spokesperson Jose Castaneda stating "This decision misunderstands how our products work" and asserting that Google honors user privacy choices[^1].

[^1]: Malwarebytes - Google misled users about their privacy and now owes them $425m, says court

So I had researched it a while ago and don't recall having found anything effective and non-suspicious to protect from public camera mass survaillence in cities and the like. Is there anything that is a good option for that yet, and if so, could you point me toward it?

A VPN that grants network-level privacy on mobile by routing app traffic through Tor, assigns each app a separate circuit for improved separation, bypasses app-level censorship, features per-app routing, security via Rust-based implementation, and awaits early adopter feedback.

Private company - but can they be trusted to maintain user privacy?

Hostinger is a (German?) company that provides web hosting, vps and other services.

And all service providers/hosts around the world are expected to comply.

Here's one summary of the looming access control measures.

Reading and understanding all this (and the linked sources) feels so.. difficult, obtuse, complex.

Hey there,

i have a domain (.de-domain, registered with netcup) that i would like to use for my email-provider, but i am hesitant.

Why i am hesitant: I don't want that people might be able to find out my name/adress that is registered with my domain. If some service does not need my personal data, i simply don't want them to be able to access them. It's as simple as that.

I read that a whois-check could reveal my data, but the situation seems more complicated. At least, i couldn't reveal my personal data with a whois-check.

Why i would like to use my own domain: I want to be more independent from my mail-provider.

I am not that tech-savvy, so sorry if this is a silly question. I tried searching, but didn't found anything, probably because keywords like domain bring up lots of different topics.

In case anyone is interested in a digital exodus:

https://mastodon.social/@patrickleavy/115182449720835182

ETA a link with more details: https://www.rebeltechalliance.org/collectiveaction.html

I use GrapheneOS and love my privacy. However, I am not as knowledge in regards to simcards.

My family needed to get a new simcard while abroad and I was hesitant to get a new simcard and preferred to 'hitchhike' on a family members internet thearing so he could get a simcard instead of me.

It left me with the choice to:

• Get a Sim card
• Get an e-sim
• Let a family member get a simcard and hitchhike from their internet. (Internet hotspot thearing)

My question: Was my worry in vain and I could actually get an e-sim/Sim or did I do it correctly, making someone else get a Sim and share the internet to me? :P

What I'm worried of, is that I'm currently outside EU and I don't want any weird hacking attempts towards me from the government. There are a lot of protests here, quite violent ones at times too, and I am aware that governments usually use stingrays or equivalent devices to identify or stalk people of interest.

I've used mullvad for quite a long time, but because it doesn't have port forwarding, its created some concerns with media sharing. Ive seen TorGuard and AirVPN as the main 2 that are recommended. Are they as trustworthy as Mullvad?

We all hate google and youtube, but overall as a community we're all simultaneously lukewarm and non-committal about pushing towards using an alternative. I admittedly cling to invidious frontends for dear life.

It seems like whenever somebody asks for an alternative to youtube, they're offered Odysee and Peertube, but inevitably many others chime in about the shortcomings of both of those platforms.

Can we as a community come to a consensus as to which of these platforms should be pushed forward?

I don't even think it needs to be a binary choice. Obviously youtube cannot be immediately replaced for it's archival of educational and tutorial videos, but we can at least push newcomers towards using invidious frontends for those instances.

Maybe Odysee is better for some type of content over Peertube. Let's discuss which platform works best for what and try to be more active about sharing and promoting them not just to viewers but potential creators as well.

If you go to share a youtube link, try to see if that video exists on an alternate platform first and share that link instead. I think that's a good first step towards getting away from youtube in the privacy community.

But youtube alternatives are still very much on the fringe and I'm hoping this post will at least inspire some discussion about changing that.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/613592

Comments

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37278389

Optical blur is an inherent property of any lens system and is challenging to model in modern cameras because of their complex optical elements. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a high‑dimensional neural representation of blur—the lens blur field—and a practical method for acquisition.

The lens blur field is a multilayer perceptron (MLP) designed to (1) accurately capture variations of the lens 2‑D point spread function over image‑plane location, focus setting, and optionally depth; and (2) represent these variations parametrically as a single, sensor‑specific function. The representation models the combined effects of defocus, diffraction, aberration, and accounts for sensor features such as pixel color filters and pixel‑specific micro‑lenses.

We provide a first‑of‑its‑kind dataset of 5‑D blur fields—for smartphone cameras, camera bodies equipped with a variety of lenses, etc. Finally, we show that acquired 5‑D blur fields are expressive and accurate enough to reveal, for the first time, differences in optical behavior of smartphone devices of the same make and model.