freedomPusher

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/14184367

Lemmy version 0.19.4 introduces 3 relatively intolerable bugs, and 0.19.5 only fixes one of them.

• cannot post, risk of data loss
• cannot cross-post, but no data loss.
• can only visit the default timeline view

Lemmy version 0.19.4 introduces ~~3~~ 4 relatively intolerable bugs, and 0.19.5 only fixes one of them.

• cannot post, risk of data loss
• cannot cross-post, but no data loss.
• can only visit the default timeline view
• (update) cannot search

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/14087065

One quite annoying Lemmy behaviour is when you search for a community that has many results spanning multiple screens (e.g. query “software”), the list is largely clusterfucked with crappy centralised instances that go against the #fedi philosophy (e.g. #lemmyWorld, #ShItjustWorks, #lemmyCa, #LemmyZip, #programmingDev, etc).

I discovered a fix: ctrl-rt-click on every community in the list to open each in a tab. Then click “block community”, then repeat the search. It works the way it should: blocked communities are excluded from search results.

Wish I realised that sooner.. would have saved me some effort and frustration in trying to search only for communities in the decentralised free world.

One quite annoying Lemmy behaviour is when you search for a community that has many results spanning multiple screens (e.g. query “software”), the list is largely clusterfucked with crappy centralised instances that go against the #fedi philosophy (e.g. #lemmyWorld, #ShItjustWorks, #lemmyCa, #LemmEE, #LemmyZip, #programmingDev, etc).

I discovered a fix: ctrl-rt-click on every community in the list to open each in a tab. Then click “block community”, then repeat the search. It works the way it should: blocked communities are excluded from search results.

Wish I realised that sooner.. would have saved me some effort and frustration in trying to search only for communities in the decentralised free world.

In the US, consumers can freeze their credit worthiness records and receive a code. When the records are frozen, the only orgs that can access the records are those already doing business with the consumer. If a consumer wants to open up a new account, they share the code with the prospective creditor who uses it to see the credit report.

So the question is, how are access controls on credit histories done in various EU nations? Do any use unlock codes like the US, or is it all trust based?

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/14006758

Yikes.

“In the adequacy decision, the European Commission estimated that the U.S. ensures a level of protection for personal data transferred from the EU to U.S companies under the new framework that is essentially equivalent to the level of protection within the European Union.” (emphasis added)

Does the EU disregard the Snowden revelations?

And what a missed opportunity. California state specifically has some kind of GDPR analogue, so it might be reasonable if CA specifically were to satisfy an adequacy decision, (still a stretch) but certainly not the rest of the country. Such a move could have motivated more US states to do the necessary.

I must say I’ve lost some confidence and respect for the #GDPR.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/13985430

The problem:

Most #fedi authors post links with no idea if the hosting server discriminates against people, or who. The consequence is that the fedi is muddied with references to exclusive venues that do not treat people equally, which wastes the time of readers who are impacted by discrimination. A variety of walled gardens pollute our threadiverse experience. So how can we remedy this?

Proposed fix:

Suppose we create a community and designate it as a testing area which welcomes bots. So e.g. I post something in the test community, and a bot that is paywall-aware replies yes or no whether the link is paywall-free. A bot that is Cloudflare-aware does the same. A regional bot, such as a bot in Poland can check that Polish IP addresses can reach the URL and make noise if the website blocks Poland. Etc. It need not be just bots.. someone in some oppressed region might manually attempt to visit links and report access problems. We would certainly like a bot in a GDPR region to test whether access is refused on the basis of a data controller’s unwillingness to respect GDPR rules. The OONI project could have a bot that reports anything interesting in their database.

There could also be anti-enshitification bots, which point out things like cookie walls.

There are bots that find better links to replace Cloudflare links. Those bots could help direct authors to better URLs to share.

There could be a TL-DR bot that replies with a summary or even the full text, so an author can decide before posting in the target community whether to omit a shitty link and just post the content.

(update) It’s worth noting that for Mastodon there an ad hoc tool. If you follow @[email protected], that bot will follow you back and analyze every URL you share for whether it is Cloudflared. If yes, it will DM you with alternative URLs.

Note that the mitigator bot is quite loose it its judgement. If the host is not Cloudflared but another host on the same domain is Cloudflared, it is treated as a positive because it’s assumed that when you visit the host it will link to other hosts on the same domain.

The problem:

Most #fedi authors post links with no idea if the hosting server discriminates against people, or who. The consequence is that the fedi is muddied with references to exclusive venues that do not treat people equally, which wastes the time of readers who are impacted by discrimination. A variety of walled gardens pollute our threadiverse experience. So how can we remedy this?

Proposed fix:

Suppose we create a community and designate it as a testing area which welcomes bots. So e.g. I post something in the test community, and a bot that is paywall-aware replies yes or no whether the link is paywall-free. A bot that is Cloudflare-aware does the same. A regional bot, such as a bot in Poland can check that Polish IP addresses can reach the URL and make noise if the website blocks Poland. Etc. It need not be just bots.. someone in some oppressed region might manually attempt to visit links and report access problems. We would certainly like a bot in a GDPR region to test whether access is refused on the basis of a data controller’s unwillingness to respect GDPR rules. The OONI project could have a bot that reports anything interesting in their database.

There could also be anti-enshitification bots, which point out things like cookie walls.

There are bots that find better links to replace Cloudflare links. Those bots could help direct authors to better URLs to share.

There could be a TL-DR bot that replies with a summary or even the full text, so an author can decide before posting in the target community whether to omit a shitty link and just post the content.

(update) It’s worth noting that for Mastodon there an ad hoc tool. If you follow @[email protected], that bot will follow you back and analyze every URL you share for whether it is Cloudflared. If yes, it will DM you with alternative URLs.

Note that the mitigator bot is quite loose it its judgement. If the host is not Cloudflared but another host on the same domain is Cloudflared, it is treated as a positive because it’s assumed that when you visit the host it will link to other hosts on the same domain.

A national central bank that keeps track of bank accounts, credit records, delinquency, etc for everyone in the country has their website on Cloudflare. People are instructed to check their credit records on that site.

The question is: suppose you don’t use the site. Suppose you only request your records offline. What are the chances that Cloudflare handles your sensitive records?

I guess this might be hard to answer. I assume it comes down to whether to central bank itself uses their own website to print records to satisfy an offline request. And I assume it’s also a question of whether the commercial banks use the website of the central bank to feed it. Correct?

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/13489053

In the onion v2 days we had underwood2hj3pwd.onion. There were half a dozen other onion email providers but Underwood was the only one that did not have a clearnet email alias (IIRC). That was a useful feature because you could distribute an onion address to a MS Outlook or Gmail user and they could not use it to share their correspondence to you with Google or MS in the loop. They had just two options: step off the ad surveillance platform or not contact you at all. That option died with Underwood.

The other onion email services all have a clearnet translation. So if (for example) I give a gmail user this address:

foo@yllvy3mhtamstbqzm4wucfwab57ap6zraxqvkjn2iobmrtxdsnb37dqd.onion

and they are motivated to reach me, they can figure out that the corresponding clearnet alias is foo(/at/)onionmail.info and then they can use that address to send me a msg that is then shared with their surveillance advertiser. And worse, that’s less effort for them than obtaining an onion email account.

So what I do now is give an XMPP account. Since Google has abandoned jabber and MS never partook, XMPP avoids Google and MS. But XMPP is not a drop-in replacement for email. OMEMO is glitchy/buggy with pitfalls.

I would like to offer an email option. Ideally, an onion email service would offer a clearnet alias that cannot be determined from the onion address, which implies a different userid string.

The linked¹ #gemini article is the political platform of the French green party in Belguim w.r.t. digital rights. It was translated from French.

I’m overall impressed enough to vote for them. But I do have some concerns:

“At the Belgian level, we propose to establish a legal guarantee of 5 years for new electronic devices.”

Yikes, waaay too short. Needs to be at least 10 years. But it helps that they advocate FOSS:

“Generalize the ability to use free software on all devices to decrease software obsolescence.”

Though this statement is far too vague. If a maker of hardware with proprietary non-free software only gives 5 years of support, there needs to be a legal obligation that they port FOSS to the device at the end of the warranty. This is missing in the green party’s plan.

A lot of other things are missing in their plan, but generally their principles are sensible.

¹ (edit) actually it cannot be linked using the URL field due to a #LemmyBug. But at least it was linkable in the msg body.

It’s interesting to visit threads from an mbin instance because it shows you the number of up votes and down votes. When I see a Lemmy thread with 10 up votes then I go over to visit the same thread from mbin and see 20 up votes and 10 down votes, it really gives a different perspective.