One example would be state disability programs, they already need my real name and identity to work with me. Are there any downsides to sharing a simplelogin alias containing my real name vs no containing my real name? I just think it would be easier record keeping for them.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18390499

For those of you using Proton services to protect your privacy, a new feature is being rolled out which is a self-custody Bitcoin wallet. If you have a proton e-mail address, you can now send and receive Bitcoin automatically. This is in tradition with their long-standing policy of accepting Bitcoin payments for their services.

A few key points to know:

• You and only you have access to the Bitcoin, it is a self-custody wallet. You are not dependent on proton's cooperation to access your funds and they do not hold onto the funds for you.
• Proton automatically translates e-mail addresses to Bitcoin addresses. This means you can send/receive BTC to/from any Proton user by just knowing their e-mail address
• Proton does not support Bitcoin lightning. This means transactions will take an average of 10 minutes for an average fee of 75c. Hopefully they will add lightning in the future so that can drop to under a second for pennies in fees. Lightning would also enhance privacy
• Note that using Bitcoin is pseudonymous. Using it privately and anonymously requires some effort.
• Proton has also put together a good primer on Bitcoin here.

from their blog post:

Early in our journey, we experienced first-hand what it’s like being cut off from the financial system and at the mercy of large banks and institutions — an ordeal that affects millions of people across the globe. In the summer of 2014, as the original Proton Mail crowdfunding campaign was in progress, Proton had a near-death experience when PayPal froze our funds, questioned whether encryption was legal, and whether Proton had government approval to encrypt emails.

Fortunately, in that instance PayPal returned the blocked funds, and Proton was able to start the journey that we’ve been on for the past decade. However, that dangerous moment has always stayed in our minds, and we still keep a proportion of Proton’s financial reserves in Bitcoin.

Having experienced firsthand the unreliability of the traditional financial sector, building Proton Wallet is an important strategic move to make Proton more resilient and independent in the future. By enabling us and the entire Proton community to more easily adopt means of payment that deliver on the promise of financial freedom for all, we better insulate Proton from the risks posed by traditional finance.

Staring yesterday evening, I'm unable to watch any videos with Freetube (on PopOS 22.04). I think Google is trying harder and harder to break things.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15132091

Bedfordshire Police have said just ten arrests were made over the Bedford River Festival this weekend (20/21 July) with Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology responsible...

I just tried changing my email on studentaid.gov to a simplelogin alias (using SL is a habit at this point) and I got notifications that emails from it were bounced while trying to verify the email change with sent codes. I looked it up and found a bunch of Reddit posts about issues with SL and iCloud.

I want to keep a timeline of the places I go like Google Maps can, and export it to mac for my diary*. The maps app doesn't have to be great, it just needs to keep a timeline in the background, I would still use Apple Maps as my main navigation app.

*(ideally I can automatically export it somehow, perhaps with the Shortcuts and Scriptable app but just tell me any apps with a timeline and export feature)

Hiya, just switched to LibreWolf due to Mozilla's recent actions... Just quickly wondering why these two "privacy preferences" are off by default? Are they not worth ticking off? Or is this another "part" of ones fingerprint that makes it more unique?

Doesn't seem especially practical, but I thought folks here might be interested in this method. With the increasing scarcity of pay phones I suspect it might be equally as "easy" to get a burner cell phone with cash and register a signal account that way.

And it applies across your entire SL account. Seems very easy to hit, given that people use SL to curb influxes of inbound email spam.

If you go over the limit, they start throttling your emails (delivering them late).

We're happy to announce that BusKill is presenting at DEF CON 32.

What: Open Hardware Design for BusKill Cord
When: 2024-08-10 12:00 - 13:45
Where: W303 – Third Floor – LVCC West Hall

BusKill is presenting at DEF CON 32

via @[email protected]

What is BusKill?

BusKill is a laptop kill-cord. It's a USB cable with a magnetic breakaway that you attach to your body and connect to your computer.

Watch the BusKill Explainer Video for more info youtube.com/v/qPwyoD_cQR4

If the connection between you to your computer is severed, then your device will lock, shutdown, or shred its encryption keys -- thus keeping your encrypted data safe from thieves that steal your device.

What is DEF CON?

DEF CON is a yearly hacker conference in Las Vegas, USA.

Watch the DEF CON Documentary for more info youtube.com/watch?v=3ctQOmjQyYg

What is BusKill presenting at DEF CON?

I (goldfishlaser) will be presenting Open Hardware Design for BusKill Cord in a Demo Lab at DEF CON 32.

What: Open Hardware Design for BusKill Cord
When: Sat Aug 10 12PM – 1:45PM
Where: W303 – Third Floor – LVCC West Hall

Who: Melanie Allen (goldfishlaser) More info

Talk Description

BusKill is a Dead Man Switch triggered when a magnetic breakaway is tripped, severing a USB connection. I’ve written OpenSCAD code that creates a 3D printable file for plastic parts needed to create the magnetic breakaway. Should anyone need to adjust this design for variations of components, the code is parameterized allowing for easy customization. To assemble a BusKill Dead Man Switch cord you will need:

1. a usb-a extension cord,
2. a usb hard drive capable of being attached to a carabiner,
3. a carabiner,
4. the plastic pieces in this file,
5. a usb female port,
6. a usb male,
7. 4 magnets,
8. 4 pogo pins,
9. 4 pogo receptors,
10. wire,
11. 8 screws,
12. and BusKill software.

Golden DIY BusKill Print

Full BOM, glossary, and assembly instructions are included in the github repository. The room holds approx. 70 attendees seated. I’ll be delivering 3 x 30 min presentations – with some tailoring to what sort of audience I get each time.

Meet Me @ DEF CON

If you'd like to find me and chat, I'm also planning to attend:

• ATL Meetup (DCG Atlanta Friday: 16:00 – 19:00 | 236),
• Hacker Kareoke (Friday and Sat 20:00-21:00 | 222),
• Goth Night (Friday: 21:00 – 02:00 | 322-324),
• QueerCon Mixer (Saturday: 16:00-18:00 | Chillout 2),
• EFF Trivia (Saturday: 17:30-21:30 | 307-308), and
• Jack Rysider’s Masquerade (Saturday: 21:00 – 01:00 | 325-327)

I hope to print many fun trinkets for my new friends, including some BusKill keychains.

Come to my presentation @ DEF CON for some free BusKill swag

By attending DEF CON, I hope to make connections and find collaborators. I hope during the demo labs to find people who will bring fresh ideas to the project to make it more effective.

That's a use case for aliases, catching if any company or service gives out your email to be abused by advertisers and whatnot. I tried looking for stories but didn't find any, I wonder if you have any to share.

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/2121207

EU’s law enforcement agency Europol is another major entity that is setting its sights on breaking encryption.

This time, it’s about home routing and mobile encryption, and the justification is a well-known one: encryption supposedly stands in the way of the ability of law enforcement to investigate.

The overall rationale is that police and other agencies face serious challenges in doing their job (an argument repeatedly proven as false) and that destroying the internet’s currently best available security feature for all users – encryption – is the way to solve the problem.

Europol’s recent paper treats home routing not as a useful security feature, but, as “a serious challenge for lawful interception.” Home routing works by encrypting data from a phone through the home network while roaming.

We obtained a copy of the paper for you here.

Europol appears to want to operate on trust: the agency “swears” it needs access to this protected traffic simply to catch criminals. And if the feature was gone, then ISPs and Europol could have smooth access to traffic.

But if the past decade or so has taught law-abiding citizens anything, it is how, given the right tools, massive government and transnational organizations “seamlessly” slip from lawful to unlawful conduct, and secretive mass surveillance.

Not to mention that tampering with encryption – in this instance available in home routing as a part of the privacy-enhancing technologies (PET) – in security and privacy terms, means opening a can of worms.

It turns out, as ever, that agencies like Europol actually do have other mechanisms to go after criminals, some more controversial than others: one is “voluntary cooperation” by providers outside the EU (in which case Europol has to disclose information about “persons of interest” using foreign phone cards with other countries) as well as issuing an EIO – European Investigation Order.

But that barely compares to breaking encryption, in terms of setting up the infrastructure for effective mass surveillance. Europol’s complaint about the available procedures naturally doesn’t mention any of that – instead, they talk about “slow EIO replies” that hinder “urgent investigations.”

Europol presents two solutions to the home routing encryption “problem”: One, disable PET in home routing. The second is a cross-border mechanism inside the EU where “interception requests are quickly processed by service providers.”

I want to be logged in so I can do most things on Reddit like post and comment. I want it to be a web frontend rather than an app because I keep many tabs on Reddit open in my browser while doing research on things (like digital privacy for instance!). I did some searching and didn't find any currently working frontends with login support.

Last year Danny Mekić wrote this article : https://dannymekic.com/202310/undermining-democracy-the-european-commissions-controversial-push-for-digital-surveillance which was published in a newspaper and then the author got shadow-banned on X. Today the same Dutch newspaper reported that Mekić won two court-cases about this.

• Dutch article about the verdict - paywall : https://www.volkskrant.nl/tech/x-mag-gebruikers-niet-meer-zomaar-shadowbannen-oordeelt-amsterdamse-rechter~befb7fd0/

• Archived copy : https://archive.ph/ckW2a

• tl;dr English translation :

X is not allowed to shadow-ban users easily the judge said. Only during the court-case X explained why the account of Meki was shadow-banned : He had shared an article about the CSAM law on X. "I still
do not understand why X this only said in the court hall, rather than telling me right away when I
asked about it" Mekić said.

• Mekić on Mastodon : https://mastodon.social/@DannyMekic
• The author's username on X : DannyMekic
• Article from last year by WIRED : https://www.wired.com/story/csar-chat-scan-proposal-european-commission-ads/

It seems like the main benefit of such frontends is the lack of trackers and fingerprinting, but what if the browser, like Firefox, already did that with UBlock Origin and fingerprinting protection?

... what should we do?
I guess it all depends on how it would be implemented, which is something I have a hard time imagining at this moment. How do you imagine day to day online life in a post-Chat Control EU world? Which ways of communicating would still be private? Is there anything we can do at this point to prepare for the worst outcome?

It's now been two weeks since I created an account and tried making a post, but immediately so I got a message saying my account is on hold. I tried emailing Jonah Aragon who's listed on the site, and messaging the mods on the forum, but still haven't heard back. Any ideas for what to do? This is really annoying.

Solution: I came up with this uBlock Origin filter rule: startpage.com$removeparam=/abp|lui/, I started by removing all the paramters and then took them out one by one while testing if searches made on startpage.com worked with them: startpage.com$removeparam=/abp|t|lui|sc|cat/. I also got a response from u/SPSupport that the paramters don't show when I search from the URL bar with my search engine set to https://www.startpage.com/sp/search?query=%s, which I did.

I want to be able to see the search query in the URL, and have a URL that I can always go back to if I restart my browser. I set the HTTP request method in settings to GET instead of POST since that shows the query, but it adds a bunch of extra paramters:

• The URL I want: https://www.startpage.com/sp/search?query=wizard+of+oz
• The URL I get: https://www.startpage.com/sp/search?query=wizard+of+oz&abp=1&t=device&lui=english&sc=evp2qxFIy8iZ00&cat=web

I tried Startpage and Searx but when I search things celebrity info or health conditions, the kind of searches where Google and other 1st party search engines would show info cards on the right, they show them on the left above all the search results rather than on the right side like Google search does. Its bad design because I have to scroll down to see the results when I wouldn't have to otherwise, and I'm used to the Google search layout, it probably takes some getting used to for other people as well. Its a waste of screen real estate on wide screens, it looks like the UI was made for mobile only.

I'm eligible for the US Lifeline program to get a phone number for free. I would use it on websites that require a phone number, like Discord, which doesn't accept numbers on services like Google Voice, and replace my personal phone number with it wherever necessary. And I would start using my personal phone number only with friends and family. I would NOT be using a provided lifeline phone, but rather a sim on my iPhone.

I may need/benefit from using Slack for "work stuff".

Yeah, sucks totally, but network effect is a thing.

What is the best way to use it, on Android and on Linux, from people that use it often.

Do they have a webapp? How do they do their servers, is it centralized? Any wrappers for anything I should think of?

Using it in the work profile (GrapheneOS), getting the APK from APKpure is the option I would consider as last resort.