Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Just do your part and don't get discouraged. You don't have to do everything. Walk the walk, talk the talk. If things don't work out, at least you tried; that's more than the majority did.
Do what you do no because of some expected local or global outcome, but because it's right.
i wish i had spent more time on the "pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will" part before i started to learn about leftism; i'm in a funk rn because there's a seemingly impenetrable gulf between where we are as a society and where we think we are and it's making me want to give up.
All things that go up must come down. Icarus’ wings will melt from the sun’s heat. The web will crumble under the weight of llm bots. Markets will crash due to llm’s not living up to their hype. Big tech will be broken up. Billionaires and the trillionaire will be taxed to death. Regulators will lose interest. Let’s have hope.
This made me so hot. Pure smut.
all long after you die; i wish i could take pleasure from knowing that people that i have zero relation to will get to enjoy this reality.
It has been written! Now we wait
he is no longer a trillionair. Don't forget that.
Billionaire or trillionaire is irrelevant. He's still a dumbass
i think it will get better, but probably not before lobbyists make it worse first. i guess my question about it is: will i still be able to go to lemmy/mastodon/peertube along the way, and what would it take from the instance owner's part to keep governments from forcing users to relinquish IDs?
Time to help build a new type of network: https://reticulum.network/
I have experience in programming and building computer systems. 12 years of experience and self-education. The project you linked looks promising. I'm always the first to support and contribute to such projects but we lack infrastructure for this to become a thing
Great! Here’s the thing: power will not build this network, people must. Node by node. You alone can service an decent area with $100 LoRa node and (for bootstrap) an I2P backhaul. I fundamentally believe something like this is essential for a free future — be the change you want to see.
And what happens if governments start banning cryptography or force backdoors on crypography?
Agreed. And we can easily bridge existing net to alternative transmission mediums while the existing net allows. Providing an easier time for others to adopt. I run a reticulum node as well.
We can even start community VPN and use site to site VPN to build a new internet!
Running a node myself and it's fun!
The EU isnt trying to push chat control. If it was then the EU wouldn't have shot it down multiple times like it has been.
Lobbyists are the ones trying to push chat control on the EU.
lobbyists need time; the more they have, the more they can do.
In Poland we call it "gotowanie żaby" (eng. boiling a frog). This is a nice idiom for slow action towards a specific goal despite the resistance of reality.
Yes and honestly we better learn to enjoy the struggle because it's never going away. We will always have to push back.
TL:DR: Yes. Long answer: It's complicated.
Citizens of the world must rebel against their governments
But seriously, boss—I’m tired. Are our attempts to preserve internet freedom futile?
Nah, we're fine. It's just that serious secrecy is a lot more effort and I'd rather not need that. But we do have all the tools.
That's 80% of the frustration for me. They have already lost that fight for control when they legalized encryption. Now the cat is out of the bag.
For example, encrypting things and hiding them in normal pictures and posts. Using code words in normal online interactions, woven into sentences where there is nothing to decrypt and the message only makes sense to people looking for a message.
Properly executed encryption isn't just indistinguishable from regular white noise, if it's mixed into a channel already carrying a message, an observer not looking for something will never see the difference.
You mean steganography, not encryption. Which would be possible even if it'd be illegal.
I think moving away to decentealised means of connecting is the way. We already have things like Reticulum. If we invent a powerful and robust decentralised way of physical connection (like LoRa or HaLow but better) then we won't need any corps - neither ISPs nor those that create web services for the ISP based network
You are definitely right, but I will caution that people are going to have to get used to a lot slower connectivity speeds and higher latency than we've been used to.
Max reticulum link is 40mbps, tor to onion services is like 5mbps, wifi halo is like 1-16mbps and MeshCore and Meshtastic are like ~20kbps max.
Centralized internet has gotten us used to speeds of hundreds of megabits per second and latency of 10s of ms, and that's just not possible when decentralizing systems, at least not right now.
at least not right now.
I think this is the key point. Decentralised alternatives begin as slower and less ergonomic, but over time, when more people use them, they should catch up on the proprietary solutions. The massive transition from Windows to Linux that has been happening lately is a good example of that IMO. It's only us who can help these initiatives grow after all.
Find what and where you can fight best, and throw your weight behind it. Don't fall into dispair, that's what they are counting on.
Some fight for better laws, some fight for better politicians, some hack, some donate, some build, some propagandize, some host and archive, some preach and philosophize.
The best often do several of these things. Find what you're inclined towards and do it. We need every last drop of effort to defeat the corpos and their corrupt political allies.
You can't stop the signal.
Had similar thoughts this morning. I think it's clear that many countries are going to head down the Great Firewall route; which is now very effective. It's so hard to bypass and risky that most people don't attempt to. As more countries implement these measures, and the list of countries/datacenters where people can set up XRay proxies (for example) shrinks, it will be easier to detect and block. I imagine if ad-hoc meshes became popular, then they'd be shutdown too. The problem is more political than technological.
But seriously, boss—I'm tired
Unfortunately, that's their game plan: be an unrelenting bureaucracy that grinds you down so you eventually just give in and finally accept it as it is now then passively accept what they come up with next.
How do you even type an em-dash?
I use Heliboard – on Android — which has a lot of different dashes when you long·press the -regular- dash.
With Linux you can use the compose key or some key combinations, usually with a modifier like AltGr or Shift+Alt.
Most word processors do it for you If you type space dash space then any letter, it will convert the dash to an emdash when the letter is typed.
We will always be able to keep our own provacy. Linux phones are getting better, motorola is working with grapheneos. Even if all new phones suddenly become locked down we will still have our own phones. They cant stop us from building and using our own private services. The main issue I see is friends and damily not willing to use private messages.
It's a mess when the right wing control freaks are in the gov. The only thing a user can currently do is avoiding as much as possible these platforms, using instead eg. P2P for communications (https://otr.to/, https://github.com/michal-wrzosek/p2p-chat, https://mesh.im/, etc.). Because of this and big corps the internet is dying, I see the future only in decentralized networks, I2P or something like this for an communication without a big brother in the middle.
Nope. They have no power over decentralized services outside their jurisdiction.
We will always have the option of privacy, even if we loose every court battle in 99% of countries
Nationalizing banks. Soon enough, we'll have to. It's just a question of when at that point.
Yes, because "The EU" is not a hive mind. There's politicians on both sides of this. We just need to make sure we back the right ones.
Of course we can win against politicians who we pay but don't listen to us. At some point, this is not democracy anymore, and if this is not democracy anymore, then the people is going to express itself through non-democratic measures. Just saying.
Until then, we have work to do: convince friends, family, politicians. Expose lobbyist, corporations. Support education, spread knowledge.
Yes.
We have to keep fighting, and it isn't easy but we have been building great things! Look at the growth of the fediverse with projects like mastodon, Lemmy, pixelfed, etc. More and more, people want alternatives to surveillance-capitalist social media platforms. They see the value in privacy as the stakes get higher for activists. Keep fighting, keep sharing.
Now, I also believe that ultimately we cannot solve political problems with technical solutions. We need to organize online and offline to effect real change. This organization must be multifaceted ("diversity of tactics"). A recent success of this type has been rolling back flock surveillance in municipalities around the US. Go to city council meetings with your neighbors. If the council won't listen, then go out later with a comrade and smash those fucking things.
Can someone 😇 please crash (DOS) more times this services so that people find other options (WhatsApp> signal, X>fediverse, etc)? It's always been like that when there's a blackout..