diyrebel @ diyrebel @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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88

Joined

2 yr. ago

I really cannot stand that phrase because it’s commonly used as poor rationale for not favoring a superior approach. Both sides of the debate are pushing for what they consider optimum, not “perfection”.

In the case at hand, I’m on the pro-nuclear side of this. But I would hope I could make a better argument than to claim my opponent is advocating an “impossible perfection”.

Glad to see they are tagged. It could evolve more but the tags are the most important thing.

I think this project has some tools that might automate that:

https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare

They ID and track every website that joins #Cloudflare. It’s a huge effort but those guys are on top of it. A script could check the list of domains against their list. There is also this service (from the same devs) which does some checks:

https://karma.crimeflare.eu.org:1984/api/is/cloudflare/html/

but caveat: if a non-CF domain (e.g. example.tld) has a CF host (e.g. somehost.example.tld), that tool will return YES for the whole domain.

Manually adjusting availability is a can of worms that I don’t want to open

I would suggest not bothering with any complex math, and simply do the calculation as you normally do but then if a site is Cloudflare cap whatever the calculated figure is to 98%. Probably most (if not all) CF sites would be 100% anyway, so they would just be reduced by 2%. Though it would need to be explained somewhere -- the beauty of which would be to help inform people that the CF walled garden is excluding people. Cloudflare’s harm perpetuates to a large extent because people are unaware that it’s an exclusive walled garden that marginalizes people.

So I have to ask why was this post which asked what is a decent client for Debian removed (per rule #3):

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/1681507

while at the same time this “What's the best Android/iPhone app for Lemmy?” is not removed? Is it because the moderator created this thread & thus /above the law/, in effect?

It’s not a matter of quick learning. If that were the case, GUI is a clear winner. It takes more time to learn a text-driven UI. But the learning curve pays off. You invest more time learning but the reward is reaching a point where you’re much faster than a mouse allows. I started off using gnusocial from a browser then transitioned to #bitlbee, after which I could search, read, and react faster than in the GUI. Same for Mastdon. Sometimes I’m forced into the Mastodon GUI because of something being unimplemented, in which case the loss of speed is apparent. Just like in the 90s, the keyboard is still faster than the mouse.

BTW, I used a DVORAK keyboard for years. I never measured my speed difference but I think it slowed me down overall because there were moments where the brain would drift into QWERTY mode (and vice versa on a QWERTY keyboard), and the speed difference w/out drifting seemed negligible so I ultimately settled back on a QWERTY keyboard.

Servitor indeed looks like a good option. Thanks for the list!

To be clear, both of them are funny.

I have had no choice but to try Firefox because (for years) #Lemmy has been wholly broken on Ungoogled Chromium. And for me the FF-Lemmy UX is terrible.

Younger generations have no baseline for comparison because they were raised in GUI browsers. My baseline is IRC, gopher, usenet, emacs, lynx, mutt, bitlbee, toot (TUI + CLI), gnu screen, & piles of scripts on 15+ y.o. hardware, etc. So [bart simpson’s grandpa’s voice] all you young whipper-snappers chained to your GUIs with JavaScript, mice, labor-intensive clicking around have a very different reality and baseline of what’s good. Us older folks struggle to find tools that don’t rely on a mouse & which avoid all the #darkPatterns & bugginess of the modern day web.

(edit) and wtf there are apparently several phone apps for the fedi. I just don’t get how people can like the small screens, small keyboards, and speech-to-text that causes embarrassments.

The bigger problem is not even the mouse-dependent UI.. it’s that browser clients have no practical HDD access apart from cookie storage. Rightly so, but I should have a local copy of things I write because my hard drive has better uptime & availability than any cloud service could have. When censorship strikes msgs are destroyed without backups. And (at least in the case of Mastodon), even the admins cannot recover posts they’ve deleted even if they want to. Wholly trusting a server to keep your records is a bad idea. So a browser can never by suitable for blogging/microblogging, at least certainly not without an archive download option that can be triggered by a cron job.

Cloudflared services like ani.social are getting a “100%” available stat. That site may be up but it’s unavailable (denying availability) to something like ~1-3% of the population 100% of the time. So in principle it should never be able to achieve the 100% availability stat.

I understand it would be quite difficult to calculate an availability figure that accounts for access restrictions to marginalized groups, because apart from Cloudflare you would not have a practical way of knowing how firewalls are configured. But one thing you could (and should) do is mark the known walled gardens in some way. E.g. put a “🌩” next to Cloudflare sites and warn people that they are not open access sites.

The lestat.org availability listing is like a competition that actually gives a perception advantage to services that exclude people, thus rewarding them for compromising availability. I would also subtract off ~2% for all CF sites as a general rule simply because you know it’s not 100% available to everyone. They do not deserve that 100% trophy, nor is it accurate.

“Exactly” would imply just one issue. It would be like asking Greta what exactly is her issue with climate. Or asking Snowden what exactly is his issue with mass surveillance… or tell RMS he can only pick one problem with non-free software.

The first problem I encountered with Cloudflare was being in the excluded group. Being blocked from websites that were presented as though they were open to the public was how CF’s existence became known to me. The more you study CF, the more wrongdoing you find. The exclusivity problem just scratches the surface. There’s a good outline of the Cloudflare problem here: https://git.kescher.at/dCF/deCloudflare/src/branch/master/subfiles/rapsheet.cloudflare.md

Knowing what I know now about CF, I actually prefer to be excluded from their walled garden. I seek out tools that will help me avoid it. Thus I’ve come to actually see the blockade as a benefit. So perhaps I could answer your question after all with a single issue: the problem is that Cloudflare is growing and thus shrinking the decentralized free world as a consequence.

You’re viewing the world through a simplistic “good guys” / “bad guys” lens s.t. those you deem forces of good surely could not be a “walled garden”. The term serves well w.r.t. places where content is published. Restricted access venues: (Facebook, Cloudflare [with restricted access enabled], LinkedIn, Yelp, Quora,…) are not open access. They are walled gardens.

While #Signal is in fact technically a walled garden, it’s bizarre to bring it up simply because it’s a p2p platform with no public content to speak of. The term doesn’t really serve us well in a discussion of p2p private chat platforms. Although it’s important to recognize Signal:

• takes an extremely protectionist stance,
• deploys tactics to push Signal users into Google’s walled garden,
• threatens lawsuits against projects who attempt to use the same platform (#LibreSignal),
• and is outspokenly hostile toward the idea of federations

See https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/issues/779

A Cloudflare host can leave the walled garden, but steps are needed

It is possible to configure a CF host with unrestricted access, in which case you could argue those particular sites are not in the walled garden, but that’s relatively rare. And it still requires a hell of a lot of hand-waving on your part because CF algos still override the user settings in some instances.

Im glad we agree. Because its the entire point. You are nitpicking where it suits you and thats not really honest conversation.Tor browser isnt the only way to access tor

TLS is useful very specifically in the case of banking via Tor Browser, which is the most likely configuration the normal general public would use given the advice to access their bank over Tor.

There are entire swaths of the world, billions of people, where phones are basically the only gateways to the inter.

I do not recommend using a smartphone for banking. You’re asking for a huge attack surface & it’s reckless. People will do it anyway but to suggest that people should avoid Tor for banking on the basis that you’re assuming they are using a phone is terrible advice based on a poor assumption. Use Tor Browser from a PC for banking. That is the best advice for normies.

The point is, again, that Tor and specifically exit nodes are more hostile than normal ISP relays.

And again, those hostile nodes get less info than ISPs. They have to work harder to reach the level of exposure that your ISP has both technical and legal privilege to exploit.

Saying selling metatdata that is unencrypted is the same level of malicious as a nation state going after you (life and death) or having your identity or bank account stolen is clearly pretty naive.

Wow did you ever get twisted. You forgot that I excluded targeting by nation states from the threat model as you should. If someone has that in their threat model, they will know some guy in a forum saying “don’t use Tor for banking” is not on the same page, not aligned with their scenario, and not advising them. You don’t have to worry about Snowden blindly taking advice from you.

It’s naive to assume your ISP is not collecting data on you and using it against you. It’s sensible to realize the risk of a honeypot tapping your bank account and getting away with it and regulation E protections failing is unlikely enough to be negligible.

You still have to deal with getting your funds back and paying for stuff to live in the interim.

If you’re in the US, you have ~2-3 bank accounts on avg, and 20 credit cards (US averages). Not to mention the unlikeliness of an account getting MitM compromised despite TLS in the 1st place. Cyber criminals choose the easier paths, just as 3 letter agencies do: they compromise the endpoint. Attacking the middle of a tunnel is very high effort & when it’s achieved they aren’t going to waste it on some avg joe’s small-time bank acct. At best you might have some low-tech attempts that result in no padlock on the user side. But I’ve never seen that in all my years of exclusively banking over Tor.

Thats a bad assumption.

Not in the slightest. Everyone is subject to mass surveillance & surveillance capitalism.

MOST people arent really concerned with it in the western world.

Most people don’t even have a threat model, or know what it is. But if you ask them how they would like it if their ISP told their debt collector where they bank so the debt collector can go do an unannounced legal money grab, you’ll quickly realize what would be in their threat model if they knew to build one. A lot of Corona Virus economic stimulus checks were grabbed faster than debtors even noticed the money arriving on their account.

And thats not a Trump thing. its existed WAY before trump. Snowden showed that and it was Obama, not trump, that went after whistleblowers harder than any predecessor before them.

You missed the source I gave. Obama banned the practice of ISPs selling customer data without their consent. Trump reversed that. That is wholly 100% on Trump. Biden did not overturn Trump, so if you want, you can put some of the fault on Biden.

W.r.t history, echelon predates Snowden’s revelations and it was exposed to many by Nicky Hagar in the 80s or 90s. But this all a red herring because in the case at hand (banking customers accessing their acct), it’s the particular ISP role of mass surveillance that’s relevant, which Trump enabled. Or course there is plenty of other mass surveillance going on with banking, but all that is orthogonal to whether they use Tor or not. The role of Tor merely mitigates the ISP from tracking where they bank, and prevents banks from tracking where you physically are, both of which are useful protections.

Further trying to make this about “party” sides is a bad idea. Its something all parties

You can’t “both sides” this when it’s verifiable that Obama banned the practice and Trump overturned it. While Obama’s hands are dirty on a lot of things (e.g. Patriot Act continuity), it’s specifically Trump who flipped the switch to ISP overcollection. Citation needed if you don’t accept this.

And there are some areas where straight access TOR is illegal and can get you in trouble.

The general public knows your general advice to use/not use Tor is technical advice not legal advice, and also not specific to their particular jurisdiction.

That’s not a magic bullet for secuirty.

It wasn’t presented as such. Good security comes in layers (“security in depth”). TLS serves users well but it’s not the only tool in the box.

There are so many ways to exploit connections. Look at what happened here on lemmy with vulns leading to takeovers of instances with xss of session cookies.

Tor Browser includes noscript which blocks XSS.

The primary difference is your ISP is not generally actively hostile. They may want to sell metadata but they aren’t actively trying to exploit you.

Selling your metadata is exploiting you. And this exploit happens lawfully under a still-existing Trump policy, so you have zero legal protections. Contrast that with crooks stealing money from your bank account, where, if it’s a US account, you have regulation E legal protections.

If your ISP (or in some cases a nation state is your isp) is actively tracking you, then there are other alternatives that may be better.

Different tools for different threat models. If you are actually targeted by a nation state, Tor alone is insufficient but it’s still in play in conjunction with other tech. But from context, you were giving general advice to the general public telling them not to use Tor for banking, thus targeting is not in the threat model. But mass surveillance IS (i.e. that of your ISP).

But to answer my your question my thesis is tor is not necessarily a privacy panacea.

Tor is an indispensable tool to streetwise users. Of course it is a tool among other tools & techniques.

The threat model an American or European has is much different than someone from Vietnam or turkey or China, which is also much different than someone from the Nordic countries.

Those threat models all have a common denominator: mass surveillance. It is safe to assume mass surveillance is in everyone’s threat model as a baseline. Of course there are a variety of other threats in each individual threat model for which you couldn’t necessarily anticipate.

Dynamic IPs change on average every few days

The users who would be most impacted by an attack are the ones who are right in the middle of a conversation. Having a conversation interrupted is worse than being unable to check for new news or start a new conversation. So I think using the IPs for ~2—3 days of firewall masking would give users a chance to wrap up the conversations they’re involved in. As well as give users a chance to quickly grab their archives (to the extent that the server can handle it).

(edit) Why not combine this with tar-pitting? Unknown IPs could be tar-pitted until they login, at which point their new IP becomes known.

It’s a good point but incident response amid heavy attack does not require perfection. It would certainly be borderline useless over the long-term, but I think most “dynamic” IPs rarely change. Last time I paid attention, I think I had the same dynamic IP for over a year. I would also expect IPv6 to be even less dynamic.

Perhaps users who use DDNS from afraid.org (gratis) could be accommodated along these lines.

I don’t want to raise an alarm about it because I don’t think it’s worth scaring people who are just dipping their toes in the fediverse waters, and because it can be fixed.

Informing people is always the right move. People should be as aware of the security situation as possible & it’d be irresponsible to withhold that info.

The warning should also come with the solution: use Tor. That solution would solve countless other problems stemming from the marginalization of the Tor community. The advice should be:

1. install Tor
2. get on the fedi

Also. Those running an exit node can and do sniff traffic.

Sure, but if you stop there with that statement you’re just FUD-scaring people from using the service that does more for their privacy than conventional direct clearnet usage. Every connection that matters uses TLS so the exit node honeypot only sees where the traffic is going, not what’s in the traffic and not where it comes from. IOW, the exit node knows much less than your ISP.

It’s bad practice to login to stuff that’s important (like banking) over tor.

It’s the other way around. You should insist on using Tor for banking. It’s a bad practice to let your ISP track where you do all your banking.

Also, nation states can track you using a variety of techniques from fingerprinting to straight up working together to associate connection streams.

And your thesis is what, that we should make snooping easier for them by not practicing sensible self-defense?

A large number of tor nodes are run by alphabet agencies.

Let them work for it - and let them give the Tor network more bandwidth in the process.

I don’t know if it’s even possible, but it would be cool if I could use the fediverse over TOR just for the sake of supporting TOR.

Here are two #Mastodon onion nodes:

• iejideks5zu2v3zuthaxu5zz6m5o2j7vmbd24wh6dnuiyl7c6rfkcryd.onion
• 7jaxqg6lfcdtosooxhv5drpettiwnt6ytdywfgefppk2ol4dzlddblyd.onion

Bad link. This article (ironically about privacy) pushes a #Google #reCAPTCHA courtesy of #Imperva. Would someone with access plz copy-paste the article text here.

Thanks.

Maybe you misunderstand the enforcement part of the GDPR. It’s not made for you to get personal enforcement out of it.

You obviously have not read article 77. This article entitles individuals to report GDPR violations to a DPA for enforcement. Article 77 does not distinguish violations against an individual (which I suppose is what you mean by “personal enforcement”) and violations against many. Some of the violations I have reported can only be construed as violations against the general public. E.g. an org fails to designate a DPO.

The problem is there is nothing to enforce article 77 itself. When a DPA neglects to act on an article 77 report, there is no recourse. There is only a provision that allows lawsuits against the GDPR violators. But then when someone did that, and then claimed legal costs, an Italian court decided for everyone in a precedence-setting case that legal costs are not recoverable. Which essentially neuters the court action remedy. So we have an unenforced article 77 and a costly & impractical direct action option.

It works on the basis of multiple infractions being recorded and then escalating the agencies response level.

It’s not even doing that much, in some cases. The report has to get past the front desk secretary and be submitted into the litigation chamber before it’s even considered as something that would indicate a trend. If it doesn’t get past the secretary it does nothing whatsoever. Some of my reports were flippantly rejected by a pre-screening secretary for bogus reasons (e.g. “your complaint is ‘contractual in nature’” when in fact there is no contractual agreement, apart from the fact that the existence of a contract does not nullify the GDPR anyway).

I work with many companies as IT consultant and I can assure you, that they all FEAR the GDPR

So you’re only seeing the commercial response. Gov agencies & NGOs are also subject to the GDPR, which is where you see the most recklessness (likely due to the lack of penalty). On the commercial side banks also don’t give much of a shit about the GDPR because when they violate it there’s a shit ton of banking regs they point to and the DPAs are afraid to act against banks because of the messy entanglement of AML/KYC laws that essentially push #banks to violate the GDPR.

Enforcement of GDPR does happen and you can review every enforcement on a public website called enforcement tracker.

Indeed I’ve browsed through the enforcement tracker. It’s a good prop for making the public believe that the #GDPR is being well enforced. They are cherry-picking cases to enforce to convince the public that something is being done, but people who actually submit reports know better. We see the reports that are clearly going unenforced.

I have also personally requested information about me and my family through the rights bestowed by the GDPR

I have had article 15 access requests denied which I then reported to the DPA, who opened a case but just sat on it. For years, so far.

(edit) By the way, I suggest you leave Lemmy·world for a different instance. If you care about privacy at all, you don’t use Cloudflare nodes. I cannot even see the msg I wrote (which you replied to) because #lemmyWorld blocks me (which I give some detail here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/1435972). I had to reply to you based purely on your msg without context.