irotsoma @ irotsoma @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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Messenger messages are supposedly e2e encrypted, but that doesn't mean the clients don't then turn around and give those messages to Meta. The clients do scan the messages and are known to add that information to your advertising profile which is also sold. So, while the messages themselves might be protected in flight, and they may not be shared with Meta in full, they are not private. Also, the meta-information about who you're contacting is not encrypted, but that's also the case with most apps, including Signal, as that is difficult to pull off while still being easy for people to find you.

Phone number can be problematic to share in some areas of the world, so it does depend on where you are, but email shouldn't be an issue in general. So easy to get an additional, private email address and use both at the same time.

I also don't have most mainstream social media anymore but have noticed a significant drop in people asking for it these days. Might just be my location in a city with a lot of progressive, tech savvy people, though.

I mostly use phone number and/or Signal these days.

No it's a bit complex. The transmissions are sent constantly at regular intervals and are a very specific size and are then combined later. So it's not "instant" messaging. It's closer to email.

I rarely consider anything "too far" unless you're doing something totally ineffective or duplicating effort, and not talking about redundancy. I think most people who say this are either the people who we need to be secure from or people who are ignorant to the threats. I'm not saying the same threats affect us all, but there's always a possibility you could become a target through whistleblowing, protest, being attractive, pissing off a random stranger, etc. And usually by the time you are a target, it's too late. Your information is already out there and it's difficult to stop broadcasting more with all of the tracking systems in place all over.

It's often not clinical paranoia that causes people to worry about security and/or privacy, primarily it's a desire for a minimal amount of privacy, hiding from predators, and/or basic protection from fascist regimes of various strengths that have taken over most governments. Often keeping a little privacy also is the best way to prevent becoming a target in the first place.

Not only that, but every app will constantly appear to be sending messages, so real messages are greatly obfuscated. That's honestly the real innovative part of the product IMHO.

That's not what I understood from the post, but could you point to the specifics of what you're talking about in regards to the identifier being encrypted in transit? It seems the ID is sometimes obfuscated, but that is trivial to remove and not meant for security as mentioned.

Not lock-in in the traditional sense where you're locked to a particular technology, but effectively lock-in by making a commonly used feature for migration not available for free. This wasn't discussing uncommon cases like having your own domain in front of a free email service since that's not then fully free.

The most common use of free email services is to use the service's domain and if you need to switch, then needing to change your email at tons of different places. I am still stuck on gmail for a couple of accounts because changing the email with those services means creating an entirely new account and thus losing all history, etc. Example is the Shop app. Without forwarding I'd end up having to keep the gmail app on my phone to get notification of new emails which is problematic since those apps come with additional tracking services which is the whole reason for migrating from gmail.

I alias traditional stuff to better, usually drop-in versions of that thing on computers that have the better thing. I often forget which systems have the better thing, so this helps me get the better experience if I was able to install it at some point. For example I alias cat to bat, or top to htop, or dig to drill, etc.

Point seems to be that people are switching from gmail to proton for free email, but it's going to be even more difficult if Proton becomes like Google turned out since you'll have to pay to get all the email to your new address while you are transitioning to whatever is next. Instead go to that next thing now before you get "locked in" by having all of your important emails going there. With gmail at least you can forward the emails for free from the places you forget to change your email with at first.

I don't think the OP is saying to switch to gmail. They're saying if you think switching from gmail is hard, just wait until you have to pay to forward all of your email if you need to move away from Proton mail if they end up being as bad as Google. They're saying use something else that's neither gmail nor proton mail.

Thunderbird desktop does have telemetry and can be disabled. You can always block it from connecting to those URLs, too, if you want. It shouldn't affect functionality as far as I know. Android Thunderbird doesn't have telemetry yet since it's a continuation of the K9 app. But the help saya they plan to add it as soon as they figure out the best way to allow users to opt out.

I don't know much about what it's doing with geotrust, but I assume it's something to do with certificates for the webapp portions of the application. Probably would need more info to be sure.

And I believe the detectportal URL is for checking for internet access.

Unbound on the router which connects upstream with DNS over TLS. Ports 53 and 853 are NATed to the phiole and several other DNS servers like Google's are blocked so devices can't bypass the pihole very easily. This is only on my primary VLAN. Other VLANs are given the Unbound DNS by default but are allowed to bypass if they insist. I have one VLAN for guests and one for trusted devices in addition to the primary one.

They'll never understand, or never admit yo understanding, that if you put a door in a wall, everyone will exploit it. Just think of how city defense worked before flight. Every invader would go after the gate and it was much, much easier to penetrate than the rest of the wall. But in this case that gate will be totally unguarded, so anyone who figures out how to open it, will open it for everyone. And will make tools for others to use to unlock and open it easily and it will be very difficult to change it if it's the same gate with the same key used by everyone. Imagine if door locks were all the same. No one would bother locking their doors if it was that easy to unlock instantly. And that's what the real goal is. To make people stop using security.

Yeah, that only works for people who are brainwashed to follow whatever the current regime is pushing regardless of how much it hurts them personally, but especially if it doesn't hurt them directly in the very short term.

My Meta account got locked without explanation and support couldnt tell me why, but suspiciously right after they implemented their new policies allowing hate speech but also I had deleted all of my posts going back to 2006 not long before that and had only been using it fir groups, so it wasn't as big of an impact so wasn't worth suing them to find out why I was locked out exactly or to start a new account.

GrapheneOS is great, but this move by Google may make it difficult for Graphene to continue to offer major updates. Only time will tell. But for the short term it's a great option.

I've decided not to invest in any more Pixels, personally. Even if they reverse the decision this time, it just means it will happen later, so then future versions of the OS will be out of reach or at least not as good as they could have been. I probably will keep my Pixel 7 Pro with Graphene until the battery is too bad for daily use.

Battery circuits come on enough to be a load that needs to be considered and will show up if you measure load on the device vs load consumed by the components connected to the power supply. In terms of low power devices, it is significant, though not the primary concern. But compared to the pi PSU, the charger not to mention the battery and internal PSU of a laptop, consume way more power and produce way more heat.

All of the rest assumes needing always on, heavy load processing which isn't what the post I replied to was talking about. I was specifically replying to idle power load. And in my case, even with a bunch of self hosted applications, most of the time my servers are idling. If I was running a virtualization farm or something that was always under heavy load, then yes, as I mentioned, a single board server isn't ideal.

As for disks, I don't use SSDs on my pis except one that actually does a lot of local data processing. Everything else runs in memory and stores persistent data on my NAS, including logging. Virtual memory/swap is disabled on all and things that need temporary storage/cache of small amounts of data is cached on RAM disks where applications can't be configured to not use disk caching. The only need for the SD card is for boot and some minimal IO needed for local OS operation. I have a Raspberry Pi 3 B i got about 8 or 9 years or so ago with the same SD card in it.

They aren't what I use as a database server, obviously, but they are extremely low power compared to what an old laptop would need and work great for things like pihole, and other network applications as well as being a part if my home kubernetes cluster and run the majority of the cluster's processes on demand.

Only if you're running it at full load all the time and comparing that to a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount of work. Also, only if you live in a cold climate and the heat generated is not a concern and power is supplied by a renewable source so power isn't a concern.

Not quite. Unless the system has pretty advanced power management and is using very recent technology with high density, it's unlikely that an x64 chipset will use less power than a comparably powered arm64 chipset. Not just the processor, but the smaller board is actually a power saver and allows it to generate less heat meaning both less power wasted and dissipated as heat as well as less power needed for fans to properly dissipate the heat. I've never seen a laptop use 3W at idle when considering the whole device, maybe just the CPU, but not if you include the rest of the components like RAM and disks and power supply. And especially true in a laptop that is old enough that it's being recycled. Heck, the power supply and charger alone might be using 3W at idle with full battery.

With a raspberry pi 4, the typical power usage for the 2GB RAM model is 5W under load for the whole device and about half that for idle. Add a couple of watts for the extra memory and wider bus on the 8GB model and other things can add to that, but that's mostly accurate. The pi 5 is a little more and the 3 is a little less. Of course, the efficiency of the laptop at full load might end up being better than a comparable number of raspberry pis it would take to do the same amount if work, but comparing a single pi or any other reputable arm-based, single board computer to a single laptop at idle is always going to be that way.