A while ago, Alexa devices would actually process the stuff you said on your device. They disabled that for some reason. They need their cloud servers to waste more energy, I guess.

I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention privacytests.org by name, but it reaches a conclusion that may as well:

If you see a dumb checklist trying to convince you to use a specific app or product, assume some marketing asshole is trying to manipulate you. Don’t trust it.

Thankfully there’s a good recommendation in the very next paragraph for all things (messaging apps, browsers, etc):

If you’re confronted with a checklist in the wild and want an alternative to share instead, Privacy Guides doesn’t attempt to create comparison tables for all of their recommendations within a given category of tool.

Also: shots fired at XMPP throughout, as the poor protocol limps along trying desperately to catch up to the encryption baseline that was set over a decade ago by the first versions of Signal.

Ultimately, both protocols are good. They’re certainly way better choices than OpenPGP, OMEMO, Olm, MTProto, etc.

Why OMEMO is “bad” is indirectly answered earlier:

The most important questions that actually matter to security:

• Is end-to-end encryption turned on by default?
• Can you (accidentally, maliciously) turn it off?

If the answers aren’t “yes” and “no”, respectively, your app belongs in the garbage. Do not pass Go.

Similar discussions have skewered the federated Delta Chat for having an even worse version of this issue.

I hesitantly wonder if something like Perplexity might actually be the future of search engines. It seems relatively capable of correctly interpreting search queries full of half-remembered thoughts and potentially inaccurate text into salient results. I disregard the guestimations it makes about the links it provides (of course) but the couple of times I tried it out this way, it seemed to work better than Google.

I also wonder how much energy it requires compared to whatever trash Google returns.

Considering Google has put effort into intentionally worsening its own product, it makes sense that their chapel alternative would be something people just use.

So Cloudflare’s business model is openly the same as a corrupt security guard, somebody who promises to protect your stuff unless they get paid well enough?

And the AI Company Man told me I needed to scan my face into an orb to do this! At least they used the word “governance” a bit and offered me a pittance for the brave new opportunity.

There seems to be something a little… off here. VP looks like it’s a tech demo for a patent held by another company.

The new VPN service is operated by the American company VP.NET LLC, which in turn is owned by TCP IP Inc

And TCP IP (a terrible name for people who want to look it up) is exclusively proud of owning a patent it thinks is worth a lot of money. From its site:

We own the intellectual property that enables hardware-guaranteed network privacy—addressing a critical market gap worth $562 billion by 2032.

To me, it sounds like the CEO is trying to sell the company itself as a product to a larger investor. And that other privacy considerations, like jurisdiction, never factored into this.

Then I got to this part of the article, which seems to confirm those suspicions.

The idea to use SGX as a privacy shield comes from Andrew Lee, the chief privacy architect at VP.net. As the founder of Private Internet Access, which he sold to Kape a few years ago, Lee has a long history in the VPN space. However, he believes this new concept is a breakthrough.

So this company is run by somebody who sold out before.

All I can tell you is what I read on the linked page because I haven’t analyzed the bill itself.

Impact on ALL Canadians:

Companies must keep records of your personal data under secret government orders, with blanket immunity for privacy violations for handing over more than they should.

It’s your right until they ban it

Is there no such thing on Android already?

Usually, Apple devices are limited on features, but I’ve never seen an Android app pull this off.

Watch out for Bill C2. It requires companies to collect data on you (Canadian citizens) and shields them from “accidentally” oversharing it.

https://piefed.social/post/974112

It’s difficult to identify cops when they hide their name, badge number, and face. And when they get extra, pro bono legal support when challenged.

And those are just the developments from this year that I can recall.

Edit: this was supposed to be a reply to @[email protected] but either my app broke or I’m half blind

What are you assuming about my identity, and declaring about your own identity, that makes you uniquely able to speak about affairs in China, while telling others to shut up about it?

It uses Meta’s Private Processing technology

Ooh what’s that, is it like homomorphic encryption where they can process your data without seeing the input or output?

Meta says users can “direct AI to process their requests,” like for AI chat summaries, using Private Processing. If they do, the system won’t “retain access to user messages once the session is complete” so that a potential attacker can’t access them after the fact, according to the company.

Never mind. It’s utter bullshit. It’s a pinkie promise that they’ll take your data and totally not keep it.

Mark already told us people who trust him are “dumb fucks”

What are you assuming about my identity, and declaring about your own identity, that makes you uniquely able to speak about affairs in China, while telling others to shut up about it?

(context: From what I see, you joined this thread to praise China’s healthcare.)

If only there were politicians that upheld the Constitution

Why are you bringing up race when somebody is talking about national policy

Are you looking for client-side encrypted storage? If you are willing and able to perform the encryption step on your own, a lot of options are available to you.

If you’re just looking for something that’s better than Google or MS, it’ll probably be even easier to find.

If you don’t believe in lesser evil like you just said, and you think China is fascist like you just implied, why say “at least the trains run on time they have healthcare”?

It sounds like the kind of virtue signaling you disapprove of.

I’m glad you thoroughly understand the concept of “the lesser evil”