Oliver Lowe

Not included in the above, but handy is also an alternative web UI for Reuters news: https://neuters.de

You can report the message so that future messages from the spammer won’t send. Unfortunately no direct way to mark the message as junk automatically like email, but Signal does have Message Requests which may help? https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007459591-Signal-Profiles-and-Message-Requests

Honestly, DNT as it’s implemented in browsers today is not a sufficient solution

I’ve come to the same conclusion (blogged about it here https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/11/linkedin-do-not-track/) after updating myself on where it’s all at.

I also think about pop-ups back in the 90s/00s. Imagine if browsers sent a “No-Popups” header (or something) back then. I doubt we would have seen any change in company behaviour. Instead, it took something like Firefox to implement pop-up blocking by default (https://lwn.net/Articles/130792/).

Ironically this site serves koko analytics, which now ignores the Do Not Track header (as per Mozilla’s recommendation, mind you). See commit 6890f3c.

Thankfully uBlock Origin blocks loading the scripts.

Assuming MTP is Media Transfer Protocol?

Devil’s advocate: what about the posts and comments I’ve made via Lemmy? They could be presented as files (like email). I could read, write and remove them. I could edit my comments with Microsoft Word or ed. I could run some machine learning processing on all my comments in a Docker container using just a bind mount like you mentioned. I could back them up to Backblaze B2 or a USB drive with the same tools.

But I can’t. They’re in a PostgreSQL database (which I can’t query), accessible via a HTTP API. I’ve actually written a Lemmy API client, then used that to make a read-only file system interface to Lemmy (https://pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Using that file system I’ve written an app to access Lemmy from a weird text editing environment I use (developed at least 30 years before Lemmy was even written!): https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382

More ideas if you’re interested at https://upspin.io

They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.

This touches on something that I’ve been struggling to put into words. I feel like some of the ideas that led to the separation of files and applications to manipulate them have been forgotten.

There’s also a common misunderstanding that files only exist in blocks on physical devices. But files are more of an interface to data than an actual “thing”. I want to present my files - wherever they may be - to all sorts of different applications which let me interact with them in different ways.

Only some self-hosted software grants us this portability.

Maybe there’s some IP address ranges to try block?

It’s difficult because, for example, blocking the addresses OpenAI’s crawlers use may inadvertently block addresses from Azure used by Bing or whatever.

I suppose it’s a call to arms - the intended audience is those who are familiar with all those acronyms. It’s meant to ignite a fire in the belly to spur individual action against the proposed Chat Control legislation.

I know what you mean though. The reality of “resisting” is actually kinda messy. Using all the mentioned tooling is exhausting. Much like I don’t think that consumer recycling is going to save humanity, I don’t think that if everyone “made the little effort required to secure their data and their communications” it would end crazy proposals like Chat Control. TLS is so common now (in HTTPS) and WhatsApp (implementing e2ee) is incredibly popular. Yet here we are.

The article briefly mentions open-source software. To me this is where I see more private & secure by design stuff like you mention. I’m happy that things like Lemmy exist making countermeasures like 3rd party cookie blocking sand URL cleansing irrelevant.

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They don't necessarily need to; hopefully we can help people install uBlock Origin which removes tracking query parameters from URLs. See privacy.txt

Is it? Found this setting: https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/img_1639-png.2219522/

Not sure what the default is and I don't have iOS 17 yet.

Thankfully uBlock Origin removes those parameters for us. The default filters include a whole bunch of removeparam filters; e.g. privacy.txt See also removeparam.

Maybe you could help your friends and family install Firefox and/or uBlock Origin? Every little bit helps :)

Probably not; userChrome.css just modifies the local user interface of Firefox, right? I don't think any of this information is ever transmitted to servers, nor is it available from Javascript. Custom user styles however could probably be used for fingerprinting.

Related interesting article from Mozilla: Privacy and the :visited selector

Does this sound like what you’re after? https://www.onaudience.com/resources/how-to-buy-audience-data/ Let us know how you go.

But seldom in the motorbike space, I think?

I’m still not sure whether the post is just spam.

I agree. ActivityPub messages are not necessarily public information; implementations like Mastodon and Lemmy just assume it - and there's nothing stopping the services relaying the messages elsewhere afterwards.

Actually in my fiddling with ActivityPub I've made some posts and comments to a Lemmy instance which were not relayed to other instances, even though they would have been if I made them using Lemmy. So there's definitely opportunity for systems to implement features inbetween "totally public" and "single recipient".

This was the provider I went with after self-hosting my mail for 7+ years on an OpenBSD VPS. I feel like Migadu is an honest and good-value service.

Each time your browser makes a request (such as updating the graphs), it's submitting a new DNS query each time.

That would be surprising; most HTTP clients reuse network connections and connections are deliberately kept open to reduce the overhead of reopening a connection (including latency in doing a DNS lookup).

Then again, I've seen worse ;)