freedomPusher

joined 3 years ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

eclic.ro is an exclusive Cloudflare site just like change.org is. Exclusivity is obviously quite lousy for democracy. Better alternatives are here:

https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/140

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

privacytools.io always was shit show even before the infighting. They put their own endorsement site on Cloudflare. Despite a collossal pile of dirt emerging on #Signal:

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

PTIO continued endorsing Signal non-stop, refusing to disclose the issues. That was also before the breakup. Dirt was routinely exposed on PTIO endorsements and it never changed their endorsement nor did they reveal the findings on their website.

Now both factions are hypocrits just as they were when they were united. The original PTIO site is back to being Cloudflared (nothing like tossing people coming to you for privacy advice into the walled garden of one of the most harmful privacy offenders), and Privacy Guides has setup on a CF’d Lemmy node. The hypocrisy has no end with these people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Interesting, but that does not help because Mint jails all their docs in Cloudflare.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Also worth noting that #Ubuntu and #Mint both moved substantial amounts of documentation into Cloudflare (the antithisis of the values swiso claims to support). I have been moving people off those platforms.

BTW, prism-break is a disasterous project too. You know they don’t have a clue when they moved their repo from Github.com to Gitlab.com, an access-restricted Cloudflare site. There are tens if not hundreds of decent forges to choose from and PRISM Break moved from the 2nd worst to the one that most defeats the purpose of their constitution.

It might be useful to find dirt on various tech at prism-break, but none of these sites can be trusted for endorsements.

The prism-break website is timing out for me right now. I would not be surprised if they were dropping Tor packets since they have a history of hypocrisy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

If you look in their bug tracker, it actually reveals that they ignore dirt that has been dug up on their suggestions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

As others have mentioned there is little in the way of justification for these suggestions, and while I happen to agree with plenty of them, I’d personally like to see more reasoning, if not to appease people that already have opinions then to help newer users understand their options.

Indeed. In fact it’s actually worse than you describe. Swiso witholds negative information. They don’t want to inform people. They want to steer people. For example, swiso’s endorsements for donation platforms have some quite serious problems:

https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/141

swiso is also aware of the serious issues with Qwant and the serious issues with DuckDuckGo. Not only failing to remove them but also failing to inform. Qwant and DDG are both Microsoft syndicates!

(if anyone is interested, one of the most privacy-respecting search services is Ombrelo¹, which is largely unknown to the world because PTIO, swiso, and prism-break don’t do the job they claim to do)

And swiso is aware because that’s their bug tracker.

/cc @[email protected]

¹ https://ombrelo.im5wixghmfmt7gf7wb4xrgdm6byx2gj26zn47da6nwo7xvybgxnqryid.onion/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

There are a few good alternatives and swiso has been aware of them for ~4+ years:

https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/140

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

After reading the article it’s not as great as I was hoping for. From the article:

“We’re obviously going to be interested in having the books sell as successfully as possible, but we’re not going to harm the fundamental mission of the library to provide free and easy access to the content on our shelves. We’re not going to sacrifice that mission. Just because we’re operating Angel City Press, we’re not going to buy 500 copies of every title and put them in every branch library. That’s not prudent. That’s not what a good library would do.”

So it’s still a profit-driven press. This is a conflict of interest but the library seems confident they can negoiate that fairly.

I was hoping the press would become non-profit and then be used to print and distribute creative commons licensed content. I have a friend (who shall remain unnamed but who is well known) who would like to release their work into the commons and give up all rights apart from attribution. In principle a library-owned press would seem ideal. But I guess this is not the right tool for the job. It also seems the books this press will print are LA-specific anyway.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

StreetComplete shows me no map, just quests on a blank canvas. OSMand shows my offline maps just fine, but apparently StreetComplete has no way to reach the offline maps. I suppose that’s down to Android security -- each app has it’s own storage space secure from other apps.

In principle, we should be able to put the maps on shared SD card space and both apps should access it. But StreetComplete gives no way in the settings of specifying the map location. And apparently it fails to fetch an extra copy of the maps as well in my case.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Protonmail failed to satisfy F-Droid’s inclusion criteria because it requires gms (playstore framework) and because it uses Firebase messaging.

Since I’ve disabled gms in my device I’m not sure how Protonmail would work for me. Someone tells me I might simply lose push notifications capability. But I am confused because Snikket pushes notifications just fine on my device.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

it’s worth noting that protonmail has an onion and their clearnet server also accepts tor connections. So users can control the leakage of their IP... but only if they’re willing to solve countless CAPTCHAs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I’m on the edge of quitting protonmail. The issues:

  • #CAPTCHA hell. At least for Tor users.
  • no app in f-droid
  • API shenanigans and/or CAPTCHA breaks hydroxide (the foss bridge)
  • protonvpn: you can no longer fetch all the configs in one download. You have to click “download” >120 times now to get all the configs
  • account locks if you do not login frequently enough (i think every 6 months)
  • if you supply your login creds but get a CAPTCHA and say fuck this, and walk, it does not count as a full login needed to reset the expiration clock
  • the CAPTCHAs are graphical which forces you to enable images in your browser; but when you do that you get images that junk up your screen and waste bandwidth
  • no public keyring. Hushmail was better in this regard. An advanced user could upload their PGP public key to Hushtools and then encryption just worked for hushmail users contacting that person. After Hushmail started charging, I would tell the normies who need comms w/me to get a gratis Protonmail account. But then I have to send them my public key and they have to figure out how to attach it to my profile in their phonebook. It’s a show-stopper in many situations.
 

I noticed a library that has ethernet ports, which I must say is quite impressive. So many libraries strictly expect people to use wifi which has downsides:

  • many (most?) wifi NICs have no FOSS drivers (ethernet is actually the only way I can get my FOSS laptop online)
  • ethernet is faster and consumes less energy
  • wifi radiation harms bees and other insects according to ~72 studies (update: separate discussion thread here which shows the research is heavily contested)
  • apparently due to risk of surrounding households consuming bandwidth, 2FA is used (which is inadvertently exclusive at some libraries)
  • enabling wifi on your device exposes you to snooping by other people’s iPhones and Androids according to research at University of Hamburg. Every iPhone in range of your device is collecting data about you and sending it to Apple (e.g. SSIDs your device previously connected to). From what I recall about this study, it does not happen at the network level, so ethernet devices attached to the same network would not be snooped on (and certainly SSID searches would not be in play).
  • (edit) users at risk to AP spoofing (thanks @[email protected] for pointing this out)

I don’t know when (if ever) I encountered a library with ethernet. Is this a dying practice and I found an old library, or a trending practice by well informed forward-thinking libraries?

BTW, the library that excludes some people from wifi by imposing mobile phone 2FA is not the same library that has ethernet ports, unfortunately. If you can’t use the wifi of the SMS 2FA library then your only option is to use their Windows PCs.

 

All libraries in #Brussels are closed on holidays and most of them closed on Sunday. Exceptionally, a few open on Sunday for just a 2 hour window so you can get a book and get out.

Even more exceptional is one branch in the city that is officially closed on Sunday but you can sign up for access all day. It’s not staffed but you can badge in and surveillance cameras record everything throughout. You cannot bring friends and have a duty to prevent tail-gating through the door. But it’s good to at least have the option. Otherwise it’d be quite annoying to have no access on Sunday. Most people get Sunday off so of course it’s the most interesting day to use the library.

Anyway, it’s cool that the Swedish library in that article was respected apparently despite no surveillance (I assume). If that were a regular thing I guess there would eventually be a bad apple.

 

Videos used to be on VHS tape, then DVD, then blu-ray. But these discs are being obsoleted. My library piled ~10s of thousands of audio CDs on tables a couple years ago and simply gave them all away. For a week you could take whatever you wanted. The library did not want them back. They were offloading.

So apparently the trend is: everything is going to the cloud. If I want to learn a new skill, Youtube has become the way to do that. So how do you bring home a #Youtube video? The library has started blocking Invidious downloads-- probably fearing copyright issues.

Didn’t people generally used to be able to checkout a dozen or so DVDs? So you could watch the content at home in your overstuffed chair with beer, popcorn, pizza, whatever. The online access restrictions force us to do the viewing inside the library and only during library hours. And of course if I try to carry in an overstuffed chair, a keg of beer, and pizza, they’ll probably bounce me for breaking the “no food” rule. So it seems we’re losing the ability combine beer and videos.

When a video is walking people through the steps of repairing or rebuilding something, it can be absurdly impractical to memorize the video and (for example) try to rebuild your motorcycle. The video has to be in front of you as you work on the device.

In an abstract way, it’s a #rightToRepair issue. I would love to drive a motocycle into a library and disassemble it in the PC area as a publicity stunt.

 

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/5178140

Connecting to the WiFi network of the French library system is arbitrarily restrictive. Connection dies the moment a Tor packet is sent. Tor is legal and also does not break the agreement people must agree to when connecting.

Does anyone know if this is the library’s decision? They apparently outsource to Cisco so I wonder if Cisco decided for themselves to block Tor traffic without being directed to do so.

Is it typical for public libraries to block #Tor?

 

Does the EU or any EU member states have anything comparable to the Library Bill of Rights?

 

The WiFi service requires no password but once you connect you are forced through a login portal that requires your mobile phone number which it then verifies via SMS.

I imagine a lot of people with GSM service likely have a data plan, thus don’t need WiFi. People on limited/prepaid plans would benefit from WiFi. But non-GSM users are discriminated against and it seems like a human rights violation. Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 21 ¶2: “Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.” I wonder if it might be a #GDPR violation as well since it would seem to undermine the data minimization principle.

The library has PCs but then of course those PCs are limited to the apps the library installs.

 

The library’s PC was blocked from a Cloudflare site. This was not the CAPTCHA style block but a hard and fast absolute block. I tested another site which I know is Cloudflared, and no block (but that was the type of site that pushes CAPTCHAs rather than absolute blocks).

So I’m wondering how common this is. Cloudflare is generally hostile toward any shared IP address. Are many libraries experiencing Cloudfare blockades?

 

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/Brussels/t/344992

Until recently, it was possible to download #Youtube videos on a library PC & store on USB drive by using an #Invidious front-end. Recently the library has blocked all invidious instances. You can still view videos but when you try to download one it gives a 403 forbidden error.

Why are they doing this?

I can only think of two possibilities: 1. bandwidth limitations 2. copyright issues. Anyone know anything solid about this?

Suggestions on other options would be appreciated. I assume users cannot install their own apps, which means front-ends that need installation are problably a non-starter. It looks like there is a web-based front end called #Piped but many of those instances are hosted with the same domain as Invidious thus may be blocked as well.

#lawfedi

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