TCB13

TCB13, 5 days ago

Let me correct you: this is another sign that Europe was dragged into a war because the US needed to jack up their economy with a manufactured war that, besides Ukraine, hurts Europe the most.

TCB13, 5 days ago

How delusion one must be to think that the US isn’t profiting from this war? C’mon, the US just loves to sell all kinds of militar equipment. Russia has been a problem since ever but a bigger problem is the US that poke around the entire globe for wars and don’t really care about the impact because for them it’s all profits. Unfortunately for me, this time, they decided to poke around Ukraine and Russia.

TCB13, 5 days ago

Clearly you don’t live in Europe, you aren’t paying the electrical, gas and whatnot bill that this war caused. Get over yourself, your American lifestyle is only possible because a large chunk of your economy is only possible due to wars somewhere else.

TCB13, 5 days ago

Of course I place blame, and a lot, on Russia. After all they were the ones to react. But frankly Ukraine has a ton of as well.

TCB13, 5 days ago

Okay great, so you’re in denial about what’s going on around you. There’s a bigger picture than what you’re painting, I’m not saying Russia acted correctly nor that we shouldn’t blame it but Ukraine and the US aren’t saints either and profits are being made.

TCB13, 5 days ago

Innovation and privacy go hand in hand here at Mozilla

As well as profits and corporate interests.

People speak very good thing about Firefox but they like to hide and avoid the shady stuff. Let me give you the un-cesored version of what Firefox really is. Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances and they also do stuff like adding unique IDs to each installation.

Firefox does is a LOT of calling home. Just fire Wireshark alongside it and see how much calling home and even calling 3rd parties it does. From basic ocsp requests to calling Firefox servers and a 3rd party company that does analytics they do it all, even after disabling most stuff in Settings and config like the OP did.

I know other browsers do it as well, except for Ungoogled and because of that I’m sticking with it. I would like to avoid programs that need no snitch whenever I open them. ungoogled-chromium + ublock origin + decentraleyes + clearurls and a few others.

Now you’re free to go ahead and downvote this post as much as you would like. I’m sorry for the trouble and mental break down I may have caused by the sudden realization that Firefox isn’t as good and private after all.

TCB13, 5 days ago

Interesting… I wasn’t aware of ClearURLs for uBo. How good is that? Does it really filer all tracking elements like clear URLs does?

TCB13, 4 days ago

I’ll have to test it. Better to have one less extension.

TCB13, 5 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

Yes, yet telegram isn’t a piece of shit of an app that runs slowly on every device, can’t sync messages because “something went wrong” and doesn’t depend on electron to run. Also, not funded by the CIA.

TCB13, 5 days ago

Okay that’s fair, even if remove that and assume they hold zero influence / there are no cleaver backdoors Signal is still not good when it comes to performance and reliability.

TCB13, 5 days ago

Window XP, is that you?

TCB13, 6 days ago

And here I was under the impression that using USB storage for anything else than installing operating systems was a thing of the past.

TCB13, 6 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

SMB (NAS), Syncthing, FileBrowser, snapdrop.net, email and sometimes public cloud services…

TCB13, 6 days ago

And rEFInd, GParted Live… SystemRescueCd.

TCB13, 6 days ago

Yes, that’s true but I’m no longer doing that. Everything sync to the NAS using Syncthing that in turn is set with file versioning and weekly snapshots.

TCB13, 7 days ago

Yes there is, in most countries you can first submit your code to the intelectual property office and then pay someone to audit it.

TCB13, 7 days ago

Via the government ID system, the state exerts a monopoly on identity and an obsession with tracking people from “birth certificate” to “death certificate”. Disproportionate KYC regulations actively exclude people without government-issued ID from necessary services, including jobs, housing and healthcare and even everyday things like online shopping, receiving mail, buying a sim card, doing volunteer work, taking classes, or visiting the gym or library.

The author must be American… it is a given an accepted fact** across Europe that you’re required to carry around and show if requested by authorities your govt id. **Nobody consider this a big deal, and yes, it is obvious that if you don’t produce it then you won’t be able to get a job as registering for a job requires the company to enter both your tax ID number and your social security number in at least one govt platform so they can pay your and retain the required amount for taxes and social security you can can later have a retirement…

Americans like to play very loose with identities and then you get tax frauds, identity theft and ultimately SIM swapping attacks that are almost zero in Europe because every single mobile carrier will require your govt id to buy a SIM card in the first place and will also require it if you need a new one.

In an ideal world, people would be judged on their actions and intent, rather than on circumstances of birth and decisions of bureaucrats. For housing, only your ability to pay rent would be relevant. For a job, only your skills and work ethic would be relevant.

Yes… and how you’re expecting to have a pension and prove you’ve worked x years and some place if you don’t provide a govt id?

For healthcare, only your medical condition would be relevant (it would be against the Hippocratic Oath to deny medical treatment to people without ID, especially if they are paying out-of-pocket in cash).

Yes… and how are you expecting the hospital to keep a medical record that contains important information about your health and is required to provide you with decent healthcare without actually requiring a govt id / identification?

TCB13, 7 days ago

Sounds like all you’re saying is Europe doesn’t respect personal privacy or the right to go about your life not being harassed by government officials when you’ve done nothing wrong.

I’m saying that yes, and also that you can’t benefit from certain things like tax breaks, pensions and proper healthcare without identifying people.

TCB13, 7 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Hospitals used to track you by name and address, with no problem. They did for me for decades. Using a government ID number isn’t necessary, organizations just like exerting control.

Yes… and then you’ve those same hospital selling your data to insurance companies (or being owned by them) because that’s mostly the way they’ve to keep track of people and have updated medical records across the country.

Meanwhile in Europe what you get is the govt manages your healthcare data and hospital simply access and update the data in a controlled and organized fashion by typing your social security number into a govt provided system. You, as patient, also get an SMS message asking for permission whenever they want to access information / do certain actions or just notifications of data access. Prescriptions use the same system, you walk out of a clinic / hospital without any papers, just go into a pharmacy and they can pull what’s prescribed to you.

And no, in the US you don’t need to have ID to go anywhere. You can drive from California to Maine never having to show an ID - why should you?

Well I can drive across multiple countries in Europe using highways without ever stopping or showing IDs… however if some police officer appears and asks for it I’m required to show it by law.

Also, your social security number is not to be used as an ID - states so right on the card. Let’s think about the implications of that statement, vs what is occurring today.

Yes, because the US doesn’t have the concept of a citizen ID / identity card and people are identified by stuff like a social security number or a driving license (lol)… there’s almost no standardization when it comes to identifying people in the US (especially across states) and social security shouldn’t be used to identify people mostly because in the US there’s no useful central database thus those numbers might not be correct, unique etc.

In Europe countries have way more autonomy and sovereignty than any US state yet there’s a cross-border framework for identifying people. Every country has it’s own citizen card that follows certain rules, usually includes a single (or multiple) numbers that are used as citizen ID, social security ID for taxes. Those cards are also required to contain a chip (smartcard), allowing for the secure digital identification and authentication as well as the digital signatures - you can login into any govt service with your card a PIN and/or sign contracts with it for instance. Some people such as lawyers, doctors and accountants are even required by law to sign documents with those cards instead of handwriting because forging signatures is doable while forging a X.509 digital signature isn’t possible.

TCB13, 7 days ago

In the case of US gov., they’ve been caught repeatedly selling taxpayer info for money. THAT is the problem.

Yes, this is a problem but I don’t think that you can fix it by making it harder to identify people… Because that also increases identity theft, general criminal behavior, make you unable exert other rights etc.

TCB13, 7 days ago

Yes, a “non shitty verification system” like what EU countries do. Want to validate your identity? Sure show your ID card with a photo and smart card, insert into a smart card reader and the person can attest your identity against the info there. Same goes for using those cards to make signature forging a thing of the past.

TCB13, 7 days ago

If you require KYC for buying and changing cards then SIM swapping becomes impossible as nobody can get a new SIM card with your phone number by social engineering the carrier.

TCB13, 7 days ago

Yes, but those things need to have procedures and employee authentication. If someone employee is found to be accepting bribes for SIM swaps then it should be fired on the spot and hold legally liable for all the damages - you can easily add this into a work contract. If a carrier doesn’t do this and doesn’t log those kinds operations then it’s just poor management and people shouldn’t buy services from it.

TCB13, 8 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

“This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened.

I don’t believe this is what that rare, what I believe is that this was the fist time it happened to a company with enough exposure to actually have in impact and reach the media.

Either way Google’s image won’t ever recover from this and they just lost what small credibility they had on the cloud space and won’t be even considered again by any institution in the financial market - you know the people with the big money - and there’s no coming back from this.

TCB13, 7 days ago

Thank you for confirming my suspicions. :)