He had my support until he signed himself over to Russia. It may have been his only choice, but what he says doesn’t matter one way or the other in my book.
Imo its understandable since he’s going to have to live in russia for the rest of his life if he doesn’t want to live in a US prison for the rest of his life.
I suppose I don’t understand the alternative, doesn’t the United States ask immigrants to do a similar type of pledge? I kinda expect most countries do. Seems logical. I could be wrong about that, maybe immigrants don’t have to pledge loyalty to the US for citizenship? I’ll have to look it up.
I guess to me it seems disingenuous to judge someone for making arrangements to live in a country he cannot leave. He is forced to stay there by the United States, it wasn’t a choice.
Anyway I could definitely be missing something here but I can’t think of what he could have done differently, what would you have done in his situation?
As an aside, I have a lot of respect for Snowden because he showed us how little respect the United States has for obeying its own laws. The laws which are based on our supposed virtues. The US violated every principle it proclaimed that American citizens had. We never had them. Turns out we’re just as crooked as the countries we judge. I value that knowledge, Snowden is a patriot who risked everything so the American people would know the truth about our government and he did it with utmost care. He’ll go down in history as such. He’s the reason we can even discuss this topic. I thank him for that gift, despite the contents being disgusting.
At this point it’s less about trusting Snowden and more about not trusting Russia. I wouldn’t put it past Russia to find a way to speak on his behalf and say what they want with his voice, power, and reach. That’s tantalizing. AI, Photoshop, social media posts, whatever. He’s under their control willingly or otherwise.
As far as Snowden’s words, I look at the content of what he says, and I have yet to notice any straying from the original message. The message being, “The United States does not follow its own laws or ideals, and not only intends to violate these rights with regards to terrorists but with regard to everyone.” If I were to notice straying from the message, or propaganda (coerced or otherwise) I would of course react accordingly. Every interview I have seen, and I haven’t seen them all, his views have been measured, thoughtful, terrifying, and enlightening. Not to mention, backed by substantial evidence.
As far as LLMs (AI doesn’t exist), it’s far too nascient to be undetected. Like ad-blockers and advertisers, there is a permanent war between LLM output and LLM detectors. In this battle, the detectors have, by far, the upper hand. In five years, who knows. But I work Iin tech and dabble in my own models. The LLM tech of today is extremely primitive.
It sucks but what else was he supposed to do? He had no passport and if he got extradited to the USA then he’d spend years of a life sentence in solitary confinement at a CMU prison or worse. Take one look at how the US government treats those they consider terrorists and you’ll understand his decision.
True. He’s probably telling the truth about a lot of things, but notice what he doesn’t say. He’s a smart guy and is not saying certain things to stay on Putin’s good side.
He’s been in Russia 10 years now. He would probably be out of jail if he had surrendered. Chelsea Manning is already out:
She was sentenced to 35 years at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. On January 17, 2017, Obama commuted Manning’s sentence to nearly seven years of confinement dating from her arrest in May 2010.
Yeah. He’s 100% compromised. People don’t have to hate him or what he did, but once you put yourself totally within a power like Putin, you’re effectively dead.
I think For All Mankind also did a great job showing that dilemma in later seasons.
The US government doesn’t openly torture, murder, kill to expand their borders, put people in jail for blank signs, or many other terrible things the Kremlin does. The US government is easily, hands down better than the Russian government.
Uh, yeah it does. Not to mention the US has killed more people through colonisation, direct and proxy wars, etc. than any other nation in human history.
Guantanamo Bay seemed like pretty open torture to me.
American imperialism, while different than European imperialism, is imperialism nonetheless. And damn, Native Americans would like a word with you about this point I should think…
It is no longer safe to organize a protest in Louisiana, Mississippi, or Texas. Blank signs or otherwise. This is just as of* a couple of days ago, even, dang.
Guantanamo certainly wasn’t open torture, it was hidden and very controversial. My comment was about the current US government vs the current Kremlin, seems like you’re intentionally misconstruing it to make a point.
No longer safe is a biased way of interpreting the law which allows organizers to be held financially responsible for problems caused by their protest.
The scary thing isn’t that this sort of thing is technically possible. It’s that the cops try this lazy-ass investigative method because they know full well the information oligopolies readily play ball and provide the data more often than not.
And that my friends is the very definition of Fascism: when big business is in cahoots with the authorities. Don’t take my word for it: Benito Mussolini, the very dude who invented Fascism, said it himself in 1932:
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
I’ve known Big Data would eventually lead us to full-blown fascism since Scott McNealy inadvertently spilled the beans about the future of privacy in 1999. Everybody dismissed McNealy back then and said nobody would stand for this. But I instantly realized he was telling the naked truth as it would happen that day. And I’ve been called a nutcase and a conspiracy theorist ever since, for a full quarter of a century.
And now here we are: everybody is finally coming to the same realization - too late to do any goddamn thing about it.
It is unlikely that Mussolini ever made this statement because it contradicts most of the other writing he did on the subject of corporatism and corporations.
I remember the term for the fascists in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here was corporatists. That novel was contemporaneous with the rise of fascism as I recall, and it’s a chilling look at how America might have gone fascist back then. It’s pretty relevant to what’s happening now.
Got to hand it to the guy, he was well-educated and could write, which is more than you can say for his modern-day imitators, especially the loud, orange one.
Yep. Nationalize that sucker for just long enough to sell every asset, IP and piece of real estate, and turn over the money to those harmed by the crime.
There’s zero excuse for allowing Avast to continue to exist after what amounts to intentional wide scale fraud.
Edit: To be clear, I’m not advocating for an approach outside of current laws, I’m saying we need to fix the laws and tackle the next one of these correctly.
CEOs and shareholders can get on board, because they also want a peaceful no-heads-lopped-off resolution to this kind of crap, too. Everyone can still win, here.
Actually it does not, sadly. I’ve used it for years (probably five or even more) and ditched it couple months ago when I got angry at it. The main problem is I could not force it to accept MMS on newer android (used to work on my old phone IIRC) which is crucial for my work - because voice mail gets delivered as MMS in my country. Every time I got work phone call that I missed meant voice mail that never got delivered. I got notification that I have MMS, and that I need to allow them, but that’s it. Everything was allowed in the app and in the systsm, still no MMS.
Same. I've been supporting it for some years now, but I'm upping the ante. I have many friends, family, and business associates I've been able to get on Signal. It's a super useful app, and a crucial privacy service. Let's do what we can to keep it going.
Umm, doesn't one have to backup anything one wants to save/ have access to in the future? Aren't upgrades a thing will all software? I'm not sure how this is different for Signal versus any other messaging app. Or any app / client that produces documents, etc?
The process is a bit involved on mobile. Setting up a backup location, using a third party app to sync updates and deletions etc. It could be simplified by integrating with common cloud storage services (the encrypted file)
Also iOS doesn’t have backups at all last I checked. If you lose your phone the messages are toast
Well sure, but encrypted backups are still secure. What’s not secure (or private rather) is someone realizing they can’t have a backup of important chats and going back to Facebook Messenger.
Backups are a thing on Android, and they’re planned for iOS. It just hasn’t happened yet. People can choose what they want to backup and when they want disappearing messages turned on.
It’s not AI, though. They’re just using buzzwords, because what they described is functionally no different from AFIS. It’s just a poorly written algorithm.
I’m aware, but unfortunately I’m not big enough in the tech industry to create differentiating terms. AI is an extremely broad term ranging from literal if-else statements to LLMs and generative AI. Unfortunately the specifics usually get buried in the term
I don’t think that the issue is that people don’t know; people don’t care. They don’t understand how horrible the loss of privacy is, and think that the marginal convenience of being able to control your thermostat from your workplace, or have your refrigerator add milk to your shopping list outweighs the negatives of them being turned into botnets, or monetizing all of your data to squeeze every last penny out of you.
The difference is the part immediately after you stopped quoting:
They don’t understand how horrible the loss of privacy is…
What OP is saying here is that people know abstractly that smart devices are not privacy friendly, but they don’t understand how big a deal that actually can be.
We also shouldn’t be conditioned to just accept terms of services with no recourse, by this point I think most people just press accept and know by now whatever it is there, isn’t worth the trouble of fighting to have it changed. So companies get to legally have a free for all with your privacy, cause you consented to things you’ll later find out you didn’t even know you consented for.
The TOS are the legal equivalent of a locked car door. It’s the bare minimum prevention against a lawsuit, but really doesn’t protect anything. It’s because they are so long and opaque that they are often unenforceable.
It helps once, but does it push notifications when the TOS changes from the last time you read it?
The TOS could switch from protecting your data to sharing it for money at any point in time and that would apply to any existing data. Unless you know you can get them to delete it, the fact that the TOS used to say something does not matter once they change it.
@snooggums@throws_lemy@HelixDab2@Jessvj93 ofc that’s always the risk you take when using any service. Sadly a lot of the time the ToS is so long it’d take forever to read but this is the closest I’ve been able to find to quick overviews on the the ToS of a specified service.
Note that it does not have every service critiqued as I think ppl with TOSDR manually read the ToS and evaluate.
ToS are the worst thing ever. They are “contracts” that you are required to sign to do literally anything in the world but are not allowed to negotiate and can be modified at any time without your consent and your original signing is propagated to the new contract and it is still considered binding. Also, they are allowed to put clauses in which hand over rights to your property, intellectual or otherwise, which is irrevocable and perpetual. Additionally, you have many “software” providers putting clauses in which state that you only lease the license, you do not own it. Even if you have a physical media with the software, you only purchased a lease and it is therefore illegal for you to resell it. They are also allowed to revoke your lease at anytime, without recompense of any sort. That is the real power of SaaS, not the subscription, but the fact that nobody is ever allowed to own something, no matter how much money you have paid.
Yes, as others have said, they are virtually unenforceable, but it does happen often enough to make sure you are afraid of it.
I also feel many don’t understand the full extent, either. They’re used to using fairly secure devices in their everyday life (often not realizing how much the software they install is also spying on them), so why wouldn’t these IoT things also be secure?
In my experience, it’s all very vague and ethereal until the risks are highlighted for them. “So what if Google can read all of my emails? What could they possibly do with that information, anyway; why should I care?” is an example of a portion of a real conversation I’ve had.
I agree. There are far too many people with the “if I’m not doing anything wrong, then what have I to hide?” mindset. I’ve seen people unironically say that all Tor users must be engaging in illegal activity, and I don’t think it occurs to them that in many parts of the world, freely accessing information is an illegal activity, and by adopting this mindset we’re empowering that type of state.
I like the way a coworker put it to me, it’s the same reason we have locks on our doors and curtains on our windows, it’s not because we have something to hide, but a right to privacy that tech giants have widely ignored.
I wonder how disastrously bad things will need to get before it finally breaks through into public consciousness that maybe putting surveillance cameras everywhere was a bad idea. I expect we’ll find out in a couple of decades.
I’m really unsure of how this will play out. Gen Z seems to be way more okay with stuff like this and I think it’s just a general mindset shift that I don’t really see changing. Gen Z tends to constantly share their location with every acquaintance, on snapchat, etc all the time.
As much as stuff like this freaks me out and seems many steps too far, younger generations don’t, so I feel this is going to get worse over time, not better.
The real issue is that people have become so soft, so INCREDIBLY dependant on convenience, that they have given up all control. Having autonomy/privacy/ownership over your own environment is just too much work. It’s easier to just let someone else handle the surveillance system for you. What could go wrong?
This issue of complacency plagues just about everything, from cloud computing and banking to transportation and housing.
Have fun! Don’t hesitate to ask me via DM if you have a question or encounter any problems as I’d say I’m quite experienced with all the tools I listed.
I use Vanadium for high-security tasks, but Mull is my default browser for standard browsing. It has better privacy, because it has built-in anti-fingerprinting mechanisms and you can actually install proper adblockers like uBlock Origin. Also, I don’t want to support Google’s monopoly on browser rendering engines by using a Chromium-based browser, so I prefer Mull which is based on Gecko.
In terms of security, Vanadium is better than Mulch. Mulch uses some of the patches of Vanadium, but it lacks many security improvements that are present in Vanadium. My current setup is Vanadium for tasks where high security is very important, and Mull for just standard browsing.
Is there a good alternative, maybe locally hosted, for location history?
While I’ve recently disabled it for Google, it actually was helpful for going back in time and remembering where I was on X day, on numerous occasions. Would be cool if there was a locally hosted, open source alternative.
Privacy, freedom, and corruption? Like Trump banned international travel from how many Muslim countries? The fact that that happened at all is insane. You don’t think these tools will be abused? Like the UK banned fetish porn (which has been thankfully overturned). You would be fine if say… these tools were used to monitor your sexual habits?
I guess it could sometimes be an unfortunate coincidence that you do something suspicious where a crime just occurred. But surely you’d be proven innocent after looking at other evidence.
This goes beyond coincidence. This is more like you being a suspect every time some crime is committed. I'm sure in a perfect world you would be proven innocent... but that world doesn't exist and handing over this power to corporate entities and govts only opens it up for abuse.
There are many people currently in jail for crimes they have never committed, there are people who’ve been arrested simply for looking like the suspect despite not being them, wrongful convictions are an issue and everyone should protect themselves because in a lot of crimes people don’t want justice, they just want someone to punish.
That was confounded because his mother’s ex boyfriend seemed to be the murderer and used his car. Am I the only person on Lemmy who DOESN’T obsess over privacy, demand FOSS, and refuse to use Windows? My mother doesn’t have a shady ex-boyfriend, and it seems like a pretty fair exchange otherwise to give up my data in exchange for great free services that generally work pretty well — it’s not like I could sell my data myself. Nor am I paying my own money to use them. I don’t feel like getting a worse experience for e.g. maps (saw another post about it) just for the sake of data that (for most intents and purposes) doesn’t affect me directly.
That’s fair, we as a society are probably manipulated quite a lot. though I feel like law enforcement getting cases wrong is a somewhat separate issue from the “targeted ads” one. The alternative would be to use shittier evidence, potentially racism, or just let it go unsolved. I hate ads too and I block them so I don’t have to see them. I guess I’m tired that 1/3 of Lemmy posts seem to be about privacy/FOSS, I wish there was more variety like the R-site.
It’s been my experience that for most people, Google services are not a requirement, but a luxury… especially for daily life. Now, most Google-esque services are a requirement for daily life, but as they said, there are alternatives that you can use that work.
There are alternatives for every service they offer.
I used to believe that, but what’s the alternative for a phone keyboard with swipe typing and speech recognition that actually works?
Or a phone that gets reliable push messages and also works for banking?
Cause I hate Google, but these are things I actually need in my life.
Sounds like you’re on Android but there are still options. I am no subject matter expert but there are many who are and they are just a quick duckduckgo search away. Good luck!
First, I use GrapheneOS, so I can continue using Gboard and a few other Google products that do not warrant or require an internet connection, with network access disabled.
Alternatively, the next best keyboard is grammarly (also with network access dsiabled) and you can also use voiceinput.futo.org with that one.
It’s actually because the Tensor chip is the most secure one available, and because Google promises several years of software updates, with a solid history to back it up.
You mean the Tensor chips that don't appear until 6th gen, even though the project supports 5th and 4th gen?
They also literally state:
Devices need to be meeting the standards of the project in order to be considered as potential targets. In addition to support for installing other operating systems...
And
Devices with support for alternative operating systems as an afterthought will not be considered.
This pretty much rules out 99% of smartphones. I would argue this even rules out non-Pixel favourites such as the OnePlus lineup, even though I'm writing this on a Lineage-loaded OnePlus 7T. Support for other ROMs is there but it's quite fucky. Add in what you said about firmware support and yeah, only the Pixel lineup would apply.
Understanding that you probably paraphrased for brevity, it’s hard to respond with anything helpful because only you know where the goalposts of, “actually works,” are – same thing with, “reliable push messages,” and, “works for banking.” I’ve used swipe input on the native Samsung keyboard and SwiftKey and found that they work just fine, but not as good as GBoard. If you’re going from a Google-invested product to pretty much anything else, it’s likely going to be a worse user experience, so you just have to set your expectations appropriately and keep in mind that what you’re getting in return for that is intangible but important.
What have you tried so far, and how have they failed you with respect to the metrics you’ve stated?
Swiftkey isn’t a real option for me, it just sends my data to another one of the big 3 tech megacorporations.
What I’ve tried:
Degoogled my phone with UAD and used apps that can run in the background instead of relying on Google Play Services for push. But I kept missing important messages cause push didn’t work reliably. It lead to a wild goose chase of which system apps can be disabled and which permissions revoked without losing core functions, none of which is documented properly anywhere. Location only worked outside sometimes and took 3 minutes for a fix. And it still may not even do anything for privacy because the underlying system is made by Google and could just ignore all of my settings.
Installed LineageOS. This solved the problems above. But my banking app refused to even launch on it.
Gave up, again used a debloated Android but kept Google Play Services and its dependencies intact and just used no Google account or Google apps. Now banking works, push works, location works. But Google still has unlimited root access to my device, contacts, calls, SMS, location, so really what’s the point?
How feasible is it to interact with your bank or other necessary services in a browser vs using the play store app? I can see LineageOS being viable if you can make such a transition.
Impossible. I either need a phone or buy a TAN generator for 2FA.
I’m currently thinking about that, or just leaving a spare phone at home with no data on it and location disabled. But the banking app is also used to verify bigger credit card payments. And without having it on me, I would have been unable to pay for plane or train tickets while traveling more than once.
honestly, having a spare phone that sits at home is a great solution. Your main phone can be a native pixel/grapheneos (not lineage, graphene has no issues with feature comparability). And the spare phone at run all the apps for, idk, your robot vaccum, smart home, etc. At home you have more control of data and connectivity.
we all have old phones that can be used as spares. My 8 yr old phone is the “remote control” for my house. Using accounts that don’t tie to me, on it’s own vlan, pi-holed, etc
for speech recognition there is “futo voice” which not only works better than Google’s speech talk-to-type by allowing the user to fluently speak, but it also works offline and doesn’t upload voice recordings anywhere. You won’t be able to use it with gboard because google will not allow the use of another talk-to-speech engine with gboard, you’ll have to download another keyboard first.
mobile banking is an unnecessary luxary. Moving money around/paying CC biils often takes days to go through anyway so the urgency of “doing it now” mobily can wait until you’re at your desktop.
Push notifications, I’ll give you. Without any services some apps cannot recieve push notifications. As the other user suggested, using a pixel with grapheneos, you can install sandboxes google services or microG and then have full functionality.
On grapheneOS you can choose which apps have access to internet/data much more fine-grained that what google allows you.
Please read the article. The data in question, besides the IP that I don't see how they can get since it's coming from your instance and not the user directly, is the bare minimum that's required for AP to even work, and it is the same data that every federated instance is already storing and propagating. The author of the article says as much.
Facebook is a shit company but the privacy of this data is not one of the issues with it. As has been said before already, all of this is already very public, very easy to scrape and it is impossible to prevent it, if you want to keep your profile picture, username and comments private then dont upload them to a federated social network... or well, any social or network at all.
That information is already public knowledge (aside from your IP address, I assume the Threads policy is actually talking about the instance's IP address). I can collect all of that info about you right now myself, without even running my own instance, because kbin exposes that data. Every other instance that your posts touch gets that info too.
If the Threads instance was defederated, sure, they wouldn't see it through that particular view. But they could be quietly running any number of other instances out there already just for the purpose of harvesting that info. Or they could be using a webcrawler or an API to get the info from some other third-party instance.
I think ultimately people need to accept that when they post something publicly - posts, comments, profiles, etc - then by the very nature of it being "public" everyone can see it. You can't simultaneously "protect" and "publish" this information at the same time. It's the DRM paradox, but even harder to resolve than the usual. The only way you can "protect" this information is to not publish it in the first place - ie, don't have a profile on the Fediverse and don't post comments on it. Because the Fediverse is designed to spread that information around.
My understanding is that typical N95 masks may not prevent facial recognition. Different systems have different performance but many will work successfully with a masked subject. The position of the eyes are one of the key inputs to many facial recognition systems.
Exactly! This is my point , this is the biggest reason that I want this glasses. But I didn’t found more information if they really work besides their own site.
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