Saki

@Saki@monero.town

New to Lemmy. A privacy advocate. Interested in number theory.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Saki,

Some of possible solutions include:

  • always use Tor 24/7, Tails or not, when possible, even when browsing normal websites, or using IRC etc.
  • use bridges

US govt pays AT&T to let cops search Americans' phone records – 'usually' without a warrant (www.theregister.com)

A senator has complained that American law enforcement agencies snoop on US citizens and residents, seemingly without regard for the privacy provisions of the Fourth Amendment, under a secret program called the Hemisphere Project that allows police to conduct searches of trillions of phone records.

Saki,

See also:

Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records

The French National Police is unlawfully using an Israeli facial recognition software [installed massively and secretly. The Minister ordered an investigation]

Saki, (edited )

about time 😊 that’s not the goal; one of the first basic steps!

EDIT Sorry I should not have said it like this. Even though that was my honest feelings, said as free speech without any meany connotations, this should have been treated as good news, like someone finally ditched Windows.

One of the next steps might be to figure out how not to load GA.js GTM.js Google Fonts etc.

There is a long way to go to de-Google oneself, and unfortunately it’s not easy nor trivial. One subtle example: Google is a broker of Tor Snowflake, which could cause a difficult dilemma.

Saki,

If you’re familiar with Electrum and migrating to the privacy coin, Feather may be a convenient choice.

The fundamental problem for you might not be the wallet; but KYC vs. non-KYC. Is it allowed to post a link or mention specific platforms here? You may want to check a website about no-kyc and try a trusted, no-kyc platform—not a CEX but a DEX (pure P2P), so no company can monitor your private life (related to shopping). You can browse monero.town, which is a friendly Lemmy instance of !privacyguides in the sense that Monero is recomended on the official site of Privacy Gudies: www.privacyguides.org/en/cryptocurrency/ (I’m a mod from !privacy)

The tricky part is, if you have been once KYCed, your privacy invaded, then you couldn’t undo it (un-KYC it). You may need to start over, creating totally new addresses, doing everything anonymously over Tor. If you’re not that privacy-oriented, you can just swap the KYC coin you have to Monero, and you’ll be invisible from that point.

But Moneo is not magic to solve everything. DYOR and stay safe!

No-KYC "Auto" Prepaid Cards are now available on Stealths (stealths.net)

Hi Monero community! Three months ago, we launched our service with automated virtual cards. It was a successful launch but we needed to close our VCC service for new orders after the first month due to issues with the provider. After 2 months of manual-only delivery, we’re happy to announce that prepaid cards are automated...

Saki,

If this works, that’s very interesting and potentially very useful.

  1. International Prepaid Card: Supported Countries even include China, Turkey, Turkmenistan. Feels rather unlikely. Is this actually tested well? Or you just listed countries where in theory this might work?
  2. What if that 3-D Secure thing is required?
  3. To test this for a small amount like $5: “Total fees: $5.14 ($5.00 + 2.50%)” means I’d pay $10.14, i.e. fees are 102.8%, higher than the card value itself?
Saki,

What exactly does one need to do for “activation”? A phone number and/or GeoIP are involved?

This item in you FAQ page is also cool :)

The product I want to buy is not listed, can you help?

Yes, please contact us to create a special order. We can buy any digital & physical products for crypto.

I truly hope this will become a popular and convenient element for the Monero community and your business will be fruitful. You may want to consider talking to Kycnot.me; if recognized and listed there, that may mean a lot. Thanks for joining monero.town and sharing this interesting news. It’s still iffy, but it does sound great if it works 😊

On the other hand, your blog article, How to Buy a Domain 100% Anonymously?, suggests that you may not be very familiar with these privacy topics. The most obvious and easiest options (Njalla, Incognet) are not mentioned—both directly accept Monero. Also, your knowledge may not be up-to-date, unaware of the ramifications of “Thick Whois”, esp. NIS2, Article 28.

Saki,

Bitcoin is absolutely fungible.

Bitcoin’s Fungibility Graveyard. Also CEXes can and will freeze your fund. Furthermore, miners could refuse to confirm tx. This happens because coin A and coin B are not indistinguishable—some may be perceived as “dirty” “suspicious” or “high-risk”.

Monero doesn’t have this prob, as no one can distinguish the “cleanness” of coins.

The seemingly tautological, trivial equation 1 XMR = 1 XMR has some rather deep meaning. Not to say BTC is generally not fungible, but it’s not “absolutely” fungible.

Saki,

Monero could be also “enticing” for a kidnapper.

The thing is, you’re not a “terrorist”, not a “kidnapper”, not a “child abuser” etc. Most of us are not. Such evildoers are relatively rare, probably less than 1% of people. Sadly, most of us are relatively poor, not having money to launder to begin with. Only less than 1% might.

Big Question: Would you prefer to destroy the privacy of every ordinary, law-abiding person, including yourself, just because less than 1% of people might abuse it? Would you insist that everyone must give up e.g. the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination because of the same reason?

There is no such thing as “a moderate amount of privacy.” Either you have it or you don’t; having privacy means that you can freely and independently decide whether or not to share some specific info about your private life with a specific person. Which is not about hiding; it’s about personal freedom.

Saki,

I like to learn different points of view; some of your points are valid. This conversation is indeed meaningless for you, though, if you’re only interested in “winning” as in “I’m correct, they’re wrong. I want to correct them.” 😺

As for malware, you may agree that the root of the problem is security flaws of the said user or their OS. Even if all the cryptos are banned, such a user (executing random files, blindly believing in Big Tech…) is likely to be exploited and abused; their credit card numbers, passwords, sensitive info being stolen anyway.

Both you and I know that most of crimes in this world have nothing to do with Monero. On the other hand, quite a few people use Monero for good-will donations too, which would have been otherwise impossible. Surely you don’t want to make a donation to support Country X with transparent KYC BTC if that makes Country Y angry but you might need to visit this scary country for some reason. Maybe it’s like cars, guns, knives, etc. Cars may help criminals run away, without which some crimes would be impossible. Cars may kill a lot of people too. We know that. But we may not outlaw cars, nevertheless. Can we agree that this is actually a difficult problem, with a lot of philosophical ramifications or something like that?

Saki,

Similar posts by the same user @maltfield were accepted in the past: monero.town/post/131992monero.town/post/131986monero.town/post/478694

The idea itself could be interesting and thought-provoking. Personally I wouldn’t like to be oppressive, removing posts easily; but this time, monero.town/post/1144305 it seems somewhat excessive too. Any advice? I’m new here, though technically a mod. @monerobull @rottenwheel

Saki, (edited )

They double-posted a new one monero.town/post/1142415 in !moneromarket.

The only applicable rule is “No spamming or off-topic ads.” Maybe we can remove it from !privacy, while keeping it stay in !moneromarket (up to admin/its mods), to which this ad more properly belongs?

  • Positive: This BusKill thing, also sold via ProxyStore, may be legit (it does what it says it does). shop.proxysto.re/conf/914 Sketchy but mildly interesting. More or less related to privacy and Monero, it’s not totally off-topic in !privacy; their ads were accepted in !moneromarket a few times already.
  • Negative: Their ads are cross-posted to ~10 communities and repetitive though infrequent; having the nature of spamming.

Thoughts: I’d against the idea of “powerful moderation” where self-righteous mods check every post closely and easily remove ones they don’t like. Also, “reported by 4 users” shouldn’t be a general criterion. If it was, a malicious person having 4 accounts could try to kill any post this way. In this specific case, reports are most probably genuine & really appreciated.

Saki,

Since you’re the admin, you have the final say, obviously. @maltfield is a fellow user of monero.town. Apparently their posts were well received once ( monero.town/post/478676 monero.town/post/132041 ) then became a bit too repetitive and (perceived as) spammy.

we should probably add something similar to r/monero where you can only advertise every 2 weeks as well as limiting reposts to your own community and a limited amount of others

Sounds reasonable.

Saki,

Current Status 2023-11-19 23:00Z (Any comments would be appreciated)

  1. Some of these posts by our fellow user @maltfield were removed by mods in several instances (lemmy.ml, lemmy.one, lemmy.world, etc.). Modlogs:
  1. Even in these instances, not all of their posts were removed. For example lemmy.ml/post/4403541 from 3 months ago was well accepted, and is still kept. Maybe @maltfield is not a “pure spammer” and we can discuss with them in a civil manner, ask them not to overdo it.
  2. The said user even got (2-month?) bans from certain instances. I wouldn’t like to ban/block a fellow Monero supporter from monero.town. At the same time I don’t want people from other instances to see monero.town as a “bad” place. (Hopefully people are rational enough not to assume @maltfield represents typical Monero users/privacy advocates.)
  3. Some other instances did not (yet?) remove @maltfield’s posts in question. E.g. our friendly instance !privacyguides still keeps yesterday’s BusKill post: lemmy.one/post/6940197
  4. I PM’ed @maltfield ~8 hours ago, explaining the situation, asking “Speak up now if necessary.”
Saki,

Right. Idealism doesn’t always work.

In this specific case, though, it feels unfair to suddenly give them a severe punishment, as they didn’t do anything against the rules when posts were made, monero.town had accepted their posts for a few months, @maltfield was never given a warning; some users even found Buskill interesting/fun and posted positive comments at first.

"Monero on the front page of The Economic Times in India” [Is someone crowdfunding a Monero ad in India’s economic newspaper?] (Don’t take this too seriously) (nitter.oksocial.net)

EDIT: Don’t take this too seriously; do not actually send a donation (unless you really want to, like admiring “Nice photoshopping!” “Thanks for the fun pic”). While it’s entertaining and thought-provoking, using their work this way is ethically questionable too. As @z0rg0n pointed out, one could even see this as a...

Saki,

Thanks for pointing out potential problems. The post has been edited to include a warning. Though it seems obvious that one shouldn’t believe anything blindly, there may be gullible persons too.

Saki,

@alphonse Sorry, I double-posted a link to the same tweet. This was coincidental, we posted almost at the same time!

It might be better to use nitter.oksocial.net. It’s Tor-friendly so more people can see the linked post (while nitter.net is blocking Tor now).

Saki,

@ride I know the background: this info could be very useful, and you commented, “Even if not directly Monero-related, this draws attention to the community when such contributions come from here.”

The problem is, !privacyguides has a different set of rules than Monero.town does, explicitly stating:

This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.

Hence, as you can see in monero.town/post/1085883 (you double-posted the same thing, too), a negative comment about this:

I feel like this might count as self-promotion, given it’s mentioning a particular website, their GitHub, their running service, etc. Regardless, it is informative

@LWD is not “childish”, even stating “it is informative.” But even if this post may be useful, we should follow the rules of !privacyguides when (cross-)posting here; otherwise, Monero.town may look bad.

Saki,

That’s a good point. One of the two biggest weak points of a so-called e2e provider/platform is, the e2e provider itself.

The only true e2e is e.g. Alice does gpg -ea on an offline computer, copy-pastes ascii and sends it to Bob via an online computer, who copy-pastes this ascii to his offline computer and does gpg -d there. Their seckeys are airgapped from the communication channel. Sharing your sec with a provider is especially ridiculous (e.g. Proton). At least that’s what I think.

Saki, (edited )

‹s​ilverpill:poa(.)st› Anyone working on a GUI for multisig (or planning to work on it)?

‹t​obtoht:monero(.)social› I am.

‹t​obtoht:monero(.)social› As part of Feather

cf. Is An XMR Version of Nunchuk Wallet Technically Possible? monero.town/post/1017203@japananon

Saki, (edited )

Thank you for confirming that there would be indeed some COIs between Cake and Moon, and that at least one of Cake’s contributors or ex-contributors has started this anti-Monero (?) blockchain analytics provider.

A dilemma is: if Cake is not a honeypot, of course you deny the claim that it’s a honeypot; if Cake is indeed a honeypot, of course you deny the same claim. If Moon and Cake are totally unrelated, you say, “They’re unrelated.” If Moon and Cake are secretly or subtly collaborating in some way, you say the same thing. So asking or answering a question about something like this is largely pointless.

Probably an ideal solution is not trust, but math and technology. Yet pure P2P doesn’t look very realistic, so a centralized big player like Cake may be necessary to some extent. There is always a trade-off between privacy and convenience.

As of writing this, GitHub shows Justin Ehrenhofer as your contributor. You may want to erase the past to avoid “misunderstanding” about what happened. Things must be much easier on Reddit or Twitter 🤭 sorry about that, but this is Monero.town.

https://images4.imagebam.com/30/c2/ea/MEQ7W3O_o.png

Saki,

This Lemmy instance is relatively new, so everyone here is relatively new 😃

Monero (XMR) has some interesting, experimental features—among other thing it has the “privacy first” design, having a lot of valid use cases. Monero might be what Bitcoin originally tried to achieve. Yet it’s not magic to solve everything. We’re not “religious believers” who blindly insist Monero is perfect. The privacy coin does have several potential problems too.

Many of us are critical thinkers, questioning the recent tendencies toward excessive surveillance society, or negative problems caused by monopoly by Big Tech, and so on. I hope you’re interested in some of these privacy points. Many or us are not traders nor investors—more like privacy advocates, a kind of philosophers, or cypher punks. I hope you find some of those topics interesting, important, informative, or otherwise thought-provoking.

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