This is a cool proof of concept and pretty easy to adapt for almost any purpose not just text. I don’t think it’s “useful” but then again “usefulness” isn’t exactly well defined in the first place.
I imagine that for a very small minority of the population, that’s actually their kink. Writing sexually explicit and politically suspect text messages in order to force some unwitting federal employee to participate in some deranged message-au-trois. The world is filled with all kinds of people.
Are you absolutely sure that you flat-out “don’t have anything to hide” and would readily and truthfully furnish me with every information I asked of you? :P
I wouldn’t mind you finding out any information about me. I would mind you feeling entitled to me putting in effort and time to answer you. I’ve read all the suggestions people here posted and none made me reflect or get anywhere near changing my mind. Privacy centric people just have to accept not everyone is like them. I respect your need for privacy. I don’t understand why you obsessively require me to hold the same belief.
I wouldn’t mind you finding out any information about me. I would mind you feeling entitled to me putting in effort and time to answer you. I’ve read all the suggestions people here posted and none made me reflect or get anywhere near changing my mind. Privacy centric people just have to accept not everyone is like them. I respect your need for privacy. I don’t understand why you obsessively require me to hold the same belief.
I don’t think anyone requires you to hold any specific beliefs, nobody within this comment chain anyway.
It’s a bit akin to meeting someone on the street and being told “It’s nighttime!” while the sun is out. I’d definitely be interested in understanding why that other person considers it to be nighttime and I would at the very least be disappointed not to get a conversation out of it.
Three different fictitious requests:
“Can you spare some change?”
“Would you let me skip ahead of the queue please? I have an urgent appointment later on.”
“Will you let us share your user data with our partners in order to improve our services?”
I’m assuming here - and please correct me if I am wrong - that you would be likely to acquiesce to 3. in most contexts, maybe even more likely than to acquiesce to 1. or 2.?
Privacy sentiments are subjective beliefs, not an objective fact like nature.
I genuinely don’t see a point in engaging with you, even just based on what I stated above where you use your personal beliefs in line with objective, provable elements of the natural world. So I’ll choose not to. Cheers. 👍
Privacy sentiments are subjective beliefs, not an objective fact like nature.
I genuinely don’t see a point in engaging with you, even just based on what I stated above where you use your personal beliefs in line with objective, provable elements of the natural world. So I’ll choose not to. Cheers. 👍
While I obviously cannot force you to continue a conversation you do not wish to have, I’m a bit perplexed by what you’re saying here and at what point “belief” entered the conversation. If you’re saying that data, personal and otherwise, has no real, objective, provable value then surely that would go against all physical evidence? There must be some kind of misunderstanding here. Well, cheers ✋
Let me scroll through your phone, see if there are some nice pictures or chats, the google search history, browser history… Uuh what’s that Lovense Buttplug App for? Do you have any medical conditions or mental health struggles? How do you approach people on Tinder? What’s your salary?
“The you won’t kind providing me with your full birth name, ss#, address, mother’s maiden name, bank account number, pin, computer login, phone login” etc, etc.
You unfortunately can’t teach something like this to someone who doesn’t even understand the consequences of it. Or care. Leading a horse to water n all that.
You unfortunately can’t teach something like this to someone who doesn’t even understand the consequences of it. Or care.
You can absolutely explain it and teach it and make people care. It’s just not easy. I’ve only ever encountered uninformed “I have nothing to hide”-responses to equally lackluster throwaway explanations . It’s a very difficult and abstract topic, it doesn’t come naturally! Don’t treat privacy concerns as equivalent to pointing out dirt on someone’s clothes, treat it like calculus. Successfully conveying it requires time, conversation and didactics.
I once saw the explanation that when someone is looking through your window at your house you also close the blinds or even call the police even though you have nothing to hide.
I got someone to use Signal recently, because I don’t text outside of it. Last week, she asked me why that is. I sent this Bruce Schneier essay on the eternal value of privacy to someone who knows absolutely nothing about tech, and she understood.
I’m gonna try it again next time it comes up with someone else. I think this essay does a really good job of putting it into perspective, so I’m hoping this is the silver bullet I can continue to send when someone asks.
Overall, in general, I try to keep it in real world terms. Why do you close the door when you go to the bathroom? Why do you lock your doors? Why do you have curtains/blinds? etc., along with what some other intelligent people responded here.
Generally I’ve found the people who say this get privacy and secrecy confused. You close the door when you go to the bathroom because you want privacy, not because you have anything to hide. Everyone has a pretty good idea what you’re doing in there but you close the door anyways. Secrecy would be if you were cooking Meth in the bathroom and wanted to keep it a secret.
I don’t nas, but I suggest a combination of offline drives, cloud services or remote hosts, and just ignoring data that is easy to recreate like builds and software installs.
The key is to keep the data organized in such a way that you know which parts deserve which strategy.
That is the wrong answer entirely. You should try to dictate prices to ISPs. The better approach is to work to increase competition. That will drive down prices and increase speeds.
Its worked in my city as prices for fiber are cheap and there is like 6-7 companies who will do it.
Telecom is a natural monopoly: even if you’ve got 6-7 companies marketing to the public, chances are only one of them is actually running the lines (maybe two, if we’re talking about both fiber and coaxial) and the others are just resellers. In other words, the competition is kinda artificial since the one with the infrastructure should (in theory – barring regulations disallowing it) always be able to undercut the others, who are just middlemen taking out an extra chunk of profit.
Although I guess you could argue that deregulation is better than the regulatory-captured status quo, fully regulating the telecom provider as the monopoly it is (if not nationalizing it entirely) would be inherently more efficient.
This is why I think that the lines should be owned by the municipalities (or a multi-community partnership) and access to them resold. Not even just for fiber, do all of them. The town already handles the water and the sewer, why can’t they lay the pipe for the gas?
They don’t need to be the ISP, or the cable company, or electric company, or whatever (though they can be). Just own and maintain the infra. Obtain right of way. Lease access.
@queermunist@moreeni I have to disagree. The plagiarism claims are unfounded as the ais are making their own artwork off of what they have learned. Usually starting from noise and de-noising it into something that matches its' memories of the key words. In the case of the generative art ais anyway.
While there can be valid arguments against copyrighted material being used for the ais, plagiarism is not one of them.
Far be it from me to defend the concept of intellectual property, but if a chat bot can be argued to not plagiarize then that implies it has an intelligence. It really doesn’t. It’s plagiarism with extra steps.
It's illegal if you copy-paste someone's work verbatim. It's not illegal to, for example, summarize someone's work and write a short version of it.
As long as overfitting doesn't happen and the machine learning model actually learns general patterns, instead of memorizing training data, it should be perfectly capable of generating data that's not copied verbatim from humans. Whom, exactly, a model is plagiarizing if it generates a summarized version of some work you give it, particularly if that work is novel and was created or published after the model was trained?
All these AI do is algorithmically copy-paste. They don’t have original thoughts and or original conclusions or original ideas, all if it is just copy-paste with extra steps.
Learning is, essentially, "algorithmically copy-paste". The vast majority of things you know, you've learned from other people or other people's works. What makes you more than a copy-pasting machine is the ability to extrapolate from that acquired knowledge to create new knowledge.
And currently existing models can often do the same! Sometimes they make pretty stupid mistakes, but they often do, in fact, manage to end up with brand new information derived from old stuff.
I've tortured various LLMs with short stories, questions and riddles, which I've written specifically for the task and which I've asked the models to explain or rewrite. Surprisingly, they often get things either mostly or absolutely right, despite the fact it's novel data they've never seen before. So, there's definitely some actual learning going on. Or, at least, something incredibly close to it, to the point it's nigh impossible to differentiate it from actual learning.
Not once did I claim that LLMs are sapient, sentient or even have any kind of personality. I didn't even use the overused term "AI".
LLMs, for example, are something like... a calculator. But for text.
A calculator for pure numbers is a pretty simple device all the logic of which can be designed by a human directly.
When we want to create a solver for systems that aren't as easily defined, we have to resort to other methods. E.g. "machine learning".
Basically, instead of designing all the logic entirely by hand, we create a system which can end up in a number of finite, yet still near infinite states, each of which defines behavior different from the other. By slowly tuning the model using existing data and checking its performance we (ideally) end up with a solver for something a human mind can't even break up into the building blocks, due to the shear complexity of the given system (such as a natural language).
And like a calculator that can derive that 2 + 3 is 5, despite the fact that number 5 is never mentioned in the input, or that particular formula was not a part of the suit of tests that were used to verify that the calculator works correctly, a machine learning model can figure out that "apple slices + batter = apple pie", assuming it has been tuned (aka trained) right.
Not once did I claim that LLMs are sapient, sentient or even have any kind of personality. I didn't even use the overused term "AI".
LLMs, for example, are something like... a calculator. But for text.
A calculator for pure numbers is a pretty simple device all the logic of which can be designed by a human directly.
When we want to create a solver for systems that aren't as easily defined, we have to resort to other methods. E.g. "machine learning".
Basically, instead of designing all the logic entirely by hand, we create a system which can end up in a number of finite, yet still near infinite states, each of which defines behavior different from the other. By slowly tuning the model using existing data and checking its performance we (ideally) end up with a solver for something a human mind can't even break up into the building blocks, due to the shear complexity of the given system (such as a natural language).
And like a calculator that can derive that 2 + 3 is 5, despite the fact that number 5 is never mentioned in the input, or that particular formula was not a part of the suit of tests that were used to verify that the calculator works correctly, a machine learning model can figure out that "apple slices + batter = apple pie", assuming it has been tuned (aka trained) right.
I don’t think it’s a question to “hate” AI or not. Personally, I have nothing against it.
As always with Privacy, it’s a matter of choice: when I publish something online publicly, I would like to have the choice wether or not this content is going to be indexed or used to train models.
It’s a dual dilemma. I want to benefit from the hosting and visibility of big platforms (Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter etc.) but I don’t want them doing literally anything with my content because lost somewhere in their T&C it’s mentioned “we own your content, we do whatever tf we want with it”.
I tried thumb key and it just took too much effort to get used to. Not to mention it basically requires using one thumb instead of two, so it’s possibly slower.
and also has no predictions, which really slows it way down since you have to type out each long word the whole way through instead of just getting it to the point of uniqueness and clicking the suggestion.
Been using it for a couple of years now I think. Haven’t seen a reason not to like it.
There’s a thread in GitHub where the privacyguides.org guys discussed some flaws in the encryption but that was at the very beginning, I remember reading those have been solved apparently.
Pricing, well, it seems cheap but honestly I think it’s just because we are used to seeing outrageous prices for ridiculously small amounts of storage. Thinking about it, 30 eur for 100gb is not cheap at all, like some other comment says when compared to physical drive prices. Plus, offering lifetime is a common marketing technique to attract customers used by small or starting businesses. I don’t know if that is the case here but it certainly isn’t an automatic red flag for me. I don’t know if they are gonna be around next year or 5 years from now, but I’m willing to take the risk. They claim to have lots of users and be cash flow sustainable, plus they keep developing and are getting into business features to attract that kind of customers, certainly doesn’t look like a business on life support to me.
App and code-wise, they are much better than they were a year ago. Android app is still a bit janky sometimes but I don’t use it a lot so I got not much to say, other than I can see my files and upload something small once in a while just fine. The desktop client is amazing, the best functioning client for Linux that I have used from any service, or from the few services that have a Linux client at least. The clients are open source and since the service is e2ee you don’t really need to see the server code if the client encryption is done correctly, which apparently there is no sign that it isn’t, as mentioned before.
Overall I would say you can use it, but keep a backup somewhere else just in case, which is just the thing that anyone should be doing anyways.
At e.g. Hetzner you can get 10TB for 25 EUR so no, that is not cheap at all, even if it might include some additional services compared to the Hetzner offering (which is not end to end encrypted but for costs of disk space that should not matter).
You are the one who introduced that detail about Hetzner. Nobody discussed using their hosting service. People were discussing cloud storage options and prices.
FYI. Blockchain is only so very power waster because for cryptocurrency uses the users churn out new rounds continuously as if there is no tomorrow.
Here, your public key relatively rarely changes. If you had your protonmail account for years, it probably hasn’t changed ever yet.
Maybe I’m wrong in this, but this seems to be similar to what Keybase was doing, and that was a cool idea!
at €300 per 2tb? that's like 10x the current cost of storage. sounds like a reasonable price to provide what is really just a modest quota, indefinitely, so long as there isn't a wave of 'fires' across southeast asia that puts every hdd and most nand facilities out of commission and storage costs skyrocket to prices never before seen.
Unlimited anything (time or space) tends to be much more common among unprofessional companies who don’t last that long or add limits after the fact anyway.
It’s fairly common to give a (sense of) a good deal to new people while raising a bit more money roght now than you would with a traditional subscription.
Then later when you start getting more users quicker you cancel that offer and nee users have to use a subscription (which will make you more money over time).
Protonmail did something similar originally, giving out Visionary for life for a (large) one-time fee. It’s a decent strategy to raise money from people who believe in your product.
there's nothing stopping the company from discontinuing the sale of new 'lifetime' plans should there ever be a concern about the 'costs' to serve those who already have it. as it is now, they have a fairly high price on a very modest amount of space, and it appears to me that they're covering their ass here wrt future servicing costs.
Funnily enough, they don’t advertise preventing users from opening unapproved media files as a feature. So that could either mean they’re sneaking it in, or that the image is not genuine.
You are absolutely right! Using a single public encryption key can not be considered as secured. But it is still more than having your content in clear.
I intend to add more encryption options (sharable custom key, PGP), that way users can choose the level of encryption they want for their public content. Of course, the next versions will still be able to decrypt legacy encrypted content.
In a way, it makes online Privacy less binary:
Instead of having an Internet where we choose to have our content either “public” (in clear) or “private” (E2E encrypted), we have an Internet full of content encrypted with heterogeneous methods of encryption (single key, custom key, key pairs). It would be impossible to scale data collection at this rate!
“smartphone” doesn’t matter. it is a computer that runs software. the only question is who controls that software? free/libre software is by definition one that you control. and what you described means that you dont control your device.
so advices: easy way is to just install lineage os or graphene or some other open source android version. you will control it. i dont advice to install google play services.
other advice: you can get a sony phone because it can run sailfish os. also i believe those are great. otherwise install open source android, lineage or something.
sailfish has android emulator (it costs money) but sailfish is not android. it is a linux/qt based system. very polished. not as polished as open source android, but it is fast, lightweight and beautiful. native sailfish apps arent feature rich but do you really need feature rich? then you can get more apps from fdroid store and use android emulation layer.
other, better but harder option: get a device which is well supported by postmarketos.
postmarketos has several user interfaces but neither of those is what you have used to. i believe it is the best option but you must prepare yourself to be able to change. most probably you wont have a working camera. thats ok, i live like that.
privacy
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.