Server providers threatening to terminate business with Mullvad because some of its users used port forwarding to host contents that meant legal trouble.
Mullvad chose to terminate support for port forwarding in a transparent way and gave clear dates to prepare. This was done instead of selling off their users or collaborating with whatever legal threats they were facing.
I don’t like it, but at least I understand their business decision. Even if I took my business elsewhere, they have a solid point on transparency.
Why is everyone outraged when Google/Microsoft/Yahoo and others have scraped the whole internet for two decades and are also massively profiting from that data?
There’s a significant difference in the purpose of the scraping.
Google et al. run crawlers primarily to populate their search engines. This is a net positive for those whose sites get scraped, because when they appear in a search engine they get more traffic, more page views, more ad revenue. People view content directly from those who created it, meaning those creators (regardless of whoever they are) get full credit. Yes, Google makes money too, but site owners are not left in the cold.
ChatGPT and other LLM’s works by combing its huge database of known content its “learned” to cook up an answer through fast math magic. Content it scrapes to populate this database can be regurgitated at any time, only now its been completely processed and obfuscated to an insane degree. Any attribution of content is completely stripped in the final product, even if it ends up being a word-for-word reproduction. Everything OpenAI charges for its LLM goes directly to OpenAI, and those who have created content to train it will never even know it was used without their consent.
Essentially, LLM’s operate like a huge middle school plagiarism machine shitting all over any concept of copyright, only now they’re making billions off said plagiarism with no plans to stop. It’s a huge ethical conundrum and one I heavily disagree with.
Google et al. run crawlers primarily to populate their search engines. This is a net positive for those whose sites get scraped, because when they appear in a search engine they get more traffic, more page views, more ad revenue.
This is not necessarily true. Google’s instant answers are designed to use the content from websites to answer searcher’s questions without actually leading them to the website. Whether you’re trying to find the definition for the word, the year a movie came out, or a recipe, Google will take the information they’ve scraped from a website and present it on their page with a link to the website. Their hope is that the information will be useful enough that the searcher never needs to leave the search engine.
This might be useful for searchers, but it doesn’t help the sites much. This is one of the reasons news companies attempted to take action against Google a few years ago. I think a search engine should provide some useful utilities, but not try to replace the sites they’re ostensibly attempting to connect users to. Not all search engines are like this, but Google is.
I was on the waitlist when it was a paid app and I had not pre-paid for access, and my opinions are based on that.
I would start by saying any privacy bonafides this application has are from it running on the Matrix protocol and using Matrix bridges.
I was on the waitlist for over a year. I was honestly initially very excited when my turn came, because this was after they changed their funding method, switching from “everyone pays” to “some users pay for additional features to be unlocked.”
I got a Zoom link sent to me for “onboarding.” This was because initially, setup was fairly complicated for some people, and folks needed to be walked through it.
The first notification that I would not have privacy and my communications with this company would be recorded was when I entered the Zoom chat room and was notified that Beeper would be recording the session.
At no point in the year before this had it been made clear that any communications with this company would be recorded. I logged off and wrote an email stating that this is why I did not join the onboarding process. I left for work shortly after and thought about it the rest of the day.
I would not receive a reply offering for a non-recorded zoom session until the next day. By that point, I had questions, and I asked that they answer some of these questions before I re-scheduled a new meeting.
The questions were all related to Eric Micigovsky and his previous entrepeneurship with Pebble watch. When he sold Pebble, he screwed the workers on the way out, in my opinion, and it did not give me hope that he would make sure to sell Beeper to a company with the same values as he laid out in creating the application. He was happy to sell his company when it became unprofitable before: what would prevent him from doing it again?
More importantly: If the company is sold, how is there any guarantee that the privacy policy would not change?
I never received a response to these questions at all. I declined to ever use the service, ever since. I figured if they didn’t think it was worth spending the time to answer such questions to me and lose me as a customer, they must not be very worried about the answers to such questions. Based on this, and the CEOs past history, I felt using the service was inadvisable.
Finally, in something that isn’t so much my opinion as much as a fact.
When it comes to using iMessage specifically, you need a macOS server or an iPhone (both need to be relatively new) to run the iMessage bridge from. Beeper runs a fleet of these, but to make this work, you have to turn off some extra security settings on your Apple ID, and you have to give Beeper your password just once. They claim it is never stored, logged, or cached. It’s quite possible that this is true, but it does mean you technically have your Apple ID logged in on a foreign machine you have no control over. What if this machine and all the other macOS servers got hacked to be part of a botnet? What if Apple bans all the Apple IDs involved for being part of a botnet? It leaves more questions I’m skeptical there are good answers for.
So you want oppressed people to use the Chinese Yuan or Russian Rubel and Argentinian Pesos as their Currency (super unstable in value due to inflation, highly surveiled) rather than giving them choice to use something like Monero to transact in privacy?
If you do not live in a dictatorship you have no right to comment on the usefulness of a privacy preserving tool. Maybe you do not see its value, but others in different situations than yours might need it.
Yeah sure it should be used for its utility on a needs-basis, I don’t really disagree with you or care if people use it for whatever reason they want to.
Point was that as a global general-use currency it doesn’t provide much added utility for the average person or provide a real solution for any of the underlying structural issues that people say it does.
Can activity pub change it’s terms to say that all crawlers that use this must be gnu open sources and all information crawled must be open to the public on gnu open sources software (no crawling to a private enterprise)?
My understanding is all the big tech companies are scared of what happened with router software (openwrt) and they don’t want to be forced to let competition be a foss community via gnu licensing.
Isn’t ActivityPub just an application protocol? To my knowledge there’s no ActivityPub inc. licensing the usage of the protocol or anything like that. A web protocol is just a series of guidelines everyone has agreed on following, you can’t attach terms and conditions to it.
Step 1: don’t use iCloud services; use WiFi Sync with a computer for syncing and backups. Step 2: turn on Lockdown Mode if this works for you. Step 3: limit the number of apps you install. Step 4: set up VPN to your own network and run a PiHole or similar to filter access.
For most people, this is more than enough guidance.
I believe signal uses google to push the notifications and if its giving you the option to add it to google keep the phone obviously know what it is the message content.
Assuming this is on an android phone with the normal Google Play Services on it then you should expect that Google can theoretically read anything that appears on it. It’s probably not that sinister though, I don’t imagine anything is being sent away and logged (though it theoretically could be!), there’s probably just some process which reads every incoming notification and if it thinks it sounds like a task then it offers you the prompt. Is this some setting you haven’t disabled in Google Assistant?
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