FriendOfDeSoto

This will not be the final chapter on VPNs. People in government change - the UK is ushering in the 100th PM in the last decade this week. Somebody is going to scream “think of the children” again and all reason dissipates faster than you can say “haven’t we been here before?” It’s like chat control on the continent. These zombies are eternal.

From my Monday morning armchair, I think it’s a fair assumption that their business was already in a downward trajectory. The automobile industry used to be the plow horse of the German economy and plenty of businesses down the supply line have suffered for their inability to move with the times and ditch internal combustion engines. Automobile gets a mention in passing but thanks to various more or less elected madmen doing their mad things in various crises on this planet I doubt any of the other fields mentioned were putting them in a better position. So either they were dumb about their IT security or the diminished security was due to their economical situation in a confounding clusterfuck.

I find it fascinating to think that you could ruin a competitor now simply by hiring a ransomware as a service outfit. If you know they’re on the ropes, they probably cheap out on IT. Send the bitcoin fueled North Koreans in and soon you can buy it up for cheap. I don’t think that’s overly paranoid to consider today.

Wait a minute… ಠಿ⁠_⁠ಠ

It’s probably worth paying attention to this to see what information they release eventually. However, if there was indeed a hacker attack of some sort, it was probably illegal to do, and it’s also very possible that their infrastructure wasn’t up to par and they were aware of that - these are just two legitimate reasons why they were counseled to be tight lipped about this at this time by the police or their lawyers respectively.

The gained advantage in your theory lies in drivers being unaware that they’re being “scanned.” They are not doing a great job at hiding this then, are they. A motorcycle could evade this all together, a car might also be able. And the solar panel could better be used to power a camera and/or a license plate reader if they wanted to know who is passing.

I’m sure if we put enough lab coats on the task they can come up with a system that can ID a model by the reaction in the coil. But at what cost? A light switch is cheap. A light switch that can tell who is using it surely isn’t. And why go to this length and not just do the cameras? Ockham’s razor.

I don’t disagree with your thought per se. I’m looking at your train reservation example and think that soon you won’t be talking with a real person but two ChatGPTs in a trenchcoat. So corpos aversion to privacy tools drives you to corpo’s desire to cut overhead. And I’m sure there are plenty of examples where the phone in option simply does not exist. Or where it cannot exist because they can’t find people to staff it or a model to fake it effectively.

I see a future where you sadly have to feed one of these agenetic models, when proven much safer to use than today, with the minimum of information necessary to get your train tickets or whatever, and then let it fight with the other side while you do something else.

You are so awesome. Not a single fault in your conviction, your reasoning, or your personality. Who among us mere mortals could ever change your mind? The answer: none. Because we do not hold a candle to you or we simply do not care. Thank you for rage baiting with us today.

Why “even?” Even after struggling with privacy concerns you don’t think they’re the future of wearables. Shouldn’t that be “because of?” Normally, privacy concerns aren’t a big plus point. I didn’t want to buy this hypothetical device but after learning all the data goes directly to an unencrypted database on an open server in the cloud, I was all in?

TL;Dr because of this dumb premise that is the first sentence:

As someone who is largely (if not always) inseparable from my iPhone’s camera, the desire to test out Meta’s elusive AI glasses was a natural next step.

If that’s your natural next step, your opinion doesn’t matter to me.

Stop fooling around with “he used his private money”, it’s money he earned with this company, by donations, VPN and services, paid by the users.

What you call fooling around I call a factual distinction. It’s also been pointed out that Mullvad money wasn’t possibly a big bulk of the donation. Because they’re not raking in the dough.

I’m not telling you not to be outraged. If I were a customer of theirs I’d be mad too. You draw your own line and that’s just fine with me. Let me draw mine.

I believe facts matter. Facts like Mullvad didn’t directly fund a Nazi party, but one of their owners did. And it wasn’t per se a Nazi party becausre they are more of the horseshoe persuasion where they try to marry ideas from the extreme right with those from the extreme left, which is an unfortunate trend in European politics right now. And I’ve pointed this out before: the real threat is already in the Swedish parliament as the 2nd largest fraction. They are the Sweden Democrats and they are probably more deserving of the Nazi label.

This isn’t good. It’s also not entirely correct. Mullvad isn’t financing this party directly. One of the owners took his money he made from the company and donated it to the loonies. He could’ve bought crypto with it, spent it in blow maybe, but he didn’t. “Mullvad is financing this party” is not correct. “Your Mullvad fees may have ended up indirectly financing this party” is correct and an ongoing concern. So is their tepid response to the story breaking. I would still advise caution, hammer them with public outrage pressure on the socials, and hope they get rid of the loonie party donor before you bankrupt an otherwise serviceable VPN provider. If that guy is still there in a couple of months, by all means leave.

There is no shortage of c@<%s in the tech sector.

If we leave some of the more scandalous headline making stories to the side, people on Lemmy tend to be the de-googlers of the world. And when they sign up for Proton, they discover Proton is a quarter Google in a trenchcoat. They want you in their ecosystem and they want you to stay there. So you wake up one morning and you’re out of the Google frying pan but into the Proton frying pan. So some of the hate is disappointment.

You’re going to have to vaguely doxx yourself here. There are plenty of places on this planet where you can’t legally get a “burner” without providing ID.

How can you live anonymous? Off the grid maybe in a log hut in the woods. If you’re in a vehicle, you’ll need license plates. If you buy land there needs to be a name on the deed. You can obscure those maybe behind company names if you make the effort. But there will be a paper trail.

If you buy land, you might as well invest into a more comfy tiny house with solars on the roof and dig a nice pit for the toilet. Keep chicken and grow veggies or something.

Define “worth it.” I think Mullvad is a tad expensive but for protection while surfing the web it’s a good service. And the fact that they take mail-in cash is unique.

You can just look for a pre-paid credit card wherever you are. You may have to sacrifice your name and number but you don’t have to wrestle with the post office.

Just do what all other writers have done and choose a starting point and then increment the numbers a bit every time. That horse has not only bolted, it ran past the horizon, had a fulfilling family life, and died of old age.

The UK government is giving Apple and Google three months to build on-device scanning infrastructure.

Nothing has gone through parliament yet. That’s not to say that a majority of twats couldn’t be found there. But crucially I think this is not something a floundering PM can decree on his own authority. So far this threat is about as believable as any statement by the incumbent American president on Iran.

Even for a non-bank website, I imagine there is an octogenarian federal judge somewhere in the States who is still puzzled by fax machines who made a ruling holding website owners liable if they didn’t do this when they know of any vulnerability that could affect the user. So there is a possible legal angle as well.

The people who use browsers other than the ones listed will either never see this message or know how to upgrade on their own.

I think this is not a clean cut case of evil planned obsolescence. There are valid security concerns, as browsers are a common attack vector. You should get that updated, also to protect your privacy while surfing online. So for a banking site or similar, I kind of get it. (I recognize there is a possible conundrum when people can’t go bank in person because the bank no longer has branches and/or get excluded by their old hardware/economic reasons from doing it online. Should they be able to choose risking it if the bank knows about a flaw they then leave exposed? Shit’s complicated.)

That being said I’m sure this banner of corporate concern was not primarily motivated by the security and privacy of their users.

Unless you’re running a model on an air gapped machine that will never connect to the internet again, there is no privacy preserving way to use so-called AI today. All the providers will tell you it’s no problem. But then you read the news about which model fucked up what today. And it’s a lot. Anybody using so-called AI today is voluntarily participating in a massive, not well organized beta test. At their own jeopardy.

So don’t give it your medical history and don’t talk to it about your innermost thoughts. Try to keep it out of your internet browser and history if you can.

The semi-established canon in second wave Trek was that 10 could not be reached. Semi-established because there were higher numbers in TOS iirc. So Tom Paris went too far, in more than one way.

I have the feeling Star Trek writers just forget about this.

Occasionally we get the reverse retcon where they realize they made a mistake and then try to never speak of it again. Breaking the warp 10 barrier, turning into cuddly and horny komodo dragon fish, is another example of this (although Lower Decks made fun of it later).