The most worrying claim is that some bosses are surreptitiously watching staff via their webcams.

I would hope that this is illegal but maybe not. Company property and all.

I think a lot of people just hadn't heard about it. It didn't get enough publicity. I'm pretty technically literate but didn't really know about it. I mean, I've heard the name before and seen the logo, but I never looked into it until I read your comment. It sounds great. Maybe it could catch on now.

After seeing Zuckerberg tape over his webcam, I started taping over it on everything. If a billionaire tech CEO like Zuckerberg doesn't trust his IT to lock down his machine, no one should.

I wonder which of these web alternatives will "win" and become mainstream. It's interesting seeing them over time, but it's kind of sad that freenet has been doing this for 20 years but never gained any traction.

Who knows, I don't care all that much for what other people do with their time.

The ACLU is wrong here. They have been weakening on free speech issues, and the consequence is that they fall for related fallacies.

Suppose the company simply sold an index of where to find face photos for various people. Suppose someone with this list tripped a web archive like archive.is to store each photo. Suppose another person writes a tool that can pull up the face photo and put it on the left of your screen, leaving you free to compare it to a photo on the right. And suppose lastly you've downloaded and installed a free GPL software program that lets you compare the faces according to biometrics and see if they are the same. Who committed the crime?

Now that is NOT to say I want these bastards tracking faces all over the world. But we must first rule out the impossible before we can focus our attention on what is left. If we can't keep a company from compiling faceprints, what can we do??? Like DUH, we can keep people from USING THEM!

Advantages of building the wall there include the millions of people who will be duped or forced into giving "consent" by countless very important organizations, like employers, who aren't "protected" by the censorship-level restriction.

So what am I saying? Well, I'm saying you can't discriminate against a customer or employee for refusing to be faceprinted, or force them to submit to biometric comparisons. They have to make accommodations. It is at the same level as barring businesses from discriminating by race or even handicap. Americans don't like to think of some punk from the government trying to tell Business who they can do Business with, but there it is. A business that surreptitiously looks up faces to give one person a discount over another should be treated exactly the same - legally and emotionally - as a business that charges higher prices if you are black or female.

elaborate

Would you consider that the norm?

Yes, I'm not addicted to my phone.

But do you?

Most suspicious thing about DDG is the marketing push. Where did the money for that come from? That, and it's US based and to my knowledge not completely open source, so one should assume it to be compromised by default.

I too am wary of DDG. runnaroo seems like a good option if searx is not working for you.

It's nice to see the ACLU doing something sane again like suing companies for invading privacy. An example of the madness they're taking a break from (from Wikipedia):

On June 21, 2018, a leaked memo showed that the ACLU has explicitly endorsed the view that free speech can harm marginalized groups by undermining their civil rights. "Speech that denigrates such groups can inflict serious harms and is intended to and often will impede progress toward equality," the ACLU declared in guidelines governing case selection and "Conflicts Between Competing Values or Priorities."

Ricochet is an interesting project too. It also doesn't have centralized servers. It routes messages through the tor network.

https://ricochet.im/

The developers aren't giving guarantees about it though. From the website:

Ricochet is an experiment. Security and anonymity are difficult topics, and you >should carefully evaluate your risks and exposure with any software.

We’re working on auditing, reviewing, and always improving Ricochet (and we’d >love more help). There will be problems. We hope to do better than most, but >please, don’t risk your safety any more than necessary.

DDG is pretty much only lying about being privacy focused.

https://www.stoutner.com/new-default-homepage-and-search-engine/

Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, used to run the Names Database.[1] This was a website that aimed to connect people who had lost contact by gathering lots and lots of e-mail addresses. Getting access could be done by either paying money, or submitting lots of e-mail addresses of other people. Since the service revolved around gathering personal information, it is very suspicious for Gabriel Weinberg to start a business that is privacy-oriented. [2]

DuckDuckGo used to set a tracking cookie, even though they claimed they didn't. This was done by a third party they cooperate with, which means that it wasn't necessarily intentional, but if it's unintentional, it shows a worrying lack of care.[3]

DuckDuckGo is based in the US. This makes it really easy for the NSA to compromise it. If it were based in the EU, for example, the NSA wouldn't have the legal power to force them to log everything without telling anyone. This wouldn't guarantee privacy, but it would make it a lot more plausible. Instead, they're based in the US, which means that the NSA can do whatever they want with them. There are secure search engines that are not based in the US.[3]

[1] https://archive.is/9wR4O
[2] https://archive.is/N2qe8
[3] https://archive.is/qntuk

Does a pair of similarly-sized tin cans offer any protection, or do the spies subsidize sufficient accelerometers to be able to defeat your puny human tactics over the length of any reasonable car trip? (I assume they do with an Apple phone, but who would spends so much anyway? The spies should be paying YOU.)

Oh, the authoritarianism is coming, don't you worry.

Remember when the police found OJ Simpson in the mid '90s during his infamous police chase by tracking which cell towers his phone was connected to? The tech has gotten much better since then.

I can switch my phone out. Or leave it at home.

No. Because as you said, most carry one around willingly.

you live under a damn rock

yea, it's super awesome. the mail in a box seems really legit, as far as i've been able to tell. for a personal server it is super adequate.

Rad. Lots of affordable VM hosts out there!

Yeah, that there is the timeless conundrum. If you make a complex system easy, you have to make it a black box that you don't actually understand. It's only safe if the black box's engineers did a good job of make sure it's air tight. (The MiiB engineers may well have!) On the other hand, if you let the complex system be complex, you have to do a dang homework assignment to figure out how to do something.

It's nice to see that hosting infrastructure has evolved to the point that VMs are commodified and companies compete and drive prices down and that if you know how to tinker with operating systems you can have quite a powerful machine that you have full control over for, like, dirt cheap.

Pretty good read. Yeah, there are a thousand ways for your phone to compromise your privacy in spite of everyone's best attempt to do otherwise. (And I'm not suggesting everyone always does try to do otherwise.)

nice. i like ramnode, it's 3 bucks for a 1-core, 512mb ram, 160~GB hdd, 2TB bandwidth. 5 bucks gets you double those specs

there's some ssd ones too but for a personal email server i figured hdd is probably plenty fast enough

and man mail in a box was easy to set up. too easy tbh, now it's kind of like a black box that i dont' really know how it works. i set up a mail server with dovecot/postfix etc back in like 2012 and it was .. complex