The firms, which include Twitter (TWTR.N) and Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) YouTube, share "hashes," unique numerical representations of original pieces of content that have been removed from their services. Other platforms use these to identify the same content on their own sites in order to review or remove it.

I can think of one way to get around this but it has some downsides for privacy so I think it should be used carefully and only when necessary.

You can open up a picture with Notepad++ or another text editor and add whatever text you want so that the hash will be different and not match what's in their database. You could even add a hidden message if you want. You could add hidden messages to other files too using steganography techniques and that would change the hash.

The downside is that now the file is more traceable. So lets say someone posts some meme about vaccines on poal but they edit it to include the text "Death to all jews" when you open it in notepad. Someone else saves it and shares it on Facebook without knowing about the hidden text. Now if this system is set up to track image hashes across platforms, the feds know that the facebook user either got that image from poal or got it from someone else who got it from there. The exact same picture could be on lots of other platforms but they would know from the hash where this particular user got it from.

They are finally admitting to the backdoor now.

For me it was very hard to avoid 4chan bans they must have strong invasive tools to identify you even if you delete your cookies and change your IP address.

Riddle me this: how come the only way for 4chan to see if you're a human is by demanding a Google "captcha" that invades the whole computer with spy scripts? If Google is hunting for clusters there, seems like there's a reason.

Strange coincidence, with the news of UK's journalist persecution under the idea his reports could be used for what they call "jigsaw identification".

I have to assume the ad gurus behind both are in the same milieu.

depends on what phone you use

I can on a desktop or laptop. Not so easy on a mobile.

Block Google from your life.

So, Google decides for themselves that they will be the internet police. I smell Nazism.

Yes it is interesting... What I really detest though are people who speculate something controversial without any actual evidence. Dots often are connected where there is actually no thread. Of course ANYTHING (literally) is possible, but I like to see why exactly and what was found. What some present as "evidence" is too flimsy.

Take just providing information to the Swiss authorities - of course any legal organisation will have to state that, but they require formal warrants, and they can only provide what they have. It does not mean they can actually decrypt the contents of your mail and provide it. Which is why many organisations prefer to have as little access as possible, and not be able to decrypt information. Outside of the USA, Russia, and China, most countries legally do not allow fishing expeditions by the authorities to just see what they can fine, there has to be something of legal substance against an identified individual.

I look rather at examples like Facebook's Cambridge Analytica - broadly reported with the evidence found to actual events and outcomes. That was one of the vents that made me leave Facebook altogether. WhatsApps' terms and conditions that stated they would share my metadata to Facebook as well as their 3rd party partners - I ledt WhatsApp.

I'm certainly going to keep an eye open anything that does develop around ProtonMail though, and see if anything in that report actually gains traction.

That's really useful to know, and wish Samsung promoted that more. That's certainly something I'd consider buying then.

That's actually a good idea, thanks!

tuck the wire through your shirt

https://ramble.pw/f/whatever/3524/wireless-earbuds-are-stupid-change-my-mind

Can you please post a link to your rant. Thanks.

At the time of making this comment, Samsung's Galaxy Buds and Galaxy Buds+ are the most repairable true wireless earbuds I've seen. Their batteries do not require any soldering to replace.

iFixit has made a good guide on how to do this. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Samsung+Galaxy+Buds+Battery+Replacement/127556

Props to Samsung for their repair-friendly design.

They certainly have a place... I used to often have my wired one's snag on door handles in the house and that was plain irritating to me as I walk quite fast. That said, with wired you never have to worry about battery time or batteries that die after 2 years ;-)

Sadly, I'm not surprised Wikipedia is doing this. There are many malicious users who use VPNs, Tor, and other anonymity tools to put false information on their platform. By preventing editing of content by people who use these tools, platforms like Wikipedia is able to maintain their credibility.

Interesting - thanks, I might try this.

Very controversial article. It was posted multiple times on reddit where it got heavily criticized. Here are some threads I found ranged from most discussed to least.

(42 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/he87m5/the_truth_about_protonmail/

(19 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/PrivacySecurityOSINT/comments/ol7gth/anyone_here_able_to_evaluate_the_truthfulness_of/

(17 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/LinuxCafe/comments/hetbh8/the_truth_about_protonmail/

(3 comments) https://old.reddit.com/r/AntiMSM/comments/l8tsdr/protonmail_is_cia/

It was also submitted to HN but didn't gain much attention.

Related discussion on raddle, which was apparently forked from this 4chan thread

I posted a rant about wireless earbuds recently. I never quite understood the appeal.

Both of their websites are Clownflared and both have cryptocurrency of some sort (Session uses the blockchain for messaging, Status allows sending transactions in a message), not everyone might like that, especially with Session, since you can't technically delete your message after sending...

Session

Status

The phone number requirement is a problem, but the fact that it's from USA is not. E-mail especially suffers from this.. How about those IM?

• Threema requires paying 3.99 CHF (3.69 EUR, 4.34 USD), but at least you can pay with Bitcoin (but not Monero).
• Wired can't be used with the Tor Browser because it blocks local storage, but maybe you can use Pale Moon with Proxy Privacy Ruler and the domain set to proxy through Tor? You can't pay for the Pro/Enterprise account with a cryptocurrency, but at least a phone number is not required in any case. It also doesn't use Clownflare, but I'm not sure about downtimes.
• Wickr has been acquired by Amazon, so that doesn't sound good... but at least Tor works, I think. I have no idea if you can pay with a cryptocurrency, though, but it's not required. It doesn't have Clownflare and it didn't go down since last 90 days.
• Jami is probably better to use over Tor, considering it's P2P, so your IP could be seen. There's no payment or personal data required. The website doesn't have Clownflare and there's no downtime because it's P2P.

Maybe I'd need to analyze these apps more (including paying for Threema, but who uses it?), but I think Jami would be the best from these.

The original is actually at Luke's Videos PeerTube instance, the Based PeerTube instance is simply playing the video from that instance, which is kind of annoying when using uMatrix, but at least youtube-dl still works, which is what matters the most.

As for the shutting down message, I have already prepared for it and saved metadata from all of its local videos I could find with the sitemap.xml (which looks like it only includes 1624 out of 1640 videos? Also, when downloading a deleted video, the description and the JSON info gets downloaded, the video doesn't, and the thumbnail does, but really it downloads the error about turned off JavaScript). I haven't downloaded the videos because I don't have 543.8 GB of storage left, only 177 GB, besides, the Internet Archive (where I want to upload the metadata) probably wouldn't like the videos.

I think that proposing XMPP as an alternative isn't bad if you tell people to enable OMEMO because I think pretty much every XMPP client allows it, even if it requires installing a plugin. But yes, even with that, there's a problem with lack of usage, same with VoIP, social, or other things like that, so obviously, good luck trying to escape the Boomerbook botnet or that Macroshit Tease thing.