I am fucking scared of the mass surveilence nightmare direction that the internet and the world as a whole is going towards… C2PA, france hacking itself into citizen phones, the UK anti encryption law, EU’s chat control, etc. Im also sick of and hate the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality that corpos try to push. I dont wanna know how the world will look like in 5-10 years.
It is an absolute nightmare, but you can gain some privacy back with ublock origin, an adblocking DNS on your phone, Firefox, a VPN, and ditching all things google/meta. As I type this out, I am reminded how much effort it takes to claw back your privacy…yeah OP, I’m with you, the modern internet is a profit-at-all-cost cesspool that can eat a moldy potato!
Ditching google is the most difficult part, especially when iPhone is so locked down :(
I’ve primarily been an iphone user over the years and was recently hand me downed an older pixel. Using grapheneOS and firefox, I was surprised to see there were only about a dozen extensions available, good ones, but not all of them like I’d assumed. Then I discovered chrome on android has zero, is that right? I cannot believe that there are so many people that use a mobile browser without an adblocker. On iOS safari, I have dozens of incredible extensions (basically countless through the app store) that make the internet useable again. I’m happy to see safari opening up.
You can get any extensions you want on Android with Firefox Beta (or Nightly) by creating a custom collection at addons.mozilla.org
Firefox on mobile has piles of apps generally now. No need for a list or nightly or beta.
There’s only a subset of addons available normally, this method lets you make any addons you want available on Android. This is what I’m referring to: https://www.androidpolice.com/install-add-on-extension-mozilla-firefox-android/
You can put Google-free Android forks on your phone or tablet. My phone is LinageOS with minimal Google footprint and my tablet has no gapps at all.
I use Gmail, Tasks, Drive and Calendar for the sake of convenience, since I could self-host all of these.
How so? You can just use an iPhone without running any Google apps on it, right?
It’s sad, 10-15 years ago it was as simple as Adblock :/
Now it’s nearly unavoidable and/or requires quite a few changes to your native device to make it more secure
Yeah, for all of Jobs’ “vision” cell phones were really just a way to profit of of free information.
For mobile adblockers I recommend AdAway: https://github.com/AdAway/AdAway
Firefox mobile now supports extensions like uBlock Origin, although that only works for the web and not the whole phone.
I’m down to using Facebook in Firefox again. And reddit very occasionally too. Gostery,AdBlock, privacy possum, so many addons available for Firefox.
Sweet! Just installed. How does it compare to adguard?
It redirects Ad servers to the 127.0.0.1 ip (loopback adress) or blocks them from connecting to your device
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There’s actually a lot to look forward to. In fact you’re talking on one of those reasons right now.
e2ee is only a recent thing which is significantly more private. You can have an entirely private FOSS operating system that has parity with Windows for free.
The privacy and FOSS ecosystems are thriving more then ever. There are more VPN providers then ever before, and Tor gets better and better.
We have decentralized social media like the fedi which gives complete freedom against corporate control.
We have all sorts of amazing FOSS tools out there. We even have an AI that can be run completely locally and with custom unfiltered models that is very close to competitive with ChatGPT, and also free.
None of these things even existed like 10 years ago, or were in their infancy. They’re all competitive to modern corporate alternatives. Privacy alternatives are by far in the best state they’ve ever been, and they’ll just continue to improve as the community grows larger.
We can own all these tools and self host. In fact we’ve never been able to “own” anywhere near as much as we can today.
Thanks for providing a positive perspective! It’s really important we don’t lose sight of the good things.
What is this local ChatGPT alternative you are talking about?
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Thank you for the Hopium
aaand there’s intel management engine and amd platform security procesor which undermine your foss efforts on most platforms
Why do people want to be doomers over literally nothing. There’s so much good that you’re just ignoring.
Intel can read RAM directly and other parameters using their built in security systems on certain chips. Maybe do more research first to understand why that is distressing. There are some projects for open source CPUs on-going.
I’ve looked into this extensively but see zero actual real world effects other then being a boogyman to hardcore FOSS nerds
Idk what you’re talking about, it’s been done plenty of times?
Plus we dont even really know what new “Security” tech their cooking up nowadays. Especially with in-house chips like Apple M chips.
Meltdown Redux: Intel Flaw Lets Hackers Siphon Secrets from Millions of PCs
I feel like the management engine card is sneakily changing the threat model in the middle of the conversation.
Is it bad? Yes. Is it a big source of security holes? Absolutely.
Is it a way that Facebook is going to profile you to try and sell you to advertisers? Or a reason why you can’t ditch Windows? No.
What does ditching windows have to do with security chips? OS sits above the hardware so that does not make sense. Any linux distro is just as susceptible as it stands.
No ones worried about social media companies messing with your hardware (not yet). That’s off-topic. Besides, legally nothing stops Intel or AMD from just selling the harvested data to Fb or whoever so that point is kind of moot too.
Actually news just broke as I was writing this and guess what. Now there is a bug allowing browser exploitation of the CPU using… Javascript! What a time to be alive…
Be more optimistic friend.
Government will continue to do surveillance but they can be constrained by the legal system. Corpos will build ai to sell you bullshit off whatever data they can get on you but you can block their ads and leave their platforms. Encryption is math and can’t be stopped by a law. UK law makers won’t be able to enforce their law even if it’s passed.
It’s cheaper than ever to run your own server, and will continue to get cheaper. Manage your own digital footprint and work towards decentralizing the web. Don’t worry so much about other people, they’ll come around eventually.
This is being made increasingly difficult every day, with huge corporations openly discussing the advantages of killing the open internet as it is today: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/README.md
The endgame seems to be to turn you into a mindless, agency-less zombie slave to these corps with your input being ads delivered to your (sub)conscious, and your output being you mindlessly doing whatever the ad wanted you to do. This is as much psychological – and social – divide-and-rule as it is technologically damaging, so even if you don’t know (or want) to run your own server, you will end up being affected, fractured and sharded against your own community all the same.
A sample case in point: It is getting more and more difficult to run your own servers when you are forbidden to spend your own money from your own electronic devices to pay for goods and services without being surveilled (and pounded by ads).
Most payment apps rely on device attestation “security”, that requires your mobile device be “compliant” to someone else’s rules, standards and endgames, to the effect that if you want to change your own bought-and-owned device in a way your ad-masters disapprove, you will be prevented from making payments from your device – and more significantly thereby, from participating in your community, economy and society unless you bend over to one of many private corporations that want you just as bent and broken as the rest of the people they already have.
This is pure, unadulterated evil at your doorstep, ringing your doorbell.
I know I probably sound far more pessimistic and hopeless than things actually are, but that is better than being asleep at the wheel. I do not wish to rob you of your optimism (I am actually happy that we still have it), but unless we see our world for what it really is today, it will be far more difficult to know and drive what it may become in the future.
Here is another example of how hard some people have worked to turn your own devices against you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
Thanks for the video link. Very interesting. This is how all computers will be built eventually. So seize the means of computation until we can…
UK law makers won’t be able to enforce their law even if it’s passed.
that said, we should also always remember that unenforceable law is law that can and will be selectively applied. Something they can whip out against people when they don’t have anything else.
This is absolutely not a “this is fine” comment
But the US “intelligence agencies” have been spying on the US and the world for 2 decades now pretty openly. Yes it’s worse that other countries are joining or ramping up spying, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves into believing this is a new development. The evil fuckos who up at the 3 letter agencies and equivalents around the world know where true power resides and they know methods of controlling people. The fact that France is doing this stuff should be a sign to the French (and everyone) that the government fears the people. A government which fears the people demanding that it serve the people is no longer legitimate. If the French ripped apart their shit from the root it would be justified… as an outsider. They’ve done the proper procedure of ask, then demand… now force. But Americans got out shit to sort out which tbh is incredibly more fucked up so I will leave the French alone in that respect
What happened to the ethos of the original internet cultures that were so dominant. It’s like large swaths of that generation grew up and sold out to become the oppressors. And the other portion are being crushed by that system.
I think the end of net neutrality hastened there older internet’s demise. now corps are free to monetize as much as they like.
Yup. When net neutrality died it let a few corporate overlords rise up and kill off much of the old free web. What much of us grew up on was a much fewer, wilder web. One you could still dream on and where you could still think damned near any new thing could come from anyone. Now, you pretty much have to already have $.
Wait, what do you mean Net Neutrality died? I thought they lost signing the bill to end it?
When was the last time you accessed a http website (not https)? Basically any schmuck in his basement could cobble one up. Nowadays you have to rent a server from some cloud service which goes against the whole net neutrality concept.
People just stopped bothering when their browser screams at them for accessing an unsafe website. That’s where net neutrality died IMO.
Wait, I don’t get this. Https certs are trivial to acquire and keep up-to-date with Let’s Encrypt. You can deploy a server like Caddy that will handle most of it for you. I’m a schmuck whose own website is self-hosted and I put an nginx rule to redirect http to https, because I don’t think anyone along the path between your computer and my website deserves to eavesdrop on the conversation.
The path of least resistance isn’t self-hosting anymore. No matter how easy it is, a twitter/facebook/youtube account will give you much more credibility and reach for a smaller cost and less setup time. I suppose I didn’t include that in the original message because I didn’t want to treat self-hosted websites and user accounts on large websites as similar, but it seems like they fulfill the same purpose nowadays.
Money happened.
Only a small % of people were on the internet then it grew and grew and the new people flocked to new spaces and didn’t like the old internet culture because it was quite elitist and toxic.
I also recently noticed that everything get’s more and more hostile towards the user. I observed so many apps and Websites that have hidden some big features behind a paywall recently - as if they don’t already make enough money with data collection and selling. First they make you comfortable with these QoL Stuff and then they steal it away, holding it in front of your face and want you to pay for it now, something that was free for years. It’s filthy…
I bought a lifetime license for the Spark email app. I even sent them some extra money when I learned their engineers are in the UK. Then they pushed out an update that removed the feature that caused me to buy their app in the first place, locked half of the other features behind a subscription, and said that since it’s an “update”, the previous lifetime subscriptions don’t count. Mother fuckers! Fuck the Spark team. I uninstalled it, gave them a 1 star review, and installed Fair Email. It’s a better app in most ways, is completely free, and is privacy focused. The only thing is that it’s missing the one feature I paid for, which was to be able to long press an email, tap “search for all emails by sender”, and then bulk action them. It was really useful for bulk deleting all Amazon confirmations and stuff like that.
The EU is very much hit and miss. I do appreciate them putting Google, Meta, and Apple in their place, and some on the legislation regarding smart phones they have passed. But ultimately they want to have all your data for “security”.
Still, I think the situation in the US is a bit worse.
Yes, they are unfortunately not as opposed to surveillance by governments as they are by that of megacorporations. While I appreciate that they are trying to keep the likes of Google and Meta in check, I also very much dislike the several attempts to enforce data retention and essentially encryption bans.
That the Data Retention Directive was eventually annulled by the Court of Justice of the European Union gives me some hope that the legal system within EU can withstand these attempts, but maybe I am being too naive? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
It’s like governments and corporations are competing at control over information flows. In EU bureaucracy wins more often, and in US corpo lobbyists win more often.
Can’t say I find this competition healthy…
It’s pretty much the story of Arsenal Gear in Metal Gear Solid 2 lol
Kojima always had a way of seeing into the not so distant future and pretty much nailing it.
Yeah, it’s incredibly hard to be optimistic about how things are going. Tech used to be one of those things that made me excited about things to come and look forward to the future, but now (with rich AI tech bros ripping off artists and creatives, proof of work harming the environment, people owning and controlling less and less, etc.) it just feels like so many things are pushing us in a bad direction.
On the bright side, things like Linux, FOSS and the Fediverse are examples of good tech, and at least the potential for a future where the people have some agency and ownership over the digital world. I hope that we can continue to grow software in an open and community-based direction, if only so that the niche of geeks who care about computers and the internet can have some way of fighting back against ever-growing tech conglomerates.
I’m concerned about when governments get ahold of usable quantum computers.
We’ll always be one step ahead of the bad guys. Fortunately we have places like this where like-minded people can gather who understand the dangers.
There are ways around it if you are willing to put in the work and deal with incoveniences.
For example, never use native Android or iOS, flash a custom ROM, never install proprietary apps, just that cuts a lot out. Only use cash for all stores and services, never carry payment cards with you, that wipes out financial tracking. Never give real info to stores. Use email aliases so different people have a different address. Don’t use Windows on computer if the prgrams you use are not exclusive to Windows.
Those can be the beginner steps to how to be almost invisible in society. One thing I’ve done is try to push people onto SimpleX chat app for messaging so I can have a different random ID with each person I message so there’s no contact info to share. Even people I know in person, we hang out together, I try to get them on SimpleX in place of Signal.
AI has entered the chat
Honestly it’s one of my personal reasons for disliking AI. I (let alone most of our kids) don’t want or need a reason to think less, let alone own less of my content. FFS.
It truly sucks. but seeing decentralized/open-source projects - Lemmy, I2P/TOR, Linux, etc. warms my heart. It helps me see there’s truth out there and pushes me forward down this path.
I genuinely believe that this is nothing new. Governments have just learned in the last few years that most of their citizenry don’t give a shit about privacy. They’re just making it official, so it can be penalized if you openly try to do something about it. I think…
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I love how vrchat is so much of a freak show (and I love it for that) that corpos are too scared to even acknowledge its existence. Dunno if you’ve noticed, but whenever a company talks about “the metaverse” they tend to mention all the mainstream social programs except vrchat, despite vrchat being one of the largest. Vrchat seems like it’s too gay, trans, furry, weaboo, autistic and neurodivergent for corporations to be able to apply their normal methods of sanitation and control to it.
it’ll look either
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more like where the vikings live
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more like where Americans die
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