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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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    • He used to follow (probably still does) open white supremacists and Nazis of the Richard Spencer/Lauren Southern type and got called out for it and privated his follows on twitter. That was many years ago but given he’s never done a u-turn and say started attacking gamergate and other reactionary gamer politics or loudly supporting broad coalition progressive politics I think we can assume he still holds those politics and more importantly he dog whistles and is part of a pipeline of radicalizing young men, specifically gamers into hate.

  • He also used to follow a ton of open white supremacist NAZIS on Twitter like Laura Southern and that guy who got punched in the face. People screenshotted it and he noticed and privated his follows. That was many years ago. But you don’t follow open Nazis if you’re just some gamer dude (if he was some sort of respectable journalist you could have an excuse of having a newsworthiness angle but he followed them because he liked their posts because he is a NAZI).

    I think he’s more greedy than committed to bringing about Nazi goals so is somewhat careful about not exposing too much of that part of himself but he’s part of the white supremacist gamergate to white supremacist streamers pipeline and should be called a Nazi until they day he 1) admits he was a Nazi, 2) disavows that. 3) disavows other Nazi gamer streamers who exist in his “edgelord space” 4) becomes openly progressive and goes out of his way to denounce and attack fascists and white supremacy. Until that day he should be assumed to still be a Nazi.


  • It’s impossible to de-google or meaningfully remove unwanted stuff from Smart TVs while keeping them usable for streaming purposes.

    What you want to do is factory reset, don’t connect to the internet, go into settings and turn off whatever you can, and then use a streaming box.

    Yes it’s an additional cost but it’s BETTER. The processors and memory in those TVs are lousy, the apps are often sluggish, the experience is simply not great. Frankly the hardware was built not to be usable for you, they are data collection platforms that include minimal low quality streaming experiences in order to collect data. No software is going to fix that.

    Want something that “just works” and supports all the major streamers? Get an Apple TV 4k. It’s pretty private but importantly no ads, clean interface, powerful hardware. Is it maximally private? No. But it is easy.

    Want to put in effort? You can get either a Dune-HD box (some have dual-OS without reboot where one is Netflix certified to get you full resolution while passing DRM checks while another is unlocked bootloader which you can install all kinds of things like Plex and Kodi on) or get some other Android streaming device of your choice (Walmart’s Onn brand 4k devices used to be very good and cheap though you might need to check as I heard rumors the latest devices can’t be unlocked).

    You’ll have a better experience on more powerful hardware and will never want to go back to the bad on-board TV experience.


  • Wait until you find out they offer apps with ties to:

    • FBI
    • US military
    • CIA
    • NSA
    • The most awful fascist ghouls on podcasts and youtube
    • The “israeli” state and its war criminal institutions.

    Curious then you pick on vague ties to China to fearmonger.

    I mean FFS Microsoft and Google are actively abetting the most documented genocide in a century. Where is the outrage from these garbage people over that? Where’s the push to help boycott and pressure them to stop assisting the slaughter? Children are being killed right now in Gaza with the help of these American companies and where are the stories encouraging people to stop using them?


  • IMO focus on purchasing physical content from creators or distributors who NEED to get paid.

    It’s one thing to foolishly throw money at these big companies for blurays of an already very successful series while they’re throwing their old libraries in the trash or ‘the vault’ or just shoveling most of their money towards low quality reality garbage.

    It’s another to buy a Criterion or BFI or Vinegar Syndrome bluray of something out of print that they need to recoup the costs of restoring and scanning.

    If someone buys a bluray of an MCU movie they are a chump, firstly for liking that stuff, secondly for giving Disney more money for it when those things already earn piles of cash in theaters and that alone would be enough to keep them paying salaries and producing that stuff.

    Spend money on independent film-makers/releases, on restorations, on series you like on the verge of cancellation.

    Sadly I think the conclusion is already written, physical media’s days are numbered, the big companies are going to shut down the overwhelming majority of bluray and dvd production within 5-10 years is my feeling because why sell you for $20-$30 a copy of something when they can get your rent in the form of streaming monthly payments for the rest of your natural life?

    And best of all with the rent they can push ads which further increase their revenue. That bluray is a one-time payment, ads for watching the movie on streaming are a continual revenue stream. I predict that they will either have completely killed off ad-free tiers of streaming to push most of their audience into an even bigger and more valuable ad pool to sell to advertisers OR the prices of the ad-free tiers will grow dramatically away from the ad-supported tiers. Right now it’s a few bucks a month, I suspect within 10 years it will be 170-300% the cost of the ad-supported version.


  • Because their founder (Marlinspike) is probably under a National Security Letter, maybe it’s just that, maybe he’s done some crimes they’re also holding over him. If you look at his behavior it’s that of someone very paranoid that they’re going to be found out to be cooperating with the feds and get hit with charges for not upholding the bargain, someone straddling one or two big lies that have to be maintained to keep their life going. Very controlling of things they should be open about if they care about privacy as they claim. But exactly the behavior of someone under an NSL who’s terrified of getting hit with charges for that and maybe other things but who is expected to front and run a purported privacy first messenger. The secrecy, the refusal to allow others to operate their own servers, the antagonism towards federation, the long periods without publishing source code updates.

    This doesn’t necessarily mean that signal message content is compromised, the NSA primarily scrapes metadata and would most care about knowing who is talking to who and to put real names to those people and building graphs of networks of people. Other things like what times they talk can be inferred from upstream taps on signals servers without their knowledge or cooperation via traffic observation and correlation especially when paired with the fourteen eyes global intercept network. With a phone number it’s also a lot easier to pinpoint an exact device to hack using a cooperating (or hacked) telecom. Phone numbers can also be correlated to triangulated positions of devices, see who in a leftist protest network was A) heavily sending messages and B) attended that protest and left last and begin to infer things about structure and particular relationships.

    And those saying it has to do with spam prevention, that’s kind of nonsense. First I still get the occasional spam, second a phone number that can receive a confirmation text is something all these criminal organizations have access to which the average person doesn’t. Third it’s possible to prevent spam just by looking for people (especially new accounts under 120 days old) sending very small amounts of messages (1-3) to a very large amount of other users especially in a short amount of time. Third there’s no reason to keep the phone number tied to the account, a confirmation text could be required with a promise to delete the phone number immediately after (would still be technically useful to the NSA though less useful for keeping track of people changing numbers or using a burner for this who might be higher value targets).


  • A ton. Mozilla is already behind on all kinds of miscellaneous less used standards implementations compared to Chrome AFAIK. On top of that there are security fixes needed monthly and realistically you need to be able to push emergency patches within 48 hours or less (really 1/4 or 1/2 that) or people are going to flee because they got cryptolockered because of you.

    How quickly would sites be unsupported? Hard to say. Most likely large chunks of the internet would start blocking Mozilla user agents as an out of date security threat for their userbase before it actually ran into actual implementation problems. The problem would be that, websites and services no longer even bothering to try to support Mozilla and making changes that break things, and of course security holes and exploits which would likely eventually lead to no-click complete computer compromises and other very bad things. Once it falls far enough behind on standards a lot of sites will block it for that reason because they don’t want bug reports or to spend money chasing down an issue potentially caused by an out of date piece of software.

    Google or whoever owns Chrome would keep pushing new web standards at a fast pace to kill and bury any attempts to keep Firefox running. At that point there’s nothing really stopping them closed sourcing large parts of Chrome to kill privacy forks and lock down control of the web which most big websites would be fine with as Google’s interest is in getting through ads and preventing the end user from control over their own computer in favor of the interests of the website owner.

    It would be apocalyptic potentially for what remains of the open web and user freedom.


  • Majestic@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml[Deleted]
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    2 months ago

    This is going to get DV victims killed. At least on phone tracking like iPhone’s family sharing makes it clear it’s happening and often has a way of disabling it when you make your final run for it allowing you to keep your phone.


  • Interesting project. Thanks for the link and I do appreciate it and could see some very good uses for that but it’s not quite what I meant.

    Unfortunately as it notes it works as a companion for reverse proxies so it doesn’t solve the big hurdle there which is handling secure and working flow (specifically ingress) of Jellyfin traffic into a network as a turn-key solution. All this does is change the authorization mechanism but my users don’t have an issue with writing down passwords and emails. Still leaves the burden of:

    • choosing and setting up the reverse proxy,
    • certificates for that,
    • paying for a domain so I can properly use certificates for encryption,
    • making sure that works,
    • chore of updating the reverse proxy, refreshing certs (and it breaking if we forget or the process fails), etc

    Which is a hassle and a half for technically proficient users and the point that most other people would give up.

    By contrast with Plex how many steps are there?

    1. Install (going to skip media library setup as Jellyfin requires that too so it’s assumed)
    2. Set up any port settings, open any relevant ports on firewall, enable remote access in setting with a tickbox
    3. Set up users
    4. Done, it now works and doesn’t need to be touched. It will handle connecting clients directly to the server. Users just need to install Plex client, login to their account and they have access.

    By contrast this still requires the hoster set up a reverse proxy (major hassle if done securely with certificates as well as an expense for a domain which works out to probably $5 a year), to then have their users point their jellyfin at a domain-name (possibly a hard to remember one as majesticstuffbox[.]xyz is a lot cheaper than the dot com/org/net equivalents or a shorter domain that’s more to the point), auth and so on. It’s many, many, many more steps and software and configurations and chances for the hosting party to mess something up.

    My point was I and many others would rather take the $5 we’d spend a year on a domain name and pay it for this kind of turn-key solution for ourselves and our users even if provided by a third party but that were Jellyfin to integrate this as an option it could provide some revenue for them and get the kinds of people who don’t want to mess with reverse proxies and certificates into their ecosystem and off Plex.


  • Jellyfin needs to partner with someone people can pay a very low and reasonable and/or one-time fee to enable remote streaming without the fuss of setting up either dangerous port-forwarding or the complexity of reverse proxies (paying for a domain-name, the set-up itself including certificates, keeping it updated for security purposes).

    And no a VPN is not a solution, the difficulty for non-technical users in setting up a VPN (if it’s even possible, on smart-tvs it’s almost always not, and I don’t think devices like AppleTV and other streaming boxes often support them) is too high and it’s an unwanted annoyance even for technical users.

    I’m not talking about streaming video’s through someone else’s servers or using their bandwidth. I’m talking about the connection phase of clients and servers where Plex acts like an enhanced dynamic DNS service with authentication. They have an agent on the local media server which sends to the remote web service of the third party the IP address, the port configured for use, the account or server name, etc. When a client tries to connect they go to this remote web service with the servername/username info, the web service authenticates them then gives them the current IP address and any other information necessary. It then sends some data to the local Jellyfin server about the connecting client to enable that connection and then the local media Jellyfin server and the client talk directly and stream directly.

    Importantly the cost of running this authentication and IP address tracking scheme would be minimal per Jellyfin server. You could charge $5/year for up to 20 unique remote clients and come out ahead with a slight profit which could be put back into Jellyfin development and things like their own hosting costs for code, etc. Even better if they offer lifetime for this at $60-$80 they’d get a decent chunk of cash up-front to use for development (with reasonable use restrictions per account so someone hosting stuff in Hetzner or whatever and serving 300 people with 400 devices will need to pay more because they’re clearly doing this for profit and can afford to throw some more money at Jellyfin).

    Until Jellyfin offers something that JUST WORKS like that it’s not going to be a replacement for Plex, whatever other improvements they offer to users it’s still a burden for the server runner to set up remote streaming in a way that isn’t either incredibly dangerous (port forwarding) OR either involves paying money to third parties AND/OR the trouble of running your own reverse proxy and/or involves walking users through complicated set-up process for each device that you have to repeat if you change anything major like your domain name when using a VPN.


  • Yeah GIMP is more than a decade behind Photoshop and a lot of other software in many respects.

    It’s frustrating. Basic things like content-aware fill for small spaces, not even AI generating huge things for large missing pieces but removing some text over a person’s cheek or plaid shirt, something in total 100x100 pixels big or so. Just doesn’t exist. You can clone stuff but it’s not aware of things like the gradient of a shadow that it should match or a highlight or other basic things so you’re left doing extensive work using layers and then cleaning it up to be visually acceptable using multiple tools over 10 minutes of time whereas Photoshop does it with one tool in an instant.


  • Incredible. This is one of those hard to believe moments.

    It’s been 21 years since the release of GIMP 2.0.

    It’s been more than 10 years since work on a majorly overhauled GIMP 3.0 was announced and initiated.

    And it’s been 7 years since the last major release (2.10).

    I can’t wait for the non-destructive text effects. After all these years of dealing with the fact applying drop shadows meant the text couldn’t be edited, at last it’s no longer an issue.


  • Look less suspicious. Be fingerprintable easily. Look unique but in a normal way. Be logged in. Look like a “normal” web user not using a hardened browser. That’s what tends to trigger them and what tends to escalate them to demanding more work to get past them.

    There’s no turn-key solution that fakes all of this flawlessly I’m afraid.



  • I doubt they would be allowed to hand out keys (which they do not hold) to another government that would compromise American businesses, agencies, etc.

    Um, yes they would. The very point of eyes agreements is they allow countries intelligence agencies which aren’t allowed to spy on their own people to spy on each other’s people then pass each other the data. Snowden revealed this all a decade ago.

    The CIA and FBI do not store classified sensitive info on iPhones that are backed up anywhere. At least not anything that would come as a surprise to the British or be a risk. Nothing they wouldn’t have access to via the existing intelligence sharing.

    The UK and the US are thick as thieves and have been since the end of WW2.


  • This is frightening.

    They do not have the ability to just remove e2e back-ups in the UK alone and walk away from this, that’s not how the law is written as I understand it.

    The snooper’s charter gives the UK government the RIGHT to DEMAND access to encryption keys of any user GLOBALLY. The law is that they can force the cooperation of Apple to decrypt the account of an American user, of a German user, of a Russian user, of a South African user, of a Brazilian user, of a Japanese user who have never stepped foot in the UK.

    So they’re claiming that this protects their users, that they haven’t complied but the only way to avoid complying with these secret gag orders for compromising encryption GLOBALLY at the demand of the UK government is to remove themselves entirely from the jurisdiction of the UK. Is to remove all executives and technical personnel from UK soil, to not hire such people who live in or are citizens of the UK as technical personnel as they could be gag ordered and compelled to cooperate. To basically entirely pull out of any presence but maybe storefronts in the UK and take steps to prevent the arrest and pressuring of their executives and key technical people with access from being subject to UK coercion.

    That they haven’t done that means all users globally are still at risk. This may be a big PR stunt to convince people they haven’t caved when in fact they have in secret and will hand over data of global users to the UK which shares it via eyes agreements with the US, with France, Australia, etc. This has the added benefit of allowing the UK to keep such access secret by acting annoyed with Apple but not actually pressing any case. If they try and actually prosecute or pressure Apple that’s a sign that they haven’t cooperated globally, if they only offer angry words to the press IMO that’s a sign that in secret they’ve given access globally and only informed UK users that their cloud data isn’t protected.