Hello guys. So after I posted the rant about me blocking Google and Facebook through my hosts file, some people commented with the idea of creating a gitlab page with more privacy tips etc.

Well, that is turning into a project (actual website) that I initially started alone but @ewpratten joined the 'team' as frontender!

He'll be doing the front end and I'll be doing the backend :).

I think this will be my first ever (active) collab so I'm pretty excited =D.

My views on the github/MS thingy.

I've had to explain in at least 20+ rants that some people might have legitimate reasons/opinions for disagreeing with this deal. I find it quite bad that I even have to say this but that aside for this rant.

Microsoft is a commercial company which does a lot for open source, that's a fact.

In my case, I mostly look at the part of Microsoft in regard to how they treat users and user privacy as this, in my opinion, shows for a great deal how trustworthy a company is.

It's publicly known that Microsoft joined the prism surveillance program in 2007 which in my opinion also meant selling out all users.
Next to that, through at least windows 10 it has done quite intrusive user tracking which I also see as a betrayal to its users.

I could go on and on about cases but I've made my point on at least microsoft.

As for github selling itself to Microsoft, this most likely means that it'll also be integrated within the prism network. That's my main point of concern as to why I disagree of this deal and have lost my trust in github for selling to a company which, imo, has absolutely no respect for its users' privacy and has ethics I entirely disagree with.

I still haven't formed an opinion on the rest of arguments out there as, due to a medical thing, I'm hardly able to focus right now.

You might agree or disagree, that's your very right and that's perfectly fine. Just don't say that I haven't come with an actual argument/opinion as for why I disagree with this deal.

Guys, I've been thinking.

When I get married I'm gonna make my partner agree to terms of service and my privacy policy instead of the lame wedding vows 😛

Instead of 'I do', it'll be 'I agree'.

Should also probably make him sign an NDA incase things go south.

Edit:
Also, probably a code of bathroom conduct. (I just remembered that football while peeing rant)

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

So I said I'd rant this yesterday but a long night of server management came in the way!

Yesterday @trogus mentioned in a comment that he thinks everyone deserves a place where they feel like home and this is that place for me along with some sub-places which derived from here.

So in this linux/foss chat yesterday I was trying to get into an IRC chatroom (all people there (or at least a lot) are also like minded on privacy/security). I don't want to use email signup if not absolutely neccesary (don't judge me, everyone there own thing) and I found out very late (after 20 minutes of instructions from a fellow devRanter) that this thing required email signup. I didn't wanna do that so I said that and started typing a whole essay of why I'd rather not do that and what my reasons are (privacy partly) but then the guy said: "haha you got it man".

For one second I forgot that I don't have to explain myself over there on stuff regarding privacy that a lot of people would find paranoid. Man, that feels like being home :).

So now I'm working on my first collab with a fellow devRanter on a privacy website thingy! Excited and want to start working on it right away.

BUT OH NO I'VE GOTTA GO TO WORK IN 15 MINUTES TO STAND BEHIND A TABLE PACKING MOTHERFUCKING BOXES ALL DAY, YEAH NO THAT SOUNDS FUCKING COCKSUCKING EXCITING. (okay I can pay rant but still).

I need a hug 😞

- devRant TOR rant! -

There is a recent post that just basically says 'fuck TOR' and it catches unfortunate amount of attention in the wrong way and many people seem to aggree with that, so it's about time I rant about a rant!

First of all, TOR never promised encryption. It's just used as an anonymizer tool which will get your request through its nodes and to the original destination it's supposed to arrive at.

Let's assume you're logging in over an unencrypted connection over TOR and your login information was stolen because of a bad exit node. Is your privacy now under threat? Even then, no! Unless of course you had decided to use your personal information for that login data!

And what does that even have to do with the US government having funded this project even if it's 100%? Are we all conspiracy theorists now?

Let's please stop the spread of bs and fear mongering so that we can talk about actual threats and attack vectors on the TOR network. Because we really don't have any other reliable means to stop a widely implemented censorship.

Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!

I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.

So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.

I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.

'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.

I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.

Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.

So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.

TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.

Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.

There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.

I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.

Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.

I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.

Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!

Hello devRanters! A little while ago some ranters and I who are all passionate about FOSS/Linux decided to get together in a chatroom. Slowly more people are coming in but just wanted to post this in case any foss/linux liking people would like to join! I am not even sure if this is allowed on devRant (posting something like this) so if not, my apologies and I will remove the rant!

Keep in mind that the chat exists for people who are very keen on FOSS/Linux/security/privacy so no offense but it probably isn't the best place for people who don't like/care about that stuff :).

Big Brother is listening🤔

Fucking phone company just sent me a notification, CCing all other business customers they have in Sydney. I am going to sign all those customers to a porn newsletter, and then advise them about the privacy breach.

Happy data privacy day!

This rant goes to my best friend.

Fuck you!

You do not fucking argue with people for doing what they like! So what if I want to use linux? What fucking problem does that make? Am I now a hacker fanboy for wanting to use a terminal instead of fucking pointing and clicking on shit like a monkey? Am I not allowed to want my privacy and free open-source? What? I shouldn't browse internet without getting my personal info stolen? Oh, they're tracking criminals? Then why don't you install a camera in your fucking living room so you can help them out? And don't fucking get me started on why I don't want to use Windows 10.

Fuck fucking fuck fuck. I know he's a good friend but this fucking shit gets my blood boiling.

Son of a... insurance tracker
You hit delete and I’m stuck with this reply!?!

Stuff it, I’ll rant about it instead of commenting.

How’s an insurance e company any different to google tracking your every move, except now it’s for “insurance policy premiums” and setting pricing models on when, how, and potentially why you drive.

Granted no company should have enough gps data to be able to create a behaviour driven ai that can predict your where and when’s with great accuracy.

The fight to remove this kind of tech from our lives is long over, now we have to deal with the consequences of giving companies way to much information.

- good lord, I sound like a privacy activists here, I think I’ve been around @linuxxx to long.

Rant!

When I'm in my "zone" working please for the love of god don't stand behind me staring at me and my screen, every time you do that you make me feel that my privacy is being raped and I can't do anything about it !!

Goddamn, people who rant against the GDPR make me rage...
Making privacy issues more complex for both user and provider is exactly the damn purpose! People who dont care about their private data make me sick! These ignorant fucks get to elect my government? Wtf! GDPR means more work for companies but that also means companies who actually care will implement it and everyone else can gladly fuck off! Keep your stuff in the states where you can build your own manipulative society...

Damn... I should relax a bit...

I live in the USA. Recently moved to a new state. Contacted car insurance company to change my policy to the new state.

Upon doing so, I was told about a new program they have where you install an app on your phone that monitors your driving. It gives discounts to your premium for driving safely.

Intrigued, I decided to try it out. At the end of the month, my discount was TWO DOLLARS.

Uninstalled, not worth the surrender of personal information that they profit off of in addition to my premium payments as well as the drained battery every day.

Disillusioned, again.

Has anyone else had experiences with similar discount programs, and was it worth it for you? Maybe I’m just a shitty driver ;).

!rant

Wanted to share a project with you, which I heard about at a Python Conference I attended.

It's a Raspberry based Hacking Station to educate and sensitize students about data privacy. The amazing thing about the project is, that it is a graduation project from a high school student.

If you're interested, check out spypi.ch

This is not an ad or something, I was just amazed by the talk and the idea of the project and wanted to share it with you.

Hey there!

So during my internship I learned a lot about Linux, Docker and servers and I recently switched from a shared hosting to my own VPS. On this VPS I currently have one nginx server running that serves a static ReactJs application. This is temponarily, I SFTP-ed the build files to the server and added a config file for ssl, ciphers and dhparams. I plan to change it later to a nextjs application with a ci/di pipeline etc. I also added a 'runuser' that owns the /srv/web directory in which the webserver files are located. Ssh has passwords disabled and my private keys have passphrases.

Now that I it's been running for a few days I noticed a lot of requests from botnets that tried to access phpmyadmin and adminpanels on my server which gave me quite a scare. Luckily my website does not have a backend and I would never expose phpmyadmin like that if I did have it.

Now my question is:
Do you guys know any good articles or have tips and tricks for securing my server and future projects? Are there any good practices that I should absolutely read and follow? (Like not exposing server details etc., php version, rate limiting). I really want to move forward with my quest for knowledge and feel like I should have a good basis when it comes to managing a server, especially with the current privacy laws in place.

Thanks in advance for enduring my rant and infodump 😅

Rant !Dev

News says FB took a huge plunge and Zuckerburg lost $15 billion in 1 day and this is the result of all the privacy breaches

I'm looking at the price charts and even from my memory, it's still higher than when I checked last time.

Am I missing something or it seems news these days and the headline journalists are just monkeys finding the quickest way to get attention and some money? And reporting things out of context... Too me it just looks like a market correction... Just like bitcoins...

26 or so hours up now. And I've got a few stories to tell :) feel free to refresh your cup of coffee and take a seat.

Last few days I've been going into this odd place called intown.irl to get in touch with its inhabitants. An odd place I have to say. But in some cases quite rewarding, even got a MILF home with me and into bed at some point. Anyway...

3 days ago I think it is now? Thursday evening I took my laptop to this local bar where I had this issue about dihydrogen monoxide with one of the bartenders earlier (you'll find that rant on those keywords). Still wanted to visit it regardless though, as I met that first woman there earlier that approached me. Unfortunately I didn't see her there that day.

Some bald guy who was clearly drunk approached me. Many people were already giving curious looks at this laptop I brought to the bar. I finally tuned it up with the stickers from FOSDEM.. I'll put a picture of it in the comments. My theme was one of privacy (central), distributions and Google's open source initiative (which aligns with the keychain token I got from them as well). But of course.. that guy.. he thought that a pimped/riced laptop obviously meant that I was a hacker.

Guy went to the toilet.. went back.. and suddenly grabbed my laptop and turned it towards him. Boy was I never more smugly satisfied that those rubber pads on the bottom are quite resilient. Could've almost damaged my screen by trying to grab it like that. But it's a CCFL display.. so high voltage. If it were to become broken.. worth it. 😈

On it at the time was a terminal, pinging Google (had network issues at that bar, to the point where one of the - I think - staff members got up to me and offered the WiFi password and got to talk with me.. more on that later), and my usual Linux desktop along with the Arch anime wallpaper with the quote of Da Vinci.. simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Of course the guy saw the terminal.. and probably reaffirmed.. yep, that's a hacker. At least he wasn't too wrong about the general term.. but the hat.. most likely he was wrong on that one.

Guy left with this question.. "you are a hacker, aren't you."
I replied to him: "No sir. I'm not a hacker. I've got no idea what you're talking about."
Guy kept looking at me weirdly for the whole night to come.

Back to that companion guy though. Mac user, yada yada.. but he told me about his backup solution. Apparently - I shit you not - he has not only the photos on his local device, he's also frequently backing them up in Time Machine (which I was really curious about whether it uses mirroring or snapshots.. he couldn't tell, lmk if you do) but not only that.. he was storing another offsite backup in that very bar, in case his house went on fire.

Now that is a proper backup scheme!!! If only more people were like that.

Seriously though.. that bald guy who took my laptop just like that... I just let it slide for that one time, but I tend to treat my machines as an extension of my very self. I think that was a very uncalled for move. Asshole...

How would you have reacted to such a thing? And.. maybe that's why we technologists don't get outside too often? Fucking everything is hacking these days if it's not Knopkes and Blinkenlights… Not every shell is a h4xx0ring console for h3kk1ng de fasbuk…

This rant has been one that I've been wanting to rant about for a while now. Me being drunk as fuck right now (mind, stay awake!) doesn't really help, but meh.
At least Wanblows was able to install its "features" properly... Except it wasn't, being the featureful ShitOS it is.

I want to rant about privacy. Not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". That's been ranted about plenty by the MIcroshaft-loving folks as well as the privacy-aware opposition. Rather, I'd like to rant about the privacy-concious.

I am a privacy-concious-person, with his current status quo being that he doesn't yet know a privacy-concious solution to every data-intrusive "common solution" out there. So I tend to value privacy next to De Lijn while sharing location data to Google with Google Maps. Point is, I do not know privacy-concious solutions to everything out there yet. So I use the convenient over the privacy-aware.
(after review while drunk I was unable to make sense of this)

In the privacy-aware circles I tend to see that it seems to be black and white. You share your data with Google, yet you oppose data collection by local institutes? WRONG!!! YOU MUST BE A TINFOIL HAT!!!
No, seriously I don't want to share my data with Google. Just that they're the only realtime navigation platform with decent UI out there that I know of right now.

Privacy isn't all black and white here. I block any intrusion that I'm able to, anything else I abide to, while awaiting a good alternative that does respect my privacy which I would gladly use instead. That does not imply that "I have nothing to hide". I do, and I have a lot to hide.

So that makes up the black and white nature of privacy, which is a fallacy. Another one is the whole idea of "I have nothing to hide" to begin with.

If you have nothing to hide, would you be comfortable with sharing your location data (IP address, habits, common trends, etc) with me? To share your information with me, to have your contacts share your info with me, without your consent? Of course you wouldn't. But that's what's happening right now.

Warning: long rant

I'm sick and tired of feeling like I'm the only person who cares about their privacy

I try, as much as I can, to avoid surveillance. I use firefox, protonmail, duckduckgo, e2e encrypted chat platforms, avoid social media like the plague, and do everything I can to block facebook and google trackers on websites I visit

And it's exhausting

Each search I make means I waste another 30 seconds because duckduckgo doesn't pull the answer directly from webpages like google does

I get weird looks when I give people a @protonmail email address, and I have to explain what it is to them every fucking time

People ask if I have social media, and I either give them nothing or my Github account

And for what? Nobody else cares, no matter how much I explain how toxic google and facebook are to society.

They just say 'I have nothing to hide' as they scroll Instagram, letting Zuckerberg build an intimately detailed profile on them.

They just say 'so what' as they google memes from their chrome browser, allowing google to share that information with god-knows-who

If everyone else has given up their privacy for convenience, why am I still fighting a losing battle?

It feels like I'm fighting a war against big tech by myself, and I'm tired and about to lay down my arms

Hired a new BI developer. She tested reasonably ok in SQL, and certainly showed good strengths in visualising data, plus had a good attitude in the interview. We hired her. She broke her laptop the first day. We got her another then she complained the camera didn't work but didn't realise the lever in front of the camera was to move the privacy shutter off and on.

Assigned her some work of taking queries that are used in a BI tool that targets the transactional database directly, and re-jigging them for Snowflake which we're using as a data warehouse now, aggregating all our data into one place. Yet, she's struggling to understand why the SQL query she's pasted in doesn't work as-is.

I go over it again; the source schemas and tables are this, but in Snowflake we've named them this. She then bemoans how much work that is to change them all - I say use find and replace. She then struggles with Snowflake syntax errors and asks for a guide on T-SQL to Snowflake. I show her Google and say "this is what I did when I hit these problems - search for 'Snowflake equivalent to T-SQL getdate()' or 'how to get current date in Snowflake' but she still doesn't understand. I ask if she's every had to work between T-SQL and MySQL or MySQL and PostgreSQL or Oracle and so on and she says yes. I say the syntax isn't the same, is it? And she goes oh, now I understand.

She scored reasonably in her SQL test but I'm now concerned there's something fundamental missing in her grasp of SQL. I gave her a detailed demo of the tools, I explained in the interview and on her start about our move to a data warehouse for all our apps, and put her through some training plus gave her time to work through our Confluence pages - not expecting she'll remember everything, but more to ensure she recalls they exist and what the general contents are.

Anyhow, that's my rant.

I feel I should open a github repo, for people to contribute privacy policy parts into, have say folders like "google analytics" and then whenever people encounter those in the wild, add examples there, so people could fetch together a full privacy policy for free, as all those new cashgrab websites are just fucking insane. But I am not really sure, if that would find any contributors tbh sadly.

P.S: I seem to have developed now a third sense, when the devrant post cooldown is down, so I can rant more lol, because whenever I feel like posting the thought or rant, the cooldown is just about to expire

FUCK!
After submitting a registration form I noticed the site is served over plain HTTP. Their marketing site is served encrypted, but login and register are not! What the fuck!!!

Fuck everyone who does this stupid fucking shit with disregard to basic security features! Their goddamn bullshit privacy policy is bragging about how it's top priority to protect their customers' information and shit like that. Get the fuck out, cunts!!

I contacted them so I might have a continuation to this rant if I'm not satisfied with their answers.

Goddamn it!

I am calling this a premonition rant, of more rants to come.
I have a feeling in my bones.
We have a newly acquired fat cat customer with bucks to blow who we have done some digital work for already and swag bag of marketing perkiness.
I will call the CEO of this whale "The Porcupine"
The Porcupine has a business degree and industry experience, nothing to do with websites or applications.
It claims to be a visual perfectionist yet never delivers an overall coherent review.
It likes to fixate on minor brand style differences in websites and apps we have built.
The Porcupine seems to be always busy with policy and legal and other things rather than participating in their own projects.
Procrastination on feedback or reviews until the day before release is common.
Many overtime hours worked, not a sliver of thanks. The haughty attitude indicative of somebody who thinks web development is like desktop publishing.

"It's just code" in response to a crash production server change they were warned was a risk that borked all of our responsive templates and took 3 hours to fix.
Their entire brand is shades of pea green, grey and lime. No serif fonts because they are suck. Arial and Helvetica are boss.
One of my devs missed a CSS style on privacy policy hyperlink text that went times new roman and I had various account directors and our CEO on phone telling me how embarrassing it was for us to let this happen.
Anyway. They pay on time and the cost estimates for all the upcoming work are juicy.
We have shitloads going on for an upcoming hard date conference and everything is already compressing.
Therefore I can already smell doom and feel those porcupine quill getting closer to my ass as I beg their AD today if we have any feedback on the 10 or so project reviews yet?
Nope.

!rant

tl;dr at the bottom

This might not be a popular opinion, so please, if you throw things at me, limit yourselves only to tomatoes and other soft projectiles. Thank you!

So this being said, i must say ut: i actually like how facebook use this data overall. While i am completly against privacy violation, that data is given up by ourselves with a choice to do it, so we can't hand them for it. However, i think the fact that we got ads for what our interests are is quite awesome! For example because of this i found webcomics and artists i curently hold really high in my praises and this might not have been the case if FB had another business model.

This being said, i just think people should focus on problems more important than how social media manages to earn some bucks, and while is our choise to be part of that we can't simply call ourselves "products". History holds many stories about civilization that gaved no choice if you wanted or not to be a product so we could be at least glad it is not the case anymore.

Anyway, if you read all the way down here, tnaks for your time!

TL;DR: Facebook is no holy church but it actually not so bad, we can find things we get to love or actually needed in the first place in their targeted adds system. At least we have a choice to be part of this or not!

I hope not too many people followed this advice. It was a tutorial for making your Raspberry Pi act as a network-accessible CCTV camera, and the tutorial was good, but that end part... yikes. Don't just port forward your http stream!

At least I know how I can just have it accessible only through my OpenVPN.

So i recently started a new Instagram account with new email ID apart from the personal Instagram account which has my friends from Facebook and even from highschool.

The new account was supposed to be a secret, part of an experiment I'm doing with my life choices. And there i only follow people that i look up to. I'm not expecting anyone from real life to follow me their and i prefer if they don't.

Nobody was supposed to know about this new account other than me. But guess what, it seems this account is being advertised to my friends from other account and some of them are following this new account. I'm 99.9% sure they are following just to get a follow back.

I'm feeling shitty about this, but i ain't gonna follow them back. If i need to see their story and photos, I'd get back on my personal account.

Guess I'll have to suck it up and be okay with fact that those "friends" will be seeing my vulnerable side.

For fuck sake!
Fuck locatefamily.com, just searched out on google my name and surname, both foreign and hard to even spell out for many, and it's the first time that I saw my data(where did I live, my current work phone number, name and surname) open wide as the second link of my search, fuck!

But there's a clue, at that address I lived for a not so long period, so I did search my emails in that period and other than my employers and government emails(in which I don't trust either), here's a list of companies that had my info(partial or full):
Only address(with name and surname):

Amazon.it with 14 other companies(for shipping)
eBay with 4 other companies(for shipping)
voxelfarm.com
trenord.it
DUMA (LIGHT) di Adel
decathlon.com
gruppoargenta.it
paypal.it

All info:
gearbest.com
glistockisti.com
oculus.com
Banggood.com

Overall there are 33(including government, employers and national main mail service) potential leaks of that data, with 7 in full exposure.

After this, I'm thinking how it's even avoidable to not leak personal data, because from any of those businesses I got goods or services that otherwise I couldn't without exposing such informations... fuck.

Some people don't send an email. 🙏🏻😔

Browser rant:

I just want to get this off my chest, IE isn't a bad browser. It's highly outdated but it was good back when the alternatives weren't there. And today it's new "browser update" Edge isn't bad either. Edge really is a neat freaking piece of software. Microsoft tries their best to make a browser for their operating system (and a browser engine for their new app format!) that means it has couple of features the alternatives don't (or only with plugins) - oh and plugins, they're coming too. And still it's not slow either. From my own experience (I say this because every user says their browser is the fastest) it's way faster than Quantum. Yet Quantum is still a very good browser because it's faster than the old firefox, I guess it's open source(?) and still a privacy focused browser. Chrome (my personal favorite) on the other hand is really the fastest thing you can get - if you allow it to use all your ram - (if people like linuxxx say firefox is faster for them, I'll just smile) but for everyone worrying about ram usage and "spying", well - you know what I mean. And still I can understand people trying opera or FF/Chrome/Edge mods, I myself love "Monument". Just stop saying a browser is bad because it doesn't have what you like/does have what you don't like. The only bad browser is Midori, okay? 😘

Tl;dr
IE isn't bad but old. Edge isn't bad today. Every high end browser (edge, quantum, chrome) has their perks and none of them is "bad".

Q/A:
What's your favorite Browser? Comment below

!Rant
The new bill passed the house for ISP to be able to sell data. This get me ticked off. I already ausme that ISP did it under the table. Doesn't make it right. Now it legal for them to breach our privacy. At what leave do i need to run my own internet just to feel safe. VPN can sell the data, ISP can sell data about you. I spend my life teaching how to protect people online and now I can't even say they are safe at home from someone with wrong intention. A quote​ comes to mind.
"Dear lord I need to see some change, because the man in the mirror is wearing a mask"
I shouldn't have to feel every time. I boot my PC, that I need to remind my self that what I'm doing now is being sold so someone can lable me. When will the common man learn to protect their privacy online; And where is the line in the sand?

It not all bad, this event has given me the itch to code. Just to spin some heads I'm going to make a script to make random Google query across the widest array of topics, so my profile is full of contradiction.

The few who read this have a nice day!

!rant
I have a Facebook account, but I never post anything! neither I like or comment on any post, also I am following random pages!!!
I bet their privacy spying algo is confused af!!!

Just another privacy rant.

I'm sick of people using the excuse "I don't care if Google keeps all my data it's just for adds"

That's true now but if you look at the current trends governments are making to forcing ISP's to store metadata, then it will be the actual data. Eventually they push that to other companises as well.

Now look at Australia for example the police don't need to notify you, let alone get a warrant, to access your metadata. There's also a law in NSW were you can be charged for accociating with a peraon commuting a crime.... Now your in jail for downloading movies years ago that you forgot about but your ISP didn't. I now that's a rather extreme punishment but, Imagine if the government needed some cash so they fine every person that ever downloaded a movie and everyone accociated with person.

Just a crazy theory with poor examplees but just because your data isn't hurting now doesn't mean it won't.

I'm gonna sit in a corner with my tin foil hat now.

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

<rant>
I'm getting so sick of people bitching about their privacy and apps (looking at you gdpr).
They want full anonymity and share 0 data... well fine but then pay me 2.99 a month to use my service... oh you don't want to spend money well ok then, ill use some of your metrics and share them with advertisers so you can keep using the service at no cost... oh you don't want us to collect the data you are already spewing around on every online platform? well then we cant have you using our service because you are costing us money... what? the gdpr is forcing us to keep providing you with the service... but... who is going to pay for resource costs?!
arrghh!!
</rant>

ps: the gdpr is so full of loopholes, half the arguments you "nerds(be honest you read it on facebook that we have to delete you data...haha..)" use for how great it is are...well... moot

pps: with you nerds I don't mean the readers of this

Not sure whether to tag this as a rant or a joke, because it feels like equal parts of both. So fucking disappointed with Australian government.

Listening to hardstyle - gives me energy

School (I don't mean this in a positive way) - creates a lot of hate and anger which gives me plenty of energy to code and to change things (mostly privacy and also a bit of freedom related)

I just realized that I could create a whole rant about the issues I have with school

I want to rant about it but I don’t even know what to say.

It’s just sad that people share the most personal things with Facebook and other services as long as it’s not a person who asks for it.

It’s just a machine who knows me better than my parents do.

OPEN YOUR FUCKING EYES.
Who is behind the machine? Humans.

It’s 2019. Soon 2020.

They still don’t get it.

That’s what you should teach those kids. A class “how to protect your privacy”..

Not this Shit: : if I Buy 20 melons that contain 70% water, they loose 1% each mile. You carry them for 15 miles. 5 of those miles are in the sun which makes the water vaporize 5x faster. How much fruit exclusive water is left at the end?

WHO THE FUCK CARES? We have cooling boxes and cars.

Focus on something important please..

!rant

Feature request:

Hey!
I think it would be awesome to have a PM system, where you can send personal messages to each other.
I understand that you'd need to integrate blocking and other privacy features, but hey what do you think?

People, finally back with a rant😌

You definitely have heard about the new privacy policies in the EU. What do you guys think about this BS?

Who the actual fuck has come up with such trash? Politicians can be such dumbfucks sometimes wtf..😐🤔

Given how much talk there's around security, I think it'd be grand idea to dedicate a weekly rant to cybersecurity. Could spark an interesting discussion, especially in today's heated climate. Thoughts?

E.g. Best way to increase security/privacy?

Why the fuck is everyone behind this whole privacy thing . I mean what did you expect , servers do cost... you know . No one wants to provide you a service to chat with your shit collecting butler in the adjacent room unless it's going to benefit them .

Stick your face on the internet and want people to date you ?

Understand that your virtual social needs need to be supported by a ridiculous amount of electricity and man power which wouldn't be required if you could just throw out your rotting willie nilles in the open .

All this isn't fucking free .. wait were you shocked ? Oh so you just thought there were a few thousand servers powering buckets of pictures of horse poop that you for some reason thought your girlfriend was interested in . NO!

IT'S PRIVACY you are paying with your gaddamn privacy !! Information pays just like the time you paid a 100 bucks to the boyfriend of your girlfriend to find out more details .

Ridiculous . You people don't like ads . You don't like paying . You don't like providing information . THEN DON'T USE THE DAMN INTERNET .

IF YOU'RE REALLY THAT CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY THEN SPEND SOME VALUABLE TIME TO ACQUIRE ENOUGH OF A SKILLSET TO SETUP A VPN AND STOP POSTING YOUR PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR EX'S WALL ASKING HER TO CALL YOU.

One more honest thing to rant about is ads . As much as you hate them they're an easy way out . I'm not sure why a 20 second ad would bother you on mobile and not on television and I'm not sure why you wouldn't buy the ad company and shut it down if 20 seconds were so costly to you .

I want to rant even more on uninstalling services like Windows and Google for stupid reasons but I'll take a break here . My frustration has touched low levels.

This is not a rant. Not really. It's more expressing my own insecurity with a certain topic, which somehow upsets me sometimes (the insecurity, not the topic though).

I have nearly no knowledge about security/privacy stuff. I mean, yeah, I know how to choose secure passwords and don't make stupid DAU mistakes. The very basics you would expect someone to have after a CS bachelor's degree.
But other than that... Nothing. And I would like to get a bit into that stuff, but I have no clue where to start. First getting my head wrapped around low-level stuff like network layers? Or something completely else.
This topic is so intimidating to me as it seems huge, I have no idea where to start, and I feel that if you don't have "full" knowledge, you are going to make mistakes which you might not even notice.

I sometimes get really scared about having an account hijacked or similar. Also in our job it seems to become more and more of a topic we should know about.

Anybody got any advice?
I am looking for a way to improve my knowledge in security in general for professional reasons and my knowledge about privacy for private reasons.
It's just, every time I start reading something related it seems that I am lacking some other knowledge etc...

self.rant = self.dev = False
I just won a debate defending mass surveillance and I hate myself.
I actually used Snowden to defend it.

So, not really a rant. The opposite in fact. With all this frustration about GDPR lately, GUESS WHAT FUCKING HAPPENED?! My domains (at one registrar so far) where all made private because of the law. GOOD DAY!

In nearby county to mine, coder was arrested for 3 months for nickname matching leaked terrorist nickname "grower" by coincidence. His coding education was enough reason for arrest.

All hdd/ssd/usb/mobile devices were confiscated for thorough analysis right from the morning by police.

Feeding my security paranoia. Encrypting fully filesystem(LUKS) and my internet traffic (self raised open vpn), wiping fully usbs. I ll be protected from my ISP recording my traffic, and from unauthorised access to my data.

Random question...
Do you guys happen to know a nice videocall website and/or app for smartphone (Android)?
Possibly one that doesn't send all of your data to third parties and whatnot? °w°
Thaaaaanks ♡

!rant

What actions do you take to protect your privacy while browsing/working? What browser/browser extensions/other stuff do you use?

Hey guys, this is my first rant/question so be gentle (please).

I've heard from my friends that there are some people who are really into privacy etc. So can you recommend best VPN(s) out there?

!rant
For a project we have to formulate political viewpoints and laws about digitalisation. It's not for a computerscience class, but for a additional class on politics. We have to formulate laws or guidlines/goals for the politicians to work towards in regards to "digitalisation" for the society/country we would like to live in.

For example stuff like "there should be net neutrality to guarantee free information and equal oportunities for all" and such stuff or "programing should be taught in school to prepare people for the economy of tomorrow" so it isn't limited to anything.

If you where a kind of king/ruler/what ever, what policy (in regard to "digitalisation") would you define and why? (Note: they doesn't have to be realistic for now. They shouldn't end in a dystopian future, but in a "better" future for all of humanity.)

What I thought of so far would be:
- Government use and promote Opensource and practice Opendata
- strong rights to privacy, you can request your data and demand it being deleted
- basic programing/IT education in school
- "reschool" program for people currently in the workforce that want to learn new things
- develope a policy on AI
- promote that Computer Science isn't just for boys but for every one
- less working hours per week due to automatisation/splitting the work among the whole population/basic income

*yes I'm lazy, thanks for doing part of my project ;)

So, I've been seeing a lot of people concerned about privacy around here lately.

I completely understand it, and I too, don't want all my data to be available for anyone at any given time. I get it.
However, the only way to get privacy, is to build it yourself.

Buying a phone? Who says (apart from the company itself) that it doesn't have some integrated chip, or that the os lies to you or w/e

When using your phone, who says your Sim provider isn't intercepting all your traffic with a man in the middle attack?

These sound like conspiracies, however, if you really want privacy, either build it yourself (or with other privacy activists) or let go of the comforts of technology (i know, you're not the only source of info about yourself, the only way to shield yourself is to go into the woods and live a simple life.)

It's pretty sad that these are the two options, but I've yet to find a better one.

(ps, I used to have a "no logs, no ip, no anything" VPN provider, and as soon as some agency requested info, they got it, so I wouldn't easily trust the promise of 3rd parties anymore.)

This is a continuation of my previous rant about admob being not very informative when it comes to invalid traffic and the resulting restriction in ad delivery.

I then wanted to use admob mediation to hang in facebook ads. My app is written with Xamarin.Forms.

So first I needed to make some facebook configuration - create an account, let my app review, create some ad placements and other shit. I came to the point where I had to put in a link to my privacy policy and the link could not be accepted due to some SSL fuckup -.-'

I then found out that there is an issue with my SSL Chain. With the help of whatsmychaincert.com I solved that issue. Little side note here: I have limited knowledge of that stuff and my cousin helped me set up my homepage so I had no idea what I was doing. Did a snapshot and luckily I did not needed that as everything worked :)
This took me around half an hour just so I can paste the fucking link to activate my app in facebook developer portal.

After that I made the whole mediation configuration shit - not an issue as google documented this quite well but it took some time.

Now comes the shitty part. To use admob mediation you need adapters to the other ad network. I found a nuget package with exactly what I needed just to find out that it is outdated. So I pulled the repo and saw that this thing is an aar binding library. Never did that stuff so I read some docs again. Updated the package and consumed it in my app.

The google docs then said "Use this mediation test shit to check if you did everything correct before going prod" - aar binding nr. 2 (but I am now familiar with that :P). This thing then told me that facebook ads could not be loaded because the SDK version is outdated -.-' SDK version comes from another nuget package which is referenced by the first aar thingie. I tracked that thing back to a repo where I found out that they are indeed totally behind. So I downloaded the aar, made a binding lib and bound that to my first aar binding lib as that depends on this.

Put that all back in my app - tested mediation and fucking finally after 6 hours everything comes together! all lights are green and things work.

Sorry if this is not quite a rant but it was quite a journey and I just had to share it.

Question: What do you guys think of this logo?

Anyway, here's my rant..

I'm starting to get pissed off with my relative for whom I'm doing a project.

He's coming up with the ugliest logo and fonts I have ever seen in 2018.

I mean it's business so I don't have much say in what he decides esp since he seems to have taken it upto himself to design the logo and managed to make a logo suggestion I made even terrible.

I have told him multiple times to avpid the knockoff wierd fonts and use simple fonts that looks normal.

And yet, he comes back everytime by changing colors in one of the letter n the words 🤦‍♂️

Maybe it's because we are from different generations and we have different visions on what it should look like.

He is the kind of guy who goes on and on about how he used computers and internet back in the 90s everytime we meet!

He probably uses MS Word to design the logo! This is the newest logo he came up with.

If I were to be honest, I would be probably rude in his eyes, since it is his "work".

What do you guys think of this logo? Can only show that much of the logo to maintain some privacy.

!rant
A more of an informative thread .
I'm a noob when it comes to privacy protection..
I'll ask all the Indian DevRant is, how can an individual/organisation misuse your Aadhar card , email address and phone number details .
Like if they have it together , how can they misuse it?
It'll great if you can let me know

tldr: I am looking for recommendations for a basic website for my parents. GOTO question;

Pre-Story:
My parents have a small (offline) business. They have a website to give some general information and list their weekly offers.
When I felt that what has come out of the website-building tool (you know, clicky clicky stuff) looked a bit too early 2000's and is a total ripoff for what you get (almost 20€ per month), I created something with Google Sites for them. Feel free to roast me, but web development is not my field and now it looks much more modern, is mobile friendly and does what it is supposed to do. Weekly offers are edited in a google sheets file, which is embedded in the website. Not great, but this way my mom doesn't have to deal with editing a tables on the page - trust me, it won't look good. This also meant they could downgrade the hosting package to discard the clicky-tool and just the domain (maybe 1€ per month). The website itself is hosted for free by Google.

Some time ago GDPR became a thing and then I was tasked to have a look at it. (side note: I don't want to rant about being responsible for it, that's fine. My parents don't really ask me to do a lot for them.) You can't enter any data on the website, it's just very basic stuff and data protection wise there's just the "usual" stuff (cookies, embedded tools, logs). I added another site with a halfway complete privacy policy. Regarding the whole cookie issue (do not enforce unnecessary cookies) I couldn't find an easy solution. It's not 100%, but what can you really expect from a small business like this? I've seen worse.

Now to the question:
Can you recommend a good alternative to the current solution (Google Sites)?
It should be cheap (<3€/month incl. domain) and my parents should be able to make some basic changes (just text in predefined locations). I am not afraid to get my hands dirty - I can deal with some HTML, CSS, JS - but I don't want to sink a lot of time into this. No need for analytics or the like. Maybe a newsletter would be cool (with the weekly offers), but that's just a random thought of mine and definitely not necessary.

Thanks for reading :)

I want to create an open source sort of clone of Facebook but privacy minded.. I deleted mine a few weeks ago because of the massive amount of datacollection. I mean, talking on messenger about shoes for example, then going on fb to see shoe commercials. I mean, fck that man.. you can change some settings but nothing in regards to this. This go beyond my limit of privacy.