Oliver Lowe

Not included in the above, but handy is also an alternative web UI for Reuters news: https://neuters.de

You can report the message so that future messages from the spammer won’t send. Unfortunately no direct way to mark the message as junk automatically like email, but Signal does have Message Requests which may help? https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007459591-Signal-Profiles-and-Message-Requests

Honestly, DNT as it’s implemented in browsers today is not a sufficient solution

I’ve come to the same conclusion (blogged about it here https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/11/linkedin-do-not-track/) after updating myself on where it’s all at.

I also think about pop-ups back in the 90s/00s. Imagine if browsers sent a “No-Popups” header (or something) back then. I doubt we would have seen any change in company behaviour. Instead, it took something like Firefox to implement pop-up blocking by default (https://lwn.net/Articles/130792/).

Ironically this site serves koko analytics, which now ignores the Do Not Track header (as per Mozilla’s recommendation, mind you). See commit 6890f3c.

Thankfully uBlock Origin blocks loading the scripts.

Assuming MTP is Media Transfer Protocol?

Maybe there’s some IP address ranges to try block?

It’s difficult because, for example, blocking the addresses OpenAI’s crawlers use may inadvertently block addresses from Azure used by Bing or whatever.

I suppose it’s a call to arms - the intended audience is those who are familiar with all those acronyms. It’s meant to ignite a fire in the belly to spur individual action against the proposed Chat Control legislation.

I know what you mean though. The reality of “resisting” is actually kinda messy. Using all the mentioned tooling is exhausting. Much like I don’t think that consumer recycling is going to save humanity, I don’t think that if everyone “made the little effort required to secure their data and their communications” it would end crazy proposals like Chat Control. TLS is so common now (in HTTPS) and WhatsApp (implementing e2ee) is incredibly popular. Yet here we are.

The article briefly mentions open-source software. To me this is where I see more private & secure by design stuff like you mention. I’m happy that things like Lemmy exist making countermeasures like 3rd party cookie blocking sand URL cleansing irrelevant.

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They don’t necessarily need to; hopefully we can help people install uBlock Origin which removes tracking query parameters from URLs. See privacy.txt

Is it? Found this setting: https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/img_1639-png.2219522/

Not sure what the default is and I don’t have iOS 17 yet.

Thankfully uBlock Origin removes those parameters for us. The default filters include a whole bunch of removeparam filters; e.g. privacy.txt See also removeparam.

Maybe you could help your friends and family install Firefox and/or uBlock Origin? Every little bit helps :)

Probably not; userChrome.css just modifies the local user interface of Firefox, right? I don’t think any of this information is ever transmitted to servers, nor is it available from Javascript. Custom user styles however could probably be used for fingerprinting.

Related interesting article from Mozilla: Privacy and the :visited selector

Does this sound like what you’re after? https://www.onaudience.com/resources/how-to-buy-audience-data/ Let us know how you go.

But seldom in the motorbike space, I think?

I’m still not sure whether the post is just spam.

I agree. ActivityPub messages are not necessarily public information; implementations like Mastodon and Lemmy just assume it - and there’s nothing stopping the services relaying the messages elsewhere afterwards.

Actually in my fiddling with ActivityPub I’ve made some posts and comments to a Lemmy instance which were not relayed to other instances, even though they would have been if I made them using Lemmy. So there’s definitely opportunity for systems to implement features inbetween “totally public” and “single recipient”.

You can be polite about it and not confrontational.

Really important. Coming from a place of mutual respect is a really nice - even underrated - way to make progress in the privacy space!

My understanding is that the anonymous profile thing won’t really work. That’s as far as ActivityPub is concerned - one of the protocols behind Lemmy, Mastodon et al.

Every person/bot/whatever which comments, posts, upvotes; any social “activity” must have an independently verifiable public identity (via WebFinger). Here are some example identities:

• my Mastodon account: otl@hachyderm.io
• a random kbin account: density@kbin.social

When some “activity” is performed by that identity, a message is delivered to many (many!) servers. They could be running anything but we commonly see Mastodon, Lemmy, Meta’s Threads (soon?).

Each server can really do whatever it wants with that message. For example:

1. I posted this photo from a Mastodon instance (via @otl@hachyderm.io)
2. The Mastodon server also delivered a message to !motorcycles@lemmy.world.
3. The Lemmy server at lemmy.world stored it in a big database so subscribers can read it.
4. @ganksy@lemmy.world replied “Wild and chilling landscape”.
5. Lemmy stored the reply and also delivered the reply to @otl@hachyderm.io.
6. Mastodon stored the reply in its own big database so I can read it.

Coming back to the OP:

That was a long winded way of saying we should have (optionally) private profiles in lemmy.

Here is some service’s idea of what @otl@hachyderm.io is:

• kbin
• lemmy.sdf.org
• Threads: https://threads.net/@otl@hachyderm.io (not yet!)

There’s no way to make a profile private because there isn’t really a profile to begin with. What we really have is just the activity received from @otl@hachyderm.io. The whole thing feels a lot more like email than popular social networking sites when you get down to the nuts and bolts.

Old-school mailing lists archives also offer a way to search for posts by author. e.g. Richard Miller

I never expected that they’d put generative AI in WhatsApp, like, why???

it doesn’t really add anything substantial to what the chat app is already good for: chatting with our fellow humans.

A lot of this is for WhatsApp Business. Meta are monetising WhatsApp. The idea is that businesses will use WhatsApp Business and the shitty AI features to (direct from their website): “Engage audiences, accelerate sales and drive better customer support outcomes on the platform with more than 2 billion users around the world.”

What a cringe :(

Not that simple, unfortunately :( The problem is that one particular vendor (Meta) controls the client - the app - to the service (Whatsapp). Right now we can only hope that Signal doesn’t add this kind of feature. There are already cryptocurrency features in the Signal app of dubious utility.