Welcome back to This Week in Privacy, our weekly series where we cover the latest updates with what we're working on within the Privacy Guides community, and this week's top stories in the data privacy and cybersecurity space. Privacy Guides is a non-profit which researches and shares privacy-...
The Privacy Guides blog publishes timely information, website announcements, and other updates from the team and contributors.
Sharing this because it's one of the most promising Android projects we recommend on Privacy Guides, and it would be a huge detriment to the Android/Privacy community at large if this developer is no longer able to continue this work :(
> Happy New Year! > > DivestOS and the Divested projects as they currently stand are ultimately unsustainable. > > My goal for 2023 was to acquire a grant to continue my work, I was unsuccessful. > > Today I am announcing a fundraiser of raising $12,000 USD by end of February. > > It may be a stretch to ask, but I hope you all have found sufficient value in my work to keep these projects going. > > If it is unsuccessful I will switch to a full-time job and the Divested projects will take a backseat. > > To those who have donated, I truly appreciate your support. > > Thank you - Tavi/Tad.
This was written before lemmy.one was created, but I feel similarly (to not defederate) at the moment: https://fediverse.neat.pub/2023/07/10/threads/ - could definitely go either way with this one though.
The Privacy Guides blog publishes timely information, website announcements, and other updates from the team and contributors.
The full changelog has been linked if you are interested, but I want to call out an important update (emphasis mine):
> Previously 2FA was enabled in a single step which made it easy to lock yourself out. This is now fixed by using a two-step process, where the secret is generated first, and then 2FA is enabled by entering a valid 2FA token. It also fixes the problem where 2FA can be disabled without passing any 2FA token. As part of this change, 2FA is disabled for all users. This allows users who are locked out to get into their account again.
Probably not the way I would've handled it, but it's ok. Please re-enable 2FA on your account as soon as possible :)
The Privacy Guides blog publishes timely information, website announcements, and other updates from the team and contributors.
Can you self-host, or are you looking for another online service? Facebook Groups is basically a forum when it comes down to it, and any forum software can do what you're asking. I really like Discourse. You can self-host it for free (well, whatever your server costs), they'll host it for free if you're an open-source project, or if you're a legal non-profit you can get 50% off their hosting for $25-50/month.
As you reading are undoubtedly aware now, the Lemmy.one instance experienced a massive failure this weekend. Unfortunately the data was not in a recoverable state, so the server was restored from a July 26th backup, and data after that time is likely lost.
Since this occurred while I was out of town, I haven't had the time to collect all the details of what happened, so I will have to post more information at a later time.
I'm writing this post to inform you all that I have decided to defederate from the exploding-heads[.]com instance.
After carefully reviewing the instance, reported posts, and comments from our community, content on exploding-heads is clearly mostly—if not completely—in violation of our instance rules, including content posted by the instance admin themselves (a large factor in the decision to defederate any instance).
On other fediverse platforms I run, such as Mastodon, I would typically respond by "Limiting" such instances, since the main goal is to avoid the publishing and promotion of such topics on our public ("All") timelines, rather than control what you can or cannot access. Unfortunately, Lemmy does not yet offer the fine-grained moderation controls to make this possible, so complete defederation is our only option to avoid the re-publishing of content which is consistently hateful and discriminatory.
Defederation from other Lemmy instances is not taken lightly, and in the future I will continue to review instances on a case by case basis.
Every provider we list on our site does: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/
I'm not aware of the problems, so I can't make such a post. Looking at this now and searching by URL for magazines on kbin and communities on lemmy instances both seem to work as expected, so I can't reproduce what you're seeing.
I am aware of issues with lemmy.ml, searching for communities that are hosted on that server will often fail the first few times, and subscribing to communities that are hosted on that server often shows that subscriptions are "pending," so if that's where you are searching for communities I can see why it'd be an issue. Federation is a two-way street, so if lemmy.one can't fetch remote data then it won't work, but I've seen many other reports of people subscribing to remote communities just fine, so I don't think there's any issues we're seeing on our end.
When doing an outdoor activity, I would allow my precise location on a run.
It is well-known now that anonymizing location data still does not preserve privacy: https://iapp.org/news/a/getting-lost-in-the-crowd-the-limits-of-privacy-in-location-data-2/
PMs via Lemmy are a thing, but if you're an existing Subreddit mod I want to verify that on Reddit :)
This is usually an issue with your language settings, I wish the configuration options here were more clear. Lemmy is still essentially alpha software, associated quirks and all.
This is an issue with lemmy.ml, not lemmy.one. Lemmy servers are responsible for sending information out to other servers, lemmy.one is not responsible for pulling information in.
If lemmy.ml is not federating your community posts or your community there is broken entirely (which it sort of looks like...) then they have to fix that, or you have to rebuild a new community on an instance which isn't broken.
There probably wasn't, because nobody on lemmy.one had "discovered" it yet. It is slightly complicated, but you can find remote communities more reliably with a tool like https://browse.feddit.de/, and then paste the URL of the community you find in the search page. That will tell lemmy.one to fetch the community from that server, the communities you see on lemmy.one are ones where that process has already happened.
details: https://lemmy.one/post/1600
The biggest problem to me is what I just saw you post in another reply, that these models built upon our knowledge exist almost solely within proprietary ecosystems.
and maybe even our Mastodon or Lemmy posts!
The Washington Post published a great piece which allows you to search which websites were included in the "C4" dataset published in 2019. I searched for my personal blog jonaharagon.com and sure enough it was included, and the C4 dataset is practically minuscule compared to what is being compiled for larger models like ChatGPT. If my tiny website was included, Mastodon and Lemmy posts (which are actually very visible and SEO optimized tbh) are 100% being scraped as well, there's no maybe about it.
TL;DR: Reddit is making their tracker-filled mobile app the only way to access Reddit on mobile devices, they are falsely accusing third-party developers of blackmail, and they are on a path to severely lower the quality of content posted on Reddit and increase the amount of spam you see. To stand a...
TL;DR: Reddit is making their tracker-filled mobile app the only way to access Reddit on mobile devices, they are falsely accusing third-party developers of blackmail, and they are on a path to severely lower the quality of content posted on Reddit and increase the amount of spam you see. To stand against these changes, alongside numerous large subreddits, Privacy Guides is not currently available on Reddit. Join us on Lemmy at !privacyguides@lemmy.one :)
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As we discussed and announced a week ago on Reddit, the Privacy Guides subreddit is being made private from June 12 to June 14th to call attention to Reddit's most recent anti-consumer behavior.
What is Reddit doing?
A few weeks ago, Reddit unveiled plans to change the pricing for their API from $0 to $12,000 for 50 million requests. For third-party clients like Apollo on iOS or Sync on Android, this suddenly put the cost to create such an app in the realm of $20,000,000 per year, a figure clearly unsustainable for third-party Reddit client developers. For comparison, Imgur—a website with a similar userbase and size to Reddit—charges developers approximately $166 for every 50 million requests. This change in Reddit's pricing to far beyond any reasonable market value was driven solely to eliminate third-party clients from the market, in order to force Reddit users to use the official app instead, a plan which was successful given that most major third-party Reddit clients have now announced they are shutting down by the end of this month.
Reddit's API changes also affect a number of bots which are critical for moderation. Reddit cutting off access to clients and bots which moderators require to effectively care for their communities will only result in Reddit being overtaken by spam and low-quality content.
Why does Privacy Guides care?
The internet is supposed to be an open standard, and information on the internet cannot be funneled solely through proprietary first-party clients. The difficulty I had in merely archiving the r/PrivacyGuides announcement post on the New Reddit design (note everything missing here on internet archive) clearly demonstrates the danger of locking information into closed ecosystems like Reddit, where merely accessing this information is subject to their whims.
Open APIs and third-party clients are paramount to enabling privacy-friendly access to otherwise proprietary silos on the web. Through the use of those APIs and clients, it was possible to interact with Reddit in an entirely user-controlled, privacy-friendly way. Reddit's restrictions take that choice away, making their official app virtually the only portal to the information on their platform available to mobile users.
While Reddit is certainly within their rights to make these changes, Reddit users are certainly within their rights to reject these changes and choose an alternative.
We—obviously—think that the r/PrivacyGuides community is hugely beneficial to the internet at large, and a lot of great discussions take place informing people about privacy and protecting their data online. All of this taking place on Reddit was a necessary price to pay in order to reach a ton of new people and get them interested in private, open-source technologies, but if Reddit is going to abuse that power and try to control those people into using privacy-invasive clients, the cost of that might outweigh any benefit to us remaining on the platform.
Reddit's Current Response (Unmitigated Disaster)
In the past week, Reddit has largely made two real announcements about this change:
Firstly, they announced that they would keep the API free to certain clients which provide accessibility features. It should go without saying that this is just another way of Reddit saying: Because we are unwilling to make our website and apps accessibility-friendly ourselves, we will very generously let third-party developers do it for us for free.
Their second response has been to falsely accuse a prominent developer of blackmail, and then double down on their false accusations when confronted with irrefutable proof of their behavior. Threatening and accusing people in private messages, and then acting like the victim when those people publish those messages to refute your claims is incredibly toxic and inappropriate behavior from anybody working on any project, much less the CEO of Reddit.com.
In my view, this childish behavior from Reddit moves this situation far past the typical money-grabbing moves you should expect from Big Tech corporations and into legitimate concerns about integrity and stability at Reddit. If their leadership is going to devolve into Twitter-esque, dictatorship-fueled decision making, the entire platform can no longer be trusted as a source of knowledge at all.
What happens on June 15th?
I don't know what Reddit's response to this widespread protest will be. In any event, the Subreddit will re-open, but if Reddit's response is to do nothing, then r/PrivacyGuides will re-open in restricted, mod-only posting mode. Then we will have a community discussion about our next steps.
Reddit choosing to do nothing is—in my opinion—an untenable solution. While we will re-open r/PrivacyGuides in order to allow people to access the vast community knowledge that is already there (while you still can), it is entirely possible that the subreddit will remain restricted indefinitely. It is hard to imagine a reason why we should encourage our incredibly helpful and generous community to continue to provide valuable content to Reddit for free, only for Reddit to go down this privacy-invasive, ad-first path.
What's Next?
In any case, I would strongly encourage you to stop using Reddit going forward. The fiascos at Twitter and now Reddit clearly demonstrate that centralized big tech companies can no longer be trusted with being the gatekeepers to user-generated information (as if they ever could, hah!).
I think that smaller, federated communities like Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon are the future of knowledge-sharing on the internet, and the new Privacy Guides community on the fediverse can be joined from any ActivityPub enabled instance, such as:
- On Kbin.social: https://kbin.social/m/privacyguides@lemmy.one
- On Lemmy.world: https://lemmy.world/c/privacyguides@lemmy.one
- On Beehaw.org: https://beehaw.org/c/privacyguides@lemmy.one
- On Lemmy.one: https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides
- On Lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.ml/c/privacyguides@lemmy.one
- On any other Lemmy instance, search for
!privacyguides@lemmy.one
All of these are links to the same community, just pick whichever site you already have an account on.
Privacy Guides additionally hosts a Discourse forum at discuss.privacyguides.net where we have discussions about and analyze various privacy tools.
Lots of people here with the opposite opinion of me, which is that I like the website and not the mobile apps, but overall yeah I'm pretty convinced this format is probably the best poised alternative to replace Reddit for a lot of people. Maybe not everybody, but I am willing to "settle" for quality over quantity ;)
I would describe Apollo as an accessibility app in the sense that the regular Reddit app is unusable.
The only problem is that if your instance doesn't know about that community yet, it'll just 404, you still have to search for it first because visiting the link doesn't make your instance fetch the community yet.
This should still be the default behavior when it autofills a community link though, I hope they make this change 👍
Actually fulfilling campaign promises? This has no place in American politics! /s
Chrome and Edge 0-days patched.
> You want Chrome 114.0.5735.106 or later on Mac and Linux, and 114.0.5735.110 or later on Windows.
(Also relevant to Chromium browsers, e.g. Brave, which you can check at brave://settings/help)
> Since we launched our first paid plans in 2015, our Premium price has never changed. Now the time has come to update our plans. While prices for existing subscribers will not change, we have an awesome one-time offer if you decide to switch to the new plans right now: Get the new plans at half price and benefit from more email addresses, lots of storage, and more features!
Some people have been asking which communities they should join first, so I posted some remote communities you can subscribe to on the sidebar on the homepage :)
Tech → !technology@beehaw.org News → !news@beehaw.org Gaming → !gaming@beehaw.org Memes → !memes@sopuli.xyz Privacy → !privacy@lemmy.ca FOSS → !foss@beehaw.org Monero → !monero@monero.town Music → !music@beehaw.org Books → !literature@beehaw.org LGBT → !lgbtq_plus@beehaw.org Nature → !greenspace@beehaw.org Sports → !sports@beehaw.org Programming → !programming@beehaw.org
Find another cool community? Leave a comment :)
There's also this universal community search tool you can try using. If you find a community, just copy its URL and paste it in /search to subscribe to it here. This just goes to show that while there might not be many local communities here on lemmy.one yet, the beauty of the fediverse means that doesn't matter!
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Thursday it had uncovered an American espionage operation that compromised thousands of iPhones using sophisticated surveillance software.
With Reddit's encroaching IPO and their poorly planned API changes, we need a place to keep up with privacy topics that isn't tied to an anti-privacy, centralized sinking ship site.
Our forum running Discourse has been a great place to discuss website changes and answer questions, but it doesn't quite provide the same experience as Reddit does for things like sharing news, so we're trying something new:
!privacyguides@lemmy.one is our new ActivityPub-enabled community for sharing links and other information from the privacy and security realm. Welcome!
We're going to be trying out posting to this community for a few months to decide if we want this to replace or coexist with the r/privacyguides subreddit, so we'll see how it goes. If you want this to succeed, stay active! Our mission is to become the most inviting and friendly place to discuss privacy and security on the fediverse 😎
How do I join the Privacy Guides community on Lemmy?
You can join a few different ways:
- On Kbin.social, a Lemmy alternative with a more Reddit-like UI and instant registrations. I didn't like Kbin from a hosting perspective because of some missing features, but for just browsing communities and joining ours it's a great option: https://kbin.social/m/privacyguides@lemmy.one
- On Lemmy.one, this is the server which hosts the Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, and also the server that I admin myself. You are welcome to create an account, but it might take up to 24 hours for your account to be approved.
- On another Lemmy instance: You can join the community by entering
!privacyguides@lemmy.onein the search box on your instance. There are plenty of servers you could join, or you could host your own relatively easily if you're familiar with self-hosting. - On another ActivityPub instance: You can also probably join by entering
@privacyguides@lemmy.oneor https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides in the search box of the ActivityPub software you use, although Mastodon does not seem to pull in posts from Lemmy communities properly in my limited testing, so YMMV.
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Verification post: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13x7oe3/who_wants_to_try_out_lemmy_privacyguideslemmyone/
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/411763
> ...to keep running as is. > > creator of Apollo, a popular Reddit client for iOS, relays his talks with Reddit about upcoming ridiculous API pricing.
Today we announce that we no longer support port forwarding. New port forwards will no longer be supported, and existing ports will be removed 2023-07-01.
Communities can only be created on Lemmy.one by an administrator. While we figure out the direction we want this instance to go in, in terms of moderation, we are curating the communities hosted here on this instance, to avoid duplicating the efforts of other communities on Lemmy and ensure we're only offering unique, high-quality content.
If you moderate a Subreddit with 50K+ subscribers and would like to create your community here on Lemmy.one, please message u/JonahAragon on Reddit.
If you have another idea for a community, you can reply to this thread with your proposal for consideration. Lemmy.one and the Lemmy federation as a whole is still quite small, so communities can't realistically get as granular as they are on Reddit yet, try to think broadly and we'll go from there. Include whether you'd be interested in moderating your proposed community too :)
You can of course always create a community on any other Lemmy instance if you are not able to create one here, and users here can follow communities from any other Lemmy instance as well.
What is Lemmy?
Lemmy is link aggregator software that exists in the fediverse, meaning it connects with other "ActivityPub" software like Mastodon and other Lemmy instances. Basically, you can follow and interact with communities here on Lemmy.one, on any other Lemmy instance, or even from your Mastodon account!
What is Lemmy.one?
Lemmy.one is a general-purpose instance of Lemmy—a self-hostable, decentralized alternative to Reddit and other link aggregators—hosted by myself (Jonah). I am the administrator of the Mastodon server mstdn.party, and the founder of privacyguides.org.
This instance is generously supported by our contributors, if you use this instance to interact with the fediverse, please consider a monthly contribution to support my work.
[!Support me on Ko-Fi](https://ko-fi.com/jonaharagon)
What are the rules here?
- No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, or casteism
- No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies
- No harassment, dogpiling or doxxing of other users
- No content illegal in the United States, Germany, or Finland
- Do not share intentionally false or misleading information
- Do not spam or abuse network features.
As a general-purpose instance, we do not have heavy moderation in terms of what topics people are allowed to post about, however all users are expected to follow our rules at all times, and generally be nice and friendly on the federation.
Please report all content you see which might violate our rules for evaluation. If you are on a remote server, please forward any reports of our users to our server for our moderators to take action, we pledge that remote reports will remain confidential within our moderation team and will not be used for any form of retribution against the reporter.
jonah @lemmy.one Jonah is the admin of Lemmy.one, a tracker-free, federated link aggregator, as well as privacyguides.org, mstdn.party, and discuss.techlore.tech.