Skip Navigation
2020—2023 Ford Escape® and 2022—2023 Maverick® vehicles with 2.5L HEV/PHEV engines recalled
  • Okay, 1 year later, I got another letter that they finally can fix this for my car. And the fix is a PCM software update. It looks like instead of fixing the engine so it would not fail and sprinkle engine compartment with oil, they are improving software to detect the issue in advance and enable limp mode before it actually happens. Well, I guess better than nothing, and lower the risk for me driving a flammable car.

  • Do you think people would be okay with 'Recall' if Apple did it?
  • I guess there is a chance to see some of code, but I doubt about it being properly open sourced.

    While we’re publishing the binary images of every production PCC build, to further aid research we will periodically also publish a subset of the security-critical PCC source code.

    Source: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

  • New Hampshire Republicans Try to Require Proof of Citizenship to Register to Vote
  • Yeah, doesn't seem that the proposed bill offers meaningful improvements. The article says

    Under current New Hampshire law, voters are asked to provide proof of identity and age (usually a driver’s license), proof that they live where they want to vote, and proof of citizenship (either a birth certificate or a passport) in order to be able to register and vote.

    It's only if a person doesn't have a proof of citizenship, they can sign a sworn affidavit to register or vote, which will be checked by attorney general office after elections.

    This looks to me as a solid system already. One cannot vote by impersonating someone else, one cannot vote if you are not living in the district, one can only lie about citizenship with a significant risk of that lie to be exposed after elections with all legal consequences.

    Unless you belive that damn liberals moving buses of illegals with forged IDs to steal the elections, there is nothing much to be worried about.

  • Do you think people would be okay with 'Recall' if Apple did it?
  • Apple's PR is better. With Microsoft all news titles were like "OMG Windows will take screenshots of all you do and send it to AI", and with Apple it's more like "Apple is carefully adding AI to their products, respecting user privacy as they always have been".

    Of course, when one looks into technical details they would find that MS Recall is strictly local and runs only on special hardware that people don't even have yet.

    Apple Intelligence does send your data to cloud and scans everything you have in Apple ecosystem, not just screenshots. Of course they say it's done in very privacy respecting ways, and provide a lot of technical information to back this claim. But at the end it's closed source and is subject to change at any time.

    Having said that, Apple users are used to and value that Apple magically takes care of everything, so they are happy to pay premium for Apple's products whatever the company does.

  • Privacy services and non privacy payments options
  • No, I didn't say that. It depends on your risk model. If you are an average Joe don't worry that services are charging your credit card. If you are hiding from government then better use less online services, and if you must then find ones that accept crypto

  • Privacy services and non privacy payments options
  • TLDR: "privacy" services can't be bothered and you shouldn't too if you are not doing illegal stuff.

    These "privacy-oriented" services are businesses that need to earn money, not scare away potential clients and avoid legal issues. Accepting cash or crypto is a risk for legal and accounting reasons. They just don't think it's worth it.

    Now, to link a particular activity on a particular service with you via your payment is not a trivial task. Government can do it, but it really matters if you think you are or will be targeted by it. Data miners can correlate bank payment with an account at a service provider only if both bank and service provider sell or leak data, which is less likely if you are using a privacy a oriented service.

  • Does self-hosted VPN make sense?

    Hey all,

    I've been using a commercial VPN for years on my mobile devices and home PCs. Recently I've started to use Tailscale and realized I can easily create a self-hosted VPN on a cheap VPS with unlimited traffic.

    But I'm not really sure if that's what I need. BTW, I'm not doing anything dangerous, no torrents, no illegal stuff, no journalism or whistleblowing, not even looking up abortion clinics. I just hate mass surveillance and I don't want to be constantly profiled.

    Commercial VPN allows to "hide in a crowd" by sharing IP with thousands of other clients. But there are a few issues:

    1. Often sites blacklist VPN IPs, so I can't get in or pass captcha
    2. Performance is not very good
    3. I have to trust VPN to not keep the logs and not sell data. I used Mullvad and they are considered reliable, but you never know until it's too late

    With self-hosted VPN, I'm losing benefit of "hiding in crowd" as my VPN will be used only by me and maybe a couple of other people. My understanding is that my VPS outgoing traffic is from static server IP. So if I login to Facebook once, the address is associated with me. I'll also have to trust VPS provider to not analyze my traffic and sell it. On other hand, I'm still protected from my ISP spying, from exposing my real IP address to web sites, from dangers of public WiFi networks. And I might get better performance for about the same price.

    What's your take on VPNs? Tell me if you are using self-hosted VPN and why.

    17
    Those of you that have AmTrak'd cross-country (East-West/West-East), how was your experience?
  • I never did it, but it's interesting to read about. Last year I was planning a family vacation in Orlando, and we are in NYC area. The deal breaker for me was the cost which was like 3x of the flight. I understand that it would be more comfortable and probably I should compare with business class flight, but still...

  • Preparing to move from Ubuntu to Fedora

    Hi! I'm seeking some advice and sanity check on hopping from Ubuntu to Fedora on my personal PC. I've been using Ubuntu LTS for almost two years now, switched from Windows and never looked back. But I cannot say I know Linux well. I use my PC for browsing, some gaming with Steam (I have AMD GPU), occasional video editing, tinkering with some self-hosted stuff that is on separate hardware.

    I don't like the way Ubuntu is moving with snaps. And LTS version falls behind too much. So I decided to move to Fedora.

    My plan is simple:

    1. I will install Fedora on a fresh nvme drive. I want disk encryption, so I'm going to have LUKS over btrfs for /home, and the root will remain unencrypted.
    2. I will copy all files from old /home to new /home, with the exception of dot-files.
    3. I plan to make use of flatpaks, so I don't think configuration for my apps is easily transferable. I'll have to install and configure apps from scratch, unless I'll have to use an RPM package.

    Does all of this make sense? Is there a way to simplify app re-configuration in my case?

    And as I never used Fedora extensively (booting from live image doesn't count), are there any caveats I should be aware of?

    59
    Privacy respecting language learning tool?

    Hey,

    In the past I used Duolingo to study languages, but now I'm more privacy-conscious and looking for better options. And their recent data breach only solidified that intention.

    I recently saw someone posted a comparison table for privacy policies of Duolingo and a number of competing products. Unfortunately I cannot find it now.

    Can you give any suggestions? I'm not opposed to paid services, btw

    14
    Privacy respecting location tracking without phone

    Hey all,

    I'm looking for something that can track location of my preschooler who starts new school soon. He's too young to get a smartphone, so I have to rule out app based solutions I guess.

    My initial research found virtually nothing. One candidate is GeoZilla, which sells nice devices and their pivacy policy looks okayish regarding location data, but it still relies on their servers of course. Another option would be an iWatch, which again puts trust into 3rd party, and the device is quite expensive for a small kid.

    Any privacy-oriented trackers out there that I'm missing. Maybe there are some smartphone alternatives that can have cell connectivity and GPS and apps installed, but with much simpler interface?

    Update: Thanks everyone! I got GeoZilla tag for now. The app doesn't require personal information, which is good. However, it's annoyingly reminds to enable location for itself to track "me", which I don't need at all. Garmin came as a strong second, mainly due to my child age. Garmin devices are not for very young kids, I believe. And it costs more than GeoZilla. I still have some time to think if I really want this, though. It's not too late to return GeoZilla tag

    23
    What was your first car?

    What it was and what did you like/hate the most about it?

    It's slightly offtopic, but firsthand experience may help first time car buyers to choose.

    0
    Congressional Report Finds Meta and Tax Prep Companies “Recklessly” Shared Taxpayers’ Data
    themarkup.org Congressional Report Finds Meta and Tax Prep Companies “Recklessly” Shared Taxpayers’ Data – The Markup

    The investigation was opened in response to work published last year by The Markup

    Congressional Report Finds Meta and Tax Prep Companies “Recklessly” Shared Taxpayers’ Data – The Markup

    Might be old news for some... TLDR: Some big online tax prep sites have tracker pixels from Meta and Google, which collect things like income, filing status, tax credits, etc.

    Original congressional report file

    12
    2020—2023 Ford Escape® and 2022—2023 Maverick® vehicles with 2.5L HEV/PHEV engines recalled

    I just got a letter from Ford about this.

    https://www.ford.com/support/how-tos/recall/recalls-and-faqs/2020-2023-ford-escape-2022-2023-ford-maverick-engine-failure-recall/

    1
    Welcome to !whatcarshouldibuy

    Hi everyone,

    I've created this community as a replacement for r/whatcarshouldibuy that I was subscribed to on Reddit. I used it a lot and I valued content and advice there a lot. It definitely influenced my recent car purchases and I'd like to have similar community here in Lemmy.

    Please be polite and follow Lemm.ee instance rules.

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PO
    pound_heap @lemm.ee
    Posts 10
    Comments 105
    Moderates