It really depends on each person’s threat model. But there are a few things everyone would benefit from. Like VPN, email aliasing, password manager, 2FA/MFA. They don’t have any convenience cost and in most cases make your life easier.

If you are interested in learning more:

• https://www.privacyguides.org
• https://thenewoil.org/en/guides/prologue/
• https://freedom.press/training/
• https://anonymousplanet.org/guide.html

!fediverse@lemmy.zip, created not long ago, exactly due to similar reasons.

If you read the blog post you would know there are 0 mentions of VPNs there. VPNs have very limited purpose, and it’s just a small tool in the arsenal of privacy.

RCS doesn’t support encryption natively. Google only has proprietary encryption for Messages app.

How about the false positives? You want your name permanently associated with child porn because someone fucked up and ruined your life? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-photos-led-false-accusations-child-abuse

The whole system is so flawed that it has like 20-25% success rate.

Or how about this system being adopted for anything else? Guns? Abortion? LGBT related issues? Once something gets implemented, it’s there forever and expansion is inevitable. And each subsequent government will use it for their personal agenda.

It converts YouTube links into privacy-friendly frontend.

They offer integrated aliases via Proton Pass now.

https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore

Good point, but I didn’t think of it that way just because, I saw things and read stuff that made me suspect it…

There is “speculation” spread about every single “privacy” focused service for exactly that reason. If you don’t trust them, you are not using them. I’m not saying don’t be suspicious, but also look at facts that make it unlikely of it being a honeypot.

But they did, and it worked for them before, and it’ll always work unless no one start using that service, so there’s no point in keeping servers operational… time for a rebrand. plus they’re getting paid.

Right, but there are plenty of easier services to target that provide more sensitive information. If you are a honeypot, you have to be profitable and expand your services or people will move somewhere else. That all takes time and work. Buying other services like SimpleLogin or Standard Notes and integrating their staff into your scheme would be unnecessary complication.

having it outside 14 eyes countries would be the most stupid decision the government could make.

It’s not a story. So called 5 eyes, 9 eyes and 14 eyes refers to country agreements to share intelligence and make cooperation instant instead of having to go through proper channels that take time. I’m sure there are many conspiracy theories about specific things that might not be true, but there is no dispute that these agreements exist.

Government run honeypots are usually facilitated by federal agencies, INTERPOL, or EUROPOL, and if they want to run something in a country where they are not welcome it has to be court approved. Hence, it being run in 14 eyes countries, make it easy. Switzerland on the other hand not only requires everything to be approved by their courts, but also require using their specific privacy laws when making determination, which are the strongest in the world.

You only need to look at previous known honeypots to see where they originate and what they target.

You thinking it’s a honeypot is a win for the government. All they need to do is spread some propaganda instead of actually bothering to run a service that is hard to keep alive. And if they were to run a honeypot, having it outside 14 eyes countries would be the most stupid decision the government could make.

No company executive will go to jail for you. Give any company a court signed order and they will comply. Hence, the companies that orient around privacy limit the data they retain so that when they get a court order, they have nothing to give. Email is flawed by design, so some metadata always has to be stored for it to be functional.

You are absolutely right about metadata, but as far as protests, just having encryption is enough to prevent anyone from accessing the data. Extracting metadata from 3rd party companies or extracting a phone requires a lot more resources than cops can spare.

Updated.

Some options are listed here https://www.oss.fund/categories/bounties/

It was always happening and at a large scale, it’s just there are new reporting requirements now, which leads to more nonspecialized publications to cover it more often.

Hi. Could you add a link to your Lemmy account to any other source? The website/GitHub/Mastodon/Liberapay doesn’t mention this account.

I don’t like “big” instances, since they tend to quickly walk back on their promised goals once they no longer can manage their size. So when I joined Lemmy it was on a smaller now defunct vlemmy.net instance. The idea of operating and moderating the community was not that appealing, but it was a way to promote the instance, so I started !globalnews@vlemmy.net and !databreaches@vlemmy.net. It was a slow start, but they grew over time, reaching 1000/400 subscribers respectively and then the admin killed the instance and vanished. That was a lesson.

After that, I joined lemmy.zip, it was tiny then, but it had a lot of things going for it, multiple admins, multiple communication channels, transparent finances and good base rules. What it lacked was content. So I had to decide if it was worth my time to start over by creating another community and help it grow. I re-started !globalnews@lemmy.zip and !databreaches@lemmy.zip and just started posting without any expectations. It was an outlet to share what I found interesting or what caught my eye. Eventually, people started commenting, and organic discussions started happening. I expanded the number of communities I moderate now, but the principles are the same. No expectations.

So the reason for all this backstory is that I stay motived by believing in the project and wanting to help good instances to grow. If not for Lemmy I wouldn’t be posting anywhere else, never moderated on Reddit, never even posted on Reddit, was a habitual lurker there.

Just find topics you are interested in, maybe set up an RSS client and share the content that you find interesting yourself.

Based on a quick look, from the best to worse: DuckDuckGo > Google > Quant > Bing

Unless search engines decide to integrate a dedicated filter to Fediverse, it will always be hard to search even if it’s indexed. Cross posts, quote posts are not search engine friendly features.

• https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
• https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
• https://the-federation.info/platform/73

Blame gamers for embracing every single greedy move and asking for more. If you shout how fucked up this is and still open your wallet, you are the problem.