• 21 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • But at some point to interact with any kind of large company … You could also consider not interacting with large companies at all

    Actually the large corps are more likely to hold the data in-house. Small companies cling to outsourcing. E.g. credit unions are the worst… outsource every service they offer to the same giant suppliers. Everyone thinks only a small company has the data (and consequently that the small dataset does not appeal to cyber criminals) but it’s actually worse because they outsource jobs even as small as printing bank statements to the same few giants most other credit unions use. Then they do the same for bill pay with another company. It’s getting hard to find a credit union that does not put Cloudflare in the loop. So in the end a dozen or so big corps have your data and it’s not even disclosed in the privacy statement.

    Of course it depends on the nature of the business. A large grocery chain is more likely to make sure your offline store purchase history reaches Amazon and Google than a mom & pop grocer who doesn’t even have a loyalty program.

    Whether businesses get copies of information is usually included in a site’s privacy policy,

    I have never seen a privacy policy that lists partners and recipients apart from Paypal, who lists the 600+ corps they share data with for some reason. Apart from bizarre exceptions privacy policies are always too vague to be useful. Even in the GDPR region. If you read them you can often find text that does not even make sense for their business because they just copied someone else’s sufficiently vague policy to use as a template.

    If you really want to limit your information exposure, you either have to audit everyone you do business with this way (because most large companies do this) or hire someone (or a service) to do it.

    The breach happened in a country where companies are not required to respond to audits. No company wants any avg joe’s business badly enough to answer questions about data practices. In the EU, sure, data controllers are obligated to disclose the list of parties they share with (on request, not automatically). And even then, some still refuse. Then you file an article 77 complaint with the DPA where it just sits for years with no enforcement action.

    My approach is a combination of avoiding business entirely, or supplying fake info, or less sensitive info (mailing address instead of residential, mission-specific email, phone number that just goes to a v/m or fax). This is where the battle needs to be fought – at data collection time. Countless banks needlessly demand residential address. That should be rejected by consumers. Data minimization is key.

    In the case at hand, I’m leaning toward opting out of the class action lawsuit and suing them directly in small claims court. I can usually get better compensation that way.







  • Self hosting would mean I could control account creation and make many burner accounts. But there are issues with that:

    • If there are several burner accounts then the admin would have to make it easy for others to create burner accounts or else it would be evident that all the burner accounts are just the admin’s, which does not solve the aggregation problem. It introduces complexities because the DNS provider and ISP would have the identity of the self-hoster. One could onion host but that greatly narrows the audience.
    • It does not solve the problem for others. Everyone who has the same need would then be needlessly forced to independently solve all these same problems.
    • I do not have high-speed unlimited internet, so I would have to spend more on subscription costs.

    I think it complicates the problem and then each author has to deal with the same. If it’s solved at the fedi API level, then the existing infrastructure is ready to work.

    (edit) I recall hearing about a fedi client application that operates in a serverless way. I don’t recall the name of it and know little about how it works, but it is claimed to not depend on account creation on a server and it somehow has some immunity to federation politics. Maybe that thing could work but I would have to find it again. It’s never talked about and I wonder why that is… maybe it does not work as advertised.


  • Those do not obviate the use cases I have in mind. Secure drops are useful tools for specific whistle blowing scenarios. But they are not a one-size-fits-all tool.

    I routinely use framadrop and then transmit the links to regulators or whoever I am targeting to act on a report. But what if the target audience is not a specific journalist or regulator but rather the entire general public? The general public does not have access to reports submitted to the Guardian’s dropbox or NYTimes’ dropbox. Those are exclusive channels of communication just for their own journalists. The report then only gets acted on or exposed if the story can compete with the sensationalisation level of other stories they are handling. If I’m exposing privacy abuses, the general public does not give a shit about privacy for the most part. So only highly scandelous privacy offenses can meet the profitable publication standards of Guardian and nytimes. The reports also cannot be so intense as to be on par with Wikileaks. There is a limited intensity range.

    The fedi offers some unique reach to special interest groups like this one without the intensity range limitation.

    NYtimes is also a paywall. So even if the story gets published it still ends up a place of reduced access.

    They are great tools for some specific jobs but cannot wholly replace direct anonymous publication. Though I must admit I often overlook going to journalists. I should use those drop boxes more often.

    (edit) from the guardian page:

    Once you launch the Tor browser, copy and paste the URL xp44cagis447k3lpb4wwhcqukix6cgqokbuys24vmxmbzmaq2gjvc2yd.onion or theguardian.securedrop.tor.onion into the Tor address bar.

    That theguardian.securedrop.tor.onion URL caught my attention. I did not know about onion names until now. Shame it’s only for secure drops.



  • That story is focused on #CloudSTRIKE but the bigger more remarkable demon here is #CloudFLARE.

    This story demonstrates Cloudflare acting as a proxy bully of their own customer, on behalf of CloudStrike by pushing a frivilous #DMCA take-down demand. CF took the spineless route as it sees CloudStrike as having more muscle than their customer. After CF joins the Goliath side of the David vs. Goliath battle, CF ignores Senk’s responses and keeps proxying threats.

    Senk bounced from Cloudflare and went to a provider who has his back. #ArsTechnica publishes Cloudflare’s conduct. As embarrassment hits Cloudflare and David (Senk) starts winning against Goliath (CloudStrike), CF changes their tune. Suddenly they are on Senk’s side, saying “come back, we’ll protect you – we promise we didn’t get your messages”. LOL. Senk should do a parody site for Cloudflare too.

    Senk’s mistake: leaving CF. He should have waited until CF actually booted him. Then that would have more thoroughly exposed CF’s shitty actions. Senk gave CF an easy out.

    Interesting to note how a human on the side of civil rights who advocates decentralisation was treated with hostility by Cloudflare. Yet CF is fine with sheltering actual criminals.


  • Folks, FedEx has always been on the extreme right. Some clues:

    • FedEx is an ALEC member (extreme right lobby and bill mill), largely as an anti-union measure
    • FedEx founded by an ex military serviceman
    • FedEx gives discounts for NRA membership (though I heard this was recently discontinued). NRA is obviously an extreme right org who also finances ALEC.
    • During the NFL take-a-knee protest, FedEx is one of very few die-hard corps that refused to give in to the boycott. FedEx continued supporting the NFL throughout all the Black Lives Matter athletes taking knees and getting punished.
    • FedEx ships shark fins, slave dolphins and hunting trophies. Does not give a shit about harm to animals (even when endangered) or environment.

    I have been boycotting FedEx for over a decade. Certainly being pro-surveillance is fitting with their history and should not be a surprise to anyone who is aware of this background.

    The only moral inconsistency is that FedEx has a reputation for not snooping on your packages and seems to be favored by people shipping contraband. But to find the consistency it’s just about the bottom line. They make no money by ratting out their customers who break the law. But installing a surveillance system on their trucks is probably yielding revenue for FedEx.








  • Love the irony of being blocked from reading that article because I am anonymous and the #reclaimthenet hypocrits insist on using Cloudflare.

    So I can only comment on the title and what the OP (apparently) copied. Judging by how the masses happily continue using banks who voluntarily abuse KYC by collecting more info than required, internet users will also be pushovers who give in to whatever KYC comes their way.

    This policy will actually create victims. Just like GSM registration creates victims. In regions that require GSM registration phone theft goes up because criminals will steal a phone just for a live SIM chip. So KYC creates incentive for criminals to run their services from someone else’s PC.


  • Of course I have biases, but the bias does not reflect in my thesis (which is the opposite of what you realize). In particular, just because I find the bakers to be bigots does not mean I expect them to lose in court. I still actually believe the bigoted bakers rightfully won the case (thus, this does not prove your point, which is that you think there should have been no court case). The court case was not about whether they are bigots. It’s about whether an artist should be forced to produce art that favorably expresses people/ideas they hate against their 1st amendment rights also amid their right to choose who to do business with.

    So the court was right to rule in favor of the bakers. But your claim that there should not have been a court case at all remains unsupported. The case had merit. The rights of people in a protected group (sexual orientation) were discriminated against and so they were rightfully given a forum to have their legitimate complaint heard.

    IMO, it’s a fucked up extreme bias that brings you to consider the case frivolous, as if one side of the debate did not have enough merit to even warrant a court case.


  • They were still fined a lot of money

    No they weren’t. Read the first line of your own referenced article. The fine was dropped. And the original payment came from other people’s crowd-funded donations toward the case anyway, which was returned.

    Also, precedence matters and court ranking matters. Lower courts in certain regions can have all kinds of bizarre judgments but higher courts take precedence. The Oregon Court of Appeals is not representative of the US. The US Supreme Court is. The Bank of America case would be in a federal court as many states are involved.

    And spent a considerable amount of time and energy defending themselves for no damn reason

    So you not only misunderstood the outcome, but you object to rights of one party being tried against rights of another party in court? Bizarre to have sympathy for bigots being dragged through the court system, despite getting off the hook.



  • Love the irony and hypocrisy. What self-respecting conservative promotes regulation, particularly that would take control away from a business on who they do business with?

    There’s also quite a bit of hypocrisy from a privacy standpoint. It’s the conservatives to don’t value privacy and take the “if you have nothing to hide…” line of reasoning. When a giant corporation voluntarily shares sensitive information about customers, it’s always the right-leaning corporations who do that; ALEC members.

    Funnily enough, I boycott Bank of America for supporting conservative values (private prisons, xenophobia, fossil fuel investment, privacy-disrespect):

    https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/usa_banks.md

    while the conservatives want to cancel Bank of America for essentially for being conservative. Apparently it’s not conservative enough for BofA to apply conservative values uniformly, as opposed to giving conservative individuals preferential treatment.




  • Under the guise of reducing crime,

    Woolworths has justified these measures as necessary for the purposes of security.

    There is video surveillance, and then there is that extra intrusive step of facial recognition. They can have video without FR. They can submit video evidence to the police who can then use FR, if needed. They probably want to argue that they can block known shoplifters as they enter. But of course what they really want is to track who enters the shop, which products they look at, how long they gaze at promo ads, etc. Being able to preemptively strike without a crime, just a bad reputation, does not justify the intrusion to everyone else.

    Food is essential. It’s not like some shitty smartphone shop or Amazon b&m store that people can boycott.