c/privacy@lemmy.ml

assuming you need gps and radio on

family wants a car thats 2020 or younger t and toyota

also if you have dashcam suggestions let me know

I made a quick gallery of my recent adventure taking apart two remotes which is shared below:

Sony Bravia TV Universal Remote

Onn 4K Plus Streaming Device Remote

Procedure: Both remotes had plastic tabs holding them together. I was able to pry them apart with a guitar pick (credit card would work too) and separate the body from the internal remote board. The Sony remote (Green circuit board) was kind enough to label the component as “MIC1” with the screen printing so I flipped it over and removed the black adhesive covering over the Mic hole. The Mic hole is very small and I did try a few things before settling for a #1 flathead screwdriver from my iFixIt kit. The irony of using that kit to destroy something is not lost on me here. Anyway, I placed the screwdriver into the empty Mic hole and applied firm even pressure and let the flathead dig into the board. I went slow and could tell I was making progress when the Mic component on the other side of the board lifted away. At that point I backed out the screwdriver and used tweezers to pull off the Mic. Then quick reassembly and testing and all functions were good!

For the Onn 4k Plus Streaming remote (Black circuit board) I was able to follow the same procedure above where I used the pick to open the remote, used the screwdriver to apply even pressure to screw into the Mic hole and lift the component from underneath until I could get tweezers under it. I did however encounter an issue where a copper trace lifted with the component. It was very thin and I peeled back only enough to get a razor blade under it and sever it from the board. Then re-assemble and tested with no issues. All in all, for me with experience taking electronics apart it was about 20 minutes of working. I have one more Onn remote and a Samsung remote with a solar charger on the back to do next.

To get ahead of the comments on why I didn’t use a razor blade or heat gun to remove the mic: I tried a razor blade at first on the Sony remote but discovered that the component was soldered so close to the board that I would have to destroy the screenprint to get underneath it. Unfortunately I don’t trust myself with a heat gun either since I didn’t have Kapton tape to protect the other components.

If there is enough interest I can post the reassembled remotes for matching them or images of the Samsung remote surgery when I do it as well. Hope you all find this encouraging for how to do it on your own!

Gallery of Images: https://postimg.cc/gallery/tHX4fyD

The EFF found cops writing “idiot,” “WEIRD KID,” “blah,” “leave me alone,” and button mashing in Flock’s ‘reason’ box.

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/51620160

I love how they put a pic of “Epstein File Mark” in the article ;)

cross-posted from: piefed.social/…/the-new-apple-watch-will-use-micr…

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/51986229

🇪🇺 Seeing Ursula Leyen¹ praised all day for her State of the European Union speech is upsetting to me.

🇨🇦 While closer ties to Canada sound great, it also included her brand-new digital ID verification² law, the so called “EU Kids Act”!

➕ It goes one step further than Social Media, covering video-sharing platforms, AI chatbots, AI companions, online games, software app stores and operating systems³

Europeans should fight this surveillance state law tooth and nail! #STOPEUKIDSACT

¹not sure why we still accept people using nobiliary particles such as “von der” 🤢

²or rebranded “age verification”

³ euractiv.com/…/gamers-will-have-to-prove-their-ag… euractiv.com/…/exclusive-von-der-leyen-to-fine-te…

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/51905809

Starts to feel like a wave of this kind of BS is hitting the world.

My school has provided us some emails with a custom domain (not @gmail.com but @myschool.smth) and we as students are only able to login via gmail, however i obviously do not want that. What can i do to prevent that? I tried logging into the email via Thunderbird but i get blocked because my administrator doesn’t allow that.

My feeds have been flooded with it over the past 24 hours, and even some prominent privacy groups have been amplifying the hysteria. The panic claims everyone is about to lose full phone access unless they submit to digital ID checks.

While the actual situation stems from recent Westminster pressure on tech giants around device-level age controls and online safety, the viral framing is completely overblown. There’s no law turning every adult’s phone into a brick tomorrow.

That said, the underlying trend of pushing age-verification and filtering hooks deeper into OS-level infrastructure is still a massive red flag for encryption and digital sovereignty.

Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution: set your privacy preferences in the browser once, and never see another banner. Unfortunately, the tracking industry is pushing back – and so far, they’ve been successful. We need YOUR help to #KillTheCookieBanner!

What kind of pre-enshittification tech do you all use? Stuff where ppl look at you like you’re an alien b/c nobody does it that any more.

Me ->

Oldschool offline mp3 player rather than Spottify or other streaming or phone app, to use when running.

Paper books rather than e-books.

DRM free games I buy on GOG to avoid rootkitting my own comp.

Wired speakers rather than smart speakers.

Old ass pre-connected car.

Prob more but I can’t think of it all rn.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Privacy is surveillance

Just saw this on F-Droid (well actually on IzzySoft) and thought I’d pass it along. Haven’t tried it, please don’t kill the messenger, just sharing…

Yet they fail to understand that safety theater was never the goal but freedom and the avoidance of corporate tyranny was the goal. It was never safe just unpopular. Capitalism gonna capitalism 🤷‍♀️… oh the gipity

Proton Mail contacts → Android system address book.

A GPL-3.0 Android app that signs in to a Proton Mail account, decrypts the user’s contacts client-side, and exposes them to ContactsContract so they appear in the system Contacts app (and any other app that reads contacts) the same way WhatsApp or Telegram surface their own contact directories.

🔗 Github link

I picked this phone from Backmarket for 70 USD. I cleaned it up and started debloating and slightly degoogling it. The bootloader is locked unfortunately, but you can debug this phone.

It runs very smooth for being 7 years old and running on Android 11 (upgraded from Android 9).

Wifi calling and texting from Delta chat works, i even tried the video calling and suprisingly, it worked really well too. Now i just gotta try out the data.

1. Apps being used: (everything except from Trip Plans and Grab are downloaded from Droid-ify)

• Trip Plans: this is the app i gotta use to communicate with my group on my trip. This and Grab are the only “Google” apps on here.
• Grab: Southeast Asia version of Uber
• Mucke: Music Player
• Episteme: Book/PDF reader
• Ciphernotes: Note taking app
• Etar: Calander
• NFC Alarm Clock: setting alarms and timers
• Binary Eye: app to read bar codes and QR codes
• BlockAds: ad and tracker blocker
• GeauxWeather: Weather App
• Cache Cleaner: (not located on screen) this app helps clean out all cache in your system and user apps. Can also be set to remove and delete data.
• Keyboard: AnySoftKeyboard
• Browser: Ironfox
• Ripple( not located on screen) a app to trigger an action to protect privacy, depending on what app it is. Some apps hide/disguise or delete data, etc.

I’ve heard a lot about AirVPN, but it doesn’t have an app on Fdroid or anything. Yes you can download it directly from their site, but that is a little cumbersome.

Another option I’m considering is Windscribe.One major knock against it (and the same thing for AirVPN) is that htere is no tutorial available for installing the wireguard version on openwrt.

I really don’t know enough about these. Windscribe has been sort of tested in court (again that was in Greece, and they don’t have the same might of an authoritarian state as the US or some place), so that’s a plus.

I don’t know, I’m so confused that it sort of makes sense to stick with Mullvad at times.

I already escaped everything big tech related except for my iPhone, but i will get myself a GrapheneOS pixel at some point. My biggest problem right now is my photos being stored on icloud. What can i do to prevent that?

my home network isnt trustworthy and i cant change anything about it becuase its not mine. my mom has a virus on her computer and she doesnt let me do anything about it (she says im trying to spy on her and ill mess with her stuff even though the virus is spyware lol)

also i go in public and use the wifi i dont want a virus or be spyed on anywhrre (i hate shcool) you cant go in the back and mess with other peoples stuff

im using framework (12 i think) with qubes but i want to use a normal computer with a normal gamnig distro (the framework will explode if i use qubes and play games im sure) (if i could play games on qubes privately it would make me very happy)

wqat do i do

I’m using lunar client and its pretty decent but im kinda worried about data collection. It’s probably not horrible but still, i want to be pretty sure that it doesn’t collect any data, or atleast not a lot. I want something like lunar just more private and maybe foss as well? Also it needs to work on linux

thank guy

I’m starting Aero, a Chromium-based privacy browser. The pitch:

• Zero ads. Not “acceptable ads,” not replaced ads. Zero.
• Zero telemetry. No analytics, no crash reporting, no pings.
• Zero crypto, no VPN upsells, no affiliate links, no AI assistants that phone home.
• Fingerprint resistance on by default.
• Fork of ungoogled-chromium with a minimal patch stack.

It’s not a Brave clone. Brave is a company with investors and a crypto business model — they have an ads program that replaces ads with their own, a VPN to sell you, and a wallet built in. Aero is a project with no business model. Different species entirely.

Repo: github.com/builtbyashwin/aero-browser

Background: I’ve contributed patches to the Linux kernel across staging, networking, media, and filesystem subsystems, reviewed by maintainers including Greg Kroah-Hartman, Dan Carpenter, and Jan Kara. Same patch-management discipline applied to Chromium.

Right now it’s just me. I’m looking for 4-5 people to own specific lanes: build/CI, Chromium patches, features, docs, privacy research. Async-first. If you’re interested, check the issues — each lane has a “good first issue.” Comment there or reply here.

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/9505259

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/77371

Flock Security likes to describe its national private network of cameras and license plate scanners as a public safety boon. “I can think of no greater mission than rescuing our children,” tweeted Flock CEO Garrett Langley, sharing a promotional company video. “Another childremoved suspect located and arrested with help from Flock,” chief strategy officer Rahul Sidhu posted last month. Last week, venture capital firm and Flock investor Andreessen Horowitz put the company’s benefits in civilizational terms: “Flock eliminates crime. Decline is a choice.”

Though Flock’s investors and executives insist its surveillance dragnet thwarts the most serious of crimes, it turns out police are also using the company’s technology to go after some of the pettiest possible offenses: curfew violations, loitering, and simply being homeless.

[

Related

License Plate Surveillance, Courtesy of Your Homeowners Association](theintercept.com/…/hoa-surveillance-license-plate…)

When police seek footage from Flock’s more than 120,000 cameras nationwide, they select a category of crime corresponding with the alleged offense they are investigating, such as hit-and-run or burglary. Among the choices is the supposed crime of being suspicious in public, formally categorized by Flock as “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations.”

Records obtained from the police department in Plano, Illinois, reveal that law enforcement agencies nationwide have tapped into cameras in that small town — and thousands more cameras elsewhere — more than 1,200 times while investigating alleged “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations.”

As this data set reflects only searches of Flock cameras operated by Plano police alone, this is assuredly just a tiny fraction of the total number of “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” investigations using Flock nationwide. Records hosted by the website Have I Been Flocked? — which aggregates such logs — show hundreds more of these loitering searches in other states.

The Plano searches were conducted by police departments throughout Illinois, from neighboring states, and from a Georgia town more than 600 miles away. Many queries were license plate searches pertaining specific vehicles; others show police surveilling people on foot for the crime of essentially standing suspiciously.

Flock did not respond to a request for comment.

Police in Norcross, Georgia, for example, conducted a smartphone-based search on January 31 with “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” as the stated justification. It tapped into data recorded by 6,098 different Flock camera networks, including Plano’s, each consisting of an untold number of separate cameras that surveilled anyone who moved past them.

The search logs obtained by The Intercept do not break out “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” separately, so it is unknown in each case what exactly police were searching for. In some cases police appended extra information; the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, for example, searched over 17,000 Flock cameras while investigating “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations – Suspicious person at planned protest site.”

[

Related

Philly Cops Admit That They’re Tracking “First Amendment Activity” Critical of AI](theintercept.com/…/ai-data-center-protest-police-…)

When asked about these queries, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokesperson Josh DeVine told The Intercept that the searches in fact originated with the state’s Tennessee Fusion Center, which is operated by both the TBI and the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security. DeVine referred The Intercept’s questions to the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Flock cameras have also been used to zero in on the homeless: Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, shared Flock search data from the West Palm Beach Police Department with The Intercept that included a query pegged to an “outside agency dropping vagrant off” in the city.

In January, police in LaGrange, Georgia, searched more than 6,000 Flock networks on the basis that someone walked out of a house “with a significant amount of traffic.” Officers from the same agency earlier this year searched more than 15,000 Flock systems because of someone “lingering at a stop sign around midnight last night.”

In the data reviewed by The Intercept, most of these loitering searches didn’t include any corresponding case number, suggesting these queries were not part of broader criminal investigations. Some of the searches reviewed by The Intercept note a “suspicious” person spotted outdoors, without any additional justification for the dragnet.

Jay Stanley — a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s speech, privacy, and technology project — told The Intercept these searches indicate surveillance mission creep. “This is in line with what we see with these technologies sold on the basis of movie plot scenario, dramatic ‘saving the day.’ And yet when you look under the hood, they’re often used to nickel and dime people for the most prosaic offenses,” he said. “They become part of many departments’ over-policing.”

Loitering and vagrancy laws have an ignoble history across the country as pretextual statutes, many originating in the Jim Crow era, for the targeting of Black Americans guilty of nothing other than existing in public. Some of these laws have been struck down because of the extent to which they criminalize the most mundane behaviors: standing, walking, or simply hanging out. In 1972, the Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional a Jacksonville, Florida, loitering ordinance targeting, among other things, “persons wandering or strolling around from place to place without any lawful purpose or object” and “habitual loafers.”

Stanley pointed out that any guardrails against abuse of Flock’s camera networks is entirely self-enforced by the company, which has an interest in police using it as much as possible, and self-oversight by the police themselves. “We know that police stations don’t seem to be doing this,” he added. “Most police departments are not really paying attention.”

The post Cops Are Using Flock to Spy on People for the Crime of Standing Around appeared first on The Intercept.

---

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

I got a pretty great openwrt router, I want to set it up as privacy respecting as possible.

I am aiming to set it up offline as much as posssible before giving it network access.

I have always used ISP provided units so this is new. It comes with adguard and such but I am thinking about a fresh install to be safe?

Anybody know of anything else that would be quite wise to purchase sooner than later, due to potential (or incoming) regulation that would be regarded as privacy-infringing to enforce? I was thinking about this because I’ve been pondering a high-quality 3D printer purchase for this reason.

Advice for varying levels of budget would be quite nice, too; I partially intend on this being a post people may want to revisit.

I’m seeing lots of people subscribing with their real email address to different newsletters or random websites that they might use once in a while.

For a couple of years I have run a proxy SMTP that I kept to forward emails to my real address, as a privacy measure.

People tend to use the “+” sign in order to identify if their address was sold, for example signing up with “michael.john+amazon@gmail.com”, now what most do not realize is the fact that when selling data to third parties, most companies parse their email lists and clear our those “+” sign. (Source: I have worked with companies that do that)

I found the relay from Mozilla to be massively useful in this case, so if anyone is interested, have a try with it:

relay.firefox.com

As a side not: If you’re using firefox, it integrates nicely into your browser, right clicking on a field and selecting “Use relay mask” is enough to generate an instant address so you can easily rotate them for each service.

US military officials say they have disabled advertising trackers on a range of phones and computers, according to letters released on Friday by the US senator Ron Wyden and ⁠statements given to Reuters.

The development follows reports ​that commercially available location data had been used to target American forces in the Middle East.

The air force told Wyden it disabled the advertising identifiers on computers and mobile phones two ⁠months ago. US Special Operations Command said in a separate letter that it had “recently” disabled them on its Windows devices. The army told Reuters that advertising IDs tied to mobile devices had been disabled since earlier this year.

im tryna get a mini pc and make it a streaming box, but i of course need a remote but the ones that actually look comfortable seem to have microphones in them, and i don’t think that i will take it apart to remove the microphone. So should i just not care since im gonna use it on linux or is there an easier way to remove/break the microphone?

also does the lg remote with the motion controlled cursor thingy work on every tv or does it need to be an lg?

thank guy

every site wants it but it can easily fingerprint you

not everyone wants or can live in a cabin in the woods off grid

what do you do

Edit -> putting link here instead of in post URL to avoid auto-embed of YT vid.

motorbiscuit.com/meet-floridas-flock-blocker-the-…

77 yo guy in Florida sits in front of Flock cameras for hours, holding up a strategically placed protest sign. There are social media claims the man was arrested. But that looks like misinfo. Police talked to him, but journalists found no arrest record, plus,

Police have said that his protest is legal because he is not damaging or tampering with the cameras.

Gunn uses a 12-foot pole from his pool and a broomstick to extend it. He attaches the sign to the end and positions it in front of the camera lens. So anyone accessing footage from that Flock camera will only see the sign “Down with the Flock.” He is careful to choose only Flock camera locations where he won’t obstruct sidewalks, WUSF reported.

A man of the people. And of the pedestrians!

Anyone in or near St Pete should buy this guy free lunches.

From the Verge, Americans are cheering for vigilantes who take down Flock cameras

https://xcancel.com/TechEmails/status/2099214399840059428

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/51620960

Resistance to Meta smartglasses is increasing around the world!

It’s interesting to see how these kinds of corporations don’t really care about or put significant effort into helping people with disabilities (or really anybody), while using them for PR whenever they get a chance.

about.fb.com/…/free-ai-glasses-for-every-blind-ve… (June, AFTER all the privacy scandals)

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/51729610

🧑‍⚖️ Love how they are going after Meta in “Alvarez v. Meta” for their use of Instagram user biometrics to train #AI (EMU) plus their Smart Glasses and MetaAI facial recognition software (NAMETAG) 🥸 This could turn into a major win for everyone’s privacy❣️

The full CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT: biometricupdate.com/…/Alvarez_et_al_v_Meta_Platfo…

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/9497419

The Millennium Problems are a set of the most important open problems in mathematics. so far only 2 have been solved: the Poincare Conjecture by Grigori Perelman in 2010 and today OpenAI released this openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

The only problem is, that their AI didn’t even come up with the solution itself. Mathematicians working on the same problem recently made big strides in solving the Navier Stokes equations, and their chat logs were scraped and used in training data before they could release the proof themselves.

Here is the unpaywalled statements of the Mathematician: mastodon.social/…/117233413705701198

Western AI companies have been tackling a bunch of open problems and techbro chuds cannot shut up about it, this is just Marketing and the fact they have to steal real people’s work to do so just proves it. They really want that IPO moneyyy

yea

I wrote a blog post about encryption.

The subpoena to REI was one of 92 sent as part of HSI’s (Homeland Security Investigations) investigation into the defendants, according to the court filings. Other recipients included social media companies, airlines, telecom providers, a car rental company, and a state employment agency. At least one subpoena sent to an unnamed airline, the filings allege, asked not only for information about a defendant’s past flights, but also requested that the airline give HSI a “lookout notification” about the defendant’s travel in the future

[…]

The subpoenas sent by HSI agents are also known as 1509 customs summons, and are meant to be used to request information related to imports and exports. However, since the start of the Trump administration, WIRED and other news outlets have reported on DHS’s (Department of Homeland Security) attempts to unmask online critics using the legal tool, which can be sent without the oversight of a judge or a jury

Bit of an uphill fight with captchas everywhere. Do people here conduct all online activity over VPN whenever possible? Only for the sensitive stuff? Or perhaps the inverse because the bank already knows you? Maybe when travelling or getting around region blocking? Something else?

The one provided by my work aside, I realized that I don’t have any consistent rules around using VPN. Except sometimes, you know, when downloading ISO’s for my favorite distos.

cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/69605722

A self-written blog after conducting a study about Google Chrome privacy invasive practices.

cross-posted from : lemmy.zip/post/70348978

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/9504907

In a wide-ranging conversation about threat monitoring and analysis, the interview also touches on monitoring activists. “Last year we had an executive travel into a major city when we received some intelligence through Samdesk about a planned protest,” Ellison said. The originally scheduled protest was moved up due to permitting issues. “Samdesk gave us about 60 minutes of advanced notice that the protest organizers had moved the timeline,” Ellison explained. “That extra hour was critical. Without it our executives would have departed their meetings, they would have ran right into the heart of the disruption.”

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/51671840

📌 Pinterest used ~500 Million ROWS¹ of user pins² to train it’s AI!

Data from 2009-Now, however the Social Media corp claims “users have granted Pinterest a license”.

What license? Pretty sure AI training fine print wasn’t a thing in 2009!

It even includes “limited personal information”.

Grounds for a lawsuit? 🤓

¹ Never heard of this unit ever before, but even if we assume 1 ROW = 4-6 Pins that is 2-3 BILLION user Pins!

² Post would sound way worse wouldn’t it?

🔗 Source: help.pinterest.com/en/article/ai-at-pinterest

Im going to be going on vacation and travel in November, and honestly, this is needed. I’m on the lookout for a secondary phone that i can degoogle real quick, put the neccessary apps that i need and just call it a day. I’m already prepping my family and stating that im not gonna bring my primary phone. I was wondering what do you guys use, if any of yall bring a secondary phone. (FYI: I am in the US and will be traveling internationally)