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Hi again!
  • Slamming the "cute" button

    Lady Gaga pushing a button

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    Proton just joined the AI clown car show
  • The thing that pisses me off the most is that they are disingenuous almost to the point of lying in interpreting that survey's results. They say that 75% of users are interested in GenAI, when actually what they asked is whether people have used any GenAI at all in the recent past. And that still doesn't mean they want GenAI in Proton. That's a pretty significant sleight of hand. The more relevant question would have been the first one on what service people want the most. In that case only 29% asked for a writing assistant, which is still not the same thing as a full LLM. The most likely answer to "how many Proton customers want an LLM in Proton Mail" seems to be "few".

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    Proton Mail provided user data that led to an arrest in Spain
  • This is old drama at this point. I'll repeat what's been said the previous times this was posted.

    Proton did what they were legally required to do in the jurisdiction where they operate as a legitimate business. As an encrypted email provider they offer privacy but not necessarily anonymity, and they're open about that. They even have multiple blogposts about how to use their service more anonymously. If you thought that by using ProtonMail you were getting full anonymity that's your mistake.

    In both the cases mentioned the users made OpSec mistakes: not using a VPN in one and linking their personal Apple email as a recovery email in the other. In the first case Proton wasn't even logging the user's IP until the police forced them to.

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    Hosting a public wishlist
  • Thank you for the links, I had found a few of these but some are new. The basic idea is there, I'll see if any of these can work for us. I'm growing more convinced though that hosting a whole app for this super simple use case might not be worth it, I think we might pivot to just hosting a really basic static page for it.

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    Hosting a public wishlist
  • This is way too overkill for what we need. I'm sorry, I've been intentionally vague about the context for this but I guess it's too unclear. We're an activist group planning a protest. We might have to get this set up literally tomorrow and every penny comes out of (mostly my) pocket. We're also all paranoid about opsec and anonymity, which is why the requirement about avoiding corporate services is there. Perhaps I should have posted this in a privacy focused comm instead, I apologize.

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    Hosting a public wishlist
  • It's pretty overkill for what we need, and it would still fall under "corporate" for us. At that point I could just go for the static Notion page which I can get live in 5m for free.

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    Hosting a public wishlist
  • We can set up all of those but again, that's kinda expensive for us rn. What's the benefit of using a CMS like Joomla versus wishthis, or even a basic Caddy/Nginx webserver with a static page?

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  • I'm involved with an org that needs to set up a public wishlist for supplies for a project. The rough requirements are as follows:

    • Public webpage with a static URL
    • Can be easily edited by non-technical people
    • Editing requires authentication
    • Avoiding corporate services, especially avoiding tracking of both users and admins
    • As cheap as reasonably possible
    • As quick to set up as possible

    Nice to have:

    • Hosted under a custom domain
    • Supports users "reserving" items so multiple people don't all supply the same stuff

    One option I considered would be running something like wishthis in a VPS under our own domain, but this is kinda expensive, complex, and I don't trust wishthis' auth. A different option could be just having a static page in something like Notion or Github pages, which would be free but relies on corporate services we don't trust.

    Is there a middle ground between the two previous options? Or a better solution that fits most of the requirements?

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    Need tech support (android bullshit) (resolved)
  • I believe you need root to access those, plus a file manager that supports it (I use Mixplorer which does). Otherwise, as someone else suggested, you can access them from a computer over ADB or MTP.

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    Can someone explained what hexbear is?
  • They're insufferable commies who keep attacking other parts of the Fediverse by... uh... commenting on posts and... ehm... responding aggressively to bigoted content. They've got all these sick ass stickers that we don't and they keep flexing them in our replies which drives me crazy.

    Their instance is an authoritarian distopia where queer people feel safe and they don't waste time debating the same wrong liberal talking points every time. Also you can just call someone a dumbass if you disagree with them: a totalitarian nightmare.

    Worst of all they go around straight up bullying other Fediverse users: right now I'm locked in a bathroom stall that a Hexbear user shoved me into. I've been here for an hour missing my maths class, and I've had to drink the toilet water. My tummy is starting to hurt. Stay away from Hexbear users...

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    Proton Pass open source password manager is now available on F-Droid
  • Nice! Kudos to Proton for not abandoning their promise to publish their sources... Hoping to see Calendar on there soon too.

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    The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
  • This is such an amazing article, The Verge's staff is still capable of some excellent journalism.

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    Is BlockTheSpot for Spotify desktop safe? Also, xmanager?
  • I had high hopes when I tried it out but frankly it's been almost unusable for me. Terrible performance, laggy UI, plenty of bugs, long loading times for songs...

    I don't know if something in my mobile environment was messing with it but I use quite a few indie FOSS apps still in beta and none of them worked as badly as Spotube did. I'd love to go back to it if it improves, but for now it's just not worth the UX pain.

    Edit: forgot to mention. The idea of sourcing tracks from YouTube is cool but causes loads od trouble in practice. I've found remixed versions streamed as the original, tracks with the intro from the music video, tracks with sound effects from the music video, and tracks that just cannot be streamed cause they aren't on YouTube. I know there's a feature to pick which version to stream, but it's quite a bit of UX friction and it didn't work often enough to be a showstopper.

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    Lemmy.ml is supposedly blocked in China
  • Even if its configured correctly to totally obfuscate the data and the final endpoint of the traffic it's still blatantly obvious that a VPN is in use.

    Which is why Chinese users don't use standard VPNs, they use obfuscated proxies with protocols like Shadowsocks and V2Ray, which mask the tunneled traffic as innocuous HTTPS traffic.

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    Custom Feeds Option?
  • Support for this in core Lemmy has been discussed many times. There's an open issue for it that's been gathering dust for a while. Some apps already implement this on the client side I think, not jerboa though.

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    Instance blocks and Threads
  • Other people in that thread have pointed out that it isn't showing posts being delivered to Threads despite the block. That should be testable with other instances, but not Threads since it's not receiving any content from Mastodon at the moment. The concerning thing there is the user still being able to view content from people they've blocked, but that seems to be a bug if it's reproducible.

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    Instance blocks and Threads
  • In the EU companies can't scrape personally identifiable information without consent, even if it's already publicly available. IANAL, and there's probably ways they can sneak around the GDPR, but at least it's not a free for all. It's unclear though how it works for federation. It's definitely not the same legally though.

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    Instance blocks and Threads
  • The reason for not directly federating content to Threads isn't so nobody there can ever see my amazing posts, it's so Meta can't easily profile me. Scraping public posts on a different platform would probably be illegal, at least in the EU, and reposts don't give them a lot of data about me. Federating content, however, would give them most of the same data that Mastodon has on me without even having to ask.

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    Instance blocks and Threads
  • This post from Eugen Rochko mentions that blocking Threads at the user level "stops your posts from being delivered to or fetched by Threads". Basically, the user-level instance block is bidirectional.

    Limited federation mode is a different feature, at the admin level. It doesn't really affect the delivery of posts in either direction, it just hides the blocked instance's content from the global feed. Defederation on the other hand is indeed bidirectional, but again it's on the admin level rather than users'.

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    Instance blocks and Threads
  • Mastodon instance blocks are already bidirectional AFAIK: if you block an instance your content does not get federated with them. I was actually surprised that this does not seem to be the case for Lemmy. I don't think this break any core abstraction of AP...

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  • With debate raging in the Fedi about Threads' federation, I was having a discussion with another user about the recently implemented instance blocks. They pointed out that, blocking an instance simply hides their content from your feed but doesn't prevent your posts from being sent to them. Firstly, is this correct? Is this how instance blocks are implemented in Lemmy? If not, has this been discussed before? I couldn't find such a discussion in Github issues...

    It seems that many people have concerns about Meta's use of their data, and would like to opt out of sharing their content with Threads. Is there any way to do this in Lemmy right now, or any plan to implement such a feature?

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    Erik Moeller on Mastodon: There's a common false dichotomy about Threads [...]
  • Ah ok this I'm not sure about. I mean, Lemmy added instance blocks as well in the latest release (0.19), but it seems that, unlike Mastodon, this only hides the content from you and doesn't prevent your content from being sent to that instance. It does seem like a pretty big oversight, but I haven't found a discussion about this. There might be good reasons why it's this way.

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  • I'm looking for a way to keep track my recurring subscriptions. I just want a nice overview of recurring payments and where they come from, I don't need a solution to actively go and manage the subscriptions for me. Unfortunately my bank, despite being a trendy digital bank, does not have a good built-in tool for this.

    There's a plethora of third party services I found for this (Truebill, TrackMySubs, Hiatus, etc.) but they require you to give them unrestricted access to your bank account activity which seems like a privacy nightmare. I've also found some less invasive apps, such as Subby for Android, but they're basically just nice views over manually entered data. The ones I've found also seem to be single-platform only: even if you can sync your data (not always the case) you can then only view it from the app on the same platform.

    Do you have a good solution for this? Something that's a middle ground between giving your entire payment history to some random company and a good-looking local-only spreadsheet?

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    andscape.notion.site Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

    A new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. It's the all-in-one workspace for you and your team

    I wrote this post for a friend, I'm sharing it here for anybody it might help. I got asked multiple times how I download cracked music software so I figured it'd be easier to write it down once. It's meant for people with very low technical skills who just want to start torrenting software without major risks, and it includes a bunch of safety tips that are already known in this community.

    If you have feedback, let me know and I'll update the post.

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