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A US senator or judge or whatever his title is said today that he wants companies/governments to build a 'responsible encryption' system.
Preferably that would exist out of a big ass database which stores the private keys of citizens so in case a person loses their private key or the government needs access to encrypted content, that is possible.
NOO, WHAT COULD FUCKING POSSIBLY GO WRONG!?!?!
Seriously those kind of people should not be allowed to have the kind of positions they have.
This shit makes me so angry.45 -
"We care about your privacy [...]"
That's why we make it ultra inconvenient to turn off all of our advertising trackers and give you a broken list of on/off sliders that are slow as fuck. Also, why not just press the 'accept all' at the top of the page? See that big green button? Yeah green is good let's just press it and get this over with right?
Oh and that 'deny all' button? Yeah, a shame nobody actually put some programming into that thing, why not just press the green button next to it? You're only making it harder for yourself y'know...4 -
Dear Telegram, the fact that you're using a service which provides app usage/metrics/analytics kind of is not nice.
"But they've got the right to!"
Of course they do. But, when you advertise yourself as a messaging app focused on privacy, I expect you to behave that way.
And yes, we know your crypto is broken as fuck but that's not the point right now.
Oh and yeah, the next blog item will probably be about Telegram and how not-privacy friendly it is.22 -
So WhatsApp introduced number linking (with facebook) to its users a while ago.
I know a lot of people who opted out (this option was introduced by facebook because of european laws) because they didn't want their number linked. They said that it infringed their privacy (or however the fuck you spell that).
A few months later we found out that that checkbox thingy didn't do anything and facebook would link everything anyways. They got a 10 million euro fine I thought.
I found one thingy very disturbing though. Told some friends about the ability to opt out (when the scandal hadn't happened yet) and they did right away.
Then later on the scandal became public.
Told them about that.
'Oh but I don't have anything to hide, it's alright!'.
Jesus fucking christ how deep can people sink?! First you say that you opt out because you don't want your fucking data linked and when the fucking scandal gets public you act like everything is fine because 'you have nothing to hide anyways'.
Fucking hell.50 -
Privacy & security violations piss me off. Not to the point that I'll write on devRant about it, but to the point that coworkers get afraid from the bloodthirsty look in my eyes.
I know all startups proclaim this, but the one I work at is kind of industry-disrupting. Think Uber vs taxi drivers... so we have real, malicious enemies.
Yet there's still this mindset of "it won't happen to us" when it comes to data leaks or corporate spying.
Me: "I noticed we are tracking our end users without their consent, and store not just the color of their balls, but also their favorite soup flavor and how often they've cheated on their partner, as plain text in the system for every employee to read"
Various C-randomletter-Os: "Oh wow indubitably most serious indeed! Let's put 2 scrumbag masters on the issue, we will tackle this in a most agile manner! We shall use AI blockchains in the elastic cloud to encrypt those ball-colors!"
NO WHAT I MEANT WAS WHY THE FUCK DO WE EVEN STORE THAT INFORMATION. IT DOES IN NO WAY RELATE TO OUR BUSINESS!
"No reason, just future requirements for our data scientists"
I'M GRABBING A HARDDRIVE SHREDDER, THE DB SERVER GOES FIRST AND YOUR PENIS RIGHT AFTER THAT!
(if it's unclear, ball color was an optimistic euphemism for what boiled down to an analytics value which might as well have been "nigger: yes/no")12 -
I realize I've ranted about this before, but...
Fuck APIs.
First the fact that external services can throw back 500 errors or timeouts when their maintainer did a drunk deploy (but you properly handled that using caching, workers, retry handlers, etc, right? RIGHT?)...
Then the fact that they all speak a variety of languages and dialects (Oh fuck why does that endpoint return a JSON object with int keys instead of a simple array... wait the params are separated with pipe characters? And the other endpoint uses SOAP? Fuck I need to write another wrapper class around the client...)
But the worst thing: It makes developers live in this happy imaginary universe where "malicious" is not a word.
"I found this cloud service which checks our code style" — hmm ok, they seem trustworthy. Hope they don't sell our code, but whatever.
"And look at this thing, it automatically makes database backups, just have to connect to it to DigitalOcean" — uhhh wait...
"And I just built this API client which sends these forms to be OCR processed" — Fuck... stop it... there are bank accounts numbers on those forms... Where's that API even located? What company?
* read their privacy policy *
"We can not guarantee the safety of your personal data, use at your own risk [...] we are located in Russia".
I fucking hate these millennial devs who literally fail to get their head out of the cloud.
Somehow they think it's easier to write all these NodeJS handlers and layers around some API, which probably just calls ImageMagick + Tesseract on the other side.
If I wasn't so fucking exhausted, I'd chop of their heads... but they're like hydra, you seal one privacy breach and another is waiting to be merged, these kids just keep spewing their crap into easy packages, they keep deploying shitty heroku apps... ugh.
😖8 -
1. I wish that people start taking back their device ownership. Right to repair is an extremely important thing. Like that Nexus 6P that I've recently repaired by jamming another battery into it, now it's at 110-ish% health according to AccuBattery. And it cost me.. €10 or so? All the while if I wasn't able to get in there, it would've been a €120 paperweight (and that's not even considering the €300-ish (? Someone please fill me in on that) price it retailed at back in 2015 when it was a flagship).
(edit the so many'th: according to https://express.co.uk/life-style/... the base model was apparently £449 at release, haven't been able to verify it though.. point is, a paperweight at such prices would've been quite a bummer, I mean for me it was even one given that it failed a mere few months after purchase for €120.. €40/m for a phone ain't nothing :/)
Right to repair is an extremely important thing, and the ability to do so shouldn't ever be impeded. Users should become able again to service the devices that they own.
2. I wish that people start caring about their privacy again. Google and Facebook and the likes are large companies, but at the end of the day, that's all they are. Large companies. And they're hungry for your data, not because they're selling it, rather because they're collecting it to an extent which they shouldn't. Over at DDG (https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckg...) they explain a very much viable alternative revenue model pretty well. Additionally, there's several tools which you can use to limit the amount of data that's being collected about you. These include but are not limited to Firefox, NoScript, ad blockers (I personally use uBlock), a trustworthy VPN (ideally one of your own), and Tor.
3. I wish that software would become less inefficient. It really pains me to see that applications with functionality that could be implemented in a couple of MB at most come at a size of several hundreds of MB. 1% efficiency, even the inefficient as fuck tungsten light bulbs weren't that awful!!! Imagine what could be done with all the hardware we have available nowadays, if every piece of software would be around 80% efficient as is a common norm in electronics. Just looking at Linux which is still in many ways convoluted, modern desktops with a couple hundred MB of RAM usage? You've got it! So why can't OS's like Windows (although I have to say, huge improvements have been made there over the last few years) and browsers like Firefox and Chrome be more like that? I really don't understand.
There's several more wishes I have of course, but those are the most important ones.. hopefully I'll be able to see at least one of them come true during my life.10 -
Hey devRanters! A tiny update regarding the privacy tips etc site.
So as ewpratten doesn't have much time right now, I'm doing frontend as well for now.
Since some people also offered to contribute content, which I did not expect, I am also writing an invite/registration (based on invites) as we speak. So, this way, I can invite anyone (based on email address) into the CMS so that they can contribute content as well!
Regarding frontend, I'm introducing a system with icons. Icons? Yes, icons, let me explain:
Every application/service will get a couple of default filtering thingies. (not like clicking something and it'll filter anything out, yet) It'll enable users to see what an application does or does not. What the FUCK do you mean? Alright, so, as example, lets say open source. next to each application (read application/service) listed, there will be an open source icon. If the application is open source, this icon will be green, otherwise it will be red.
This will allow for a quick way of filtering stuff out.
For example, if you're only looking for open source stuff, you can quickly filter stuff out where the open source icon is red!
This will apply to things as open sourceness, metadata saving, usage of good crypto technology and so on. So you'll be able to quickly filter out the stuff you want to use (by eyes) through those filters!
Please let me know what you think and if you have ideas, I'll be glad to hear them!25 -
Google sucks!
No, not as e-mail or for privacy reasons. Sure, that too, but it comes with "free" stuff.
It sucks because it's breaking every possible record in the worst, shittiest, most insanely stupid APIs and integrations out there on the entire fucking planet!
It is comically stupid!
Aside from their LOVE of hard-deprecating APIs every few months, requiring constant, time consuming maintenance of every tool that integrates deeply with Google services, some of their APIs, for expensive stuff, look like they've been written by Bobby McFartface from 7th grade.
Take a look at DoubleClick Search (their ad performance reporting tool, that sure does sound like one). To upload custom, additional data, you must pass in a ton of parameter, and they REQUIRE some of them to have a specific, hardcoded value. What's the point in passing that parameter then you dickheads?!
But fine, so you uploaded some stuff using the API. Now you want to delete everything and try again after you fixed a bug - well you fucking CAN'T! You can't delete stuff, you can only mark them as "deleted" using an update call.
Bulk operations? Fuck no!
Can I just add on top? Well of course not! That will raise a ton of exceptions. Same message should be transmitted using the PUT, not POST request, in order to edit.
Can I send everything to PUT? Of course not! You can't edit something that's not there, dummy!
Can I see what's there so that I can update it, and add what's missing?
Well of course not! Why on Earth would you need to see what information is in there after you uploaded it? Who needs that anyway?
Simply send, pray, and hope that everything will be fine (it will not).
Like holy fucking crap, it can't get any more stupid!
Google is a huge pile of idiots who feed on only a single cow - the search engine.
It's times like these when I think that Google right now is the worst thing that exists for everyone in tech. It's dragging everyone down with their monopolies everywhere and complete idiocy in managing them.5 -
A big FUCK YOU to chrome, and a big FUCK YOU to google in generally. First the hell that is code.org, then the chrome. I genuinely want to open a dictionary in google to see if the word "privacy" is in there. Sure, first it was tracking users with by making them agree to a long ass TOS no one wants to read except lawyers, then barely even giving any info and asking for consent with YOUR data, but this is too far. For all you that dont know, LanSchool is an application that allows teachers to see students screens, internet history and more. Its the reason kids can't play games in English class. But most importantly, its a chrome extension. We have to do assignments from home right? So when we logon to the school account from home, LANSCHOOL GETS DOWNLOADED ANYRACKS EVERYTHING I DO. It pains me how teachers can view so much information unfairly because of some unknowing students, my friends privacy was unfairly in the hands of google and the school system. Right when I found out about tit (~2 mins after i first logged on) i made an Ubuntu VM just for goddamn google docs. Back to my friend, he went on some websites not to be considered appropriate, and got in huge trouble. He was completely unaware of the fact that they could see his screen, and I resent google for allowing a third party to manipulate my PERSONAL COMPUTER without my consent. Die google, you ruined android, which had so much potential, and now the web and virtual privacy. You should be <strike>ashamed</strike> dead, and I hope in the future you realize that one day people will have common sense.26
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*logs out of Google on Android*
*has this persistent Google search bar on launcher which I keep on accidentally tapping*
Alright, so I'm not logged into Google to see how it goes. Kind of an experiment to see just how intertwined Android and my life are with Google. And it's going quite well actually, except for my prime apps that I can't seem to get around.
*reads Google privacy policy*
"We protect your data by keeping it secure!"
Hmm, yeah.. you and 3 letter agencies are keeping it secure and out of the hands of other individuals.. that makes sense.
Don't be evil.. unless you're the devil, right?
Fuck you, I won't login like this.
*accidentally opens Google*
*le trending results show up*
- KSI vs Logan Paul weigh-in!
- KSI vs Logan Paul Manchester!
- KSI vs Logan Paul arena fight!
*opens up NewPipe in which I am not logged in either*
- KSI vs Logan Paul!!!
- Did you see the KSI vs Logan Paul stuff yet?!
*logs back into Google straight away*
Personalized search engine.. many hate it, but boy do I fucking love it.4 -
I confess I’m one of those smug people right now who’s never had a Facebook account. Why?
Although I do have privacy concerns, I’m not on Facebook because I truly, genuinely, honestly, legitimately do not give a single flying Monkey’s fuck about what you or anyone else gets up to on your own time.
I don’t care. I have no interest. And I have even less interest in telling others what I’m doing.
I fucking hate people.3 -
To register for Facebook's hacker cup.
Fuck you 1:
I need a Facebook account
Fuck you 2:
I need to enter my address and phone number mandatorily. Because they'll send me a t shirt if I win one. It's not like anyone would not win a t shirt or not want one right? So fucking slurp away at all their privacy data any way.
Here's my address for you facebook
No 666, fuck you street, privacypolis, fuckington offville.4 -
So recently I started swiping on Tinder again, after some years of staying away from it. Now that's all fine, right?
But there's another dating platform that I used long long ago, Zoosk. I didn't even know that I had an account on it anymore, and they've never reminded me of it either. But guess what got in my mailbox this morning.. 32 singles that you'll definitely like!
Now how does Zoosk know that I'm on dating sites again.. maybe Tinder? 🤔
You know what, Tinder wanketeers? Fuck you. Sharing my personal data like that. Shame on you!!!4 -
This rant has been one that I've been wanting to rant about for a while now. Me being drunk as fuck right now (mind, stay awake!) doesn't really help, but meh.
At least Wanblows was able to install its "features" properly... Except it wasn't, being the featureful ShitOS it is.
I want to rant about privacy. Not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". That's been ranted about plenty by the MIcroshaft-loving folks as well as the privacy-aware opposition. Rather, I'd like to rant about the privacy-concious.
I am a privacy-concious-person, with his current status quo being that he doesn't yet know a privacy-concious solution to every data-intrusive "common solution" out there. So I tend to value privacy next to De Lijn while sharing location data to Google with Google Maps. Point is, I do not know privacy-concious solutions to everything out there yet. So I use the convenient over the privacy-aware.
(after review while drunk I was unable to make sense of this)
In the privacy-aware circles I tend to see that it seems to be black and white. You share your data with Google, yet you oppose data collection by local institutes? WRONG!!! YOU MUST BE A TINFOIL HAT!!!
No, seriously I don't want to share my data with Google. Just that they're the only realtime navigation platform with decent UI out there that I know of right now.
Privacy isn't all black and white here. I block any intrusion that I'm able to, anything else I abide to, while awaiting a good alternative that does respect my privacy which I would gladly use instead. That does not imply that "I have nothing to hide". I do, and I have a lot to hide.
So that makes up the black and white nature of privacy, which is a fallacy. Another one is the whole idea of "I have nothing to hide" to begin with.
If you have nothing to hide, would you be comfortable with sharing your location data (IP address, habits, common trends, etc) with me? To share your information with me, to have your contacts share your info with me, without your consent? Of course you wouldn't. But that's what's happening right now.2 -
Me half a year ago: I want to work at Google one day.
Me now: I want to get more privacy and to get rid of all Google / non private services.
Right now I am trying to switch to signal but it's hard to convince my friends, which also use Instagram Facebook and Snapchat to use signal because they don't give a fuck about privacy and can't be bothered to install an app which taks less time to setup than a fucking Facebook account.7 -
I'm so fucking done with net neutrality. the only ones who want it are verion, comcast, and other big isps.
fuck them.
this is fucking merica. nobody wants it, and this is a government designed for the people. I guess it only works in theory.
the talk about this has been fucking exhausting. how much clearer could it be?
how does it keep coming up? so much of the economy is online. why would congress want this? this should be a fucking fundamental right. no bs, just fast speeds everywhere. i hate all the isps thinking that because the world is so reliant on the internet, they control everything.
isps are a service. that's it.
they're not a profiler or advertiser, just a service.
and if that changes, I'll buy a bunch of flash drives and go offline.
bottom line, we should have privacy, neutrality, and a safe web. fuck those greedy bastards.17 -
I. HATE. DELL. WITH. MY. GUTS.
Their low tiers products are full black plastic overpriced fuckshit, if you press too much the cover you can actually destroy your display. Fuck shitty laptops and fuck this shitty laptop in particular. It's slow. It's so slooooooow. It's everflying fucking slow motion, being on the web is like being in the matrix while dodging bullets made of wordpress plugins. The only good thing I can say is that is living right now, it has been... Three years? I only picked it because of high discount and ubuntu preinstalled (that made me think: oh, maybe they have components that are linux compatible regardless of distros. It was not). I'm enjoying Manjaro, when I'll have the skillz i'm going full Arch.
I will start university this fall. It's going to be a math major. I absolutely need something better than this anyway. I am also freaking out because I don't know which genre of software they could want to make me install and if they're windows/mac only. In the meanwhile I do photography, video, design and as you may suppose Adobe is often my go-to; I also have to build a workstation at home. I am freaking out because WELL FUCK WINDOWS 10 AND ITS PRIVACY NIGHTMARE PERIOD.
Which laptop I buy?
How well does heavy software run in a Windows virtual machine (on the desktop, not the laptop)?10 -
Holy shit firefox, 3 retarded problems in the last 24h and I haven't fixed any of them.
My project: an infinite scrolling website that loads data from an external API (CORS hehe). All Chromium browsers of course work perfectly fine. But firefox wants to be special...
(tested on 2 different devices)
(Terminology: CORS: a request to a resource that isn't on the current websites domain, like any external API)
1.
For the infinite scrolling to work new html elements have to be silently appended to the end of the page and removed from the beginning. Which works great in all browsers. BUT IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE SCROLLING DURING THE APPENDING & REMOVING FIREFOX TELEPORTS YOU RANDOMLY TO THE END OR START OF PAGE!
Guess I'll just debug it and see what's happening step by step. Oh how wrong I was. First, the problem can't be reproduced when debugging FUCK! But I notice something else very disturbing...
2.
The Inspector view (hierarchical display of all html elements on the page) ISN'T SHOWING THE TRUE STATE OF THE DOM! ELEMENTS THAT HAVE JUST BEEN ADDED AREN'T SHOWING UP AND ELEMENT THAT WERE JUST REMOVED ARE STILL VISIBLE! WTF????? You have to do some black magic fuckery just to get firefox to update the list of DOM elements. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DEBUG MY WEBSITE ON FIREFOX IF IT'S SHOWING ME PLAIN WRONG DATA???!!!!
3.
During all of this I just randomly decided to open my website in private (incognito) mode in firefox. Huh what's that? Why isn't anything loading and error are thrown left and right? Let's just look at the console. AND IT'S A FUCKING CORS ERROR! FUCK ME! Also a small warning says some URLs have been "blocked because content blocking is enabled." Content Blocking? What is that? Well it appears to be a supper special supper privacy mode by firefox (turned on automatically in private mode), THAT BLOCKS ALL CORS REQUESTS, THAT MAY OR MAY NOT DO SOME TRACKING. AN API THAT 100% CORS COMPLIANT CAN'T BE USED IN FIREFOXs PRIVATE MODE! HOW IS THE END USER SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT??? AND OF COURSE THE THROWN EXCEPTION JUST SAYS "NETWORK ERROR". HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO TELL THE USER THAT FIREFOX HAS A FEAUTRE THAT BREAKS THE VERY BASIS OF MY WEBSITE???
WHY CAN'T YOU JUST BE NORMAL FIREFOX??????????????????
I actually managed to come up with fix for 1. that works like < 50% of the time -_-5
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