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My girlfriend keeps getting review requests from restaurants we visited.
Then there's a list of all the visited ones on her phone.
Location services is off.
Fucking annoying.
Google sucks.
Absolutely no respect for privacy.
None whatsoever.
Privacy is a myth.
😡😡😡😡😡😡😡24 -
> Open private browsing on Firefox on my Debian laptop
> Find ML Google course and decided to start learning in advance (AI and ML are topics for next semester)
**Phone notifications: YouTube suggests Machine Learning recipes #1 from Google**
> Not even logged in on laptop
> Not even chrome
> Not even history enabled
> Not fucking even windows
😒😒😒
The lack of privacy is fucking infuriating!
....
> Added video to watched latter
I now hate myself for bitting
22 -
I just had to print out some bills for a colleague.
Nothing too bad you say?
Well.. She doesn't seem to care about security or privacy at all.
I opened the website of her email provider at my computer and moved away from the keyboard, so she could log in.
But instead she told me her email and password... In an office with some other colleagues... Multiple times and wrote it onto a piece of paper that the later left on my table.
After that I should look through her inbox to find the bills.
(Yup, I know a lot more about her now)
After finding and printing out her bills, she just thanked me and walked out of the office, because hey, why should I log out of her account?
It's nice that she trusts me... But that was a bit too much...4 -
Google cripples ad and tracking blockers: In January, Chromium will switch to Manifest V3 which removes an essential API in favour of an inferior one. As usually, Google is being deceitful and touts security concerns as pretext.
That hits all Chromium based browser, such as my beloved Vivaldi. The team argues with their own browser internal blocker, but that's far worse than uBlock Origin. One of Vivaldi's core promises was privacy, and that will go out of the window. The team simply doesn't react to people pointing that out. They're fucked, and they know it.
So what now? Well, going back to Firefox because that will include the crippled new API for extension compatibility, but also keep the powerful old one specifically so that ad and tracking blockers will keep working. Google has just handed Mozilla a major unique selling point, and miraculously, Mozilla didn't fuck it up.26 -
Instagram just imported my birthday from my Facebook, which btw, was not specifically linked when I used to post on Facebook.
Mark Fucking Fuckface Fuckerberg's team is destroying Instagram now. Ffs. 😒😒
Why is everyone okay with this invasion of privacy? And when is telegram launching an image sharing platform?31 -
Googe Analytics illegal in EU.
Fucking love you Europeans.
And for that matter any analytics software that sends or stores data in US serves, because it's against GDPR.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/...30 -
To this day I can't figure out why people still drink the windows koolaid.
It's less secure, slower, bloatier (is that a word?), Comes with ads, intrudes on privacy, etc. People say it's easier to use than Linux, but 99% of what anyone does happens on a chrome based web browser which is the same on all systems!
When it comes to dev, it boggles the mind that people will virtualize a Linux kernel in Windows to use npm, docker, k8s, pip, composer, git, vim, etc. What is Windows doing for you but making your life more complicated? All your favorite browsers and IDEs work on Linux, and so will your commands out of the box.
Maybe an argument can be made for gaming, but that's a chicken an egg scenario. Games aren't built for Linux because the Linux market is too small to be worth supporting, not that the games won't work on it...25 -
How do you like them apples ?
Devrant style
No kidding she was looking at me while I was drinking coffee, I almost spill everything up seeing that.
Dammit apple let me have some privacy !
I eat it...
4 -
corporate emails and what they mean
- “changes to our privacy policy” — we raised capital, time for you to leave! good times are over.
- “changes to our pricing” — we are basically acquired, leave now.
- “blah blah community help blah blah” — fuck you, we can't even be bothered to fix bugs in our product.
- “blah blah 30% off blah blah” — yup, the unsubscribe button was broken last time you clicked it. -
Today in horror stories: setting up the local dev environment for a project I'm taking over creates changes and notifications in prod.
Oh and my local dev env is somehow receiving data from actual patients. I don't know how.9 -
Hired a new BI developer. She tested reasonably ok in SQL, and certainly showed good strengths in visualising data, plus had a good attitude in the interview. We hired her. She broke her laptop the first day. We got her another then she complained the camera didn't work but didn't realise the lever in front of the camera was to move the privacy shutter off and on.
Assigned her some work of taking queries that are used in a BI tool that targets the transactional database directly, and re-jigging them for Snowflake which we're using as a data warehouse now, aggregating all our data into one place. Yet, she's struggling to understand why the SQL query she's pasted in doesn't work as-is.
I go over it again; the source schemas and tables are this, but in Snowflake we've named them this. She then bemoans how much work that is to change them all - I say use find and replace. She then struggles with Snowflake syntax errors and asks for a guide on T-SQL to Snowflake. I show her Google and say "this is what I did when I hit these problems - search for 'Snowflake equivalent to T-SQL getdate()' or 'how to get current date in Snowflake' but she still doesn't understand. I ask if she's every had to work between T-SQL and MySQL or MySQL and PostgreSQL or Oracle and so on and she says yes. I say the syntax isn't the same, is it? And she goes oh, now I understand.
She scored reasonably in her SQL test but I'm now concerned there's something fundamental missing in her grasp of SQL. I gave her a detailed demo of the tools, I explained in the interview and on her start about our move to a data warehouse for all our apps, and put her through some training plus gave her time to work through our Confluence pages - not expecting she'll remember everything, but more to ensure she recalls they exist and what the general contents are.
Anyhow, that's my rant.7 -
So fed up of existing.
I am not saying that I am suicidal, but if a truck was accelerating towards me, I would not bother to move.
Even though I consider myself decently successful in life in terms of career, friendship, and to some extent, family. I strongly feel that I am in a very wrong environment.
I have zero trust, safety, love, and nurturing care from my parents and others around me.
I lack physical privacy, psychological safety, and emotional void.
My hypothesis is that if I was in a better environment with slightly lesser responsibilities and needs better met, I could have achieved wonders. With that, who wouldn't?
Why do we exist? Just to suffer?29 -
!rant
tl;dr at the bottom
This might not be a popular opinion, so please, if you throw things at me, limit yourselves only to tomatoes and other soft projectiles. Thank you!
So this being said, i must say ut: i actually like how facebook use this data overall. While i am completly against privacy violation, that data is given up by ourselves with a choice to do it, so we can't hand them for it. However, i think the fact that we got ads for what our interests are is quite awesome! For example because of this i found webcomics and artists i curently hold really high in my praises and this might not have been the case if FB had another business model.
This being said, i just think people should focus on problems more important than how social media manages to earn some bucks, and while is our choise to be part of that we can't simply call ourselves "products". History holds many stories about civilization that gaved no choice if you wanted or not to be a product so we could be at least glad it is not the case anymore.
Anyway, if you read all the way down here, tnaks for your time!
TL;DR: Facebook is no holy church but it actually not so bad, we can find things we get to love or actually needed in the first place in their targeted adds system. At least we have a choice to be part of this or not!11 -
Interesting. A few hours ago I had a nice domestic conversation with my coleague about robot vacuum cleaners. He was talking about iRobot Roomba and I was talking about Xiaomi. Here's the result!
Interesting thing is that we talked in a *voice* conversation. Over Slack. Over Chrome. Over corporate VPN (openconnect).
Where's the spying link? Slack or Chrome?
My bet's on Chrome.
What does that tell you about the privacy of your sensitive conversations? :)
Hide behind VPNs all you like. If you have proprietary software (or hardware in the case of Huawei) - you're being watched and listened to.
EDIT: I'm on Linux, he's on MacOS
9 -
Inspired from Jase's face reveal, doing it again for me new friends.
Image in comments (so I can remove it later for privacy reasons).5 -
I dedicate this article to @Root. It was Root's insight that stopped my magical paranoia and allowed me to look at privacy in a constructive manner.
I present to you the guide to privacy (well, not the actual privacy, but avoiding manipulation by corporations). Enjoy.
https://notion.so/uyouthe/...5 -
macOS facts:
- Darwin core is open-source (https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu). Not the case with Windows.
- You can use macOS without using any Apple online service like Apple ID, FaceTime or iCloud. Terminal will still work without restrictions, and any app can be installed manually. It's totally different from Google services on Android, without which most of the apps won't work at all.
- macOS updates are trivially to disable. It's a matter of unchecking "Update this mac automatically" checkbox in software update settings. Not the case with Windows, Windows updates are universally hated among developers for intentionally complex UI and update services being very hard to disable.
- Almost every feature or default behavior you dislike can be trivially disabled with one console command. Features won't re-enable automatically like I heard update service does in Windows. The only feature I dislike that I wasn't able to disable was a notification about unsafely unplugging a USB flash drive.
- Out of the box, you get a sophisticated disk manager that allows all kinds of manipulation on drives, just like what you get in Ubuntu.
- Just like on smartphones, you can trivially restrict or provide access to certain features like camera, microphone, etc. on app to app basis. I don't know how to easily do it in Linux, let alone in Windows.
- Apart from mastodons like GIMP, I find open source apps for macOS to have better UI than their Linux alternatives.
- Objective-See offers useful FOSS apps for macOS, they help with privacy and malware detection: https://objective-see.com/products....
I don't want to start a fight. Please, abstain from commenting on one OS being better / worse than the other. Please, don't comment on Mac computers being better / worse than computers of some other vendor. I'm very confused now because of my Dunning-Krueger thing (read my previous rants), so I just want to present the facts about macOS that I think deserve more exposure.28 -
After more than a year I decided to download whisper (app) again and see what was being said near me.
Holly shit the app is a total disappointment, first it crashes my fucking phone the instant I open it, I try to open it again and my God I'm presented with adds everywhere and a load speed so slow a dying tortoise would run circles around it.
The app finished loading the content and it's a clusterfuck of insipid commentary and images, "I bought beautiful new panties", "my lesbian friend doesn't think I'm cute", "any girl want to talk to me?".
After looking at the decaying state of the app I noticed I had notifications, apparently my account is active somehow, I tried to delete it but as it turns out the app has no way of doing that, YOU NEED TO CONTACT THE FUCKERS!
What the fuck?! Who the hell made this steaming pile of shit and said it was an app?!
Nothing more to add, I deleted right away.
1 -
You all know that these AI dev tools are reading your code right?
It is sending it back to a data center and doing evaluations on the code. This is like handing your code to an unknown entity with no guarantees for privacy or copyright protection.
This concept bothers me and I would have to consult with my employer to even determine if we wanted to take that risk. I think it is just a matter of time before a bad actor takes advantage of this and rips off a company somewhere.8 -
That moment when you change your username because you a get a bit too paranoid of your stalker-ish manager finding you here
But i start to get why so many people want to divide their online footprint into as many instances as possible, the less is know, the less traceable you are14 -
I just pulled an all-nighter to write an usability testing protocol in Microsoft Word for a medical mobile app.
- statement of consent and privacy declaration; easy: 1 hour
- structuring the protocol and writing the different use cases; easy: 1-2 hours
- layouting the document so the tables don't look like utter shit and adding dotted lines into the columns so the user can write in it without fucking up the whole document when resizing a simple column width; a fucking nightmare: 5 hours
Why is the creation of a nice layout so inefficient to the point where I'd rather design a form in CSS and send it to my printer, get your shit together!3 -
The fun with the Slack continues (context: https://devrant.com/rants/5552410/...).
I got in touch with their support (VERY pleasant experience!). Turns out, even though I specify a `filetype` when uploading a file via Slack's API, Slack ignores it and still scans the payload and tries to determine its type itself. They say Slack needs to be absolutely certain that the file will be readable within Slack.
IDK about you, but that raises some flags for me. I again have that itch to password-zip all the files I'm sending over.
I've raised this concern to the support rep. Waiting for his comments.6 -
It seems like @linuxxx, the man, the legend, who even has their own exclusive avatar face tattoo, had left devRant for good.
The last rant was two years ago. Let's go there and let them know they will be missed.
https://devrant.com/rants/3731158/...
14 -
How must it feel to build pagination for the partner list in a cookie consent popup? Did the dev realize that they and their company are the primary reason for the GDPR? That they are the ultimate bad guys of online privacy, even worse than accumulators like Google who process their data in-house?
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My org (of which i'm basically CTO) has this administrative tool that a team uses to combat spam and scams, which is quite the problem for us.. the tool was written like 9 years ago, by my predecessor, very quick & dirty and unaesthetic and without input from those who would use it as far as interface or UX... it got modded a little a few years later by a kind of amateur coder who was at the time on the spam control team, and now there's this new maybe slightly less amateur coder guy on the team who has written this amateur tool that scrapes data off our site and massages it and stores it on his own server and then provides a better interface, or so they say.... this is all because for a couple of years people didnt want to "bother me" with a request to improve our internal tool, they thought I was "too busy" doing other things... so instead this outsider has built this stupid thing that lives on his own personal server and so now we have these problems to do with performance, security, privacy for user info, etc etc... someone please shoot me....1
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Every fucking time I get an application for simple stuff like cleaning or weight measuring, and it asks me for completely unnecessary things like making an account and requesting access to my gps location, I look up the company and find out it's Chinese. What the fuck man.1
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My dad saw an HP computer with wireless printer on HSN (Home Shopping Network). I was on the point of ordering it. I looked at their privacy notice wh. pretty much says we're going to know wh. porn you watch, with whom and when. Then we're going to sell the info. to everybody who might use it against you. Fuck that. Then I googled reviews of this outfit. Then it finally hit me: you don't order computers from home shopping networks. I'm glad it occurred to me before taking the plunge. They pull this shite telling you how much cheaper they're selling it for as opposed to retail, wh. is a complete lie because they jack up the retail price to make their selling price look cheap.3
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Tru-lyfe CTO (CTC) stories:
I spelled a juniors name wrong in a commit message...
Am I an asshole?
P.S.: it was 100% fully NOT on purpose, it's just an alternate spelling of the name, i.e. Jakob instead of Jacob (not the name of course, for privacy purposes, just an example)7 -
Yeah sure random tech recruiter, I like to be emailed directly on my email account that is only visible in that one regretful commit I made several years ago.
Definitely won't make me paranoid about your privacy practices.
On the other hand, it's refreshing to know that I'm somehow eligible for a senior position after 3 years experience1 -
Android 12, stop telling me every other day which app has permission to access my location in the background. I know, I gave permission, and I want to keep the setting "Allow all the time". Where's the "don't ask again" option?
And why does this happen for an app released by the German federal government (about once a week) but never, ever for your shitty Google Maps that always seems to know where I've been (at least if don't leave my phone at home, which is hard to do in times when you have to show your digital proof of vaccination everywhere yo go). Fucking Android, fuck the Android 12 clunkiness (inspired by Apple's iOS?) and fuck the fucking notifications. This is my phone, I paid for it, I own it, I want to turn off this bullshit. Wait, Google, once I find time to get back to LineageOS/Cyanogenmod you will never see a trace of my digital existence again. Oh, and fuck your "digital wellbeing" as well! At least you let me turn that off. Yes, I know, I am not grateful, but that's what devrant is for, isn't it? Fuck you, Google!2 -
2018 in a nutshell
New privacy terms and conditions emails.
New code of conduct emails.
today i got stack overflow new code of conducts i have never laughed so hard. -
Is there an ios app that records my gps logs for last n day(cyclic buffer)? Privacy is also important: data shouldn’t leave my phone: no internet access.9
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Apart from the fact that I arrived at a good framework at work to play in problem space than in solution space, this post is more about self realisation and a slight progress in my happiness levels.
Monsoons started in India. The vibe somehow had always been melancholic for me triggering SAD (aka seasonal depression).
However, this year I find it cosier than ever. Hot showers, lazing around on a holiday when it's pouring outside, watching my favourite show/movie. I feel very relaxed in the moment, even when work and life is not as expected/under control.
What I realised is that my problem can be solved. I need a bigger house. That would give me privacy, some personal space for hobbies, and put a barrier between me and parents easing the tension and clashes. I could then get married, and with all the money I will save (from not buying a house myself), can be used to pursue hobbies like music, art, travel, etc.
Whenever I relax, my sleep pattern changes where I have longer duration of deep sleep with many dreams (perhaps processing everything). Does anyone else experience such a phenomenon?
Anyway, life doesn't get easy or hard, we just learn to put up with shit.4 -
Things like Mailtrack are against privacy, aren’t they? Especially because it’s not in the control of receivers at all. Or am I missing something?!4
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i once changed all of the passwords of my main online accounts(google, apple, facebook, telegram, outlook) as they weren't changed for years.
i decided unique and long passwords for each of them.😎
immediately after changing the passwords, i forgot all of them. 😵fortunately, i was able to reset.
Has this ever happened to anyone?3
Wow, some guys here have the means to travel to the future!! Cool!! I too want some of that action!