*client calls in*

Me: good morning, how can I help you?
Client: my ip is blocked, could you unblock it for me?
Me: certainly! What's your ip address? Then I'll have a look.
Client: I'm not giving you my ip?! That's too privacy sensitive.
Me: 😶
Me: 😶
Me: 😶
Me: sir, I'm very keen on my privacy myself but without that information I can't do much for you 😬
Client: ah so you're refusing to help me?
Me: not like that, it's just very hard to lift an ip block for me when I don't know the ip address.
Client: you just don't want to help, fine.

*click*

😶

My mentor/guider at my last internship.

He was great at guiding, only 1-2 years older than me, brought criticism in a constructive way (only had a very tiny thing once in half a year though) and although they were forced to use windows in a few production environments, when it came to handling very sensitive data and they asked me for an opinion before him and I answered that closed source software wasn't a good idea and they'd all go against me, this guy quit his nice-guy mode and went straight to dead-serious backing me up.
I remember a specific occurrence:
Programmers in room (under him technically): so linuxxx, why not just use windows servers for this data storage?
Me: because it's closed source, you know why I'd say that that's bad for handling sensitive data
Programmers: oh come on not that again...
Me: no but really look at it from my si.....
Programmers: no stop it. You're only an intern, don't act like you know a lot about thi....
Mentor: no you shut the fuck up. We. Are. Not. Using. Proprietary. Bullshit. For. Storing. Sensitive. Data.
Linuxxx seems to know a lot more about security and privacy than you guys so you fucking listen to what he has to say.
Windows is out of the fucking question here, am I clear?

Yeah that felt awesome.

Also that time when a mysql db in prod went bad and they didn't really know what to do. Didn't have much experience but knew how to run a repair.
He called me in and asked me to have a look.
Me: *fixed it in a few minutes* so how many visitors does this thing get, few hundred a day?
Him: few million.
Me: 😵 I'm only an intern! Why did you let me access this?!
Him: because you're the one with the most Linux knowledge here and I trust you to fix it or give a shout when you simply can't.

Lastly he asked me to help out with iptables rules. I wasn't of much help but it was fun to sit there debugging iptables shit with two seniors 😊

He always gave good feedback, knew my qualities and put them to good use and kept my motivation high.

Awesome guy!

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

So, as everyone knows on here by now (or, a lot of ranters), I am a fervid privacy person.

Appearantly a new surveillance law in my country is about to extend mass surveillance/hacking a lot. So here a rundown of what they are about to be allowed to do (stuff that is not okay imo and this is the reason I am so pro-privacy):

- Mass Data Gathering: The intelligence agency over here (lets call it IA from now) can pretty much record everything send through the country.

- Extra Protection: If they want to conduct surveillance on journalists/lawyers, they have to go through extra channels first at least.

- Data/survaillance sharing: The IA is allowed to share their raw/filtered data with foreign intelligence agencies without limits. Also, they're allowed to conduct surveillance based on foreign requests.

- Secret DNA database: A secret DNA database will be created which can store the DNA profiles of any person who has commited any kind of crime. These profiles are allowed to be stored for a maximum of 30 years. This database is allowed to be shared with any foreign intelligence agency.

- Hacking: Unlimited power to hack any device deemed neccesary to hack in relation to crime. From computers to smartphones and so on. Also, it's allowed to use zero-days without reporting them to the vendor (we have seen what can go wrong with that through the ShadowBrokers scandal).

- Automatic Database Collection: They are allowed to directly tap into any database they see required (banks, healthcare, messaging services and so on). Practically this can lead to backdoors being build in because if you don't cooperate, you can go to prison. (mother of god I am not using anything closed source anymore if possible).

So yeah, this is pretty much the reason why I am so privacy consious. This country is fucked.

I work at a small retail store and we have quite a few regular customers who know I'm studying computer science because I'm always coding at work on my laptop.

One lady who comes in quite often and is very sweet asked me if I would take a look at her phone. She said she bought it and paid the owner of a phone repair store to set it up for her, but was felt like he did something weird to it. I told her I wasn't an expert but would look at it.

Oh my god. This guy set up her phone connected to his own personal icloud account. All of his music was on there. All of his contacts were on there. All of his pictures were on there. Even nude pictures of multiple people that this lady said she definitely does not know. I tell her this is very very wrong and no one in their right mind should've set her phone up this way.

I automatically think to factory reset. I'm unfamiliar with iPhone, as the last time I used one was an iPhone4 many years ago. I was unaware that apple applies an authentication lock when the phone is reset.
The authentication is set up underneath yet ANOTHER email address that belongs to this guy, as this lady promised me she has no knowledge of any email address similar to the one listed, nor does she have access to it.

I tell her to call the guy and ask for her money back and to unlock her phone so that she can reset it herself.

He claims that he cannot accept refunds if a factory reset has been performed.

Uhm, I am calling SOOOOO much bullshit. There should be absolutely no reason why the owner of the phone cannot factory reset it. The owner should be able to do ANYTHING she wants with it, without being locked out of it because some creep at a repair store did NOT DO HIS JOB CORRECTLY AND HE KNOWS IT. Why else would he claim he can't refund if it's been reset, because he KNOWS she got locked out.

So long story short I talked on the phone with him and cussed him out telling him he was wrong for taking advantage of someone who doesn't know much about technology and that he was invading privacy and violating her security and that i would report him if he didn't fully refund her and unlock her phone.

He gave her all of her money back, unlocked the phone (which she is deciding to sell because she got so scared by this), and I'm still filing a complaint against this man and his store. Who knows how many more clueless people he did this too. Fucking scumbag.

In may this year, the new mass surveillance law in the Netherlands went into effect. Loads of people were against it with the arguments that everyone's privacy was not protected well enough, data gathered through dragnet surveillance might not be discarded quickly after the target data was filtered out and the dragnet surveillance wouldn't be that 'targeted'.

They were put into the 'paranoid' corner mostly and to assure enough support/votes, it was promised that:
- dragnet surveillance would be done as targeted as possible.
- target data would be filtered out soon and data of non-targets would be discarded automatically by systems designed for that (which would have to be out in place ASAP).
- data of non-targets would NOT be analyzed as that would be a major privacy breach.
- dragnet surveillance could only be done if enough proof would be delivered and if the urgency could justify the actions.

A month ago it was already revealed that there has been a relatively (in this context) high amount of cases where special measures (dragnet surveillance/non-target hacking to get to targets and so on) were used when/while there wasn't enough proof or the measures did not justify the urgency.
Privacy activists were anything but happy but this could be improved and the guarantees which were given to assure privacy of innocent people were in place according to the politicians... we'll see how this goes..

Today it was revealed that:
-there are no systems in place for automatic data discarding (data of innocent civilians) and there are hardly any protocols for how to handle not-needed or non-target data.
- in real life, the 'as targeted dragnet as possible' isn't really as targeted as possible. There aren't any/much checks in place to assure that the dragnets are aimed as targeted as possible.
- there isn't really any data filtering which filters out non-targers, mostly everything is analyzed.

Dear Dutch government and intelligence agency; not so kindly to fuck yourself.

Hardly any of the promised checks which made that this law could go through are actually in place (yet).

Fuck you.

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

Watching the Dutch government trying to get through the public procurement process for a "corona app" is equal parts hilarious and terrifying.

7 large IT firms screaming that they're going to make the perfect app.

Presentations with happy guitar strumming advertisement videos about how everyone will feel healthy, picnicking on green sunny meadows with laughing families, if only their app is installed on every citizen's phone.

Luckily, also plenty of security and privacy experts completely body-bagging these firms.

"It will connect people to fight this disease together" -- "BUT HOW" -- "The magic of Bluetooth. And maybe... machine learning. Oh! And blockchain!" -- "BUT HOW" -- "Shut up give us money, we promise, our app is going to cure the planet"

You got salesmen, promising their app will be ready in 2 weeks, although they can't even show any screenshots yet.

You got politicians mispronouncing technical terminology, trying hard to look as informed as possible.

You got TV presenters polling population support for "The App" by interviewing the most digitally oblivious people.

One of the app development firms (using some blockchain-based crap) promised transparency about their source code for auditing.... so they committed their source, including a backup file from one of their other apps, containing 200 emails/passwords to Github.

It's kind of entertaining... in the same way as a surgery documentary about the removal of glass shards from a sexually adventurous guy's butthole.

Imma keep watching out of morbid fascination.... from a very safe distance, far away from the blood and shit that's splattering against the walls.

And my phone -- keep your filthy infected bytes away from my sweet baby.

I'll stick with social distancing, regular hand washing, working from home and limited supermarket trips, thank you very much.

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

So the country I live in is going to get a huge mass surveillance law. Currently we're trying to force a referendum because this is highly (privacy) intrusive. We can still sign them for a little bit and a friend of mine hadn't done that yet. His reasoning was that it I isn't binding anyways.

We've got this John Oliver equivilant in the Netherlands who did a piece about this.

I put it on for my friend saying that I just wanted him to watch it. If he wouldn't change his mind afterwards, I wouldn't pressure him or anything.

We watched it.

Afterwards he looked at me with eyes like 😵😧😷😲😮😫.

"they'll REALLY be able to do this shit!?!"
"where can I sign this fucking thing to get this referendum going?"

So I asked him why he suddenly was all for it.

"I'm not much of a privacy guy but this shit just crossed a fucking line".

He's going to sign it as fast as possible 😁

My coworker requested I add a bunch of tracking to our product.

I've previously tried explaining to him (and honestly the rest of the company) about privacy issues stemming from tracking, such as by their beloved Venmo. Venmo tracks absolutely fking everything you give it access to, from location data to your entire facebook, twitter, foursquare, etc. feeds, and sells ALL of it to third parties. It's scary. but! this guy simply does not understand, and/or does not care, and marches right on into all the surveillance, loudly singing the song of convenience to all who'll listen. (Nobody else in the company cared, either. :/)

ugh.

Anyway, I'm conflicted.

I have to install some tracking, but I can probably come up with an excuse to cut most of it out and gimp their surveillance. It'll still be useful to us, but it'll limit the amount of data the tracking company can sell to third parties.

but they'll push this guy pretty hard on it, and he's as technically-inclined as a smudged glass of warm, stale beer. "Better for your conversion!" they'll say. "How much tracking do you want?" he'll reply. "@ashkin, why can't you do this right now? What else do you need to make this happen?" he'll firmly inquire. and so I'll be forced to make it happen...

ergh

I have a pi-hole setup in my network for ad and tracker blocking and am dual-booting my pc.
I recently noticed just how much data windows really is trying to gather from my machine.
So I took the pi-hole graph and you can VERY clearly see the os switch. All this useless traffic coming from windows. (This is with all the privacy relevant options inside the settings already turned off!)

In 2008 I took my first web development job for an agency that's no longer around. There was a Vice President there by appointment from our coke headed owner who really liked to micromanage and invade privacy with key loggers and screencap spyware to "manage" us. I found out because my machine would snag when moving the mouse cursor and sometimes I'd accidentally paste the screenshot into photoshop just before the software cleared the clipboard. Anyway, I wasn't supposed to know I was being monitored so I just unplugged my network cable and killed the service running the jank ass spyware. I'd delete it when no one was looking and wipe out the cache of screencaps it would compile every day. It was basically a troll vs troll stalemate for weeks. Finally they gave in and told everyone what was going on so we collectively decided to seek revenge. We bought a piezo buzzer about the size of a quarter that chirped like crickets at random intervals. We stuck it on the underside of his desk inside of the middle drawer area and let it go. They spent so much time and money trying to get rid of the cricket infestation. We let it go on for weeks. I ended up quitting before the gag was up, but damn was it funny to see him squirm in that office because of those crickets!

I hate Linux so much. I mean, how could anyone of you barbarians like it??

I don't understand the hate for windows. It's secure, emphasizes privacy, and it's Microsoft. What's not to love?

Linux is just proprietary malware.

It's funny how every one says Google respects your privacy.

I remember a few months ago, one of my manuscripts was removed by Google because it "violated the terms and services."

First of all, it's just a psychological crime thriller about murder. I read the terms and services and it said nothing about murder, so I didn't violate anything.

Second of all, assuming they removed it for the reason it was all bloody and about murder, how would they know that? Did they start snooping and read my manuscript?

Fortunately, it was recovered the next day, but if Google cares so much about your privacy, why would they read my document?

!!privacy
!!political

I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.

I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).

I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.

The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)

Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)

Like, scary?

And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)

So I won't be using Venmo. ever.

I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"

I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.

He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."

but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.

I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."

His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."

Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.

and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)

But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.

Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.

He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.

I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*

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!

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!

I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.

So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.

I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.

'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.

I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.

Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.

So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.

TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.

Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.

There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.

I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.

Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.

I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.

Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!

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.

Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.

That time when...

He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.

He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.

He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.

He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).

He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).

He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.

He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.

He set up a new email account for each individual online service.

He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).

He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).

He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).

He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.

He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.

He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.

He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.

He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).

He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.

(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).

He ate a sim card.

He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).

He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.

He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).

He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).

He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.

I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.

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...

Since I started caring about privacy so much my mom thinks that I have something to hide.

Hell yeah I have.

With the recent mark zuckerberg hearing, a ton of websites have actually changed their privacy policies and terms of service, to be much more transparent, so it did have a good impact, but the thought that it took that, to implement those changes is infuriating

Last year at the the Xmas party CEO slips in that he wants the app done by end of February, I freak because I thought he meant both iOS and Android (only dev working on both :/), anyways he wanted specifics for locking out specific people that haven't paid for some in-house training (like in app persons just not in the app lol) it required web development which I'm horrible at, I spend a whole week and managed to scrape together the right functions to do a user lock out, pretty all things considering.

A couple weeks before deadline I'm done :D, I've done a lot of testing, some in-house user testing, changes made all bugs visually possible are fixed.

Now I've been sitting here waiting, it's an iOS app that is currently completed aside from some legal work, which I kept going to boss "hey, we need that disclaimer and privacy policy", he becomes busy for the next few weeks, pester him more, pester another co-worker, only a week ago did they contact a lawyer...

I'm here stuck waiting at a roadblock, developing the Android app sure but for their iOS app that they want released first, I'm stuck on hold, so annoyed, it's not like I can just put on a lawyer hat and just right some shit that says don't use x unless you agree and such.

So annoying, for about 2 weeks I just played games on my phone, I was not expecting to waste that much time lol, I was really expecting the legal stuff to be ready.

Just a side note co-worker and boss that needed to get this legal stuff knew I needed to get this done, since I mentioned it leading up to my completion.

I don't think it'd take too long with Apple when it comes to the review, it's just an update but I wouldn't put my faith in that as an answer. Just hate that I'm on hold, was wanting to finish this app and apply for a new job (nothing against the company more so because I want to go a company where I could get a but of mentoring). But I sit here waiting, working on the Android app, it'd be sad if finish the Android app before their lawyers get back to me with the legal stuff, though Android is a lot easier for me (I did iOS after completing majority of the features they wanted on Android because I was more comfortable working on it).

:/ What a drag

Warning: long rant

I'm sick and tired of feeling like I'm the only person who cares about their privacy

I try, as much as I can, to avoid surveillance. I use firefox, protonmail, duckduckgo, e2e encrypted chat platforms, avoid social media like the plague, and do everything I can to block facebook and google trackers on websites I visit

And it's exhausting

Each search I make means I waste another 30 seconds because duckduckgo doesn't pull the answer directly from webpages like google does

I get weird looks when I give people a @protonmail email address, and I have to explain what it is to them every fucking time

People ask if I have social media, and I either give them nothing or my Github account

And for what? Nobody else cares, no matter how much I explain how toxic google and facebook are to society.

They just say 'I have nothing to hide' as they scroll Instagram, letting Zuckerberg build an intimately detailed profile on them.

They just say 'so what' as they google memes from their chrome browser, allowing google to share that information with god-knows-who

If everyone else has given up their privacy for convenience, why am I still fighting a losing battle?

It feels like I'm fighting a war against big tech by myself, and I'm tired and about to lay down my arms

Fuck I hate bloated app permissions but I guess todo lists that know who you most likely to chat to when taking a dump is what we get for demanding everything for free. I get why Snapchat wants so much, I just find it fucking ironic that this is from a company that founded itself on the concept of privacy 🤦‍♂️

On my personal journey to better privacy!

Wanted to change to Qubes, but since I wind down with games, that won't happen sadly and it seems windows still doesn't support proper gpu passthrough either, so might eventually change to linux host and windows guest or create a VM I use for everything else that isn't gaming, since I still really love the idea of having a snapshot backup system.

So since that isn't quite in my timeframe right now though: first move was to move to firefox, already done the change on mobile (love having dark reader and ublock on mobile!), now setting it all up on desktop, pleasant surprise was for sure that firefox finally seems to have chromes devtools pretty much mirrored, even the mobile suite of tools.

Loading of pages is also finally fast and much snappier than chrome from the first testing I could do (on desktop, on mobile it still kind of sucks in comparison, but I can deal with that).

Please suggest me all sort of privacy tools you got, especially with firefox in mind, but also host tools, be it windows or linux (e.g. some sort of traffic obfuscator that visits random pages that are SFW but make automatic traffic filtering hard, could probably make my own, but if there's something like that already, why not), I'll save all I can use.

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

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.

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.

So I'm on vacation right now to visit family. I received an email from the head of department that, due to our department getting 7 new hires in one day, the seating arrangement has been changed.

My new seat is next to this one developer who's old enough to be my dad. He's a very nice guy and all, but the problem is he burps ALL. THE. TIME. I've never met anybody more gassy. His burps don't stink, thank God, but they're loud enough that it's seriously jarring.

You know how us devs can be completely in the zone until some marketing dickbag taps you on the shoulder and asks you to check your email or help with something that is absolutely not your job and you completely lose all focus and have to start over? Its exactly like that, except it happens every 10 minutes.

Another thing is, my back is now facing away from the wall, towards the rest of the office. The nearest section to mine is management. That means that anybody, including the CEO, can walk up right behind me and see what I'm doing at all times.

I really hate that. Id much rather be next to the wall to have some sort of privacy. Somehow sitting next to burpy guy is still the thing I'm most annoyed about though.

I tried to ask for a different seat, but my manager effectively said that I have no choice but to sit there because that guy is part of my team, and teammates should sit together. He forgot about the fact that, while the work him and I do is indeed related, I've been working on a solo project for the past few months and I don't need to be next to anybody in particular because I'm the only one working on this thing. Theoretically, I could sit in the toilet with my laptop and get my work done just fine. Maybe when I talk to him face to face in the office I can convince him to have some mercy on me.

The bright side is I'm very excited about meeting those 7 new hires I mentioned. They seem to be smart, capable people so I look forward to working with them and learning from them. Every cloud has a silver lining. 😊

I'm currently in the progress of deleting whatsapp and migrating to signal.
The hardest part of it is dealing with friends and family. I informed them about the incoming whatsapp-deletion tomorrow and the results were mixed. One friend told me she will not use signal, but i haven't talked with her that much anyway so... My mother asked me "can you not do this because i don't have space left on my phone?", my father told me "can you tell me about [...] before you go offline?", 2 people don't seem to care, and only my cousin contacted me on signal yet.

I have signal for 3 years now and even invited people to it, but i got the expected response "but all my friends are on whatsapp". Until recently i was the one with the shitload of messengers on my phone but some people can't be bothered to install a second one because i want to take one step (out of many to follow) to widen my privacy.
I'm really pissed by now and will declare any contact lost due to this as collateral damage.

I don't understand privacy advocators.

Am I the only one who wouldn't give up practicality in exchange for "potentially more secure"?

I don't understand so much what the deal is with people who avoid Facebook, or don't trust Google or Microsoft, just in the basis of "privacy" or "security".

Websites tracking you to serve ads? Well, it's pointless because I very rarely buy something from the internet or let myself be influenced, ads are waste of time, just use an adblocker.

I can pretty much upload my whole life or documents on Google drive, even if I made it public no one would really care or read it all. It's like that GitHub project you uploaded but never documented, so no one cares. I usually use alternative software not because of "privacy" but because it has features other software doesn't have.

In reality you realize people aren't that interested in your life more than their own life.

So enlighten me here. Am I the only one that doesn't lose his absolute shit when it comes to privacy?
I know that some companies are collecting data, and to a certain extent, I'm fine with it as long as the trade-off is good.
I like that Google is "learning" who I am and what I like, cause now, I only see news and articles relevant to my interests, and search predictions are much better. Same with targeted Ads. On an off chance that I'm not using Adblock I like seeing products that I might like, which I otherwise probably wouldn't even know existed.
Except for Microsoft. I have no idea why, but that's where I draw the line.

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)?

I start shaking and getting nervous when there is something I really, really want to say.

Today in school we started talking about Amazon Alexa and privacy.
This topic concerns me a lot and I started talking in front of the whole class about Google and things they do to spy on you. After about 30 seconds of me talking I started shaking because there was so much I wanted to say and with so much enthusiasm and also a bit of anger.

do you guys who don't care so much about privacy use a vpn on public wifi hotspots?

and why would you?

Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D

1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?

2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?

3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?

4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?

5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.

6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).

7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?

8) Any other advice you can give :P ?

Fuck these fucking youtube ads! I got blocked on youtube and cant play any video on desktop unless i disable adblocker. Shits so fucking LAME. Fuck off. Switching over to brave browser now and never looking back. Fuck off chrome.

Get fucked google. Now Google dropped to the last place for me from cloud providers. I'll prioritize the pedophille childfucker bill gates Azure cloud over GCP Now! Fuck Off. Shove ur ads into someone elses ass just how bill gates shoves his dick into childrens assholes on the epstein island!

Brave browser found a solution to all this fuckertry! It has built in adblockers for everything including built in vpn IP cloaker trace blocker and so much more for privacy and data integrity. Playing yt videos on brave browser works like a charm with no fucking ads or extensions installed! Everything is the same like chrome including layout development etc, minus ads tracking and data harvesting!

Before:
AWS > GCP > Azure > OCI

After:
AWS > Azure > OCI > GCP

Google ur now worse than a pedophile azure. Deserved to get spot #3 now. Shitheads

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

I used to be a big security guy, not allowing stuff like most of the social media, not bringing my phone anywhere, carrying a RPi tablet for privacy reasons. Very Stallman stuff.

Recently I noticed that I don't care so much.. I see these things as opportunities, for instance Microsoft products could be benefitial for job opportunities, I have some workout sessions on my phone.

I could restrict myself... but is it worth it just to decline some capitalist/politician's row in a dataset for analysis?

But then again I feel as a society I think we should either do this or request this data to be distributed to us as well.

Should you be playing a game of cards, when the enemy can see your hand? What do u think?

I am SOOO fucking sick of being asked if our website and gaming servers are going to be GDPR compliant. All these game owners in a panic changing everything they do just to conform to this law.

Fuck GDPR. In all reality COME AT ME BITCH. The EU wants to grow a pair of balls and act like the world internet police? Bring it the FUCK on. You can't even stop pirating in your own country, so how the FUCK are you going to regulate and enforce this law on HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of servers, when your punk ass government can't even shutdown a single torrenting website.

Give me a fucking break, and shame on you pussies for allowing it. All you people running around scared acting like your private gaming servers are important. I give a shit less how much work you put into your server. I have put more work than most anyone else, but you don't see me trying to act self important as if my gaming server is some fortune 500 company.

Your server isn't important and neither are you. The government doesn't give a shit about your server so can we all just stop acting like this fucking matters. NO ONE FUCKING CARES ABOUT YOUR SERVER.

NO ONE is going to come and sue you for not complying. GDPR is for business, and anyone that wants to argue no look it says right here it applies to all is a fucking MORON. Do you idiots stop and think or do you just believe everything typed out on paper.

THEY CANT ENFORCE THIS ON EVERYONE. They don't have the resources. So use your fucking heads and stop being so fucking scared of a law that has no resources to stop you. THEY CAN"T DO ANYTHING. EU and whoever made their polices, I DARE them to try and touch my server, I WANT them to start something with me, just so I can show the rest of the world why the Internet is still the wild west and why they have no power over me.

You think pirate bay is the only one who knows how to hide their server? You think pirate bay is the only one who keeps backups of their server to be able to re release in an instant somewhere else in the world? Bitch get real this is the internet, a place where a 5 year old can buy hand grenades from the Red Silk Road, and you wanna talk to me about your privacy? Go fuck yourself.

It's not my problem some douche bag went onto a site that used his personal information in the wrong manner. So how about you do what everyone else does and browse ANONYMOUSLY. But no it would be to easy for governments to make their own citizens responsible. Instead they have to hold all of YOUR hands, because you people are to stupid to protect yourself.

Wake the fuck up world, and stop being a bunch of whining little brats who cry for the government to bubble wrap your world so you can live safer. Natural selection is long overdue for a lot of morons still breathing air.

Build my own phone and support the Zerophone project by writing code.

Seriously what the fuck is going on with the development of major companies smartphones. Every year all there is are larger displays, better and more cameras, faster processors and some more 'AI' thrown into the mix.

What the heck am I supposed to do with a phone costing multiple hundreds of euros but locked down with an OS spying on you. The processing power available is hardly ever used because most people just use apps like Instagram, WhatsApp or other messaging services.

I get why larger screens are useful but at some point it gets ridiculous.
Better cameras are useful to some degree as well but there's a limit to it.
If you really want to get into photographing then please buy an actual camera.

Another aspect I'd of course like to talk about is privacy. It's hardly existent on IOS or Android smartphones with Google services. Of course one can install different ROMs like Lineage OS but if I already pay multiple hundreds for a device then I'd prefer it working for and not against me.

And dare you break a single part of your phone. You can't really repair it yourself anymore and one can't even change its battery. Most people either have it repaired or just buy a new one and throw it away. There is so much electronic waste, very difficult and expensive to dispose of, just buried in the ground somewhere.

Summing up: I don't really know where the development of smartphones is heading. A phone is a device you carry around with you almost everyday so I'd like it to be tailored to me and not spy on me.

I hope the Librem phone will be a success and other open source phone projects will gain more attention. I want a phone I can repair myself and tailor the software running on it to my needs. I'd like to write messages, listen to music, make calls, run a WiFi hot-spot on the phone and maybe play some tiny games on it once in a while.

So I was looking into phone app development again (as you do) and I'm working on a simple QoL app for me and my SO that will help us automate some home management and finances stuff. Naturally I delved down the rabbit hole deep and wanted to have push notifications so we don't have to check the app periodically to know when certain things happen... Oh boy... Why is mobile development so convoluted, especially if you don't want to rely on Google Services...

It seems that the most accepted way of doing this is Firebase (FCM). Well me being me, I refuse to use google services for this and I prefer self hosted solutions (for data privacy reasons) which eliminates most products out there.

It also didn't help that my framework of choice is Flutter/Dart, because fuck Android Studio and the insane buggy XML stuff and fuck Android and it's constantly changing APIs...

Well In the end I decided on a rather simple solution and self hosted an AMQP service (RabbitMQ in my case, as I have some experience with it already) and implemented a foreground service in android platform specific code on top of my flutter project to kickstart it and made my phone a queue listener... This now means I can push notifications from my server to the Messaging Queue and it will be pushed into my App automatically!

One thing I found out on this journey was that Android now kills most background services and enforces foreground services to have a visible notification in the status drawer... which I actually approve of. It's a bit annoying that you can start a reliable background service, but I'm absolutely on-board with long running processes started by my apps are constantly visible...

Long story short, I love reinventing all the wheels, especially if it's for free and private... And I also went to sleep at 2AM again because this took longer that I'd like to tune... but it works, and it's google free...

I'm thinking of trying to package this up as a flutter module later, but first I want to do testing on battery life and the general life cycle of the service. RabbitMQ says they have the client library optimized for long-lasting connections and it should be just using a tcp socket, which should pretty much be what all the push notification services are doing anyway. I'm also not completely satisfied with how the permanent notification looks.. it isn't collapsible like some of the other ones from other apps and it's about 2 lines high instead of single line... which is something quite annoying and I'm struggling to find any relevant docs on how this is done other than possible making a custom Notification Style... but I just can't believe that everyone is doing that.. there must be a built-in somewhere -_-... Ugh Android is hell...

Anyway, if any android devs here have some hints, tips and tricks on how to handle this type of background/foreground process stuff and I'm doing something wrong let me know, cause googling this shit is a nightmare too!

Why the fuck is everyone behind this whole privacy thing . I mean what did you expect , servers do cost... you know . No one wants to provide you a service to chat with your shit collecting butler in the adjacent room unless it's going to benefit them .

Stick your face on the internet and want people to date you ?

Understand that your virtual social needs need to be supported by a ridiculous amount of electricity and man power which wouldn't be required if you could just throw out your rotting willie nilles in the open .

All this isn't fucking free .. wait were you shocked ? Oh so you just thought there were a few thousand servers powering buckets of pictures of horse poop that you for some reason thought your girlfriend was interested in . NO!

IT'S PRIVACY you are paying with your gaddamn privacy !! Information pays just like the time you paid a 100 bucks to the boyfriend of your girlfriend to find out more details .

Ridiculous . You people don't like ads . You don't like paying . You don't like providing information . THEN DON'T USE THE DAMN INTERNET .

IF YOU'RE REALLY THAT CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY THEN SPEND SOME VALUABLE TIME TO ACQUIRE ENOUGH OF A SKILLSET TO SETUP A VPN AND STOP POSTING YOUR PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR EX'S WALL ASKING HER TO CALL YOU.

One more honest thing to rant about is ads . As much as you hate them they're an easy way out . I'm not sure why a 20 second ad would bother you on mobile and not on television and I'm not sure why you wouldn't buy the ad company and shut it down if 20 seconds were so costly to you .

I want to rant even more on uninstalling services like Windows and Google for stupid reasons but I'll take a break here . My frustration has touched low levels.

So many people on devRant rave about iPhones because of the better security and privacy, but the new iPhone X starts at a whopping $1000! Sure, you don't have to get the X, but that's what everybody wants.

You'll say "well, I'm willing to pay more if it means better security because that's just the way it is." It doesn't have to be. It would be much more beneficial to actually fight and take a stand for better security and more privacy than just put up with outrageous prices.

Google.

It’s just gotten to big and just dominates. They make some useful tools, but they just buy other companies to do so. But what is worse, is how much information they have on people, I’m going to be honest that I’m not a fully a privacy person but on how much they use that information for I’ve slowly started leaning away from them.

TL;DR : How would you 'smart home' with privacy?

How would you go about a privacy focused home automation/smart home setup?

What I feel is not necessarily important

> some assistant that you can have conversations with.
> Not being in home network to automate.

What I feel is essential. (in decreasing order of importance)

> Being a able to control appliances/electronics with voice/app (optional gesture)
> Have features to automate stuff, like turn on something if something happens (IFTTTish)
> Easily play music from Spotify or something similar, e.g. " * Play some Tchaikovsky."
> Simple alarm and reminder features.

So far I have seen relays and other devices that you add in the wiring and they connect to wifi. They work surprisingly well, but whatever I came across also collects personal user data.

Also not aware of any google home and alexa alternative that can so seamlessly pick up commands through ambient noise.

What are your thoughts and views?

P. S. I would have picked up something like this as my side project, but I don't see my self having that much free time atleast for the next 4-5 months.

How to manage privacy and online presence?

I've seen the privacy advocacy making its rounds around here lately. The concept of hiding as much info as possible is something I'd like to try, but on the other hand I do want to maintain social media and have an outer presence. Additionally, I do want to use some Google services even if I do move my email (mostly developer related things).

I try and be a fairly social person alongside my introverted dev life, so this has been my dilemma the past few days. I could move to those obscure open source social media sites but that defeats the purpose of being connected with the non-tech people in my life.

Question: What do you guys think of this logo?

Anyway, here's my rant..

I'm starting to get pissed off with my relative for whom I'm doing a project.

He's coming up with the ugliest logo and fonts I have ever seen in 2018.

I mean it's business so I don't have much say in what he decides esp since he seems to have taken it upto himself to design the logo and managed to make a logo suggestion I made even terrible.

I have told him multiple times to avpid the knockoff wierd fonts and use simple fonts that looks normal.

And yet, he comes back everytime by changing colors in one of the letter n the words 🤦‍♂️

Maybe it's because we are from different generations and we have different visions on what it should look like.

He is the kind of guy who goes on and on about how he used computers and internet back in the 90s everytime we meet!

He probably uses MS Word to design the logo! This is the newest logo he came up with.

If I were to be honest, I would be probably rude in his eyes, since it is his "work".

What do you guys think of this logo? Can only show that much of the logo to maintain some privacy.

tl;dr: looking for suggestions for new instant messenger (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.)

so I used to use Facebook Messenger a LOT, actually much more than even texting (I know I know, Facebook=spyware lol). I wanna ditch Facebook so bad but most of the people I talk to, I message through Messenger, and thus, I don't have most people's actual phone number. so I'm looking for suggestions for a new messaging platform, where these are my priorities:
1. Ease of use/existing userbase (e.g. the more of my friends that are already on it, the better)
2. Security & Privacy
3. the ability to easily find people I know without having their phone number

I can't wait for the release of Snips Air sometime in 2019 so that I can stop using my Google home. It's not even the privacy concern that bugs me, it's the stupid shit like alarm management. To preface, I've had a Google home since late last year and since I got it the alarms have been nothing but trouble. More than half the time when I ask it when my next alarm is, it will respond with "You have an alarm for Friday at 7pm that is going off right now" (At the time of this response it was Tuesday). Then snoozing sometimes just doesn't work, I told it to snooze for 10 minutes, it worked just fine. Then today I made the mistake of asking it to snooze a second time which responded with "Sure, snoozing for 5 minutes", I wake up 45 minutes later, and ask "Hey Google, when's my next alarm?", it responds "You have an alarm today for 7:00 snoozed until 7:15". I have an exam today so luckily I didn't sleep in too late but againg this isn't the first occurence. To prevent this I normally just have a backup alarm on my phone and the one on my phone will wake me up in case something happens. On top of that though I've had rarer cases where it will delete all my alarms and I'll have to go command by command reminding of each alarm. That's just alarms though, I also have it control several IoT devices, and me having to use IFTTT requires the utmost precision in my phrasing otherwise it won't understand ( although this issue is mainly due to how the assistant service trigger on IFTTT is configured ). It still does much better than Siri ( at least my home can set alarms unlike my mac ), I have yet to try Alexa though. Of course my last problem is the hotword, saying "Hey Google" is much better than "Ok Google" but it's still excessive when I have to repeat it for each individual command. This is why I'm so excited for snips air, a set of devices that look pretty great, hackable, and as a bonus much more private that the current options. I realize that I could get a dev kit or set up snips on a pi but the dev kit isn't exactly visually appealing and I doubt I could get something that looks or functions half decent on the pi.