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A service that requires a telephone number simply shouldn't be called an Internet service. It can't be used purely over the Internet.

Telephone numbers are fundamentally incompatible with privacy. Signal's leadership knows this, but they don't appear to care.

Me too. Several teams are trying to land grab by "wrapping" Nix with extra stuff.

But as good as flakes are, they still have big problems. flake.lock size explosion, UI hassles, no cross compiling support.

Please put your apps on F-Droid.

Owners may want to disable this in hardware rather than relying on a sketchy opt-out mechanism. The relevant part is the "data communications module". It has an LTE modem and a backup battery, so it's able to transmit even if the car battery is disconnected. It requires a little bit of dashboard disassembly to access. You can either remove it or disconnect the LTE and GPS antennas. Toyota has technical documents available for $25 at https://techinfo.toyota.com.

It would be great if there was some website that collected all the detailed instructions for removing the spy devices from different car models.

Here are some reasons.

1. Cost. I'd rather not pay for hardware and software I won't use.

2. Environmental impact. Unused and unwanted hardware is waste.

3. Unauthorized users connecting to WiFi. TVs are often in common areas. The settings menus have no authentication. So an unauthorized user might connect the TV to a WiFi network.

4. Automatic WiFi connections. TVs might connect to open or partnered WiFi networks without telling the user. Hard to know without an audit.

5. Accidental WiFi connections. Settings menus might be unintuitive (or deceptive) enough to trick users into joining WiFi networks accidentally.

6. Future data leaks. TVs might be recording data and saving it to internal storage. The next owner of the TV could connect it to a network, and years of stored data would be leaked. Again, hard to know without an audit.

Will any of this be available on Linux or owner controlled systems?

Please, stop using phone numbers. There is no reliable way to hold a phone number. The messaging protocols are insecure. If your service uses phone numbers or SMS, that means it's not secure or reliable.

I was never even able to sign up. "Customer service" just repeats the same thing on a loop.

Tech companies will slowly put themselves out of business with fraud detection algorithms.

I wonder how hard it would be to have my personal residence classified as one of these protected places. Incorporate some kind of business or non-profit, make sure it shows up the right way in Google Maps, then enjoy freedom from Google surveillance.

The loss of pay phones over the last 20 years is a loss to society. We used to have widespread access to cheap and anonymous emergency calling.

I fear services will force the use of certain devices, like those on the FIDO certified products list [0]. Will there be a way to use open hardware, open firmware, and user-controlled hardware attestation keys? Or will that be considered a fraud/bot risk?

[0] https://fidoalliance.org/certification/fido-certified-produc...

The services I interact with that support WebAuthn usually only allow you to register one key. Backup and recovery is a confusing puzzle for most of these services.

Yes, and there are surveillance companies dedicated to tracking people and the returns they make [0]. Many retailers now demand personal information like ID cards to make returns. If their secret fraud detection algorithms flag you, you can find yourself suddenly unable to make returns.

[0] https://www.theretailequation.com/

Mozilla is big tech. They are funded by big tech and they support big tech's censorship ideology.

If they want to actually break with big tech, they can retract and apologize for this pro-censorship advocacy piece: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

This is an important document and the best piece of writing I've ever seen on the topic of systemd.

It's best to run it yourself. On NixOS it's a one-liner: "services.invidious.enable = true". Then it will be up at http://127.0.0.1:3000.

Blazing fast and zero annoyances.

It's chilling how quickly the tech industry has coalesced around oppressive and biased social media censorship policies. A scant few years ago, the tech industry was a beacon of free expression.

Are there any companies or organizations working to protect Internet freedom?

Here's the telemetry documentation: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/P3A

So it's sending some amount of telemetry, but it's not so bad compared to mainstream browsers. A more detailed comparison is available in this report linked by another commenter: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

It's a matter of preference and threat models. Brave isn't perfect, and has had some controversy in their business practices. They also have some telemetry and cryptocurrency ads. For non-technical users I still think Brave is the best overall bet, especially on mobile devices. There's a great privacy comparison linked in a different thread.

For more technical people, ungoogled-chromium [1] is probably the cleanest option. It's completely free from ads, telemetry, "pings", "experiments", and the like.

[1] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

It's important to have content-neutral browsers. Several days ago Mozilla indicated their support of the Internet censorship regime: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...

Our critical communications infrastructure is in danger. Are there any serious companies or organizations out there countering this wave of censorship?

We are seeing an emerging system of privatized sanctions enacted by a collusive tech oligopoly.

Safari allows people to view any content they want on the Web. I wonder if they will ever move to only allowing users to go to specifically allowed websites?

Why does Signal require a phone number, after all these years? It's a gigantic red flag that they unnecessarily require a tie-in to the primary governmental communication surveillance system. I've seen multiple attempted explanations, but nothing convincing.

For anyone that hasn't heard it, ten states have alleged Facebook entered into an unlawful agreement with a competitor to manipulate advertising auctions. [1]

[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...

YouTube is not serving its users very well. It's becoming an unreliable service. Creators walk on eggshells to avoid political or copyright censorship. Users have a hard time finding interesting content since so much of it is being deleted and replaced with corporate media.

Zoom's lack of security focus has been a competitive advantage for them. It's clear that many users don't actually care that much about the confidentiality of their video meetings.

The low-friction nature of jumping on a Zoom call with a meeting code and PIN dominates security concerns. In fact, this phrase I've heard people use, "jump on a Zoom," indicates that the speaker expects it to be easy and fast to start the call.

Hopefully it's still possible to develop something that's both secure and convenient. But I fear there's no economic incentive to do it.

I want science to be held to a very high standard. Maybe even higher than "software engineering grade". Especially if it's being used as a justification for public policy.

As a user and downstream developer, I'm glad that the Linux maintainers are committed to maintaining a sound architecture.

The idea that they need to be more polite about rejecting low quality work is puzzling to me.

This is true, but the Nix sandbox does make it a little easier. If you're going for bit-for-bit reproducibility, it has some nice features that help, like normalizing the date, hostname, and so on. And optionally you can use a fixed output derivation where you lock the output to a specific hash.