Em Adespoton

Just so you know, turning all that off only limits SOME of the telemetry going back to Microsoft. You can’t turn it all off.

I self-host NextCloud myself, which provides shareable calendars, contacts, drive space, photos and collab office suite. It doesn’t do email. For email, I have my own domain and point the MX records at whatever service I currently happen to be using.

Proton seems to be trying to do all of this, but I don’t want one org holding all that personal data of mine, even encrypted. The only people who need access to my NextCloud data are my family, which is much easier to manage than thousands of accounts.

It wasn’t like that before Meta bought WhatsApp. This is why Signal is the superior app using the protocol; Meta stores not only the conversations, but separately stores the address books and the connection meta data and communication web. The actual messages are at least encrypted, but they’re still sitting there waiting to be accessed by anyone with a key (it doesn’t have to be her key).

AI agents can already search all about me.

They only find what I’ve made available for them to find.

Eventually they might be able to link all my personas to physical me, but by then I’ll likely be dead.

Helps that I don’t have a SSN and that credit companies don’t have my correct address.

Also helps that I don’t share photos on social media.

Either is fine. I’d just send it a wall of text and it would hit its token limit and stall.

Unless it was running towards me to protect me; in that case, I’d want Claude.

At first I thought this was the Israeli company run by “ex” Mossad that owns all the VPNs. But after going through the website, the company is called Privacy Inc. and appears to be run by a bunch of rich ex-US intelligence people.

They do a really good job of hiding their staff and company name and physical location, revealing only what’s legally required. That means they at least have the chops to do privacy right… but it always gives me a funny feeling when a company doesn’t stand behind its own brand but instead depends on third party promoters.

And they call themselves a global private telecom, but appear to be very US-focused, with two US locations (but no addresses available).

They certainly have lots of claims and appear to have thought about company structure, but this looks really similar to a Langley shell company to me.

Are there commercial enterprises outside China adopting RISC-V?

Seems to me that’s when we see the tipping point.

Following the successful laboratory demonstration, a prototype chip could be ready by 2030, the scientists said in the study.

The researchers think a further reduction in the thickness of the Mn3Sn layer will reduce power consumption even more. The next challenge, they added, will be to develop a commercially viable bulk manufacturing process capable of building the device at scale.

Aside from the viability of producing the chips at scale with rare minerals, there’s another item I don’t see answered: they’ve produced one of these in the lab — but that’s like producing one transistor. Modern CPUs have ~20billion transistors. How tight can these new systems be packed? If they’re fast and efficient but 20 billion of them would take up a football field, that’s not going to be very useful.

I haven’t touched anything that used Adobe DRM in over a decade….

The provenance and concept look fine; the claim to be the first decentralized VPN rings a bit hollow when TOR predates it by decades. That in itself makes me question the other claims more than I would if they just stuck to “properly decentralized” or similar. Celebrity sponsorship also rings warning bells for me.

But then, using a VPN for privacy purposes seems odd to me too — unless you own both ends of the tunnel.

There have been good writeups on why Apple doesn’t provide gyro data — it can be used to physically track people. This is mostly an issue in apps that embed Safari, such as a store loyalty app that can track your movement while you’re in their store — or in a competitor’s store. Since Firefox isn’t embedded in apps, it’s not an issue there.

Yes, but Teslas are spying in everyone they are in the vicinity of, too. Most cars don’t send video from their onboard cameras back to the manufacturer for analysis.

Have there been actual studies done against the various facial recognition technologies out there right now to see what the minimal adjustments are to break it, and following that, to successfully and reliably be recognized as a specific other person?

All my hardware supports IPv6; my router and modem support IPv6; my ISP supports IPv6.

And yet… I can’t use IPv6 because my ISP won’t turn it on if your modem is in bridge mode; they want to control the entire stack before they’ll let me use it. They only route it from their own hardware.

Outlook: redundant dysfunctionality

It’s a meta-app that consumes other maps, does navigation, and acts as a dashcam at the same time.

And I move more to using OpenStreets, Organic Maps and Sidekick Pro.

Shame that Apple’s going the same way as Google.

I thought the ADL had done a pretty good job of discrediting itself?

Nest and Eero/echo are two brands I wouldn’t trust even if jailbroken. They’ve both been shown to contain more hardware than originally announced after some third party tear downs.

Since by design cryptocurrencies aren’t backed by banks/nations and any transaction is permanent, they are by definition not safe.

At best, you can save out your wallet to an encrypted drive, then write it back to your phone when you need to use it. Make copies, so if one gets lost, you don’t lose the value itself.