Those circumstances include immediate threats to national security and situations where a person is in danger of death or serious injury.
Well I see a problem there. It doesn’t specify the cause of the danger or the reason the person is in danger in the first place.
EFF missed a fun opportunity to call the Rayhunter “DeCSS”.
This isn’t leaving tech… it’s leaving corporate employment.
Still great options, but I was expecting something more like: pivot to a different role in your existing company and then find another non-corporate use for those skills, or get your apprenticeship in the trades, or become a bus driver.
I wonder how much of that can be traced back to Broadcom acquiring VMWare?
Remember that fingerprinting can be your friend… because it’s much easier to fake an online fingerprint than a real one.
You can generate a unique fingerprint with each online interaction; this means that you will always have a unique identity.
Or, you can ensure you always have the same fingerprint as a large number of other people.
Think of it as the difference between using a different valid loyalty card each time you shop vs using one of the famous numbers that millions of other people are also using.
Of course, in both circumstances, you do give up the benefits of being uniquely identifiable.
Exactly. People see “AI” and think LLMs and diffusion models. Those are both probabilistic translation engines. They’re no more intelligent than an AC/DC converter, just a lot more complex.
However, there are neural networks and sense arrays in the field of AI, and those are designed to replicate the process of thought.
The real route to a thinking AI is likely a combination of the two, where a neural network can call on expert systems including translation engines to do the heavy lifting and then run a more nuanced decision tree over the results.
Thing is, modern LLMs and diffusion models are already more complex than a single human mind can fully comprehend, so we default to internally labelling them as either “like us” or “magic”, even when we theoretically know them to be nothing but really deep predictive models.
Little Snitch on a Mac.
There are an infinite number of programs that could do this. Will they? Probably not.
Best thing is to install a trustworthy personal firewall, and block all outbound network access for all processes, and then enable as needed. This won’t stop Windows itself, but it will give you a heads-up if something else is trying to send data somewhere and you can make an informed choice at the time.
This is why I run my own NextCloud instance that backs up locally and via offsite rotation.
Sure, I could still lose it all, but it would be 100% my own fault if I did.
“Peak” is rather optimistic….
LibreOffice is offline; each person can run the software in their own device to create and edit documents.
It’s features are equivalent to 2010 Office. That’s not necessarily bad, but it’s not how people usually work today.
Collabora lets you host documents on a central server and have multiple people edit at once, dynamically tracking changes and allowing full revision management. Or, you can keep your documents local and not host them if you don’t want to.
Yes it is… but it actually allows for collab features that LibreOffice doesn’t have.
I wonder why they chose LibreOffice instead of Collabora?
The one I use is part of a hardware UTM, but I also use Lockdown VPN on iOS, and https://pi-hole.net/ in a container on my LAN, and then VPN all my devices to my home network when I’m not at home.
Depends on the browser/OS.
My go-to for general browsing is Firefox with uBlock Origin and NoScript, which I also use in Edge; I have a few browsers that are still using uMatrix, and I have a proxy filter that strips calls to .js URLs by default except for specifically allowed URLs.
This is why using a local web proxy is a good idea; it can standardize those responses (or randomize them) no matter what you’re actually using.
Personally, I keep JavaScript disabled by default specifically because of this, and turn on those features per-site. So if a website has a script that requires the accelerometer for what it does, that script gets to use it. Other sites keep asking for it? I suppress the requests on that site and if it fails to operate (throws one of those ad blocker or “you have JS disabled errors), I just stop going to the site.
I’ve found that with everything disabled by default, browsing the web is generally a pleasant experience… until it isn’t.
This of course requires using a JS management extension. What I’d really like to see is a browser that defaults to everything disabled, and if a site requests something, have the browser ask for permission to turn on the feature for that particular script, showing the URL for the script and describing what the code does that needs the permission. This seems like an obvious use for locally run AI models.
Thing is, privacy isn’t binary; it isn’t even a spectrum. It’s an amorphous 3-dimensional cloud.
Total privacy means that nobody else knows you even exist. Nobody wants total privacy, even if they think they do.
What most people want is for governments and corporations to not be able to track their day to day activity, malicious actors to not have access to their identity and financial data, and individuals to only have the information about them needed to connect and relate in society.
The first thing anyone needs to do is create their own privacy and threat models. Identify your personal risks within those models and adapt as needed.
For instance, using a cellphone of any type means you’re using a location tracker. Same goes for any vehicle with a built in cellular device. That information is available to specific corporations as well as government agencies and sometimes third parties with money.
Is it worth giving up that level of privacy to be connected to other people in most places you’d be likely to go? That’s up to the individual.
Same goes for libre software and hardware.
Buying with cash is useful, or else someone is still selling your purchase patterns.
And turn your phone off before you go in the store.
What exactly does “spun off” mean here? Doesn’t Comcast still have a stake in the new org? Isn’t this just changing the lipstick color on the pig?
Security isn’t the size of the app, it’s how you use it :)