This article will describe how lemmy instance admins can purge images from pict-rs.

Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)

This is (also) a horror story about accidentally uploading very sensitive data to Lemmy, and the (surprisingly) difficult task of deleting it.

People here's take about why free software ("open source") should be preferred, in my opinion (basically the OpenBSD's opinion) is flawed.

You said "open source" is "good" because it permits having eyes on ("auditing") and make sure there isn't malware.

This is NOT the most important benefit. But it is flawed because, you guys don't even have the knowledge to do coding. You guys are activist/"journalists" working for CIA. So you cannot audit the software yourselves.

Or "open source" but with a bad code style, how can you make sure the code doesn't have backdoors? But I think hilarious journalists that is only smart enough to post fake news about how down is the Russia and China economy can't even write bad code.

"open source" is good, firstly, because it permits auditing the source code and find the bugs, replace flawed/bad code with safer alternative (for example, the advantage of an open-source C software when porting to OpenBSD is they can replace every occurrence of strcat/strcpy with safer strlcat/strlcpy), sandbox it (on OpenBSD, with pledge and unveil), do privileges separation and revocation, etc.

And I think "you can make sure there isn't malware/backdoors" is the second benefit, NEVER THE FIRST.

Conclusion: Do not blindly trust what is "open source" when you can't even do code auditing.

So I want to make this post because I don't know why instances, mine specifically, choose to block others. Now, don't get me wrong that blocking instances that are CP related and anything illegal is something that should and needs to be blocked and/or removed. but if its something like Threads, let me choose to block a user myself, give me the freedom to do so. I've seen Brodie Robertson's video talking about this, and I whole heartily agree with his stance on this where letting the user have the freedom to block a user or instance themselves.

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I just feel that some lemmy instances are turning into big tech companies where they are controlling everything, and don't get me wrong, its their server space, do what you want to do, but at least since you are using foss to run your lemmy server, at least be different then Reddit or YouTube etc. I created a lemmy account just to have a more private experience from Reddit without being tracked all the time. guess I was wrong.

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not trying to get on the wrong foot here, I am just a fan of internet freedom, and I think you should have the right to do anything you want online, that's within legal waters.

Thoughts...

In celebration of Bitcoin Black Friday 2023, we're offering a 10% discount on all BusKill cables sold between Nov 18 to Dec 03.

BusKill Bitcoin Black Friday Sale - Our Dead Man Switch Magnetic USB Breakaway cables are 10% off all orders paid with cryptocurrency

What is BusKill?

BusKill is a laptop kill-cord. It's a USB cable with a magnetic breakaway that you attach to your body and connect to your computer.

Watch the BusKill Explainer Video for more info youtube.com/v/qPwyoD_cQR4

If the connection between you to your computer is severed, then your device will lock, shutdown, or shred its encryption keys -- thus keeping your encrypted data safe from thieves that steal your device.

What is Bitcoin Black Friday?

Black Friday is ~1 month before Christmas, and it's the busiest shopping day in the US. The first "Bitcoin Friday" (launched by Jon Holmquist) was Nov 9th, 2012 (at the time, one bitcoin was ~$11). The following year, the two ideas merged to become Bitcoin Black Friday.

This year, we're joining Bitcoin Black Friday by offering our products at a 10% discount if you pay with cryptocurrency.

Why should I use cryptocurrencies?

We've always accepted cryptocurrencies because:

1. They're more secure than pre-cryptocurrency payment methods
2. They're a more egalitarian system than pre-cryptocurrency finance
3. They're more environmentally friendly than pre-cryptocurrency financial systems
4. The fees are less than pre-cryptocurrency transactions
5. They allow for anonymous purchases online
6. Their transactions are censorship-resistant

Security

Before cryptocurrencies, making an online transaction was horrendously insecure and backwards.

"Conceptually, pull-based transactions are really not that different than giving three parties the password to your online banking service and trusting them to log in and take what they need. You have to trust the merchant, their IT supplier; the acquiring bank, their third-party processor; the card network; and your own card issuer---and everybody who works for them and has access to their systems. If a bad guy gets hold of your card details at any point in this process, they could drain your account.
The picture shows the scope of all the entities with access to your critical card information" source

Asymmetric cryptography has been available since the 1970s, but CNP (Card Not Present) transactions to this day still don't use public keys to sign transactions. Rather, you give your private keys (that is, your credit card number, expiry, etc) directly to the merchant and you authorize them to pull money out of your account (trusting that they take the right amount and not to loose those precious credentials).

Bitcoin flipped this around to actually make transactions secure. With bitcoin, you don't give others the keys to take money out of your account. Instead, transactions are push-based. You sign a transaction with your private keys, and those keys are shared with no-one.

Even today, pre-cryptocurrency transactions are abhorrently insecure. In the US or Europe, if someone knows your account number and bank, they can direct debit money out of your account. For the same reason, losses due to credit card theft is enormous. To quote Satoshi Nakamoto's criticism of pre-cryptocurrency transactions, "A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable"

In fact, fraudulent transactions in the banking industry are so common that your bank will generally reimburse your account for any malicious transactions that you tell them about within 60-90 days. But if someone drains your account of all your money and you don't notice for 12 months? Too bad. All your money is gone.

In Bitcoin, transactions are push-based. source

Tokenization and 3DS are merely bandages on a fundamentally backwards, pull-based transaction model. But because bitcoin is push-based, it's magnitudes more secure.

Egalitarian

If you have a bank account, then you probably take a lot of things for granted. Like buying things online (with a credit card). Or getting cash when traveling abroad (from an ATM machine). Or taking out a loan so you can start a business.

Before crypto-currencies, it was very difficult to do these things unless you had a bank account. And in 2008 (the year with the first-ever bitcoin transaction), McKinsey & Company published a report concluding that half of the world's adult population is unbanked.

But with crypto-currencies, anyone with access to the internet and a computer or smart phone can use bitcoin to send and receive money online -- without needing to first obtain a bank account.

Environmentalism

The energy required to facilitate transactions in decentralized, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies like bitcoin is minuscule by comparison. And, most importantly, the amount of energy used to solve the proof-of-work problem does not grow as the number of transactions-per-second grows.

Traditional financial institutions require an enormous amount of overhead to facilitate transactions in their centralized networks. Unlike bitcoin, which was designed specifically to eliminate the unnecessary overhead created by a trusted third party, pre-cryptocurrency transactions required humans to verify transactions. These humans require office buildings. These office buildings require energy to build and maintain. And, most importantly, as the number of transactions-per-second grows on their network, the number of humans and office space also grows.

Bitcoin versus other industries

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yearly energy use, in TWh source |

This fact is often misunderstood because there's a lot of misinformation on the Internet that makes a few disingenuous modifications to the facts:

1. They calculate the energy usage of the computers processing transactions only, maliciously omitting calculating the energy usage of the entire industry's infrastructure (eg energy used by office buildings)
2. They calculate the energy usage per transaction, maliciously omitting the fact that the amount of energy expended by bitcoin miners is automatically adjusted by the proof-of-work algorithm (so energy usage does not increase as the network scales-up)
3. They offer statistics about "energy usage" without mentioning the energy sources. It matters if the energy source is coal/nuclear/natural-gas or solar/wind/hydroelectric

"...estimates for what percentage of Bitcoin mining uses renewable energy vary widely. In December 2019, one report suggested that 73% of Bitcoin's energy consumption was carbon neutral, largely due to the abundance of hydro power in major mining hubs such as Southwest China and Scandinavia. On the other hand, the CCAF estimated in September 2020 that the figure is closer to 39%. But even if the lower number is correct, that's still almost twice as much [renewable energy sources] as the U.S. grid"

source: Harvard Business Review

Nic Carter

The facts are that the energy usage of bitcoin is magnitudes less than the energy used by pre-cryptocurrency financial intuitions, that energy usage does not increase as the number of transactions processed by the network increases, and that mining bitcoin is often done with renewable energy.

The facts are that the energy usage of bitcoin is magnitudes less than the energy used by pre-cryptocurrency financial intuitions, that energy usage does not increase as the number of transactions processed by the network increases, and that mining bitcoin is often done with renewable energy.

Low Fees

The introduction to the Bitcoin White Paper (2008) clearly states that Bitcoin was created to reduce costs by using a distributed ledger (the blockchain) to eliminate the need for a trusted third party.

"Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.
Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs...
These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions."
source: Bitcoin Whitepaper	Satoshi Nakamoto

At the time of writing, the average transaction fee for a bitcoin transaction is $0.06. And unlike pre-cryptocurrency transactions, you can increase or decrease the fee that you pay to increase or decrease the time it takes for the transaction to complete (at $0.06, it will get added to the blockchain in ~1 hour).

By comparison, the way to send funds internationally through the Internet via pre-cryptocurrency banks is via an international wire transfer. Fees very per bank, but they typically charge $15-$85 per transaction. And unlike bitcoin, wire transfers won't make move on nights and weekends, so they can take 1-7 days to complete.

Also, with bitcoin, that $0.06 transaction fee only applies when you're sending money. Many banks will also charge a fee for an incoming wire transfer. In bitcoin, there is no transaction fee to receive money.

Anonymity

Though early cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don't ensure anonymity like newer privacy coins, ZCash and Monero were designed specifically to provide private transactions.

This allows our customers to purchase from us anonymously, which can be extremely important for activists and journalists whose lives are threatened by their adversaries.

WikiLeaks started accepting donations in Bitcoin 7 months after PayPal froze their account

We accept both ZCash and Monero. If you'd like us to accept another privacy coin, please contact us :)

Censorship-Resistant

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are peer-to-peer and permissionless. Transactions exchanging bitcoins occur directly between two parties. There is no middle-man that has the power to block, freeze, or reverse transactions. Before blockchains were used to maintain a public ledger and enable peer-to-peer transactions, we were dependent on big financial institutions to move money on our behalf through the internet. That antiquated system allowed them to censor transactions, such as donations made to media outlets reporting war crimes and donations to protest movements.

"For me, that is one of the coolest things about bitcoin...
People can potentially use it donate more anonymously to dissident groups and causes in a world where mass government surveillance threatens freedom of expression and certainly harms activists' ability to fundraise for their work, when people are afraid they could be targeted by a government for donating to a worthy cause."
source	Evan Greer

After PayPal froze WikiLeaks's donation account in 2010, WikiLeaks started accepting bicoin in 2011. From Occupy Wall Street to Ukraine, defenders of democracy have utilized permissionless cryptocurrencies to accept international donations without the risk of transactions made through financial institutions.

Buy BusKill with crypto

Don't risk loosing your crypto to a thief that steals your laptop. Get your own BusKill Cable at a 10% discount today!

Buy a BusKill Cable
https://buskill.in/buy

You can also buy a BusKill cable with bitcoin, monero, and other altcoins from our BusKill Store's .onion site.

Stay safe,
The BusKill Team
https://www.buskill.in/
http://www.buskillvampfih2iucxhit3qp36i2zzql3u6pmkeafvlxs3tlmot5yad.onion

Whenever I encounter the label "made in EU", "Germany", "Estonia", "France" ...... in the footer of a web project, which implies enhanced data-protection, apparently, I wonder:

How can it be so? There're some data-protection laws, yes. But one can't control a hosting provider 24h/day. One can't know whether an employer there copies all data on his memory-drivers.

Can't the police, if need be, seize a server as easily as it would in any other country on Earth?

Don't the majority of all of countries in Europe share information with the intelligence of US by the agreements of the 5 eyes, 9 eyes, 14 eyes? Whereas the 2nd and 3rd world countries don't.

How is it better than a label "made in South Africa", "Thailand", "Costa Rica", "Egypt", "Kuwait"?

I can see how "made in Germany" or EU makes a project worse in terms of privacy and data-protection. How could it make it better, though?

Hello everyone.

Currently me and my GF have our finances organized in a Google sheet file (hosted on Google drive), being that file integrated with a Google form.

What we do is having on our cellphones a shortcut to the form, where we input all our expenses, they are directly and automatically registered in the sheet, and on another tab we've built some sort of dashboard based on all the values the form registers.

So given this context, is there any option or group of options that are open source, and that achieve this same purpose / scenario?

If possible everything acessible on a cloud or at least onlinez so we don't lose this flexibility and accessibility on our cellphones.

Thanks in advance

I'm undertaking the process of disentangling Google and Microsoft from my life. Does anyone have any tips for removing my last 20 years of files from Onedrive and Google Drive? Where do you host your long-term storage? What's a good way to handle the migration?

We're happy to announce that we were successfully able to initiate a BusKill lockscreen trigger using a 3D-printed BusKill prototype!

Watch the 3D Printable BusKill Proof-of-Concept Demo for more info youtube.com/v/Q-QjHelRvvk

via @[email protected]

What is BusKill?

BusKill is a laptop kill-cord. It's a USB cable with a magnetic breakaway that you attach to your body and connect to your computer.

Watch the BusKill Explainer Video for more info youtube.com/v/qPwyoD_cQR4

If the connection between you to your computer is severed, then your device will lock, shutdown, or shred its encryption keys -- thus keeping your encrypted data safe from thieves that steal your device.

Why?

While we do what we can to allow at-risk folks to purchase BusKill cables anonymously, there is always the risk of interdiction.

We don't consider hologram stickers or tamper-evident tape/crisps/glitter to be sufficient solutions to supply-chain security. Rather, the solution to these attacks is to build open-source, disassembleable, and easily inspectable hardware whose integrity can be validated without damaging the device and without sophisticated technology.

Actually, the best way to confirm the integrity of your hardware is to build it yourself. Fortunately, printing your own circuit boards, microcontroller, or silicon has a steeper learning curve than a BusKill cable -- which is essentially just a USB extension cable with a magnetic breakaway in the middle.

Mitigating interdiction via 3D printing is one of many reasons that Melanie Allen has been diligently working on prototyping a 3D-printable BusKill cable this year. In our latest update, we hope to showcase her progress and provide you some OpenSCAD and .stl files so you can experiment with building your own and help test and improve our designs.

Print BusKill

If you'd like to reproduce our experiment and print your own BusKill cable prototype, you can download the stl files and read our instructions here:

• buskill.in/3d-print-2023-08/

Iterate with us!

If you have access to a 3D Printer, you have basic EE experience, or you'd like to help us test our 3D printable BusKill prototype, please let us know. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and we're eager to finish-off this 3D printable BusKill prototype to help make this security-critical tool accessible to more people world-wide!

A while ago I made an app for tracking baby activities because I became a parent and was horrified at how many permissions the existing apps required and how much tracking they contained. Both the app and the server are open source.

This is a web-app which also has an Android version in the Play Store (F-Droid didn't accept it because they don't feel like web-apps should be welcome in their store). On iPhones it can be installed as a PWA to the home screen.

Features:

• No tracking whatsoever
• End-to-end encrypted, no personal information is stored on the server unencrypted
• Track baby's feeding, diaper changes, breast pumping and sleeping (more to come)

Links:

• https://baby-journal.app - the PWA itself
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.baby_journal.twa - the Play Store Android wrapper
• https://github.com/RikudouSage/BabyJournalApi - the server source code
• https://github.com/RikudouSage/BabyJournalUi - the PWA source code

The reason I’m asking is because I have a phone that I would like to install Lineage OS on, but when I’ve tried in the past, I lose VoLTE capabilities on the phone. So I was considering using Google Voice with MicroG. I know when it comes to regular phone calls and SMS text messages, your ISP archives all your data indefinitely, so I’m wondering, from a personal privacy standpoint, is using Google Voice any less private. Do they collect any more info than my ISP does?

Also, if I plan to install MicroG, would there actually be less data collection than normal since MicroG scrubs all info except the account name before reaching out to Google’s servers. I figure Google Voice might still have access to metadata related to my phone calls, or maybe even records of calls, but so does my ISP, so is Google Voice really any worse?

Any advice is appreciated, thanks!

I am planning to buy a new phone and I would like to follow your guide. The phone brands which you consider as Tier 1 are Asus, Nokia, Motorola, Sony, LG, FairPhone, and Huawei/Honor. In this comment https://lemmy.ml/post/64888/comment/55721 you prefer Fairphone, Xiaomi, Asus, Motorola (if in USA). And for the follow up comment https://lemmy.ml/post/64888/comment/55784 you prefer Fairphone, Xiaomi or Moto. What happened to SONY, and why did you least prefer Asus now. It is not possible for me to get a Fairphone as I am not living in EU. I am happy to go with SONY cause I like photography and their camera department. Also is it possible to get same privacy and security in a SAMSUNG phone if I follow your guide? (Again for the same camera reason),