linuxandrew

NewPipe blocks ads, and optionally blocks Shorts. NewPipe does also happen to break YouTube's terms of service.

My opinion is that YouTube should be forced to permit third party clients (interoperate). NewPipe and the various other clients are proof that there is a desire for alternative experiences and more toggles and options. Forcing users to identity themselves online to watch videos (or certain classes of videos) is a privacy nightmare, dystopic even.

I wonder if one could run Delta Chat on top of yggmail[1] (very much an alpha software release) for a truly P2P IM chat. yggmail runs over IPv6 with a tun interface same as yggdrasil. Might test this out at some point for fun.

Not quite the discoverable, user-friendly experience of Briar, Bitchat etc. but it can be combined with online links (Briar can technically go online, but only via Tor; both Briar and Bitchat are only for smartphones).

1: https://github.com/neilalexander/yggmail

GrapheneOS scores well and rightly so, but my main gripe is that they don't ship F-Droid and they actively steer users to Google Play and Aurora instead.

It's weird because the only AOSP app store that has any hope in hell of providing meaningful security and privacy to users is F-Droid, through its FOSS-only stance.

That's not to say that GOS shouldn't exclusively provide and steer users to F-Droid. There are good, practical reasons for providing compatibility to allow users to consume Google Play Services on apps that they need. I get it. I just happen to think most users in the know would want to escape that ecosystem.

Podman doesn't have a dependency on systemd. e.g. it is packaged in Void Linux.

Podman has a better architecture than Docker in that it can easily run on a non-privileged user.

Quadlet (aka podman-systemd.unit) is a podman-systemd integration which can make it easy to launch and orchestrate podman containers via systemd. You can get all if the systemd dependency handling, require other units to run after a container finishes, and all sorts of other useful things. Systemd "user" units (systemctl --user) also works here with the containers running as a non-privileged user in a non-root systemd context.

Just to be clear, Quadlet is just an integration and you can still run podman without it. You can still run podman on non-systemd systems as well.

I mean you can find porn on Google and you don't have to look that hard

You wouldn't be doing anyone a favour by committing electoral fraud.

But that aside, although Australia doesn't require any ID on election day, Australians do register with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) with their name, address and date of birth. AEC workers have a printed copy of these records on election day. Obvious anomalies like someone with a different age can be reported. Otherwise anomalies like multiple votes from the same address are investigated, I imagine by interviewing the person at that address.

The AEC provides transparency about how it detects fraud and the penalties that can be imposed for people who are caught doing it. The point is that this is quite rare. The AEC's aim is to lower barriers to voting in the first place so that all people can. By detecting anomalies and using tipoffs the AEC estimates the impact of voter fraud and takes a scientific approach to recommend against raising barriers to vote.

Me neither, in Qld.

Maybe but that would be voter fraud and quite a serious offence, like going to prison for ten years, which is why not many people do that.

They can opt out, by not participating with the site

The definition of social media under the legislation is essentially any form of digital communication that allows two or more people to communicate, as decided by the minister.

No one is mandated to use social media

OK, I'll bite. What if you want to join an interest group (crafts, technical, political etc) that organises meetings digitally on a social media site? Sure, you have the choice to not use a social media website, and if you do, in all likelihood not join your choice of interest group. The point is that Meta long used unfair and anti-competitive means to corner the market, and obviously not to interoperate so that it is difficult for people to leave. This might surprise you but the relationship between platforms and users is usually coerced and not really consensual. If you do not find yourself in this position, good for you. I'm a very firm believer that anti-competitive social media companies should be regulated in positive ways, like forcing interoperability and forcing companies to making algorithmic content opt-in.

if you are on social media platforms with algo feeds, you are signalling that this works for you

Yeah except people are usually on those platforms for many reasons, like access to group chats and messages, as the platforms have a wide reach. A lot of people become outcasts by quitting social media, myself included, because our friends choose to continue to use it.

Ha! We have compulsory voting but unlike many Anglo countries we don't require voter ID, vote registration etc. In fact you do not need to provide any ID to vote, because voting fraud is so statistically low (see https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/factlab-meta/voting-fraud-negli...). We simply provide a name and address and fill out the ballot.

We have so many issues, but compulsory voting is not one of them, in my opinion. If you feel so strongly to not vote you can abstain by an informal vote like roughly 5% of the country does on any given election (https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/Informal_Voting/) or simply pay the AU$20 (roughly US$13) fine like apparently around 5-10% of Australians do on any given election (https://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/non-voters.htm).

In my view, and in the view of many Australians, people encouraging further "freedom" to not vote are attempting to suppress votes, a major issue in the United States and other countries with optional voting.

myID as it stands is a bit of a farce. It uses OIDC under the hood, but it only supports end users that download the myID app on their smartphone via the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Security is effectively outsourced to Google and Apple as the user's identity is "pinned" to their smartphone.

Take myGov in contrast which is web-capable and supports users to use a Yubikey or Passkey/Webauthn-capable device to authenticate.

Under the Australian Digital ID scheme myGov will likely be usurped by myID, which is, in my view, an inferior scheme which blatantly ignores basic standards.

They specifically don’t prescribe any particular age verification methods. This would be a great time to follow up with legislation that updates their national IDs to be able to provide cryptographically secure proofs of age without leaking identity.

Hard disagree. We do not need an internet driver's license. Australians are supposed to have a right to interact with organisations with privacy protections under the Privacy Act 1988, like APP2 which allows individuals to deal with organisations anonymously or pseudonymously.

Social media companies are doing a great deal of harm to society, but banning under-16s is tackling the symptom, not the problem. All people should have more rights and protections, like opting out (or better, opting in) to infinite scroll and algorithmic content suggestions as opposed to subscribed content. Algorithmic content today is akin to spam in the early 2000s which governments regulated and has had some impact on bad behaviour by local companies (of course I am not under any pretense that spam will ever really be solved). Social media users should be able to opt in or out of content categories which AI could potentially help with that categorisation, ideally in an uber-transparent way.

I'm young enough that "modern" social media was just starting up when I was a teenager. It's not clear that banning under 16s from modern digital communication would provide any benefits (which, by the way, social media is very loosely defined under the amendment).

Absent that, I’m sure many of the comments to come will worry about the privacy implications.

The big issue is that we are importing the UK model which will see identity outsourcing to companies like Yoti and AU10TIX, the latter which was hacked in 2021 and led to some pretty serious implications for affected users.

Of course the reality is that Meta is already doing age and identity verification on users who use privacy-protecting technologies like Firefox Container Tabs, at least in Australia, and has been for a number of years. This usually leads to an account being blocked until the user provides their ID via a photo. This will become formalised so that accounts that are detected as possibly being U16 (via various techniques like profiling and data matching against external sources) will be requested ID, and Yoti will likely be used to actually perform that verification.

Another big concern will be that this is forced onto smaller operators like Australian Mastodon sites, internet forums, mailing lists and others.

Farting maybe, but the impact from cow burps is measurable and no conspiracy theory.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17517715/

Ty, I'll fix it very soon :) Something's up with Certbot and it's probably a trivial fix.

I put in a submission to the committee for this issue[1]. The big issues from my point of view are widespread ID validation and the security and privacy consequences of that, definition of social media, lack of controls provided by social media websites, and further risks to centralisation (like ID providers requiring an app that can only run on an iOS or Google Play device).

Many of the ID verification services that have spun up over recent years like AU10TIX are private companies that don't have their users' interests at heart. It wouldn't surprise me if they become more involved with the so-called data economy (data broker ecosystem)—if they aren't already.

Meta itself causes harm to users of all ages with their algorithms (like suggested content on the feed) which can't really be turned off, and fueled the misinformation crisis which really took off a few years ago. The social media companies have done a good job of convincing the Australian government to overlook these harms.

1: https://roffey.au/static/submission-social-media-2024.pdf

Exactly this. At my old employer we (the sysadmins/operational DBAs) were pushing for newer, supported versions of Postgres. The push back was always the regression testing cycle, amount of desired change and willingness of the product owner to even engage. The testing cycle was so long that I tried to convince them to test on Postgres beta, because it would well and truly be prod with a few bugfix releases by the time testing was completed (alas, they went with n-1 release of Postgres instead).

I've recently discovered systemd-nspawn which is an alternative to LXC, builtin and integrated into systemd. Much lighter than full VMs and it's quite similar to Solaris Zones and FreeBSD jails. One way to use it is to extract an OCI (Docker) image to a path, that way you can reuse the container tooling provided by Docker, Podman et al.

I've barely touched the BSDs and it's been a few years since I last used Solaris so I can't make much of a comparison as a user myself.

Some people recommend avoiding citrus and onions in compost and worm farms typically because worms don't like it in the early stages of decomposition.

I've never followed that rule personally and my compost system works really well. I get some black soldier fly larvae and other vermiculture in the early stages. In case you're wondering the black soldier flies aren't annoying like houseflies and typically steer clear of homes and humans. I usually only see a few BSFs around the compost and sometimes a lot of larvae, but it's seasonal.

Not to mention cherry-picking facts (at best). Case in point, cars today are more environmentally friendly than the 1980s, we are told. So much so that a car driving down the motorway today is greener than a parked car in the 80s.

Even over the past two decades the global annual car production has increased by over 50%, increasing embedded (production), direct (tailpipe) and indirect (electric) emissions because few countries are free from fossil fuels. Cars create noise pollution, air pollution through tyre particulates and poor land use practices that lead to urban sprawl and further car dependence.

Fortunately there is a lot of work being done in this space on many fronts, most notably around making public transport fast, efficient, comfortable and convenient, which reduces the need for cars. In the IT space there is tons of waste in short lived, locked down devices that people regularly replace because it's too hard; government action is needed (and in some cases has been implemented, like forcing Apple to support USB C cables).

I'm neither here nor there on nuclear power plants, but are actually insanely expensive. Just look at France which will spend over $US10b per replacement power plant, in a country with well established nuclear capabilities.

The idea that "climate activists" are wrong and pro-nuclear optimists are right is just a real weird take.

If you don't like that viewpoint then maybe you shouldn't entrust your private data to an American company that can alter the deal, and you should just pray that they don't alter it further.

I don't use Facebook, and I think my government should regulate and fine Big Tech companies like Meta when they breach users' privacy.

Clearly these users opted in when they signed up for Facebook and then uploaded their photos.

Not correct. For instance I, an Australian, had an old Facebook account that I forgot about. I never agreed to any new conditions. In June I received an email from Facebook notifying me that they would be updating their ToS and begin processing public posts and photos. I have been trying to delete the account since but Facebook is refusing to without reason. The account appears to be locked and unrecoverable.

They had an option not to use Facebook.

That's nice, and I can appreciate this point to some degree, but people can and do change their minds. It's very American style viewpoint that contract law trumps all, e.g. arbitration clauses which aren't really a thing around the rest of the world. Privacy and consumer laws can and should trump Meta's sneaky invasion of privacy.

In spite of Manifest V3 being a shit show, I continue to see all manners of evidence that Google wants genuine honest reform for user privacy. The attitude & negativity is at severely problematic levels, and Google actually gets that improvement & reform is necessary to keep going for another decade without some kind of boil over/explosion.

I agree that Chrome in theory shouldnt be a part of Google. But generally I think there is incredibly little self-dealing,

OK, I'll bite. If Google cares about privacy so much, couldn't they simply disable 3P cookies like everyone else (minus Edge)? [1] Am we really to believe that the Chrome team is busy playing a game of 4D chess in the conquest for user privacy? I for one do not.

1: https://clearcode.cc/blog/browsers-first-third-party-cookies...

Not only that, they are the advertising industry, or at least a major player. Moves like Manifest V3, continuing 3P cookies and user-hostile moves on YouTube are all a part of that.

Chrome should really not be a part of Google IMO. It's a significant conflict of interest.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. With regards to privacy and tracking Chrome/Chromium is so much worse than Firefox. Whether it be terrible defaults, exceptions which allow Google to see your system info, or an incognito mode which is a misnomer, Chrome just doesn't do privacy at all.

I can sympathise about general usability concerns but they don't really relate to the OP.

I personally run Ungoogled Chromium for anything that doesn't work in LibreWolf, which is fortunately not too much.

In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem? Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless, more expensive, or less integrated so that competitors that couldn't make their own cheaper or better version had a chance to keep getting customers?

Well, they should at very least make Teams interoperable like every other goddamn service should be - or be forced to do so.

I've been "engaging" with Facebook to delete my account, and it does feel awfully like I'm talking to an LLM. We entered a circular argument with me asking exactly why I needed a new email address to delete my account, and Facebook telling me that I hadn't provided them a new email address.

https://roffey.au/2024/deleting-a-facebook-account.html

Like the OP I'll be sending a complaint to the government, in my case, Australia's Privacy Commissioner. I'm not super optimistic about whether they will do anything, having dealt with them in the past, but I'm still giving it a shot.

Signal Foundation has already said they would leave the EU if Chat Control goes ahead.

https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/112535616774247450

That's exactly the plan if it's not resolved soon. I intend to make a formal complaint following the Australian Privacy Commissioner's process[1], and if it's not resolved, then a complaint to the Privacy Commissioner.

Unfortunately Australia's right to be forgotten is pretty weak[2] unlike in Europe. The law reform commission recommended changing up the Privacy Act to extend to deletion but it was never implemented. Nonetheless organisations must destroy or de-identify personal information when it is no longer required.

I'm not really sure how this one's going to go. I guess Facebook will probably just delete the account before it goes to the commissioner. If it goes to the commissioner I have no idea if they'll accept my reasoning for Facebook to delete my account or not. Facebook might argue they still have use for my personal information. The commissioner may reject my complaint for various reasons and they are not really obliged to investigate it.

1: https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/privacy-complaints/complain-... 2: https://www.alrc.gov.au/publication/serious-invasions-of-pri...

I deleted my then-active Facebook account at the end of 2023 without issue.

Last week I found out via an email about AI @ Meta that I still have an old account, which I don't have the password for, but still have access to the email address. I tried contacting support, and 8 days later, it's not going well.

https://roffey.au/2024/deleting-a-facebook-account.html

There's one in Brisbane, Aus near where I live. Lots of big roads and motorways carve up remnant bushland and a few of those roads now have wildlife underpasses and/or overpasses for animals.

Unfortunately new motorways are still being planned and constructed further dividing up bushland and the region keeps sprawling out further with large greenfield developments on farmland and bushland.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/koalas-...