soloActivist

Discuss. (But plz, it’s only interesting to hear from folks who have some healthy degree of contempt for exclusive corporate walled-gardens and the technofeudal system the fedi is designed to escape.)

And note that links can come into existence that are openly universally accessible and then later become part of a walled-garden... and then later be open again. For example, youtube. And a website can become jailed in Cloudflare but then be open again at the flip of a switch. So a good solution would be a toggle of sorts.

When Google sabotages network neutrality by blocking Tor and Invidious instances, is it wise for the fedi to facilitate the sharing of #Youtube links?

Fedi instance operators would probably not tolerate links into Facebook’s walled-garden if people were to start polluting an otherwise open community with them. So Youtube links should probably be treated with contempt during periods where Google’s DoS attack is underway.

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/2667522

Apparently some company I do business with shared my data with another corp without me knowing, then that corp who I did not know had my data was breached.

WTF?

Then the breached corp who could not competently secure the data in the first place offers victims a gratis credit monitoring services (read: offers to let yet another dodgy corp also have people’s sensitive info thus creating yet another breach point). Then the service they hired as a “benefit” to victims outsources to another corp and breach point: Cloudflare.

WTF?

So to be clear, the biggest privacy abuser on the web is being used to MitM a sensitive channel between a breach victim and a credit monitoring service who uses a configuration that blocks tor (thus neglecting data minimization and forcing data breach victims to reveal even more sensitive info to two more corporate actors, one of whom has proven to be untrustworthy with private info).

I am now waiting for someone to say “smile for the camera, you’ve been punk’d!”.

(update)
Then the lawyers representing data breach victims want you to give them your e-mail address so they can put Microsoft Outlook in the loop. WTF? The shit show of incompetence has no limit.

Apparently some company I do business with shared my data with another corp without me knowing,

WTF?

then that corp who I did not know had my data was breached.

WTF?

Then the breached corp who could not competently secure the data in the first place offers victims gratis credit monitoring services (read: offers to let yet another dodgy corp also have people’s sensitive info thus creating yet another breach point). Then the service they hired as a “benefit” to victims outsources to another corp and breach point: Cloudflare.

WTF?

So to be clear, the biggest privacy abuser on the web is being used to MitM a sensitive channel between a breach victim and a credit monitoring service who uses a configuration that blocks tor (thus neglecting data minimization and forcing data breach victims to reveal even more sensitive info to two more corporate actors, one of whom has proven to be untrustworthy with private info).

I am now waiting for someone to say “smile for the camera, you’ve been punk’d!”.

(update)
Then the lawyers representing data breach victims want you to give them your e-mail address so they can put Microsoft Outlook in the loop. WTF? The shit show of incompetence has no limit.

To do an MX lookup over Tor, this command has worked for me for years:

$ torsocks dig @"$dns_server" -t mx -q "$email_domain" +noclass +nocomments +nostats +short +tcp +nosearch

In the past week or so it just hangs. My first thought was the DNS server I chose (8.8.8.8) started blocking tor. But in fact it does not matter what DNS server is queried. The whole Tor network is apparently blocking tor users from doing MX lookups.

Also notable that dig hangs forever. It does not timeout despite a default timeout interval of 5 seconds (according to the man page).

The link is Cloudflare-free, popup-free and reachable to Tor users.

(edit) Some interesting factors--

from the article:

For a period of over 2 years, Uber transferred those data to Uber's headquarters in the US, without using transfer tools. Because of this, the protection of personal data was not sufficient. The Court of Justice of the EU invalidated the EU-US Privacy Shield in 2020.

Yes but strangely & sadly the US benefits from an adequacy decision, which IIRC happened after 2020. This means the US is officially construed as having privacy protections on par with Europe. As perverse as that sounds, no doubt Uber’s lawyers will argue that point.

The Dutch DPA started the investigation on Uber after more than 170 French drivers complained to the French human rights interest group the Ligue des droits de l’Homme (LDH), which subsequently submitted a complaint to the French DPA.

Wow! I wonder what triggered so many drivers to consult a human rights group. I mean, consider that Uber users and drivers are all happy to run a closed-source Google-gated app.. this is not a demographic who cares about privacy. So what triggered 170 complaints? I wonder if the Dutch DPA would have taken any action had there not been 170 cross-border complainants.

The French DPA gives some interesting insight. Info to attempt to satisfy access requests were in English, not French, which breaks the accessibility rule. The French article gives more a feeling of not 170 proactive complaints, but maybe the human rights org complained on behalf of 170 drivers. I am quite curious from an activist point of view if 170 drivers proactively initiated a complaint.

The fourth breach is interesting:

by not explicitly mentioning the right to data portability in their privacy statement.

Is data portability even useful for Uber drivers in France? I’ve never used Uber (fuck Google), but I imagine drivers have feedback about how well they perform and maybe they want to port that data to an Uber competitor.. but there is no Uber competitor in France, is there? Is Lyft in France?

I normally grab a #youtube video via #invidious onion instances this way:

yt-dlp --proxy http://127.0.0.1:8118 -f 18 http://ng27owmagn5amdm7l5s3rsqxwscl5ynppnis5dqcasogkyxcfqn7psid.onion/watch?v="$videoID"

Now it leads to:

ERROR: [youtube] $videoID: Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot. This helps protect our community. Learn more

There used to be a huge number of Invidious instances. Now the official list is down to like ½ dozen.

This email provider gives onion email addresses:

pflujznptk5lmuf6xwadfqy6nffykdvahfbljh7liljailjbxrgvhfid.onion

Take care when creating the username to pull down the domain list and choose the onion domain. That address you get can then be used to receive messages. Unlike other onion email providers, this is possibly the only provider who offers addresses with no clearnet variations. So if a recipient figures out the clearnet domain it apparently cannot be used to reach you. This forces Google and MS out of the loop.

It’s narrowly useful for some situations where you are forced to provide an email address against your will (which is increasingly a problem with European governments). Though of course there are situations where it will not work, such as if it’s a part of a procedure that requires confirmation codes.

Warning: be wary of the fact that this ESP’s clearnet site is on Cloudflare. Just don’t use the clearnet site and keep CF out of the loop.

I have lots of whistles to blow. Things where if I expose them then the report itself will be instantly attributable to me by insiders who can correlate details. That’s often worth the risks if the corporate baddy who can ID the whistle blower is in a GDPR region (they have to keep it to themselves.. cannot doxx in the EU, Brazil, or California, IIUC).

But risk heightens when many such reports are attributable under the same handle. Defensive corps can learn more about their adversary (me) through reports against other shitty corps due to the aggregation under one handle.

So each report should really be under a unique one-time-use handle (or no handle at all). Lemmy nodes have made it increasingly painful to create burner accounts (CAPTCHA, interviews, fussy email domain criteria, waiting for approval followed by denial). It’s understandable that unpaid charitable admins need to resist abusers.

Couldn’t this be solved by allowing anonymous posts? The anonymous post would be untrusted and hidden from normal view. Something like Spamassassin could score it. If the score is favorable enough it could go to a moderation queue where a registered account (not just mods) could vote it up or down if the voting account has a certain reputation level, so that an anonymous msg could then possibly reach a stage of general publication.

It could even be someone up voting their own msg. E.g. if soloActivist is has established a history of civil conduct and thus has a reputation fit for voting, soloActivist could rightfully vote on their own anonymous posts that were submitted when logged-out. The (pseudo)anonymous posts would only be attributable to soloActivist by the admin (I think).

A spammer blasting their firehose of sewage could be mitigated by a tar pit -- one msg at a time policy, so you cannot submit an anonymous msg until SA finishes scoring the previous msg. SA could be artificially slowed down as volume increases.

As it stands, I just don’t report a lot of things because it’s not worth the effort that the current design imposes.

EU-based ATMs tend to charge a fee of ~€4—6 on non-EU cards. I’m fine with that because my bank rebates those fees anyway. However something seems off with some French ATMs.

France has a reputation for having the highest banking fees in Europe and their ATMs seem consistent with that reputation. Some French ATMs charge €6 and that gets printed on the ATM receipt. As expected my bank sees the fee on their side in that case and they credit it back to me -- so no problem there. But then other ATMs in France do not print any fee on the receipt. Consequently my bank sees no fee on the transaction so they rebate nothing back to me. Are those ATMs reeaaally giving up the opportunity to charge a fee to non-EU cards? Certainly no Dutch ATMs ever pass up that opportunity. When calculating the xe.com rate of that day and comparing to the money drawn from my bank account, there is a discrepancy of ~$5.50 USD.

So it looks like the ATM is adding their fee into the euro amount. E.g. I pull out €400 & decline DCC, and the ATM prints a receipt showing €400 but then draws something like €405. In principle it should be evident from the bank statement. But my bank lacks transparency and omits from the statement the euro amount and also withholds the exchange rate they applied (which the contract says is the straight interbank rate with 0% markup).

I see two possible theories here:

1. my bank’s so called fee-free FX rate is really ~1%; OR
2. the French ATMs add the fee to the amount charged and hiding the fee. They do not benefit from it but could be sloppy programming. Maybe they think it does not matter because they are still charging whatever the customer agrees to anyway.

While I struggle to believe that 3 different French ATMs would pass up the chance to take a fee, I ran the numbers on a transaction that actually does transparently take a fee and result in a rebate. I still paid almost 1% more than the xe.com rate.

All fees must be disclosed on the ATM screen by law. But my memory is not so reliable.

(cross-posting is broken on links.hackliberty.org, so the following is manually copied from the original post)

When your bank/CU/brokerage demands that you login to their portal to update KYC info soloActivist to Privacy@fedia.io ·

In the past I have only seen PayPal spontaneously demand at arbitrary/unexpected moments that I jump their their hoops -- to login and give them more info about me. I reluctantly did what they wanted, and they kept my account frozen and kept my money anyway.

So I’ve been boycotting PayPal ever since. Not worth it for to work hard to find out why they kept my account frozen and to work hard to twist their arm to so that I can give them my business.

Now an actual financial institution is trying something similar. They are not as hostile as PayPal was (they did not pre-emptively freeze my account until I dance for them), but they sent an email demanding that I login and update my employment information (even though it has not changed). Presumably they will eventually freeze my account if I do not dance for them to satisfy their spontaneous demand.

I just wonder how many FIs are pulling this shit. And what are people doing about it? Normally I would walk.. pull my money out and go elsewhere. But the FI that is pushing KYC harassment has a lot of power because they offer some features I need that I cannot get elsewhere, and I have some stocks through them, which makes it costly/non-trivial to bounce.

I feel like we should be keeping a public database on FIs who pull this shit, so new customers can be made aware of who to avoid.

Pushover consumers accepted “Know Your Customer” abuses to their 4th Amendment rights in the banking sector, so why wouldn’t the same work when it comes to internet service? I have no doubt that the privacy apathetic masses will accept this in a heartbeat.