The Indian government has introduced countless rules supposedly to make smartphone safer. In reality, the rules will make phones less safe, and enable further mass surveillance and authoritarianism.

So I am the web admin for a non-profit that deals with and discusses private medical information. My country has laws around keeping this information safe which ironically I take more seriously than a lot of the public health services I personally interact with but I digress.

With all the push for increased surveillance lately and my trying to keep pushing people towards safer alternatives, the idea I've had for setting up a private forum is starting to become more important (maybe that and my yearning for the internet of old where people on the internet were people and not a high chance of being a bot). Currently the orgs main discussion is on Facebook (yep, don't get me started on that - I did not decide that, it was many years ago and I've always hated that it excluded people who don't use FB).

We have shared hosting for the website but this severely limits options. All the software that I can install on shared hosting through cpanel has resulted in ugly, difficult to use options or gotchas like not being able to make the community private (i.e. people will want to talk about their own medical situations with other group members, not the whole world).

So my next steps are to investigate what hosting infrastructure is secure and what software will best allow for a private and secure community. I was considering Discourse but this might be overkill and I don't know if posts and DMs can be encrypted, etc. Interested in suggestions for other forum or community software that is better.

I could get AWS for non-profits but it's Amazon and I don't trust them as far as I can kick them so I don't know how safe it would be to have or if encryption would help mitigate the Amazon factor.

My knowledge of these sorts of things is pretty outdated (I'm mostly just a web des).

As the UK, Australia, and other countries appear to be introducing ID requirements and banning anonymous access, Russia reveals it has the ability to block VPN access.

Actually, there are two services with the same name, onionmail.org and onionmail.info. Anyway, what do you think about it/them?

Thanks in advance.

(Edit: free accounts on onionmail.org can only receive emails, while onionmail.info is pretty hard to use).

Source: https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2032600868005310638#m

Yeah, so basically the current prevailing schizo internet theory is that AI nerds have destroyed the internet and created infinite spam.

The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human. The advertisement goons no longer want to pay as much to social media networks.

Social media networks, in full blown panic of losing potential revenue, decided to lobby governments saying "we gotta protect the kids! ID everyone to protect the kids from pedophiles!".

The social media networks know this doesn't really protect kids. But, it does two things (and a third accidentally).

1. They now can identify who is human and who is AI slop machine, or enough to appease the advertisement goons

2. Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something, so with ID verification they can say with confidence they're not advertising to children because it's been ID verification. Basically, they can weed out the children and focus on advertising to adults

3. The feds can now tell who is human and who is AI slop. This inadvertently helps them with tracking people and serving fresh daily dumps of propaganda, or whatever they want to do.

It's a win-win-win for advertisers, social media networks, the government, and any business which does data collections.

It fucks over everyone else.

Chat, I'm not going to lie to you. This is an extremely good conspiracy schizo theory and I unironically believe it.

The news first came in 2024, but it's been very quiet since.

I've been waiting this whole time to jettison WhatsApp from my phone.

Is it available only in some parts of the world? If so can I spoof it?

We know that adversarial interoperability works, so why have we not been able to make this work?

All else failing, are there any unofficial WhatsApp clients I can use to preserve my privacy?

The teacher opens an app on their phone, holds it up, and takes several photos of the room. Within seconds, the images travel to a cloud server, where a facial-recognition algorithm detects each student’s face, extracts it, and compares it against a database of biometric profiles. The app LRCO Paraná returns a list of names. Students identified in the photos are marked present; those the system does not find are marked absent.

For some students, a false absence is a bureaucratic irritation. For others, it could threaten their family’s access to welfare. In Brazil, eligibility for the Bolsa Família program depends in part on school attendance, and in Paraná such records are now largely generated by an algorithm.

Cross posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/45797826

In a sensational turn of events in the fight against Chat Control, a majority in the European Parliament voted today to end the untargeted mass scanning of private communications. In doing so, the Parliament firmly rejected the error-prone and unconstitutional surveillance practices of recent years. Pressure is now mounting on EU governments to respect the MEPs’ vote and bury untargeted mass surveillance in Europe once and for all.

Amendment 5, tabled by Pirate Party MEP Markéta Gregorová (Greens/EFA group) and adopted by a narrow margin, demands that any scanning of private communications must be strictly limited to individual users or groups of users suspected by a competent judicial authority of being linked to child sexual abuse. This aligns with the European Parliament’s 2023 mandate on the permanent Chat Control regulation (CSAR).

Based on today’s mandate, trilogue negotiations between the EU Parliament, the European Commission, and the Council of the EU are set to begin as early as tomorrow. Negotiations are taking place under extreme time pressure, as the current interim regulation authorizing Chat Control expires on April 6. The EU Commission and the vast majority of the EU Council—except for Italy—have so far categorically rejected any restrictions on untargeted mass scanning.

Digital freedom fighter Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) commented on the historic vote:

“Today is a sensational victory for the countless citizens who made calls and sent emails to save their digital privacy of correspondence. Digital privacy is alive! Just as with our physical mail, the warrantless screening of our digital communications must remain taboo. EU governments must finally realize that true child protection requires secure apps (‘Security by Design’), the removal of illegal material at the source, and targeted investigations against suspects with a judicial warrant—not overreaching, pointless mass surveillance.”

The Hard Facts: Why Chat Control has failed spectacularly

Continue reading here - https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/historic-chat-control-vote-in-the-eu-parliament-meps-vote-to-end-untargeted-mass-scanning-of-private-chats/

Noob here. This is probably the most repeated question, but I don't know the technical terms to make the appropiate digging online, and thought of asking humans before slopping my way around.

I don't trust my ISP or the government above it.

The ISP remotely manages the local network! So I installed a router of my own and my devices only to that one.

I would like to encrypt (?) anything that goes out of my own router, so my ISP doesn't evesdrop what I'm doing even if they want to (I know I know... if they really wanted, they could just send friends to my house).

Using Linux, Android GOS, and Pihole. They live under a "picked-up-from-a-shelf" router; and that router under theirs.

(I cannot get a different ISP)

Thanks

I'm a privacy focused individual, I run GrapheneOS on my phone & self-host as much of my tech stacks to avoid sharing info with. I'm looking for recommendations of smartwatches that align with the ideals of this community. What watch do you use? What do you recommend?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/49179218

For those who use GrapheneOS, is it worth it? Do you like it?

My backups are done, all that is left is the final choice to wipe my whole phone.

Originally Umbrachat was a web app named Peersuite ( that I also developed) that was distributed as a docker image, web site, or electron app. Umbrachat has chat with channels, file sharing, threaded replies, and image preview in chat. Also, audio/video conferencing and screenshare.

I pulled out the non-social business type features ( document editing, whiteboard, and kanban ) and simplified the CSS and the code. I got everything down to under 200k in size and packaged it as a browser extension, which IMO is a way simpler method to use it.

All datastreams ( chat, audio, video) are encrypted end to end. After the initial connection to the server you are connected directly to your friends in a mesh network with superpeer capability.

github: https://github.com/openconstruct/umbrachat peersuite github: https://github.com/openconstruct/Peersuite

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umbrachat/

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/umbrachat/jdgneoijldkiffdnhkibcdnajchecaip?hl=en-US

Happy to answer any questions!

I'm wondering what would be necessary to build GrapheneOS releases yourself, and regularly update your phone from your own servers, with your builds. The server for apps.grapheneos.org should also be replaced. Has anyone done this?

The documentation for GrapheneOS has a section about how to reproduce builds:

https://grapheneos.org/build#reproducible-builds

But it would be more involved than that.

I actually have two questions, first, should I switch to GOS even though they don't really recommend it on their website and might be left behind soon?

Second, should I install the new March android update? I don't use any of these features that are listed, and some dont even work for pixels older than 8. My worry is that the phone will just get slower and drain battery faster. But on the other hand I probably need to update this to receive other security updates later this year before the 5y period of support runs out.

Also I'm not looking to replace my phone. This is still an amazing and fast device with camera better than 90% of phones out now.

Thanks for the advice!

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/60567571

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116200110686604617

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/65229031

This vote fails to reject the whole regulation but approves text amendments and now the whole process goes back to the LIBE Committee (Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs)

Amendment 5, tabled by Pirate Party MEP Markéta Gregorová (Greens/EFA group) and adopted by a narrow margin, demands that any scanning of private communications must be strictly limited to individual users or groups of users suspected by a competent judicial authority of being linked to child sexual abuse. This aligns with the European Parliament’s 2023 mandate on the permanent Chat Control regulation (CSAR).

• Vote details
• Amendments

Other sources:

• MEPs Vote to End Untargeted Mass Scanning of Private Chats
• Chat Control Timeline

Using graphene is and cash app doesn't like "emulating" their app so is there an alternative? Id need something private that works on graphene, I don't have an actual credit card and need an alternative so that I can still get paid and buy stuff but looking into open source alternatives seems like going through an ocean where I'm not even sure what's good or what would even work on graphene. Any suggestions?