Australia's Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind determined in 2024 that Bunnings breached privacy laws by scanning hundreds of thousands of customers' faces without their proper consent.

A review of that decision by the Administrative Review Tribunal of Australia has now found the opposite

The retailer did not break the law by scanning customers' identities, but should improve its privacy policy and notify customers of the use of AI-based facial recognition technology, the ruling said

Petty typical stuff by this point. The privacy-invading company wins, pissweak government makes a few privacy "recommendations" but stops short of enforcing anything

I will be upfront with this, and say that I've never been a huge fan. But I did reinstall a Matrix server, and some clients to see if it'd gotten better in the year or so since I've last used it.

This just... Kind of feels like a more centralized XMPP with group chat folders that sort of function? The spaces feature is neat, but I've tried 4-5 clients, and every single one of those throws all of them into the same screen as the DMs by default, and I can't find a way to change that.

Am I missing something here? Like. I want to at least see what people like here, I just can't.

I have never had a LinkedIn account, both out of general anti-data-vacuuming-social-media, and specifically anti-whatever-the-fucking-corphead-psychos-are-doing-on-LinkedIn tendencies, and managed to find a decent job out of uni just fine (software field). I'm now looking for a job again and the number one piece of advice I'm being given by concerned parties is "get on LinkedIn".

I'm curious how many people into the whole "privacy" thing have had to make this choice, and which way you went with it.

Do the advantages (which it seems mainly boil down to "networking") outweigh the icky feeling I'd get making an account? Of course only I can actually answer that question, but it sums up my conundrum.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55042223

Getting pixel 9, graphene?

Hey y'all! So we are changing phone providers and they are forcing us into getting a new phone. I have an s23 which I hate anyway, and can get a pixel 9 or 10 now. I want the 9 since it seems better for me.

My question is, should I install graphene on it right away? I don't wanna have to reset it again down the road. And I don't care about warranties, if it dies I can afford another one.

Graphene seems to support the 9 and 10 from what I'm seeing

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55057321

Hey yall

Had to get an all new furnace and heat pump installed. I opted for the Honewell thermostat. I don't want this thing on my wifi. I don't need to have it connected right?

“They” are saying it has to be on wifi so it can see the outdoor temp to talk to the heat pump. Bullshit i say.

Curious what everyone here uses for their weather app or website of choice ?

Good afternoon, y'all!

I have decided to take the plunge and switch over to Graphene OS. Is there anything I need to know before I use the web installer? I'm a bit bummed about having to set up all my apps again, but I'm exporting all my settings, thanks FOSS apps! to help with the transition. Most of my data is fully backed up through Nextcloud, so I'll be able to just jump straight in with my photos and data.

So yeah, any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated before I go through with it tonight. Thanks, y'all and again, I love being a part of the Lemmy community.

Every morning, I do a multiple DNS Leak test just as a precaution. Today, I did the leak test and all my IPs were different. They were the same IP block, just different. This made me suspicious and I set about trying to track the problem down. Turns out, there was a misconfiguration in the VPS. Worked yesterday, different today. I guess it was ghosts or gremlins in the machinery.

I got to thinking, for you guys who download a lot of Linux ISOs, might be a good idea to check daily. Even though you are setting behind a VPN, it's still worth the minute it takes to fire off multiple DNS Leak checks just for a sanity check.

I've been happily running my own mailserver for ten years, but recently, the overlords (garbageMail and MicroShit) have been blocking my messages. I think I knew the day would come when they successfully push me out of SMTP, and it's today. I have 100% compliance: SPF, DKIM, TLS, DANE, DMARC, etc. yet everything I send goes to spam. Emails I reply to (with reply headers) go into spam. How can they even justify it?

I don't want a full inbox (pop/imap). I'm just looking for a privacy-friendly SMTP service for sending mail with reputation. I'm not mass-marketing so pretty much whoever is cheapest per month and respects my privacy.

Looking at like, mailgun, simplelogin, proton? This is so sad.

So far so good. Not sure how it is in everyone else's phone, but if the instance doesn't work, I just swipe back, hit settings, and select another instance.

It's got Webveiw and seems nice. I can save boomarks to the bookmark app integrated with my OS but can't figure out how to access it on Searchist.

So have you tried it and what do you think? My only hangup is the bookmarks, and this was released just a few days ago, so I bet they'll fix it.

Do you use Signal for chatting securely with friends and loved ones? Us too! We endorse it wholeheartedly, and rely on it for nearly all our communication.

But the vibes are deteriorating here in the US, and we should have a communications contingency plan for if Signal goes down.

Here's a year-long programme to get yourself off Big Tech products, step-by-step.

Many here will already have done this, but please share with your friends and family who are still yet to take that journey.

Let's stop feeding the (data) beast! This movement requires huge numbers of people to do it, to be really effective, so all upvoting is appreciated 😀

I miss the olden days when staying logged out of your account meant your recommendations weren't cluttered up by every post you read, video you watched or search you did across every device.

Any way to curb this?

So I just discovered that SmartTube had malware in it (yay) and so I reset my Chromecast I had it set up on.

What is weird though is that when I reset it now it disconnects from the WiFi all the time like seriously every 10 mins or so AND the Mullvad app was showing up back on it but the thing is I didn't reinstall it.

Is it possible this malware wasn't wiped from the factory reset? Or am I just paranoid?

Dont want to self promote, just looking for some feedback on a vpn im building and the thoughts and reasoning behind why i'm doing certain things.

Token instead of account username/password (pretty self explanatory) No 3rd party processor for XMR payments and running my own node Shared exits with 2 locations ( no obvious correlation between 1 user = 1 ip) Wireguard Only for smaller attack surface Endpoint flushing when a handshake is over 10 mins old on wg interface so the user's IP doesnt even live in RAM .onion mirror available which I encourge you to use

I explain other stuff mostly on the FAQ, i encourge everybody to read it please!

I have a Debian laptop that I use for most things and a Windows 11 laptop that only gets powered on when I need to use the Lockdown Browser for my weekly quiz.

Is there such thing as having a full Windows 11 installation on a thumb drive that I can save things on? I need to be able to save files and the Lockdown Browser on it. And finally of course the Lockdown Browser must work when I use it as well. Is there such thing as that? Is there a reputable place where I can buy one so that I don't waste many hours and probably fail trying to make one myself? Thanks in advance.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/45042331

Hello again!!

Sorry for the big delay in the announcements. I know it has been a long time I have not made any announcements but I will try my best next time this doesn't happen again.

So, through the medium of this post I would like to share with you all the v1.24.36 major release version of the websurfx project which was released on the 26th of January.

If you are new, and you don't know what is websurfx then I would suggest taking a look at my previous post here:

https://programming.dev/post/2678496

Which covers in depth about what the project is and why it exists.

Credits

Before I share with you the changelog, what this release version means and a preview on what we are planning to work on for the next major release v2.0.0. I would first like to thank all our contributors and maintainers because of whom this was all possible. Specially I would like to thank spencerjibz, MickLesk and SchweGELBin who have been invaluable to the project. Also, Websurfx would not have been possible without alamin655 and xffxff early involvement.

Thanks 💖 to all the people involved in the project

Now, let's dive straight into what this release version actually means.

What does this release version means

This new release version v1.24.36 updates the hybrid caching api to take advantage of the two layer caching solution which eliminates the round trip time delay of fetching the same results from the cache.

Changelog

The changelog of all the changes can be found here:

https://github.com/neon-mmd/websurfx/releases/tag/v1.24.36

Preview of the goals for the next major release

• Different levels of privacy to choose from with the help of rust's conditional compiling features (In progress).
• Even more engines will be supported.
• Categories would be added to search results like images, news, etc.
• More themes will be provided by default
• More animations for the websurfx frontend will be supported.
• Multi language support would be added.
• I2p and tor support will be provided.
• Reduce animations would be added for those who don't want animations and effects on the frontend.
• And lots more ✨.

Call To Action

If you love our project and want to see it move ahead and progress in the direction you want, then we would suggest contributing at our project

It seems the DeFlock website is offline (as of posting this). I know Flock sent a cease-and-desist letter in the past, so did it get its way; or is it simply a hosting issue? Anyone having more information regarding this?

Update: the website appears to be online once more, and the downtime likely hosting-related.

So apparently Purism has their own privacy e-mail and VPN services, like Proton. I'm just wondering if anyone has used them and what they think, since I have never heard about them before, have never seen them recommended.