Privacy

I find it alarming that to "protect" women, men have to be surveilled secretly in all public places. This is way beyond dystopian.

AI and remote security personnel get to decide if someone is "a predator" and take 'em down preemptively if they look suspicious.

What could possibly go wrong?

Disclaimer: This is not technically a privacy matter for the reader, but I believe it is adjacent and important enough for this community.

Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal blog. All users encountering archive.today's CAPTCHA page currently load and execute the following Javascript: setInterval(function() { fetch("https://gyrovague.com/?s" + Math.random().toString(36).substring(2, 3 + Math.random() * 8), { referrerPolicy: "no-referrer",…

Far too many netizens still try to ignore this or even come up with reasons why gyrovague is the bad guy here.

Alternative archive pages:

archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archivebox.io (self-hosted)

But how else to bypass a paywall?

I've read relevant articles and clicked old links - they all seem to be history. The only ones that still work just look for the article in various archives - the subject of this post always amongst them. The same applies to this article, but there's still some good tips.

Here is the original article from 2023: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/ and what Patakallio has to say about it today:

The post mentions three names/aliases linked to the site, but all of them had been dug up by previous sleuths and the blog post also concludes that they are all most likely aliases, so as far as “doxxing” goes, this wasn’t terribly effective.

Here is a relevant ArsTechnica article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS.

archive.today (.ph, .is, .md, .fo, .li, .vn) also loads a pixel and javascript from mail.ru. The script mentions lamoda.ru, kommersant.ru, dzen.ru, ad.mail.ru, vk.com, vkontakte.ru, ok.ru, odnoklasseniki.ru. I haven't researched this further, but I think one can assume that your IP address will be spread across all relevant Russian websites. 10 years ago I would have said "so what? The Russians have social media too" but today you can safely assume that all this data is available to the government itself and is actively contributing to the hybrid war.

All in all, archive.today has always been in the "too good to be true" category. Call me suspicious.

And once again because it's important:

The Wikipedia guidance points out that the Internet Archive and its website, Archive.org, are “uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.”

It was reported in Brazil last week that the Federal Police was able to access previously displayed WhatsApp "view once" messages during an "extraction carried out by specific software that jointly displays the messages and files sent, reversing, in practice, the single view of the message" .

Here follows the original report, in Portuguese, and a quick translation to English.
Emphases and text within square brackets on the translation are my own.

Original Report

Mensagens trocadas entre Vorcaro e Moraes foram extraídas e periciadas pela PF, diz jornal

Reportagem publicada pelo blog da jornalista Malu Gaspar, do jornal "O Globo", trouxe prints de mensagens atribuídas ao banqueiro Daniel Vorcaro enviadas ao ministro Alexandre de Moraes horas antes de Vorcaro ser preso pela primeira vez.

O jornal o Globo publicou, na noite desta sexta-feira (6), uma reportagem informando que os dados das mensagens trocadas no dia 17 de novembro entre Daniel Vorcaro e o ministro Alexandre de Moraes, do Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), foram retirados do celular do dono do Master por meio de análise técnica da Polícia Federal (PF), e que essa análise permite visualizar, ao mesmo tempo, a tela de whatsapp com as mensagens e as imagens de visualização única nela contida.

O jornal informa também que, diferentemente do material enviado à CPMI do INSS, o conteúdo a que o Globo teve acesso não é fruto de comparação entre os horários dos textos que constam em blocos de nota de Vorcaro e as mensagens enviadas por ele, embora coincidam, e sim resultado da extração realizada por um software específico que exibe conjuntamente as mensagens e os arquivos enviados, revertendo, na prática, a visualização única da mensagem.

English Translation

Messages exchanged between Vorcaro and Moraes were extracted and examined by the Federal Police, says newspaper

A report published by journalist Malu Gaspar's blog, from the newspaper "O Globo", brought prints of messages attributed to banker Daniel Vorcaro sent to minister Alexandre de Moraes hours before Vorcaro was arrested for the first time.

The newspaper "O Globo" published, on the night of this Friday (6), a report informing that the data of the messages exchanged on November 17th between Daniel Vorcaro and Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), were removed from the [banker's] cell phone through technical analysis by the Federal Police (PF), and that this analysis allows viewing, at the same time, the WhatsApp screen with the messages and the single-view images contained therein.

The newspaper also informs that, unlike the material sent to [a National Congress investigation], the content that "O Globo" had access to is not the result of a comparison between the times of the texts contained in Vorcaro's notebooks and the messages sent by him, although they coincide, but rather the result of extraction carried out by specific software that jointly displays the messages and files sent, reversing, in practice, the single view of the message .

Nobody wants to use AI to bug our phones, or to build a sprawling nerve system to track our vitals, because our phones are already bugged. Everything we do on them is recorded a dozen times over, by our wireless carriers, by the websites we visit and the apps we use, by the vendors and ad networks those companies are sending their data to, and in the marketplaces that sell that data. We built the eyes of the Greco decades ago.

But that data has remained relatively secure—or maybe more precisely, its potential energy has remained relatively buried—largely because it’s tedious to work with. It’s messy; it’s scattered across different sources and in different formats; combining it together is a pain, and most of us are simply not interesting enough to investigate. Data analysts who work at shadowy government agencies have lives too, and they do not want to write 595-line SQL queries either.

But AI doesn’t mind. And that’s the boring danger of what happens next: Not of AI becoming a superintelligent Sherlock Holmes finding impossible patterns in its enormous mind palace, but of it being a million monkeys at a million typewriters, doing the grunt work no person wanted to do. Because when prying questions are a prompt away—rather than 24 hours of work away—who wouldn’t get tempted to pry?

they handed over payment info with the real name

https://nationaltoday.com/us/ga/atlanta/news/2026/03/05/protons-privacy-policies-fail-to-fully-protect-payment-info/

I would like to invite all of you Linux users^1^ to check out the latest release of Konform Browser.

Konform Browser is a free/libre and open-source (FLOSS) fork of Firefox with the primary goals of security, privacy, and user freedom. Hoping to be an example of how these three goals don’t have to be at odds but support each other and work in harmony. Would love to hear your feedback on if it's in the right direction and what can be improved.

Been posting on and off the lemmies about the project during 2026. Below are major highlights since 140.8.0-103 update from a week and a half back:

• Bundling and enforcing use of bundled fonts. Konform Browser now carries the same font-loading patches and bundled fonts as Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser. While this does increase download- and installation sizes, it has two clear benefits:
  • Significantly improved resistance against font fingerprinting used by tracking scripts. Konform Browser should now be more robust against this attack by having shared global font fingerprint.
  • All languages and scripts should render as expected regardless of what fonts you have installed on system.
• Also bundled is now Multi-Account Containers Lite addon. It's a debloated^2^ fork of Firefox Multi-Account Containers so you can utilize Container Tabs and set per-container proxies without installing addon for it.
• While "AI chatbot" feature was already disabled and hidden by default, it was previously still possible to trigger activation of proprietary networked centralized cloudbots by setting pref browser.ml.chat.enabled=true. These have now been fully removed and replaced by a single provider utilizing locally running llamafile instance.
• Ported a bunch of security fixes and improvement on fingerprinting protection from FF Rapid Release and Tor Browser which didn't make it into upstream FF ESR.

For details and references see linked release notes. For even more details I hope the commit log is digestible.

Packages available for most Linux distributions.

AUR source package

Releases

Konform Browser is also on Mastodon where followers make me happy: https://techhub.social/@konform

^1^: Non-Linux users: This is the year to convert! (Or help out with porting if you're a rare BSDer ;))

^2^: Similarly as rest of Konform Browser: Removal and disabling of telemetry, analytics, ads, touting, nags ("call-to-actions"), and integrations with centralized proprietary service (Mozilla VPN in this case).

Mostly a "mildly infuriating" thing, but I had to setup my testing environment for a midterm.

First issue, my room is messy af lol, so I don't wanna be there and have the auto proctor be like "YOU COULD BE CHEATING!1!11!" because I've got stuff in the background, so I try to find a spot at my campus library, but bitches are loud af even on the upper floors.

Second issue, "Windows, Mac, and ChromeOS only" Sigh. Not suprised but, now I have to boot into my Windows partition that I haven't used in about half a year. And then redownload the coding environment again... Also fuck Microslop's file management and Onedrive. I love digging through folders figuring out where shit.

Third issue, the fucking testing environment just won't work when I do the device check. Had to download a bullshit extension to "lock down" the browser and get camera/mic access for the test, but it couldn't get my camera permission for some reason. Reload and re-setup like 5 times, no dice.

Fourth issue, even after disabling like every extension I had on UNGOOGLED chromium, I give up and download Google Spyware Chrome from scratch, re-login to everything, download the extension, and then FINALLY the rest of the setup works. Do a sweep of the room I'm in with the cam, and then test. Basically wasted like 30-40 mins setting up and downloading shit.

I was unsure if the proctor who reviews the footage would disapprove of me using the school computers because they're typically in an open environment (noise, people, books), so that's why I used my laptop instead of downloading the spyware to the school PCs. Similarly I did this test kinda last minute (due Sunday) so I couldn't just schedule an in person time on campus (I don't wanna drive on the weekend lol)

Democrats in the Wisconsin Legislature want to update the state Constitution to add a right to privacy they say will shield state residents from federal overreach across a wide range of topics, from abortion access to immigration enforcement.

geteilt von: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/966828

Comments

“Our location data should never be sold to the highest bidder. Today, data brokers and others sell records of our daily movements, including to sensitive locations like healthcare facilities, places of worship, or rallies, as often as every three seconds. This bill would curb those practices and strengthen privacy protections for all Virginians.”

"Telegram is not a private messenger. There's nothing private about it. It's the opposite. It's a cloud messenger where every message you've ever sent or received is in plain text in a database that Telegram the organization controls and has access to it"

"It's like a Russian oligarch starting an unencrypted version of WhatsApp, a pixel for pixel clone of WhatsApp. That should be kind of a difficult brand to operate. Somehow, they've done a really amazing job of convincing the whole world that this is an encrypted messaging app and that the founder is some kind of Russian dissident, even though he goes to Russia once a month, the whole team lives in Russia, and their families are there."

" What happened in France is they just chose not to respond to the subpoena. So that's in violation of the law. And, he gets arrested in France, right? And everyone's like, oh, France. But I think the key point is they have the data, like they can respond to the subpoenas where as Signal, for instance, doesn't have access to the data and couldn't respond to that same request.  To me it's very obvious that Russia would've had a much less polite version of that conversation with Pavel Durov and the telegram team before this moment"

I've been rewatching tech documentaries lately (Citizenfour, Terms and Conditions May Apply, The Internet's Own Boy, The Social Dilemma, The Code: Story of Linux). Then stumbled onto this video about the Epstein files. Not speculation, but actual documents and actual names. Names that overlap with the people who own the infrastructure of the internet, who shaped international relationships and narratives, who give TED talks about openness while cooperating with the same governments Snowden exposed.

I never trusted governments or big tech. But I could at least tell myself the picture was fragmented. That story is harder to tell now.

And then age verification starts rolling out globally, simultaneously, with almost no mainstream pushback. Here's what nobody says plainly: it's not a content policy, it's a surveillance architecture. To verify age at scale you need identity. Identity needs a database. A database has a jurisdiction. A jurisdiction has a government. Once that infrastructure exists it doesn't get decommissioned, and it gets expanded and handed to whoever comes next. We've watched this pattern repeat with every "safety" law for years.

Then Anthropic formalizes a relationship with the US government. The same government from Citizenfour. I would like to say that I'm not surprised by any of this, but I am, and seeing it all connect at once hits differently. Especially all of those people's lies. Knowing that motherfuckers like Peter Thiel or others who run big tech or government will handle your data and your rights is fucking unacceptable and disgusting.

The one thing that keeps me grounded is that the alternative infrastructure already exists. Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix, which are federated and decentralized, no single server to seize or company to subpoena. The architecture itself is the resistance. I'm done with Discord and moving to Matrix. Self-hosting is the next step when I have the time, because that's the best way to be private and don't give a damn about some motherfuckers taking over your rights.