I understand that you can't trust any VPN altogether but aren't some better than others?

Sometimes they work, and sometimes I have to close one or the other, or every connection gets blocked. I haven't blocked anything from Proton VPN on Portmaster - just some Windows services and domains that don't break the internet when Proton VPN is off.
Do you have any idea what may be happening or how I can discover what's going on?

• both on the free plan.

Edit: I might have figured it out. It seems like they are fighting over DNS resolving. When I removed the DNS settings from Portmaster (it's already set in the browser anyway), it started working again :)

Lemme simplify it:

Let's say I have x@keemail.me. It's free. Then I upgrade it to Legendary.

Can I create y@keemail.me and z@keemail.me paying only for x? Or will I also have to pay for y and z?

What do you think of stoat ? I didn't find any comparison with other safe messaging service.

I understand that legally, it's under the GDPR but it's depand of the UK, famously imply in the 5 eyes States.

3 parties services are used, which may imply metadata leaks' and I didn't saw any mention of end-to-end encryption, OSR or other safety feature.

Stoat sell itself as safety focus. Do you think it's still an interesting app, compare to other chat service like mattermost, or do you think it's a safe-scam like Theema or proton ?

cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/post/539098

Filmed on 5/20/2025 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.

About the speakers:

Meredith Whittaker is Signal’s President and a member of the Signal Foundation Board of Directors. She has over 17 years of experience in tech, spanning industry, academia, and government. Before joining Signal as President, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and served as the Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute which she co-founded. Her research and scholarly work helped shape global AI policy and shift the public narrative on AI to better recognize the surveillance business practices and concentration of industrial resources that modern AI requires. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google’s Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world’s largest source of open data on internet performance. She also helped lead organizing at Google. She was one of the core organizers pushing back against the company’s insufficient response to concerns about AI and its harms, and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on privacy, security, artificial intelligence, internet policy, and measurement. She recently completed a term as Senior Advisor on AI to the Chair at the US Federal Trade Commission.

Stéphan-Eloïse Gras is a researcher and entrepreneur specializing in the geoeconomics of AI. An assistant professor at CNAM-Paris, she explores AI technologies through the lens of software & critical data studies. She also serves on the board of Probabl, an AI company built around the popular open-source library scikit-learn. With 15+ years in the digital sector, she has led initiatives at the intersection of innovation, research, education, and emerging markets. As CEO of Digital Africa, she oversaw a €130M initiative supporting African startups. She also co-founded Africa 4 Tech and led OpenClassrooms’ strategic expansion in Africa. Her doctoral research traced the rise of AI through a music recommendation algorithm acquired by Spotify. She teaches at CNAM, Sciences Po, NYU, and Sorbonne and is currently writing a book on the geoeconomics of AI, describing LLMs as “belief-making machines.”

Rachel Donadio, the Library’s Curator of Cultural Programs, is a Paris-based writer, journalist and critic, a contributing writer for the Atlantic, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former European Culture Correspondent and Rome Bureau Chief of the New York Times.

This event was part of Ways of Seeing, a special series exploring the connections between storytelling, creativity, and the visual world.

I'm looking for a privacy-focused code editor that can handle HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I am just learning how to code, so I need something that works for beginners as well as respecting my privacy. I have looked around, but I don't know which one is the best option.

A really big surprise following the creation of my secondo profile on my GrapheneOS, which i created explicitly to have a google environment where I could keep bank apps segregated. So, I removed bank apps and Google play store on main profile, created 2nd profile, installed Google play store on 2nd profile, then installed the bank app, which I successfully logged onto the first time. The second time it locked me out saying that my account was blocked. I called the bank and they said I have malware and I need to hard reset my phone and reinstall. I'm not telling them what my real setup is because they won't understand. I wonder why the bank app thinks I have malware if I only have Google play store, the bank app and WhatsApp on my second profile?

Just sharing my day to day experience where I try to pursue privacy but I get screwed by the system. If you don't give up all you data, your life is made difficult. That is why people choose convenience and don't question too much. Its hassle free. How do we get out of this messed up system?

Like, I tried every single bridge, and no connecting.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/50130760

Happy to see a privacy-focused carrier, and it has better policies than any other carrier out there. But founder is formerly from Palantir and there’s a lot of VC money behind it (not inherently a problem, just flagging).

Thoughts?

If you have any sense of privacy, you know better than to use Google's official Youtube clients - not to mention, they're really kind of terrible.

To view Youtube video comfortably and limit Google's privacy invasions, the main third-party clients are:

• NewPipe and derivatives (Android)
• Grayjay (Android)
• Freetube (Desktop)
• Grayjay desktop - x64 only (Desktop)

Unfortunately, if you've been using those third-party clients for a long time, you know Google plays a game of cat and mouse with them, to discourage users from using them:

• Google breaks something or other (usually the player API) or Google blocks your IP because it detects a non-Google player.
• The developers of those clients play catch-up, make their clients work again for a while.
• Google breaks them again. Rinse. Repeat.

And Google now having free rein to be as abusive as they want under the Trump regime, it's not getting any better ☹️

The developers who react most quickly to Google's shenanigans are the FUTO developers behind Grayjay: when Google breaks it, usually they have a fix within hours, if not less. And there's a reason for that: they're paid to do it. Incidentally, I encourage you to purchase a FUTO license: it's money well spent to encourage FUTO. They've really earned it.

The Newpipe developers are also fairly quick to fix their client. Not always, but they do a pretty decent job.

Freetube however can take many days to get fixed. For instance, the native Freetube player is currently broken and it's been broken for a week.

When Google plays with everybody's balls, if you're on mobile, at least Grayjay will almost always get the job done, so you don't have to compromise your privacy and hit the official client.

On the desktop however, ~~unless you have an ARM64 machine and you use Grayjay as a desktop app in Waydroid - which is a totally valid solution that works great, in case you didn't know~~ [EDIT: this is incorrect: there is in fact an x64 Grayjay desktop client - Thanks @portnull@lemmy.dbzer0.com], Freetube will sadly let you down regularly for a long time.

The official workaround recommended by the Freetube developers when Google breaks their player is to use an external player. But there are two problems with that:

• If you don't use the right external players - which Google likely broke too - or the player isn't configured to use the latest and greatest Google evasion code, it's not going to work.
• When spawning Freetube with a URL (typically by LibRedirect from your browser), Freetube ignores the external player and tries to play the video with its broken internal player anyway. You can always manually tell it to use the external player after it's failed trying to play the video itself, but it's an extra step, and you end up running both Freetube and the external player just to view a Youtube video from a website.

So I figured I'd post a little guide on how to setup an external video player that works with Freetube (and gets fixed quickly when Google breaks it) and how to spawn it directly from your browser to view a video and bypass LibRedirect / Freetube entirely.

This little guide is mostly for Linux. If you're not running Linux, the principle should be the same, but the details of how to make this work are different of course.

So the player you need is SMPlayer. SMPlayer is a great mpv player frontend in its own right. Don't worry, both mpv and SMPlayer are usually available in most distros, so you can install it normally with your favorite package manager.

But the thing that makes SMPlayer great is, to play Youtube video, it can use yt-dlp as a backend to fetch the video from Youtube:

And it turns out, the developers of yt-dlp are usually very quick to unfuck Google's fuckeries and make it work again. Almost as quick as FUTO's developers: when Google breaks things, yt-dlp is usually one of the first Youtube clients to start working again.

The problem is, the version of yt-dlp that comes in most distributions is usually hopelessly behind, so it won't work with your distro's official package.

To use the latest and greatest yt-dlp with SMPlayer, you need to use the version in the Github repo. To do this:

• Clone the repo (for example in your home directory): git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp.git
• Make yt-dlp available in your PATH: ln -s ~/yt-dlp/yt-dlp.sh ~/.local/bin/yt-dlp

Then if you invoke yt-dlp from any directory, it should start it correctly:

$ yt-dlp  

Usage: yt-dlp [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]  

yt-dlp: error: You must provide at least one URL.  
Type yt-dlp --help to see a list of all options.  

Then you can try if SMPlayer now plays a Youtube video correctly: smplayer https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw

Finally, configure Freetube to use SMPlayer as an external player:

Now try to play a video from Freetube: it should open SMPlayer and SMPlayer should play the video correctly.

When Google breaks yt-dlp again, simply go into the repo and do a git pull --recurse-submodules. Do this regularly until the yt-dlp folks work their magic and fix it, which should happen a lot quicker than fixing the internal Freetube player.

Finally, how to spawn SMPlayer directly from the browser:

• Install the RunWith browser extension: this little thing is a simple tool to spawn an external program from the browser and it's really underrated. Not terribly user-friendly to install but it does the job fine.
• In the RunWith extension preferences, configure RunWith like so:

Then if you right-click on a Youtube video link, you'll get an option in the context menu to open it with SMPlayer through RunWith:

I hope this helps 🙂

Whenever people ask about ways to make their smartphones more private or which is the most privacy-respecting phone to get, there's always a few people confidently asserting "all smartphones are spy tools, get a dumbphone with no apps if you want to be private". Which is ridiculous advice for a few reasons

• Dumbphones usually run either proprietary operating systems or outdated forks of Android. They're almost never encrypted. They rarely get security updates. They're a lot more vulnerable than even a regular Android phone

• With dumbphones, you're usually limited to regular phone calls or SMS/MMS messaging. These are ancient communication standards with zero built-in privacy. Your ISP can read any text message you send and view metadata logs of any phone calls you make. In lots of places (like Australia where I live) ISPs are actually required to keep logs of your messages and phone calls

With even a regular Android phone you at least have access to encrypted messaging apps like Signal or Session so your conversations aren't fair game for anyone who wants to read them. Of course there are better options. iOS (not perfect but better than most bloatware-filled Android devices) and a pixel with GrapheneOS (probably the best imo) are much better options; but virtually anything out there is going to be better for privacy than a dumbphone

Edit: Thanks everyone for giving your thoughts. Some really good points I hadn't thought much about

Hi,

I've seen stremio pop up a few times in my feed recently and decided to give a look. It's seems like I could use it with torrentio, but my concern is that the apps comes with a few trackers, amongst which 3 facebook trackers (share, login & analytics).

I don't know much about trackers, how they work, and what I should worry about, so I mostly try to avoid them, but could someone here tell me if I should worry about these facebook trackers (I don't use fb, but since it's pretty much the Devil itself...), and maybe suggest resources on how to get informed on trackers, what they do, and when to worry about it?

Thank you for your help.

Cheers,

I just discovered this app. I know there are folks out there who think location tracking is the opposite of privacy but it's a nice security tool to keep track of your loved ones. I found this one thats fully end to end encrypted. I am currently in the works to migrate my family of 10 over. (This includes my grandparents who are less than tech savvy)

Just thought I would share in the event there was a father like me looking for a similar tool that doesn't sell your location data or breach your data.

First one is from my personal profile and the second one is from ny work profile.

I need Instagram for our class group chat and Discord for communicating with my friends.

Saw this in my adguard home query logs.

Just updated to iOS 26 and a few hours later got this notice about “enchanted 5g” for some apps. I had no idea what it was, so I checked the details and saw that it was automatic enabled and shares info about what apps you use with Verizon. If it wasn’t for this notification I would have no idea this was running.

No thanks. Disable that.

Edit: “enchanted” lol. Meant enhanced.

I'm frustrated. I'm a long time fan of Motorola. Their phones have been pretty simple and easy to remove junk apps. Recently I got an update that forced perplexity on my phone.

Is there more software that, like TrackMeNot and AdNauseam, generate random internet activity so as to reduce the accuracy of any profiles tracking companies keep about you? E.g. software that carries out complete plausible-looking surfing journeys in the background: not just issuing searches (like TrackMeNot) and following ads (like AdNauseam), but also clicking on other links, scrolling, going back, perhaps even watching a YouTube video every once in a while and browsing Facebook? (All this, of course, respectful of the environment and the limited resources of small projects.) Or apps for the smartphone to generate false but plausible-looking position data and the like?

(Background: As many of you know, trackmenot is a browser extension that enhances your privacy by generating random search queries in the background, watering out the profiles that Google, Microsoft (and Yahoo, Baidu and AOL) have of you. It's available in the Firefox extension store; whereas for Chrome, Google has banned it from its store for unfathomable reasons. There's also AdNauseam, which works towards the same goal by randomly clicking ads in the background.)

A nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing human rights in digital spaces across West Asia and North Africa — is warning that Israeli-linked software secretly embedded in Samsung phones across the MENA region poses a serious surveillance threat.

According to SMEX, Samsung’s A and M series devices either come preloaded with the app “Aura” or install it automatically through system updates, without the user’s consent. The application reportedly collects a wide range of personal and device-specific data, including IP addresses, device fingerprints, hardware details, and network information.

​​In 2022, Samsung MENA partnered with Israeli tech company IronSource, integrating its Aura software into Galaxy A and M series phones across the region. The partnership was publicly marketed as a way to “enhance user experience” with AI-powered apps and content suggestions.

Social media users are calling for the mass cancellation of ExpressVPN subscriptions after it was revealed that a cybersecurity firm with Israeli ties owns the popular privacy service.

In 2021, The Times of Israel reported that Kape Technologies, a British-Israeli digital security company, acquired ExpressVPN, one of the world’s largest virtual private network (VPN) providers, for nearly $1bn.

The calls for cancellation intensified after social media users began circulating information about Teddy Sagi, the Israeli billionaire and owner of Kape Technologies. Many shared that in 2023, as reported by The Jerusalem Post, Sagi donated $1m to transport soldiers during the Israeli war on Gaza.