Michel Salim @michel_slm@social.privacytools.io

I grew up on dialup. 1200bps, max. I remember what it was like to get anything done at that speed, and now that it's no longer a thing I wouldn't inflict it upon anyone. That's why I try to keep my stuff as lightweight as possible, with as few deps as possible.

Treat others as you'd want to be treated, right?

A couple of years back I went to an HTML5 meetup and hung out with a bunch of web developers. I suck at web design (so much so that I didn't bother to try to write a new theme for my website, I used one that someone else made and tweaked it a little). One of the webdevs noticed that I use a couple of adblockers and yelled at me for taking money out of his mouth. That one cannot eat money, and that he gets paid a (much larger) salary (than I do) is beside the point.

So I put my laptop on the local network (Windbringer had been tethered to my mobile - OPSEC, ya' know) and asked him for the URL of the website he works on. He gave it to me. I opened it in a bare Firefox profile (no addons, no config tweaks, new right out of the box). His precious website loaded fully after just under three minutes.

Then, to make things fair, I rebooted Windbringer, got back on the local wireless, and opened it in my usual Firefox profile, with all the adblockers turned on. His website loaded in about five seconds.

"Your website loads so much tracking garbage up front that your page won't load in less than three minutes. I don't have time for that." And I left.

Unsurprisingly, I haven't been invited back, but my point stands - too much crap means your page won't load in a reasonable period of time.

"Alexa, how do I treat a migraine?"

Amazon and NHS unveil partnership...
For fuck sake!
🤦‍♂️

https://news.sky.com/story/alexa-how-do-i-treat-a-migraine-amazon-and-nhs-unveil-partnership-11760048

#SurveillanceCapitalism
/cc @aral

Mozilla plans on adding a new dedicated social tracking protection component to their tracker protection system. This feature is currently under development, but is targeted for the Firefox 70 release.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-firefox-adding-a-new-social-tracking-protection-feature/

~Open Source Security Tool of the Day~

#OSSTotD

Prowler is a command line tool for AWS Security Best Practices Assessment, Auditing, Hardening and Forensics Readiness Tool.

It follows guidelines of the CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations Benchmark (49 checks) and has 40 additional checks including related to GDPR and HIPAA.

https://github.com/toniblyx/prowler

Ouch, looks like gitlab-letsencrypt has not been maintained for a year. Given it's the only NodeJS app I have to use I wonder if it's time to write a Python version?

https://github.com/rolodato/gitlab-letsencrypt

It should be easier to sunset a Mastodon instance.

Theres lots of reasons they shut down. And that's going to be a fact of life. But the software needs to be aware of that reality.

1) Actors have PGP keypairs. They can prove your identity on a new instance, but currently, exports don't contain the private key.

2) Admins should be able to enable a "sunset mode" which among other things would show site-wide banners encouraging users to grab their exports

A lot of people get robots.txt wrong.

It is, more than anything, a courtesy to *the crawler*. It's you flagging things that may break it (infinite recursion) or things that are fleeting and pointless to cache or index.

It's not a privacy control, and it's definitely not a security measure.

If you're still using any flavour of Chromium (Chrome, Brave, MS Edge,...), please do consider switching to a Gecko browser. Google abusing its monopoly to disable ad blocking is just the beginning, they'll try turning the internet in a gated Google services network as long as we let them

telnet http://mapscii.me # For maps in your terminal from OpenStreetMap. Use arrow keys to move around and a/z to zoom in/out. Or use your mouse if your terminal supports that.

You might notice a new set of options when making your account private.

Our commitment to platform privacy, safety and security remains a top priority and we are proud to offer some of the best safety tools in the fediverse.

#pixelfed

"Surveillance scoring" is a commonly used computer algorithm practice that can cause some customers to be charged more for products &/or be used to deny housing/employment.

@dellcam says experts are calling this behavior illegal & are fighting to end it: https://gizmodo.com/the-surveillance-scores-companies-use-to-rip-you-off-mi-1835812385

UK government and local ISPs are putting the pressure on browsers to drop plans to support DNS-over-HTTPS.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-isp-group-names-mozilla-internet-villain-for-supporting-dns-over-https/

UK ISP group names Mozilla 'Internet Villain' for supporting 'DNS-over-HTTPS' | ZDNet

UK government and local ISPs are putting the pressure on browsers to drop plans to support DoH protocol.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-isp-group-names-mozilla-internet-villain-for-supporting-dns-over-https/

#Alexa won't delete your #Amazon Echo transcripts. Here's the best you can do - CNET
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/alexa-wont-delete-your-amazon-echo-transcripts-heres-the-best-you-can-do/
#privacy #freedom

@privacylab "One recent study found that Amazon is the second most-trusted institution of any kind in the United States, ahead of Google, the police, and the higher-education system, and trailing only the U.S. military."

that's gotta be one of the most fucked up sentences I ever read

Facebook auto tagging people even if you don't. So much for respecting user's privacy.

🤨 🤨 🤨

#FacebookOutage #ImageTagging #Privacy

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681231/facebook-outage-image-tags-captions-ai-machine-learning-revealed

"Before implementing a captcha, it’s worth considering if one is necessary to begin with."

"The comment form of my blog is protected by what I refer to as “naive captcha”, where the captcha term is the same every single time. This has to be the most ineffective captcha of all time, and yet it stops 99.9% of comment spam."

https://kevv.net/you-probably-dont-need-recaptcha/

v @ekaitz_zarraga

MIT Tech Review: ".5 ˚C of warming could already be enough to expose 14% of the global population to bouts of severe heat, melt nearly 2 million square miles (5 million square kilometers) of Arctic permafrost, and destroy more than 70% of the world's coral reefs." https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613900/weve-already-built-too-many-power-plants-and-cars-to-prevent-15-c-of-warming/