• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: November 8th, 2023
  • LWD@lemm.eetoDeGoogle Yourself@lemmy.ml•Mullvad leta vs 4get
    1·
    3 days ago

    Either is pretty good. If you’re looking for more diverse options I’d recommend 4get or a half decent Whoogle or SearxNG instance.

    But you’re right that you do have to trust the person or group running it, and I think Mullvad has the upper hand there. It’s big enough to attract a crowd, and its caching means the results are extra generic too.

    If you’re looking just for Google results, Startpage is… Fine, I think.

    Running a VPN makes any of these options much better.

  • LWD@lemm.eetoDeGoogle Yourself@lemmy.ml•Another deGoogled iPhone
    11·
    4 days ago

    But as soon as you do Proton Mail + VPN, you then go with Proton Unlimited and that is what makes the most sense financially.

    That’s how they get you! ;)

    Mail and VPN are something I would never want to cross associate, though. After all, any mail provider can see the full contents of any unencrypted email at some point (including Proton), and any VPN provider can see as much as your ISP used to see about your internet activity.

  • LWD@lemm.eetoDeGoogle Yourself@lemmy.ml•Switch to Qwant
    2·
    5 days ago

    I’m of two minds of this. On one hand, like you said, all your searches will still track back to your IP address.

    But on the other hand, if it’s a pseudonymous IP address, you might end up giving out less information then if you contacted the search instances directly. You don’t have to worry about scraping away cookies or using a specific browser or always being connected to a VPN. In essence, the self-hosted instance is your “VPN” for searches.

    It would be nice if you could get your friends to also use your instance, but if not, I think a self-hosted instance for a party of one is not a meaningless venture.

  • LWD@lemm.eetoDeGoogle Yourself@lemmy.ml•Switch to Qwant
    33·
    7 days ago

    I don’t know if it’s accurate to describe Qwant as “private.” There is a bit to be desired with their privacy policy, such as them apparently sending your IP address to Microsoft

    https://about.qwant.com/en/legal/confidentialite/

    There’s also this bizarre section

    If you have not consented or are not subject to the Services offered, we automatically collect technical data… Salted hash of the IP address…, market segment of a query, date and time of the visit, information about the country and chosen language…

    Anonymized by Microsoft after 6 months.

  • LWD@lemm.eetoProton @lemmy.world•Does Proton really support Trump? A deeper analysis (and surprising findings)English
    1·
    2 months ago

    There are multiple issues with this blog post.

    Paints entire issue as “politics”

    The post falsely assumes Andy Yen’s politics exclusively matter - they don’t. Andy Yen stupidly posted a opinion online, then stupidly got the official corporate Proton account to stupidly repeat it on multiple platforms.

    This is the issue: they demonstrated massive corporate mismanagement.

    Then the company tried sweeping it under the rug, and many users are unaware about the corporate statements.

    The article never addresses that issue. The author probably wishes Andy Yen’s mistake was just political, because that would be easy to write off. But it’s not.

    Trust matters

    If the CEO is able to bungle something this badly in full public sight, I lose a tremendous amount of trust in the actual product. And because Proton gets a good chance to read over every single email that comes in from an external source - password reset emails, confidential documents, etc - now I’m worried that they could bungle something that I can’t see… Until it’s too late.

    Article misrepresents Slater

    If you read this Medium article alone, you might come away with the impression Gail Slater is a champion of small business. After all, it says

    Legal experts have described Slater to be “not known as a friend of Big Tech”, and “not good for Google” despite her Republican ties. It is likely that knowing this, Andy was caught by surprise at Trump’s pick…

    I was caught by surprise too: this article misses key details about Gail Slater. Several people pointed this out to Andy Yen.

    Her Wikipedia page suggests she worked for the FTC before working for a lobbying firm and joining the first Trump administration. Then she worked for Fox and Roku and is now rejoining the Trump administration.

    That lobbying group that employed her for four years was the Internet Association.

    The Internet Association (IA) was an American lobbying group based in Washington, D.C., which represented companies involved in the Internet. It was founded in 2012 by Michael Beckerman and several companies, including Google, Amazon, eBay, and Facebook…

    In 2017, the Internet Association opposed California AB 375, a data privacy bill that would require Internet service providers to obtain customers’ permission to collect and sell their browsing history, citing desensitization and security as the basis for their opposition.

    Maybe Andy Yen stupidly didn’t know better when he made his post (as “Proton Team”) when he claimed she had “a solid track record of being on the right side of the antitrust issue”.

    But this article should have known.

    Technical issues

    This article also makes a poor technical assumption: if you read it without knowing better, you’d think Proton isn’t capable of scanning and recording the text of mail as it arrives.

    Lines like these

    Proton is end-to-end encrypted, meaning it cannot decrypt user data.

    tell the reader, either ignorantly or intentionally, the opposite of most email works. Banks, service providers, and password reset emails are all likely to be readable on receipt. E2EE emails in Proton are literally exceptionally rare.

    Assorted notes

    • This article is the one the Proton team officially endorses. (Or is that Andy Yen commandeering the account again?)
    • Assuming racism isn’t possible for Asian people is, at best, a naive thing to say as a defense.
    • The article equates women with automatically being feminist; for a paper with so many links, it’s strange that this claim was unsourced
  • LWD@lemm.eetoPrivacy@lemmy.world•Anti-virus/malware desktop software recommendations?English
    1·
    1 year ago

    Some tangential preventative measures:

    uBlock Origin on Firefox (and their browser of choice, if necessary). Preventing scam websites is a useful preventative measure that you don’t have to monitor.

    Maybe have remote support software set up on their computers set up already. Something scammers don’t like to use.

    Other thoughts:

    I know this isn’t exactly what you’re asking, but if you can get your family/friends to know to never download a program or call a phone number… Or better yet, get them to simply reboot their computer, a lot of pain will be averted.

    I wonder if there are ways you can manually lock down the computer that would also help.