• 1 Post
  • 56 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 30th, 2023

help-circle

  • Session was at first a fork of Signal without usernames.

    Now by design it uses their own custom tor-like service (instead of just… using tor) and does not support forward secrecy or deniable authentication, so anyone who collects the messages in transit can either find a vulnerability in the encryption scheme, or spend enough GPU resources to crack it, and they have confirmation of who sent and received the message and what the contents of the message are. And is headquartered in Australia, which is 5EYES and much more against encryption than the US. Oh, and the server is closed-source.

    Regarding Australia’s 2018 bill…

    The Australian Parliament passed a contentious encryption bill on Thursday to require technology companies to provide law enforcement and security agencies with access to encrypted communications. Privacy advocates, technology companies and other businesses had strongly opposed the bill, but Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government said it was needed to thwart criminals and terrorists who use encrypted messaging programs to communicate.

    Regarding the ‘vulnerability or cracking them later’ bit…

    Messages that are sent to you are actually sent to your swarm. The messages are temporarily stored on multiple Service Nodes within the swarm to provide redundancy. Once your device picks up the messages from the swarm, they are automatically deleted from the Service Nodes that were temporarily storing them.

    From Session’s own FAQ:

    Session clients do not act as nodes on the network, and do not relay or store messages for the network. Session’s network architecture is closer to a client-server model, where the Session application acts as the client and the Service Node swarm acts as the server. Session’s client-server architecture allows for easier asynchronous messaging (messaging when one party is offline) and onion routing-based IP address obfuscation, relative to peer-to-peer network architectures.

    I wouldn’t touch it with a 12ft ladder.






  • Unless you’re making more than $16 each month (most are not making anywhere close to that) from Medium then you’re just choosing another company to profit off of you. It’s also more work and takes a lot (arguably, depending on your technical comfort level) more time because again… most people have nothing of much value to say. If you’re an expert on your field or a great marketer, sure maybe you can make that $16 back and then some. Most can not. You’ll know if you can, and you can look at your medium analytics and judge that and then do the Wix thing because…

    Do you own the content that you publish on Medium?

    Yes. Everything you publish on Medium, that is rightfully yours, belongs to you and you can republish, delete or choose to convert it into other forms without worrying about anything because Medium gives you the ownership. They have clearly explained this in the Medium terms of service.

    Medium (company) might use your content to redistribute, translate or modify, and they need your permission for this. They need licensing for this because of the Medium rule; “You own your content”

    Medium is like an ocean in part because it’s so easy and free. There are some really spectacular fish and animals and rare finds and even shipwrecks full of gold and treasure. There is also a metric shit-ton of mediocrity.

    A comparison could be made to YouTube or tiktok. Sure, you can make videos and upload them to your website and then share them. But there is immense value in the existing community in algorithm.



  • The thing about medium is that it’s a trusted domain + mailing list + blog + search engine in one. All you have to do is sign up and start writing, for free.

    Sure you can have your own domain, and spin up a cheap VPS which has WordPress or other blogging software, customize and setup the share buttons and theme and other plugins, pay MailChimp or another trusted relay to actually inbox your emails, use Google Analytics or some open source complex privacy-focused analytics, and then set up your advertisements or some scheme to contact you for article product placement if you actually want to make money from it. If you’re really good and knowledgeable in your field. That’s a lot of time invested and very expensive relatively (compared to free).

    I think a lot of people just want to share their knowledge, getting paid pennies for page views comes second to that.




  • Synnr@sopuli.xyztoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldMy new favourite password manager
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    In theory, if I were to use an online solution, bad actors wouldn’t be able to pull my vault from memory.

    It’s the same issue once you login to your vault via browser extension. They have to download your vault locally on login to decrypt it when you enter your password anyway*. Even if they don’t store your vault password in memory, they either store the entire vault (unlikely for size reasons) or a more temporary key to access the vault. Local compromise is full compromise already.

    *If they don’t, then they either made a giant technological leap, or they’re storing your passwords on a simple database on their servers and that’s not what you want from a password manager.


  • Synnr@sopuli.xyztoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldMy new favourite password manager
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Yup, I have been using KeePassXC locally since (one of) the first big LastPass breaches. I thought “password manager company… they know encryption” and then kept some of the most important things stored in my vault including notes of Bitcoin seedphrases etc. Thought "even if they get hacked, they wouldn’t let anyone exfil the huge amount of data from the USER VAULT SERVER… thought “my passphrase is like 25-30 chars long, nobody will crack that”…

    5 years after my last login and I find out the breach happened, user vaults were exfil’d, the encryption was absolute shit, and the notes weren’t even encrypted.

    I don’t trust cloud companies to keep promises or know what they’re doing today. and anything self-hosted isnt Internet accessable unless it’s on dedicated hardware subnetted off and wouldn’t matter if it got hacked.






  • I chuckle inside and exit the room at the first chance when someone non-jokingly refers to themselves as an alpha male. And that’s not because I’m afraid of them–the fact is that I’m the alpha male.

    /s

    Humans in packed cities could be described in a similar way though, if there’s not a social reinforcement in place, by the community elders who are respected and followed, to keep them from it. I live in a medium sized city now because of work, but even still I can relate to the rats [I’m aware of the studies flaws].

    Put any one species into a [packed] depressing [space] with way too many strangers and way too [varied amounts of resources per individual], and they will fight and establish a pecking order eventually. This has nothing to do with how the same species would behave in the wild and with enough resources to live comfortably.

    I grew up in the country with tens of acres and my nearest neighbor was a mile away. Separated from the small town nearby by a river and surrounded by thick hedgerows going miles around in every direction, with a huge open space (fields) between our house and the hedgerows. I’ve never been happy in the city. No matter where I am, I feel like I’m in a cage. I’m not agoraphobic but there’s a sense of being ‘watched’ when I leave my house that just isn’t there when you live in a remote area. All the people, sights, sounds, smells can be incredibly overwhelming at times.

    I am only capable of attaining a true level of peace when I’m in nature.



  • Are you trying to guess what my reply would be? If not, you seriously need to look in the mirror bud.

    Hamas is a terrorist organization. They are horrific and should all be taken care of… take that how you will. Palestinians and Israel is should be able to live in peace. This much is self evident and shouldn’t be up for debate like you’re trying to do.

    But Israel lobbing back over bombs and killing innocent civilians is the Spider-Man pointing at himself meme.