Pretty much. Iirc there are a handful of places in the US that allow license plate covers but it’s usually illegal to obscure it for any reason when driving on public roads

• You have to hand over a huge amount of personal info about yourself & others to estate agents when renting a property - which they then sell to advertisers & you have no opt-out
• Similarly, landords can require you to use a proprietary app for rent payments, which of course collects & sells your private data too
• Burner phones are effectively illegal (telcos are required to collect & retain ID of every phone number they register)
• Telcos and ISPs are required to collect & retain logs of all your activities for a minimum of two years
• In some cities police can detain & search you & your property for no reason, and require you to remove any facial coverings
• It’s illegal to refuse to hand over passwords to cops (6 years jail is the max term I think)
• Police can hack your device, take over your social media, delete or modify your data for an investigation, or survey any digital device if they “think it is likely to be used by someone subject to a warrant” (this particular bill was announced and then rushed through parliament in less than 24 hours to give the public as little time as possible to protest it
• Some social media sites (including github(wtf)) are now required to age-verify all users beginning next month. Which will obviously lead to mass leaks & breaches of private data which the gov will turn a blind eye to

This is Australia. I hate it here

Exactly. The lead dev can come across as frustrated or confrontational on his social media posts but really the amount of noobs criticising Graphene for nonsense reasons or repeatedly bringing up other ‘secure’ OSes to him that he’s already thoroughly debunked again and again like e/OS would drive me insane

This shit should be strictly opt-in. As much as I hate overbearing governments, they should’ve stepped in and made it illegal to use already collected data for a new purpose without first obtaining permission. What about people who lost access to their accounts or who’ve died or something?

As much as I’d enjoy getting to work with more Macs I don’t think workplaces will deploy them at scale for the cost alone

What’s the alternative? Linux on phones is basically dead besides a few hobby projects that will never have enough of a following to be a serious contender to the duopoly

It’s a sign of rot in our culture. People feel entitled to know everything about others around them. It’s the same mindset whether it’s trawling through security camera footage or stalking someone on social media or irl. Technology has accelerated the trend and reinvented voyeurism as a mainstream hobby

At this rate we might finally see the year of the Linux desktop. I don’t know anyone who likes Windows 11 it’s been bad enough to convert even die-hard Windows fans to Linux

In what sense?

Real estate in general is a nightmare for privacy, especially for renters. You need to give a wealth of personal info about yourself and any references and it all gets sold, no data breaches needed! And your only opt out is don’t rent anywhere. And if you do anything to upset your landlord they’ll kick you out and add you to the blacklist so no other estate agent will consider you

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Whether it’s companies, gov or cops they’ll spin any lie to get what they want

Shoot the cameras down

They’ll never stop trying until it gets passed

I had a skim through the proposal and it sounds pretty solid. I do wonder though if the targeted advertising ban on under 17’s would push websites to do age verification like so many other places are doing

Not stupid, just uninformed. A lot of people are confused by how things like targeted ads work and because of that they just accept it as inevitable. They think “This website knows what I searched for on another website because it’s all linked. That’s how the internet works” and once you break down how the tracking is actually done, they realise it’s not infallible

It’s the same thing as people not knowing how planes stay in the air or what makes a car engine work. Nobody can be an expert on everything. I don’t mean to give you a lecture btw, I just think it’s counterproductive to dismiss people. But of course there are exceptions and some people just don’t want to know

How did you get into it? Any resources you’d recommend for a noob who wants to get into setting up servers?

(From the linked study, not the article)

Annual Security Training: At UCSD Health, each employee must complete a standalone security awareness training once per year (with the material designed by KnowBe4).

When employees first join, the HR system automatically assigns an employee this annual security training to complete within a few weeks. Once a user has completed their training, the system automatically reassigns this training to the user after one year (365 days) has elapsed

I haven’t dug very deep into the study to see what the training actually involves but this sounds like something employees would just bullshit their way through as fast as they can. I don’t think this proves that training in general is ineffective but that it needs to be made more engaging and interactive

I was talking to a friend the other day and she mentioned she’d searched for a product online and then started getting ads for it, and asked how often it’d happened to me. She was very surprised when I said never and I explained that I’d been using an ad blocker for the last 15 years. And by the end of our conversation I’d walked her through setting it up on her devices and now she’s one step closer to regaining her privacy

I often find people really aren’t happy with their privacy being undermined but they don’t realise there are things they can do about it. They’ll say things like “well it’s happening to everyone else too” as a coping mechanism but it’s not something they want. More education is critical

A lot of people really can’t grasp the concept of the status quo changing. Once tools are created and laws are passed they can be used for anything. It’s never going to just be the one purpose

I have a local network for sharing files between my devices but I don’t open anything up to remote access. I might change my mind once I’m more skilled at networking but right now I don’t trust myself to be able to set up something secure. If I’m on the road I just plan what I’ll need and manually sync it across before I go