What do you plan to do? Dumbphone? No phone? Break glass in case of emergency phone in a faraday pouch?

I’m considering a break-glass dumbphone in a faraday pouch. I REALLY fucking hate location tracking. I’d keep it seperate from my IRL ID. Prob is, it’s hard. Screw up once, big data pounces. One call tied to your name in any way. One friend puts it in their contacts. One time to forget the pouch and there’s a location ping at your residence. Not to mention the difficulty of even buying it and setting up a plan. Ugh :(

Like I cannot unfuck shit faster than they can enshittify the world

That’s such a good way to put it. Captures my feeling perfectly.

It’s so demoralising. Like trying to hold back the tide.

Yup I loves me some yt-dlp. But big tech is at war with it. They do everything possible to break it.

Sometimes it works only if you supply some token or credential. Which defeats the purpose. Other times it works monday but breaks tuesday.

Mad respect to ytdlp team for fighting this fight. But their enemy is formidable.

Agree. That’s fallout from web becoming soooo complex. You have webasm. WebGl. JS compilation. WebRTC. Like a hundred other techs you need.

In the old days, a small team could make its own engine. There wasnt’ so much to it. Now, only like 3 co’s in the world can. And one of the 3 is propreitary for only their own hw.

There’s Gemini ofc. But I doubt it will ever catch on outside like 0.001%.

Ayup that has been the holy grail of big tech.

They are most of the way there today. Make Identity Resolution inescapable. Bing bang boom.

It is more than just phones and lappys too. It’s everything. That smart TV. That fitness watch. That automobile. That streaming music service. The ebook reader you got as a birthday gift.

Your behavior across every single device is data gold. This is today’s reality.

Sad thing is, that argument works against so many ppl. “I can trust this app. It’s from Google!”

We(*) are tearing down personal computing. Brick by brick. The very idea of controling our own devs is getting lost. Replacing with Big Tech Feudalism.

(*) Not most of us here. But in the whole pop.

Oh, thanks! I never even heard of them.

I will invstigate. Sounds kinda promising from my skim of the site.

IDK (prob?), but more and more of the privacy structures I set up for myself are being torn down like that.

I once set up a private VOIP. I hardly ever used it. I paid on time, every month for like 4 years. Prob made like 1 call a month avg to a local biz or w/e. Suddenly one day, company demands my ID. I wouldn’t give it. Service terminated. I never used it for anything bad. Not once. That never even crossed my mind. I just did not want my call history scraped and sold to data brokers.

I hate this. My ability to escape the mass surveilence is crumbling.

I have plan to dig up and somehow reanimate Teddy.

I figure we get some cool new nat parks out of it too. If I can pull this off.

I’m still working out the details.

Oh thanks.

That’s def not the one I was thinking of then.

Tryin to trawl through my saved bookmarks… it might(???) have been this link. But when I try it now, it’s an invalid URL. It was years ago. Maybe the site or domain wasn’t kept up. So I’m not completely sure that was even the right URL.

https://hfet.org/google-recaptcha-privacy-nightmare/

I searched just now and found a few sites mirroring the claim. But they did not have the technical breakdown. Here’s something from The Register.

‘You know how we can prove you’re not a robot? Because we literally know exactly who you are.’ I don’t even know if it should be called a CAPTCHA – it feels like it’s just identity verification.

That story claims too, the more you are in google’s ecosystem, the easier you can pass the recaptcha. For example, Chrome users get past easer than Firefox.

I do have working a link about the infinite captcha block technique! Blocking via an unsolvable CAPTCHA. Warning, google domain. Goes to patents.google.

Have you considered the possibility you are a robot? /s

Hmmm. It would come as a surprise. I’m willing to consider it tho. :D

Yeah I’ve had better luck with non-G captchas. Many of those work. There’s some sliding puzzle piece one that works fine.

Long run, I wonder if captchas are a dead end. AIs can learn to solve them as well as ppl can. So what remains is to mimic the signatures of a human. Little jitters in mouse movements. Or variations in timing. But AIs can easily learn those too. So we end up with many real humans excluded, while many bots get in.

IDK but recapatch hasn’t worked for me on desktop. Since like… forever.

What happens is… I click the squares that contains the stairs. Or motorcycles, traffic lights, buses, w/e. Try to guess whether a sq counts if there are like 2 pixels of railing. Is railing part of the stairs? IDK. Doesn’t matter tho. Google rejects anything I try and displays another captcha. Same result with that one. Fucking endlessly. It will NEVER let me past. I’ve tried some dozens in a row.

I think that is because G can’t ID me to a particular human. So it does not matter how I answer them. “You shall not pass.” G had a patent on “endless rejection” techniques. Instead of an outright block, it presents you with infinite unsolvable captchas.

Someone once analyzed web based recapatcha. Their conclusion was, G isn’t trying to figure out whether you are human. It’s trying to figure out WHICH human you are. It’s identity resolution, not bot detection. If it can’t get a high enough confidence estimate, you get denied. Sometimes with infinite captchas.

Yay. Let’s make this asshole company the gatekeeper to the fucking internet.

Yeah I’m happy with Mullvad. Although like somebody said, make sure wireguard will be OK for you. They dropped OpenVPN. After trying both I like WG better, but some routers or devices won’t support it. Shouldn’t be an issue from phones or lapptops tho.

You can even pay for Mullvad with cash. Well, in some currencies. Someplace, might’ve been Mullvad? dropped rupees recently as a currency you could pay in. Dunno why. But you can pay in €, US$, CAN$, AUS$, and £.

I heard an interview once with one of their umm… founders? Tech guys? IDK.

Anyway he said their philiosphy is to collect the minimum amount of data required to provide the service. And no more.

I wish ALL co’s practiced that. Most are the exact opposite. Collect everything even if totally unrelated to the service.

I’ve also heard

“I’m not important enough for anyone to care what I’m doing.”

I’m like honey this shit is automated at population scale. You don’t have to be important. You only have to be a human.

I’m in the US. It varies widely.

I think what happens sometimes, is we get caught up in anti-abuse lists. Sites see legit abuse coming from VPN IPs. After that happens enough, those IPs end up on anti-abuse filters. Then those blocklists are used by some sites, and not othrs, so some sites won’t work.

There are also whole countries who block VPN now for social control. And others who talk about blocking them soon. That’s not the case where I live. But there are still many individual sites that use blocklists.

There are also more sites using identity resolution services now. If the identity service can’t pin you to a human real life person, it increases your block score. If your block score is high enough, you get , um, blocked.