I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention privacytests.org by name, but it reaches a conclusion that may as well:

If you see a dumb checklist trying to convince you to use a specific app or product, assume some marketing asshole is trying to manipulate you. Don’t trust it.

Thankfully there’s a good recommendation in the very next paragraph for all things (messaging apps, browsers, etc):

If you’re confronted with a checklist in the wild and want an alternative to share instead, Privacy Guides doesn’t attempt to create comparison tables for all of their recommendations within a given category of tool.

Also: shots fired at XMPP throughout, as the poor protocol limps along trying desperately to catch up to the encryption baseline that was set over a decade ago by the first versions of Signal.

Ultimately, both protocols are good. They’re certainly way better choices than OpenPGP, OMEMO, Olm, MTProto, etc.

Why OMEMO is “bad” is indirectly answered earlier:

The most important questions that actually matter to security:

• Is end-to-end encryption turned on by default?
• Can you (accidentally, maliciously) turn it off?

If the answers aren’t “yes” and “no”, respectively, your app belongs in the garbage. Do not pass Go.

Similar discussions have skewered the federated Delta Chat for having an even worse version of this issue.

I wondered why this was downvoted before I saw the original message in my notifications

yeah, thanks Mr/Ms obvious, you described exactly the reason of why it does not look vanilla at all, that big giant bottom ad banner

Anyway, my point is that I would assume Firefox would look different if there was evidence the user caused this banner by accidentally injecting malware into the browser within Linux.

Text fragment linking already works in the latest version of Firefox, although you’ll need to install an extension like this one to create links.

I hesitantly wonder if something like Perplexity might actually be the future of search engines. It seems relatively capable of correctly interpreting search queries full of half-remembered thoughts and potentially inaccurate text into salient results. I disregard the guestimations it makes about the links it provides (of course) but the couple of times I tried it out this way, it seemed to work better than Google.

I also wonder how much energy it requires compared to whatever trash Google returns.

Considering Google has put effort into intentionally worsening its own product, it makes sense that their chapel alternative would be something people just use.

What are the chances Mozilla will actually open source the deepfake text detector, which is literally the only part of the entire Fakespot portfolio that might be worth preserving?

ETA: here’s FakeSpot failing spectacularly to identify an AI-generated book with phony, AI-generated reviews.

PieFed has a way to keep votes (more) private. From 11 months ago:

There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results).

Vote privacy may be especially important because it’s really easy for a malicious server to get set up, unbeknownst to anybody else, and just pull vote data that other servers freely provide.

This narrows the possibilities down to three four interesting options.

1. Mozilla did this, and you’re the first person to talk about it online
2. Your OS did this, and you’re the first person to talk about it online
3. A protected browser page got hijacked by malware on Linux
4. You did this and forgot, somehow

Some other comments have been annoyingly dismissive, but I hope you push onward to figure out what the hell this is. Because if it’s one of the first two, it’s a big deal.

So Cloudflare’s business model is openly the same as a corrupt security guard, somebody who promises to protect your stuff unless they get paid well enough?

I don’t watch network TV either, but if I had to put up with ads at all, it would be on the device that I watch and not vice versa.

That’s terrifying.

As an example, they list a printer detecting motion nearby.

What part of it doesn’t? Besides the massive banner added the bottom of the screen, everything looks like it’s the default. That icon in the top-left corner comes preinstalled. The search engine is still the default. The only customization I see here is an extra theme and a couple of add-ons.

And the AI Company Man told me I needed to scan my face into an orb to do this! At least they used the word “governance” a bit and offered me a pittance for the brave new opportunity.

This is something new. What’s under the 3-dot menu? And to cover our bases, can you look through your browsing history to determine where this copy of Firefox came from?

“thought-provoking stories” has been part of Mozilla’s Firefox for a while, originally tied to their Pocket branding. I guess Pocket is dead but sadly not this part of it.

There seems to be something a little… off here. VP looks like it’s a tech demo for a patent held by another company.

The new VPN service is operated by the American company VP.NET LLC, which in turn is owned by TCP IP Inc

And TCP IP (a terrible name for people who want to look it up) is exclusively proud of owning a patent it thinks is worth a lot of money. From its site:

We own the intellectual property that enables hardware-guaranteed network privacy—addressing a critical market gap worth $562 billion by 2032.

To me, it sounds like the CEO is trying to sell the company itself as a product to a larger investor. And that other privacy considerations, like jurisdiction, never factored into this.

Then I got to this part of the article, which seems to confirm those suspicions.

The idea to use SGX as a privacy shield comes from Andrew Lee, the chief privacy architect at VP.net. As the founder of Private Internet Access, which he sold to Kape a few years ago, Lee has a long history in the VPN space. However, he believes this new concept is a breakthrough.

So this company is run by somebody who sold out before.

And you personally believe the people manipulating Trump have names like…

So the people you were actually referring to were…

Trump is a muppet being played out, people above him feed him king vibes to play him out. They manipulate his narcism for their profit. Elon and the young kids that are working doge are played out.

You mean people like Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, white supremacist Stephen Miller, and the Project 2025 team, right?

Because people could read your post and think you were talking about Jews.

I gotta say, knowing it’s a bit (but based on IRL testing) makes it even better. It’s like SomethingAwful met Mr Robot