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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: December 14th, 2023

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  • I’ve done a backup swap with friends a couple times. Security wasn’t much of a worry since we connected to each other’s boxes over ssh or wireguard or similar and used tools that allowed encryption. The biggest challenge for us was that in my selfhosting friend group we all prefer different protocols so we had to figure out what each of us wanted to use to connect and access filesystems and set that up. The second challenge was ensuring uptime and that the remote access we set up for each other stayed up - and that’s what killed the project as we all eventually stopped maintaining the remote access and nobody seemed to care - so if I were to do it again I would make sure all participants have alerts monitoring their shared endpoint.



  • I’m on unrooted lineage with mindthegapps / Google play services with my Google Services Framework ID registered with Google, but I still have to make 3 attempts to log in to my bank with the first 2 attempts always giving a vague error like “we’re not sure why we couldn’t connect”, similar with fidelity. Using a password manager so I’m entering the same credentials every time.

    (Edit: in the case of fidelity, instead of faking a connection issue it tells me my account is blocked and to call support to unblock it - that’s also fake because I called once and they said my account wasn’t locked and trying to log in a second time always works)

    My understanding is that it’s impossible to pass strong integrity unless you’re using the stock unmodified rom with the bootloader locked.

    I changed banks last week and the new bank (Aspiration) logs in fine the first time every time.

    It sounds like the situation is better with graphene but I find it a lot easier to switch banks than roms.



  • What kind of TV service / set top box did you have at the time? I remember a lot of talk about providers pushing set top boxes both because it lets them use newer broadcast tech with customers using old TV tuners, but crucially it allows them to have their own software running on the box that you use to switch channels, which let them use out of band communication over the cable network to report what channels you watched, when, and how long, which I don’t doubt gets sold and aggregated by ad targeting firms.

    It’s pretty common for smart TVs to do a similar thing to collect streaming app watch data when using the TVs built in apps.




  • It’s better because PPA isn’t about targeting ads at all. It doesn’t share any browsing history, topics, or any information for ad targeting to advertisers at all. What it does do is provide a way for a website to tell your browser which ads are relevant to an action you take - for example on a checkout confirmation screen the site may tell your browser “here’s a list of ad IDs for the shop you just bought from”. Your browser then checks if it’s seen any of those ads, checking completely using local data that doesn’t leave the browser, then to an aggregator it reports which ads possibly led to your purchase. The aggregator increments a counter for each ad in its database and relays the totals to the advertiser. There are no unique identifiers or any information about your habits or interests involved.

    When I initially heard about PPA I also thought it was related to FLoC / topics, but it has nothing to do with ad targeting or sharing information about habits / interests, it’s just a way to tell advertisers “Ad XYZ was effective and led to a sign up/purchase” without revealing who saw the ad or any personal information about them, just the total number of people.