They’re focused entirely on the shitty practices those other manufacturers engaged in. In that regard, Valve didn’t do much (and that’s a good thing).

Good to know! I saw that mentioned on some (apparently outdated) Comodo marketing copy as a benefit over LE

EV certs give you an extra green bar or something along those lines. If your customers care about it, then you have to. If they don’t - and they probably don’t - it’s a waste.

What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications?

End users trust the cert provider. The cert provider has a process that they use to determine if they can trust you.

What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites’ certificates?

You’re not really trusting them with your certificates. You don’t give them your private key or anything like that, and the certs are visible to anyone navigating to your website.

Your new vulnerabilities are basically limited to what you do for them - any changes you make to your domain’s DNS config, or anything you host, etc. - and depend on that introducing a vulnerability of its own. You also open a new phishing attack vector, where someone might contact you, posing as the certificate authority, and ask you to make a change that would introduce a vulnerability.

In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?

For most use cases, as far as I know, it doesn’t.

LetsEncrypt doesn’t offer EV or OV certificates, which you may need for your use case. However, these are mostly relevant at the enterprise level. Maybe you have a storefront and want an EV cert?

LetsEncrypt also only offers community support, and if you set something up wrong you could be less secure.

Other CAs may offer services that enhance privacy and security, as well, like scanning your site to confirm your config is sound… but the core offering isn’t really going to be different (aside from LE having intentionally short renewal periods), and theoretically you could get those same services from a different vendor.

You can get wildcard certs with LetsEncrypt (since 2018): https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v2-production-environment-wildcards/55578

Eligible libraries, archives, and museums have a few exemptions to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clauses that aren’t available to ordinary citizens, but these aren’t unique to the Internet Archive. For example:

Literary works, excluding computer programs and compilations that were compiled specifically for text and data mining purposes, distributed electronically where:

(A) The circumvention is undertaken by a researcher affiliated with a nonprofit institution of higher education, or by a student or information technology staff member of the institution at the direction of such researcher, solely to deploy text and data mining techniques on a corpus of literary works for the purpose of scholarly research and teaching;

(B) The copy of each literary work is lawfully acquired and owned by the institution, or licensed to the institution without a time limitation on access;

© The person undertaking the circumvention views the contents of the literary works in the corpus solely for the purpose of verification of the research findings; and

(D) The institution uses effective security measures to prevent further dissemination or downloading of literary works in the corpus, and to limit access to only the persons identified in paragraph (b)(5)(i)(A) of this section or to researchers or to researchers affiliated with other institutions of higher education solely for purposes of collaboration or replication of the research.

This exemption doesn’t allow them to publish the content, though, nor would it provide them immunity to takedown requests, if it did.

These exemptions change every three years and previously granted exemptions have to be renewed. The next cycle begins in October and they started accepting comments on renewals + proposals for expanded or new exemptions in April, so that’s why we’re hearing about companies lobbying against them now.

Dunno, I think regardless of the method used by the extension, I think any extension called “Bypass Paywalls” that does what it says on the tin can pretty unambiguously be said to be designed to circumvent “technological protection measures”.

“Bypass” and “Circumvent” are nearly synonymous in some uses - they both mean “avoid” - but that’s not really the point.

From a legal perspective, it’s pretty clear no circumvention of technological protection measures is taking place*. Yes, bypassing or circumventing a paywall to get to the content on the site itself would be illegal, were that content effectively protected by a technological measure. But they’re not doing that. Rather, a circumvention of the entire site is occurring, which is completely legal (an obvious exception would be if they were hosting infringing content themselves or something along those lines, but we’re talking about the Internet Archive here).

* - to be clear, I’m referring to what was detailed in the request, not the part that was redacted. That part may qualify as a circumvention.

In this case, it circumvents the need to login entirely and obviously it circumvents the paywall.

Following the same logic, Steam could claim that a browser extension showing where you can get the same game for cheaper or free circumvents their technological protection measure. It doesn’t. It circumvents the entire storefront, which is not illegal.

That’s the same thing that’s happening here - linking to the same work that’s legally hosted elsewhere.

Though as you said, these guys should probably be sending DMCAs to the Internet Archive

Yes - if they don’t want their content available, that’s what they should do. They might not want to do that, because they appreciate the Internet Archive’s mission (I wonder if it’s possible to ask that content be taken down until X date, or for content to be made inaccessible but for it to still be archived?) or they might be taking a multi pronged approach.

Maybe archive.today is the problem? Maybe they don’t honor DMCA requests.

Good point. If so, and if their site isn’t legally compliant in the same ways, then the extension becomes a lot less legally defensible if it’s linking there. That’s still not because it’s circumventing a technological protection, though - it’s because of precedent that “One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribution with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses,” (Source), where “device” includes software. Following that precedent, plaintiffs could claim that the extension promoted its use to infringe copyright based off the extension’s name and that it had knowledge of third-party action because it linked directly to sites known to infringe copyright.

The Digital Media Law Project points out that there are two ways sharing links can violate the DMCA:

• Trafficking in anti-circumvention tools - which is obviously not what’s going on here
• Contributory copyright infringement - which is basically doing something described by the precedent I shared above.

I’m not sure how the extension searches web archives. It if uses Google, for example, then it would make sense to serve Google ae DMCA takedown notice (“stop serving results to the known infringing archive.piracy domain”), but if the extension directly searches the infringing web archive, then the extension developers would need to know that the archive is infringing. Serving them a DMCA takedown (“stop searching the known infringing archive.piracy domain”) would give them notice, and if they ignored it, it would then be appropriate to send the takedown directly to their host (Github, the browser extension stores, etc) citing that they had been informed of the infringement of a site they linked to and were de facto committing contributory infringement themselves.

Given that they didn’t do that, I can conclude one of the following:

1. The lawyers are incompetent.
2. The lawyers are competent and recognize that engaging in bad faith like this produces faster results; if this is contested they’ll follow up with something else, possibly even the very actions I described.
3. The archives that are searched by the extension aren’t infringing and this was the best option the lawyers could come up with.

How is the accused project designed to circumvent your technological protection measures?

The identified Bypass Paywalls technology circumvents NM/A’s members’ paywalls in one of two ways. [private]

For hard paywalls, it is our understanding that the identified Bypass Paywalls technology automatically scans web archives for a crawled version of the protected content and displays that content.

If the web archives have the content, then a user could just search them manually. The extension isn’t logging users in and bypassing your login process; it’s just running a web search for them.

I use --format-sort +res:1080, which, if my understanding of the documentation is correct, will make it prefer 1080p, the smallest video larger than 1080p if 1080p isn’t available, or the largest video if nothing 1080p or larger is available.

res is the smallest dimension of the video (so for a 1080x1920 portrait video, it would be 1080).

Default sort is descending order. The + makes it sort in ascending order instead.

Ah, you’re right - Trilium doesn’t use file-backed notes at all - it saves them in a database (I think Sqlite but I’m not positive).

Trilium supports writing notes in multiple formats, including Markdown.

Does your script handle bi-directional sync or one-way only?

The main disadvantage I can think of would involve a situation where your email (and possibly also other personal data) was exposed without your name attached. It’d be possible for your DLN and/or SSN (or the equivalents for other countries) and email to be exposed without your name being exposed, for example. This wouldn’t have to be a breach - it could be that, for privacy purposes, certain people working with accounts simply don’t get visibility to names.

It’s also feasible that an employee might have access to your full name but only to partially masked email addresses. So if your email is site-firstname-lastname@example.com and they see site-firstname-****@domain.com, they can make an educated guess as to your full email address.

Also, if your email were exposed by itself and someone tried to phish you, it would be more effective if they knew your name.

https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes is a fork that appears to be actively developed. Found it near the end of the issue linked from the maintenance notice.

Thanks for that! I recommend anyone who wants to minimize risk to follow their instructions for self-hosting:

Is the source code available and can I run my own copy locally?

Yes! The source code is available on Github. Its a simple static HTML application and you can clone and run it by opening the index.html file in your browser. When run locally it should work when your computer is completely offline. The latest commits in the git repository are signed with my public code signing key.

Generally people don’t memorize private keys, but this is applicable when generating pass phrases to protect private keys that are stored locally.

Leaving this here in case anyone wants to use this method: https://www.eff.org/dice

Doesn’t their API also require you to allow-list IPs, making it basically useless for dynamic DNS?

From https://www.namecheap.com/support/api/intro/ under “Whitelisting IP.”

Reverse proxies aren’t DNS servers.

The DNS server will be configured to know that your domain, e.g., example.com or *.example.com, is a particular IP, and when someone navigates to that URL it tells them the IP, which they then send a request to.

The reverse proxy runs on that IP; it intercepts and analyzes the request. This can be as simple as transparently forwarding jellyfin.example.com to the specific IP (could even be an internal IP address on the same machine - I use Traefik to expose Docker network IPs that aren’t exposed at the host level) and port, but they can also inspect and rewrite headers and other request properties and they can have different logic depending on the various values.

Your router is likely handling the .local “domain” resolution and that’s what you’ll need to be concerned with when configuring AdGuard.

It isn’t, because their business practices violate the four FOSS essential freedoms:

1. The freedom to run the program for any purpose
2. The freedom to study and modify the program
3. The freedom to redistribute copies of the original or modified program
4. The freedom to distribute modified versions of the program

Specifically, freedom 4 is violated, because you are not permitted to distribute a modified version of the program that connects to the Signal servers (even if all your modified version does is to remove Google Play Services or something similar).

This particular scenario involves the MacOS desktop app, not the phone app. The link is showing just an image for me - I think it’s supposed to be to https://stackdiary.com/signal-under-fire-for-storing-encryption-keys-in-plaintext/

That said, let’s compare how it works on the phone to how it could work on MacOS and how it actually works on MacOS. In each scenario, we’ll suppose you installed an app that has hidden malware - we’ll call it X (just as a placeholder name) - and compare how much data that app has access to. Access to session data allows the app to spoof your client and send+receive messages

On the phone, your data is sandboxed. X cannot access your Signal messages or session data. ✅ Signal may also encrypt the data and store an encryption key in the database, but this wouldn’t improve security except in very specific circumstances (basically it would mean that if exploits were being used to access your data, you’d need more exploits if the key were in the keychain). Downside: On iOS at least, you also don’t have access to this data.

On MacOS, it could be implemented using sandboxed data. Then, X would not be able to access your Signal messages or spoof your session unless you explicitly allowed it to (it could request access to it and you would be shown a modal). ✅ Downside: the UX to upload attachments is worse.

It could also be implemented by storing the encryption key in the keychain instead of in plaintext on disk. Then, X would not be able to access your Signal messages and session data. It might be able to request access - I’m not sure. As a user, you can access the keychain but you have to re-authenticate. ✅ Downside: None.

It’s actually implemented by storing the encryption key in plaintext, collocated with the encrypted database file. X can access your messages and session data. ❌

Is it foolproof? No, of course not. But it’s an easy step that would probably take an hour of dev time to refactor. They’re even already storing a key, just not one that’s used for this. And this has been a known issue that they’ve refused to fix for several years. Because of their hostile behavior towards forks, the FOSS community also cannot distribute a hardened version that fixes this issue.