Opt-in should be mandatory for all services and data sharing. I would start my transition to Linux today if this were opt-out, though the way Apple handles this for other services makes me believe opt-in will be temporary.

Currently, when you setup any device as new, even an offline/local user on macOS, the moment you log into iCloud it opts-almost-every-app-and-service-into iCloud, even one’s you have never used and always disabled on every device. There’s seemingly no way to prevent this behavior on any device, let alone at an account level.

Currently, even though my iPhone and language support offline (on-device) Siri, and I’ve disabled all analytics sharing options, I must still agree to Apple’s data sharing and privacy policy to use Siri. Why would I need to agree to a privacy policy if I only want to use Siri offline, locally on my device, and disable it from accessing Apple’s servers or anything external to the content on my phone? Likely because if you enable Siri, it auto-enables (opts in) for every app and service on your device. Again, no way to disable this behavior.

I understand the majority of users do not care about privacy or surveillance capitalism, but for me to trust and use a personal AI assistant baked into my devices OS, I need the ability to make it 100% offline, and fine grained network control for individual apps and processes, including all of the OS’s processes. It would not be difficult to add a toggle at login to “enable iCloud/Siri for all apps/services” or “let me choose which apps/services to use with iCloud/Siri, individually”. Apple needs stronger and clearer offline controls in all its software, period.

Even if it were just a thing, Apples implementation would be limited and inflexible, so I’d probably use an app anyway.

Lucky! I finally got my mum to use the password manager I admin, but she still reuses the same dozen passwords for everything and manually enters them in… sigh. I’ve set strong passwords and 2FA for all critical accounts, so I just let her be a moron with the rest of them.

Computers break her brain. She literally responds with questions like “it’s IN the computer?” Zoolander style. I just do most of her shit myself because it’s less painful than trying to teach her.

And people believed they’d escape the days of power-tripping mods by exiting Reddit.

At least with the festive there are no alternatives.

Your data is securely preserved on your Google Drive / Dropbox account, ensuring complete ownership and privacy

Lol

Communism is when China does anything… Especially capitalism!

I was thinking about this and imagined the federated servers handling the index db, search algorithms, and search requests, but instead leverage each users browser/compute to do the actual web crawling/scraping/indexing; the server simply performing CRUD operations on the processed data from clients to index db. This approach would target the core reason why search engines fail (cost of scraping and processing billions of sites), reduce the costs to host a search server, and spread the expense across the user base.

It also may have the added benefit of hindering surveillance capitalism due to a sea of junk queries from every client, especially if it were making crawler requests from the same browser (obviously needs to be isolated from the users own data, extensions, queries, etc). The federated servers would also probably need to operate as lighthouses that orchestrate the domains and IP ranges to crawl, and efficiently distribute the workload to client machines.

The EU should take Apple to court over this for violating the GDPR.

If they aren’t deleting user data the user has deleted, especially old data that should’ve been flushed from all redundancy and resiliency measures years ago (backups, indexes, caches, etc), then they should be fined billions.

Oops. I dropped my monster condom that I use for my magnum dong.

For iOS there’s location log. You can export your history too.

Also, don’t kid yourself. If you aren’t using Graphene and have any tech company app installed on your phone they’re logging your location, and sharing it with everyone who pays, even if you opt out.

a) why the fuck would they go to that effort for a filthy commoner like yourself, and b) what are the chances that 0.01% of recoverable data contains anything useful!?!

Nobody is gonna bother doing advanced forensics on 2nd hand storage, digging into megabytes of reallocated sectors on the off chance they to find something financially exploitable. That’s a level of paranoia no data supports.

My example applies to storage devices which don’t default to encryption (most non-OS external storage). It’s analogous to changing your existing encrypted disks password to a random-ass unrecoverable throwaway.

Rather ironically, miniflux users could add miniflux releases to their miniflux feed using https://github.com/miniflux/v2/releases.atom

So it’s extra extra useless

Most SSD/flash secure erase methods involve the storage having full disk encryption enabled, and simply destroying the encryption key. Without the encryption key the data can’t be deciphered even with the correct password, as the password was only used to encrypt the encryption key itself. This is why you can “factory reset” an iPhone or Android in seconds.

For all average user requirements that just involve backups, PII docs, your sex vids, etc (e.g. not someone who could be persecuted, prosecuted, or murdered for their data) your best bet (other than physical destruction) is to encrypt every usable bit in the drive.

1. Download veracrypt
2. Format the SSD as exFAT
3. Create a new veracrypt volume on the mounted exFat partition that uses 100% of available space (any format).
4. open up a notepad and type out a long random ass throwaway password e.g. $-963,;@82??/@;!3?$.&$-,fysnvefeianbsTak62064$@/lsjgegelwidvwggagabanskhbwugVg, copy it, and close/delete without saving.
5. paste that password for the new veracrypt volume, and follow the prompts until it starts encrypting your SSD. It’ll take a while as it encrypts every available bit one-by-one.

Even if veracrypt hits a free space error at the end of the task, the job is done. Maybe not 100%, but 99.99+% of space on the SSD is overwritten with indecipherable gibberish. Maybe advanced forensics could recover some bits, but a) why the fuck would they go to that effort for a filthy commoner like yourself, and b) what are the chances that 0.01% of recoverable data contains anything useful!?! You don’t really need to bother destroying the header encryption key (as apple and android products do when you wipe a device) as you don’t know the password and there isn’t a chance in hell you or anyone else is gonna guess, nor brute force, it.

This is what neoliberalism and capitalism wants the younger generations to believe, but a large percentage of that wealth will be stolen via health care and similar predatory, exploitative systems.

Great job “democracies”! In allowing “intelligence” agencies and capitalism to profit from both war and mass surveillance; dictators, criminals, and terrorists (both foreign and domestic) can now purchase big brother oppression tools the Gustapo and KGB could only fantasize about; only limited by how much money they have or promise to generate for the oligarchy.

More specifically — by matching all of your purchases with every data point about you, and the people you associate with, they can build out statistical models to determine the data points that most strongly correlate to people like you and what motivates or persuades them to GENERATE MORE PROFIT — direct purchases, attention, clicks, discussion, word of mouth, lead generation, etc, etc…

Or… You know… What motivates/persuades you to support a dictator or vote for a specific political candidate or party, as well as what demotivates/dissuades you from the opposition — including what types of psychological warfare, disinformation, deepfakes, “fake news”, and lies are most successful in achieving these goals — all of which benefits the most horrifically immoral and unethical criminals, corporations, and individuals the most (the “good guys” aren’t the ones using deception and lies to profit and win).

I’m thinking it’s an issue that’s more along the law of averages in the training data. Interracial images don’t tend to have descriptions specifying that the content is interracial, or which individual is which race, but there are many photo’s of individuals who are known to be of a specific race, so it falls back to the stronger probabilistic confidence in race x OR y OR z and completely ignores the weak “AND” correlation coefficients.

The moment of divergence is instantaneous between the clone and original. The only way it could not be instantaneous, is if both were just a brain connected to the exact same simulation, experiencing the exact same inputs. If they didn’t respond the same, then they aren’t an exact clone. Even then, the brains would be sustained with different blood, made up of trillions of slightly different atoms — although similar, not 100% identical due to quantum mechanics — with a slightly different fluid dynamics. Actually the only way they could be identical is if they weren’t brains but identical code, running in an identical simulation, with the exact same boundaries, and no possibility of probability, chaos or divergence from that code… Oh no I’ve gone cross eyed.

We also enabled additional anti-competitive features — we think you’re gonna love it!