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privacy (13)

"Crazy Conspiracy Theorist!"

Roughly ten years ago, at a conference (one of these from 2015) a discussion ensued about government surveillance and activism. Five or so of us discussed activism in the age of mobile phones. Generally, it…

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Cars are the New Desktops

For those who remember buying a desktop computer, a laptop, or an android phone, do you remember the first boot? Likely a ton of software was installed, some you can't get rid of. At best,…

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AI can be local and personal first

While the world is distracted and wringing their hands over OpenAI's ChatGPT, some Stanford grad students quietly released Alpaca. It replicates 95% of GPT-3 for $600 and runs locally on your devices. It's been ported…

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A Deceptive Privacy Consent Banner

Or, a case study in what not to do. It started innocently enough. Accept the obvious blue button or choose "Change Settings" to see what you're accepting. Let's choose to change settings. Up pops this…

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Uber app is bad. Bad Uber.

While perusing the system logs on my phone, I notice this: 09-29 19:25:32.139 1748 2447 E ClipboardService: Denying clipboard access to com.ubercab, application is not in focus nor is it a system service for user…

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searx.is is live

rainbow over mountains with black sand beach

I launched searx.is as a SearXNG instance registered and hosted in Iceland with pure 100% renewable energy powering the server. I wanted a better, more private search experience. And I wanted it resistant to censorship…

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Online Privacy and You

woman light painted

Who cares about online privacy? Why are we still having this debate for the 22nd year? Scott McNealey said "You have zero privacy. Get over it." in 1999. Part of me says we're still having…

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Threats! Everywhere!

Out of curiosity, I enabled all of the threat detection and reporting systems on my home firewall. As it turns out, the home network is under siege. The firewall is configured to report, but not…

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