I understand the concern. I also imagine (I want to be optimistic here, maybe naively so) that most websites wants some form of analytics, probably does not code it themselves and instead of relying on aggregate data like a traffic counter of hits (maybe due to crawlers and other bad agents not respecting robots.txt) then went with somethings fancier. Maybe that fancier tool is trying to mitigate automated traffic with fingerprint detectors.

Well, one can understand and still disagree with it. I suggest contacting the administrator of such website with their concern BUT in the meantime, until they actually do act (which might be never) I suggest to start with self-defense and use dedicated tools e.g. Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection (you can use a non-Mozilla flavor of Firefox if you prefer) or even more specifically JShelter with its Fingerprint Detector.

My point isn’t really about the implementation per se (I’m aware of the limitation since at least 2011 by reading then Link Prediction by De-anonymization: How We Won the Kaggle Social Network Challenge so more than a decade ago) but rather that the “solution” Murena offers is not a mandatory service. If people want to use it, they can. I do not want to, I do NOT have to. I’m not arguing that their solution is good, or bad, only that it’s optional.

means no Play Store

Indeed, by default AFAICT they provide Aurora Store and F-Droid.

Regarding the consequence… well I don’t know the future. Maybe alternative stores will have a “trick” so that they are considered verified and thus can install other .apk, or maybe it won’t matter for rooted phones anyway.

I’ll preface my answer to clarify that I’m against surveillance capitalism and privacy Zuckering. I say that in the open, do not use Google services, Amazon, have my own PeerTube instance, IoT at home is HomeAssistant with ZigBee, etc. So my goal here is NOT to cut some slack to anyone.

I started with this because I’m not actually sure what you are referring to. Since my initial comment is about Murena STT I’ll assume it’s that but if not please correct me. This specific service… is not a compromise I would accept. So I’m in NO way advocating for me. The only thing I’m clarifying is that this service is not something one can “stumble upon” and enable without paying attention. That’s why I put such recurring emphasis on it. It’s not coherent with “sharing all data” or imagining a scenario where somebody buys an /e/OS phone Murena and somehow ending up getting their data leaked (due to the potentially imperfect anonymization) to OpenAI. One has to activate it and to do so one must be a Murena services paying customer. This is not the case when “just” installing /e/OS. So once again I’m not saying Murena is perfect, not even that it did the right choice (according to my own privacy preferences) my relying on OpenAI, and yet that problem is not relevant to most people who use /e/OS.

To make a quick a analogy it’s like installing WhatsApp on a privacy OS phone. Sure you technically can do that but if you do and complain about how Meta is collecting your data then you did it on yourself, you can’t blame the OS developers.

Then it’s arguably delegating some of the cost to the final user, large streaming companies spending a bit less on IXP contracts while viewers have to have newer hardware that might need a bit more energy too to run.

back with your Spam

Try it, report me for spam to the mods I’d be curious to hear their opinion.

Saw it earlier today, actual phone https://murena.com/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-shiftphone-8/ at 730EUR, delivery in October.

Got a CMF1 with /e/OS since ~February (cf my history of comments to see the ups and downs, overall happy with both) … and I admit I’m tempted. I obviously don’t need it and having a relative cheap (~350EUR) feels pretty nice to me. Maybe if I want an upgrade later on but for now I’ll stick to what I have.

auto delete all the telemetry /e/ collects by default, including the Voice data Sent to OpenAI?

You are back with your FUD. I don’t know what you have against /e/OS specifically or if you are genuinely paranoid but in this specific instance you are making stuff up! I clarified in https://lemmy.ml/post/35472063 so maybe a language barrier because the post you linked to was in French but the STT service is

• NOT on by default
• for paying customers only (0 chance that a random person would activate it and thus be shocked)
• tries to anonymize the data

So… that’s not even telemetry, that’s like activating a service which the company explicitly said relied on OpenAI in the first place, people STILL paid for it AND activated it. They can’t be surprised that it’s sending anything to OpenAI then.

Come on, help us make this community better. We have enough problems with BigTech, small tech and more that we do NOT need to invent problems!

PS: also the reasoning about the presence on kill switch is … just plain silly. The PinePhones are running Linux, no Android, no /e/OS/ or whoever actor you might dislikes, OSes built by others, e.g. PmOS, Ubuntu, etc and yet still have hardware kill switches.

Thanks for the clarification, it makes me wonder though, is it bandwidth saving at no user cost? i.e is the compression improved without requiring more compute at the end to decompress?

So… a lot more people now have :

• 4G/5G on the go and proper broadband at home and office and even in unique location (sadly via MuskSat for now…) other ways to get data
• very capable devices in mobile phones, (mostly Android) clients e.g. video projector or dongles, of course computers
• human eyes… that can’t really appreciate 4K on average

… so obviously we should NOT stop looking for more efficient ways and new usages but I’m also betting that we are basically reaching diminishing return already. I don’t think a lot of people care anymore about much high screen resolution or frequency for typical video streaming. Because that’s the most popular usage I imagine everything else, e.g XR, becomes relative to it niche and thus has a hard time benefiting as much from the growth in performances we had until now.

TL;DR: OK cool but aren’t we already flattening the curve on the most popular need anyway?

Is it how StingRay work? My understanding is that it’s about faking being a legit tower, not compromising a legitimate network.

Use ffmpeg to record audio from your desktop (which will include the meeting) then pass it to whisper.cpp or other text-to-speech FLOSS solutions. No need for “AI” or Windows software for that kind of tasks.

You might want to check sshfs but overall yes rsync works well. I just uploaded 200Go yesterday, no failure.

On my LAN if I want to share without downloading them then I rely on MiniDLNA/ReadyMedia for DLNA/UPnP meaning it works with VLC on desktop, obviously, Android video projectors, mobiles, etc.

Guess it depends on your usage but I stopped using Samba when I didn’t have Windows machines on my network. Never looked back.

Thanks for the clarification, found https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/3018/timeline-sim-card-registration-laws on the topic also useful.

connected to the cellular network should be considered compromised

What do you mean by compromised? Monitorable? Traffic shaped? Both? How about E2E?

get an anonymous prepaid SIM card. That is what I do: buy one with cash

Don’t they normally ask for ID? I know in France for example it’s typically not possible to buy a SIM without presenting an ID first. That wasn’t the case few years ago but not it’s common practice, if not mandatory.

Depends, as usual, on your threat model. I do not know where you live, where you went, what you do, who you are and thus who you worry about.

That being said :

• if you rely on someone else hotspot well you delegate the risk too. If they relay your traffic they can still shape or monitor your traffic. Obviously I would not expect your family member to do that… but if you are being monitored and there are data showing that you are not at home or work (wherever you usually are) and other data you are traveling together (e.g. plane tickets, border control with IDs checked, connection to services with different IPs) one could expect your surrounding to be potentially targeted. That is one extra hoop and it might protect from “shallow” surveillance but I would not be so sure.
• SIM main problem in your situation IMHO is KYC, basically that you can’t buy one without an ID and thus if you have expectation of anonymity regarding the provider of the SIM then it is not viable indeed.
• eSIM AFAICT do not enforce KYC (no scan of ID to send) and typically offer to purchase a SIM outside of the country one is visiting, unlike physical SIMs. Sure they might share ICCID and more but unless that piece of data is linked with your actual name then it might not be a problem
• honestly if you worry about “weird hacking attempts towards me from the government” then you better know a lot more about cybersecurity than I and random people on the Internet do. It’s one thing to worry about mass surveillance, with or without BigTech, but if a state agent is paying actual security professional to hack your devices or accounts then it’s another ball game entirely.

very much on the fringe

When mainstream is mostly consumerist attention grabbing bullshit, is it genuinely a problem?

With pleasure, thanks for the positive feedback. I’m not an expert but I did write a little bit on self-hosting AI on my wiki https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence so feel free to have a look and if you have questions, happy to help if I can.

Check

• HomeAssistant/WebThings (open source gateways, no need for Internet connection)
• ZigBee/ZWave (dedicated IoT wireless protocols, not WiFi or BT)
• ESP32-C6 (small cheap low-end device that supports ZigBee and can thus become an IoT sensor/actuator via e.g. ESPHome)

because basically there is NO reason to rely on “smart” objects that are expensive, power hungry and, last but not least do not respect your privacy while giving you less control.