Hey Lemmy! We've released [gofoss.net](https://gofoss.net/), a beginner's guide to free and open source software, privacy and sustainable tech. The site is available in English, French and German. We hope that it can help some of you to: * safely browse the Internet * encrypt your conversations * protect your data * switch to Linux * free your phone from Google & Apple * join the Fediverse & use alternative cloud providers * self-host your stuff The source code is available on [GitLab](https://gitlab.com/curlycrixus/gofoss). Happy to chat, let us know what you think! For more information, please come find us at [gofoss.net](https://gofoss.net) :) -- PS: We are 100% non-profit: no ads, no tracking, no sponsored or paywalled content.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/244182 > Link in German, but after all these years of people complaining and even if analytics are explicitly disabled in Element, it still phones home :(

Telegram Gets an activist raided due to their bad faith approach to privacy.

Is there a way to bypass Facebook's subscriptionwall? I swear I'm not a boomer, there's this really famous historian where I live (he's also a comrade, funnily enough) his lectures are very Interesfing and popular but unfortunately a lot of them are only accessible through Facebook, only thing is I don't have an account nor an intention on creating one, yet it is forcing me to create one to access content, is there a way to bypass it?

*"Cwtch is decentralized and focused on metadata-privacy in addition to communications privacy. Unlike other communication platforms, none of your messages are routed through a centralized server that has access to metadata such as your social network of friends, or who sent and received a particular message."* Looks like it's based on the onion-routed protocol used in Ricochet, so should be fairly robust (but not yet audited).

Great read by Drew DeVault on a very relevant topic these days.

I've heard tails is great for privacy and security, but just how good is it? On a scale of 1-10 where 1 is publicly accessible and 10 is a literal black box, how secure is tails? What are its limitations, from a security standpoint?

You might have old accounts especially cloud accounts that are just idling abandoned while still holding personal information. They might have old weak passwords just waiting to get compromised. Same goes for old email addresses that you do not use anymore but are still linked to other accounts. This is a reminder to check those, delete your data from them or to delete them altogether (delete private information manually first before deleting the account as many companies do not actually delete the data from deleted accounts and just mark the account as deleted). Some examples of this could be: * old Google accounts from old devices * old iCloud accounts * old Microsoft accounts * old Aol or similar email accounts * old accounts from smartphone vendors like Samsung, Huawei etc. that often have their own cloud services Make sure to set a strong passwords on accounts you want to keep and of course use a password manager. Besides the security password managers have the great side effect of giving you an overview over all your accounts so that you cannot just forget old ones.

just that the TV commercial looks back at you through the TV and the TV follows you around everywhere, wherever you go, whatever you do, taking note of everything to get to know every single detail about you, every interest, every prejudice, every weakness of yours, to get to know you like no person, no matter how close to you does, like not even yourself do to use that information to influence you most effectively to the TV channel's and the advertiser's advantage, to manipulate you, to sell this information about you to other companies like insurances who use the power that this knowledge provides over you to extract every last cent of money from you, to sell you.

##Some general background Discord is a privacy and security disaster. They do not make their money through ads and tracking (as of now) but they do not care about privacy or security just the slightest bit either. Discord messages are not end to end encrypted. Discord, their employees and their infrastructure partners like Google Cloud Messaging have access to your messages at all time. Do not ever send anything sensitive over Discord! Discord also does *not* delete your messages when you delete your account, leave a server or delete a channel or group. When you delete a channel or group or get removed from one your messages still stay on their server. You just lose access to them and have no way to delete them anymore. If you delete your account without deleting your messages first they will stay on their servers forever without you having any way to access or delete them. There is no official way for deleting all your messages. I am not a lawyer, but I am very sure that is a violation of the GDPR and highly illegal. They claim they anonymize that data when you delete your account, but all your messages are still tied to an account ID and there is no way to anonymize private messages that can contain personal information. Using client mods to automate deleting messages is even against their TOS. They do not comply with laws that require them to delete your data and reserve the right to ban you when you try to do that yourself. You should absolutely regularly delete your messages anyways. Make sure to have another mean of contact for your Discord friends so you do not rely on Discord as they can and do of course ban you for any or no reason whatsoever. Discord also has extremely extensive telemetry that is *not* anonymized. They basically log every click you make in the app: when you click on a profile, when you join a voice channel etc. You can see this data when you do a GDPR request. Included in this logs is your IP address, your rough location and device information for every single event. You can block some of this with uBo in a browser or with client mods. ##Settings in Discord * Opt out of personalization and other data sharing. * Set yourself to invisible/offline. Everyone on every server can see when you are online otherwise and there are bots collecting this information. ##Modifications * If you can, use Discord in a browser with uBlock Origin. * Regularly use a script like [this](https://github.com/victornpb/deleteDiscordMessages) to delete your messages. * Consider using a VPN to hide your IP address and location. * If you use their mobile app do not grant it storage permission and instead share files from your gallery or file manager with Discord. ##Usage Assume that absolutely everything you do on Discord – every message you send every word you say in a voice channel, every click you make – gets permanently recorded by Discord and secrete services, gets sold to advertisers either right away or in the future and breached to the public in the future. That is exactly what you risk when using Discord. Use it accordingly and do not share anything sensitive. If you need to discuss something private shift to another platform.

Brave new tech-totalitarian world