Technology

Millions of people not voting because it would take millions of people voting to elicit positive change and nobody is doing that is one of the most frustrating things.

I've never really understood why they claim it didn't happen, it's not like they were the ones doing it so I don't understand why they feel the need to protect themselves by claiming its non-existence.

Meanwhile the actual people who did do it fully acknowledge that it happened, was bad, and have taken steps to ensure it never can be allowed to happen again.

the old guys with piles of old greasy porn mags grinning with their remaining teeth.

Let me make it clear folks, nobody has better morals than white people, believe me. They're tremendous, the best. They follow the rules, they respect authority, they're just fantastic. I mean, look at me, I'm the best example of great morals, and I'm white, folks. White people, they're winners, they know how to do things right, they're tremendous patriots. So let's make America great again with the incredible morals of white people leading the way.

The outlook on everything on Lemmy is driving me away from the platform. I’m not saying other platforms are any better. I might just stop using it.

The same people who complain about government propaganda are the same people who type “Russia bad! China bad!” like it’s not decades of propaganda to make westerners hate these countries.

His argument is that the average person won't know any better and will just take the first sponsored result for "free VPN" of Google

Right. Why do I have to submit a retinal scan and 3 forms of ID to watch porn because parents can't be bothered to learn basic computer skills and monitor their own children?

Outside the issue of yet another competing standard to do the same thing, there's an inherent issue with verification in these kinds of apps. That is, how the identity is actually verified for the account. Is it the government itself, a for-profit company partnered in some way with governments, something else? The issue begs the question, is this something we should have in the first place?

I don't think so. And it seems to me that those who do likely don't realize how much of a slippery slope it is to complete privacy erosion. Others are simply trying to live their life and this is very far down on their list of worries. Yet here we are, where services are built around the assumption that every user has a phone (and phone number).

Some relevant media to the topic: xkcd 927 Electric Dreams S1E9

Kape technologies comes to mind, which owns Private Internet Access, CyberGhost, and ExpressVPN, and is in turn owned by an Israeli billionaire

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_Sagi

I mean, it is?

encrypted over https

The TLS handshake will generally -- through there are some ways to avoid this, and people are banging on it -- expose hostnames in the clear. So even if the IP address that you're talking to serves multiple virtual hosts, your ISP is likely to know who it is that you're talking to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

Even if your browser is using DNS-over-HTTP, which it may or may not be doing, most software doesn't, so outside of your browser, DNS is generally visible.

Some protocols still are not encrypted; I was looking at MUDs the other day, and few of them support encrypted connections. The networks that I'm most worried about are random WiFi access points, and VPNs solve that well.

The network provider can still see which addresses and ports someone is connecting to and to where the traffic goes, and how much traffic is sent.

Some network providers blacklist material -- as is the case in OP's article. For example, one of my first experiences on the Threadiverse was kbin sending me to a random discussion on policy that Ada (the lemmy.blahaj.zone admin) was having with some gay user who lived somewhere in the Middle East. Lemmy.blahaj.zone had been blocked in that country -- the country presumably didn't like something related to the server having LGBT content. The Threadiverse is semi-resillient to that -- they could still connect to a federated server and see comments. But it meant that images on lemmy.blahaj.zone were blocked in that country.

For another contemporary example, Russia has cracked down on politics online. Can't block access to content without killing off VPNs, and they went after those too.

For people who maintain a long-running IP address, it's possible to cross-correlate logs from various services. So, okay, let's say that a given IP address has been logged downloading BitTorrent content. That same IP address is linked to, at various times, use of an app where a particular unique phone ID has shown up, or maybe that a user has logged into some account service on, which is linked to personal information. Even a party who is not someone's ISP can cross-correlate logs using the IP. A VPN doesn't absolutely avoid that, but it makes it harder.

Without a VPN, anyone can get at least a rough geographical location of a user by geolocating their IP address. IPv4 scarcity has made this harder than it once was, reduced geography/address correlation, but I expect that IPv6 will make it easier.

People don't need to write their network software securely. Your cool multiplayer network game may-or-may not be encrypted and may-or-may-not be resillient to modified network traffic. If there are buffer overflows in how Quake or whatever handles network traffic, I'd rather not let the network provider be an attack vector. This has been exploited before, and while a typical ISP probably isn't generally a real risk, I'd trust random WiFi networks a lot less. A VPN will get cleartext traffic off their network.

Probably more, but that's some off-the-cuff.