Nothing makes me tune out of a conversation faster than if someone injects a ChatGPT response into it.

That’s bad enough, but now Apple wants to create a total surveillance device that not only listens to everything we say and uploads into their cloud, but also spits up random nonsense at random times?

Can you elaborate on buying monero at an exchange and then transferring it out? Do you mean that OP should

1. make a local wallet
2. make an account on a popular exchange
3. buy cryptocurrency on the exchange
4. transfer it to their local wallet

And would it be accurate to say that a local wallet can be maintained without a lot of system power, and can run on open source software? I assume that because any transfers that are sent to or from the wallet, are basically synchronized in the Blockchain, so there’s not a lot of data that needs to be stored on the user’s side.

To be fair, the article itself recommends it.

The messaging in the article is a bit mixed, which makes sense because it’s trying to explain Google’s intentionally confusing messaging, but I would like to highlight one thing:

Can you fully disable Gemini on Android? No, and that’s by design. While you can turn off activity tracking, revoke permissions, and even uninstall the Gemini app on some devices, Google is actively replacing its Assistant app with Gemini. By the end of 2025, Gemini will be the default…

If you use Android, you should not use its Assistant if you want to keep Google away from your data.

This applies whether Google calls it Gemini or not.

At least back when police were writing thousands of fake tickets, they were doing it manually…

https://www.jalopnik.com/connecticut-police-26000-fake-tickets-hide-racism-1850627875/

You basically have to go there to view the NSFW content, don’t you? I looked around some server federation rules and it seems like most servers block that one’s local communities. (It doesn’t appear to be out of ill will for the server, as most of them still allow federation of non-NSFW communities… But I imagine it’s a large chunk of data to federate with very little reward since most Lemmy servers are run on little more than donations, volunteer efforts, and fumes.)

I think this comment said it best:

This is an obvious, thinly-veiled advertisement for a company’s services. It’s widely known that ad companies track you everywhere by many mechanisms. This is why we use ad blockers of all sorts. This has nothing to do with DuckDuckGo, it’s merely used as a vehicle to get clicks.

And a supplemental note from the DDG team themselves :

This title is highly misleading, implying that Google tracks DuckDuckGo searches directly, which isn’t true… please change it to be more accurate about Google analytics and other Google trackers on websites you may visit.

(copied from my response to the same post in a different community)

What people are these? Are they real people? Do they have names or a money trail?

So… controlled by whom?

I think this comment said it best:

This is an obvious, thinly-veiled advertisement for a company’s services. It’s widely known that ad companies track you everywhere by many mechanisms. This is why we use ad blockers of all sorts. This has nothing to do with DuckDuckGo, it’s merely used as a vehicle to get clicks.

And a supplemental note from the DDG team themselves :

This title is highly misleading, implying that Google tracks DuckDuckGo searches directly, which isn’t true… please change it to be more accurate about Google analytics and other Google trackers on websites you may visit.

Leveraged for anything from buying a plane ticket to large scale business decisions, Agentic AI holds the promise of adapting to a wide variety of applications to improve users’ productivity and effectiveness.

These AI agents are so successful that their value is still completely abstract and speculative, with no specific use cases in sight. Just imagine the possibilities yourself, because we sure can’t.

A while ago, Alexa devices would actually process the stuff you said on your device. They disabled that for some reason. They need their cloud servers to waste more energy, I guess.

I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention privacytests.org by name, but it reaches a conclusion that may as well:

If you see a dumb checklist trying to convince you to use a specific app or product, assume some marketing asshole is trying to manipulate you. Don’t trust it.

Thankfully there’s a good recommendation in the very next paragraph for all things (messaging apps, browsers, etc):

If you’re confronted with a checklist in the wild and want an alternative to share instead, Privacy Guides doesn’t attempt to create comparison tables for all of their recommendations within a given category of tool.

Also: shots fired at XMPP throughout, as the poor protocol limps along trying desperately to catch up to the encryption baseline that was set over a decade ago by the first versions of Signal.

Ultimately, both protocols are good. They’re certainly way better choices than OpenPGP, OMEMO, Olm, MTProto, etc.

Why OMEMO is “bad” is indirectly answered earlier:

The most important questions that actually matter to security:

• Is end-to-end encryption turned on by default?
• Can you (accidentally, maliciously) turn it off?

If the answers aren’t “yes” and “no”, respectively, your app belongs in the garbage. Do not pass Go.

Similar discussions have skewered the federated Delta Chat for having an even worse version of this issue.

I hesitantly wonder if something like Perplexity might actually be the future of search engines. It seems relatively capable of correctly interpreting search queries full of half-remembered thoughts and potentially inaccurate text into salient results. I disregard the guestimations it makes about the links it provides (of course) but the couple of times I tried it out this way, it seemed to work better than Google.

I also wonder how much energy it requires compared to whatever trash Google returns.

Considering Google has put effort into intentionally worsening its own product, it makes sense that their chapel alternative would be something people just use.

So Cloudflare’s business model is openly the same as a corrupt security guard, somebody who promises to protect your stuff unless they get paid well enough?

I don’t watch network TV either, but if I had to put up with ads at all, it would be on the device that I watch and not vice versa.

That’s terrifying.

As an example, they list a printer detecting motion nearby.

And the AI Company Man told me I needed to scan my face into an orb to do this! At least they used the word “governance” a bit and offered me a pittance for the brave new opportunity.

There seems to be something a little… off here. VP looks like it’s a tech demo for a patent held by another company.

The new VPN service is operated by the American company VP.NET LLC, which in turn is owned by TCP IP Inc

And TCP IP (a terrible name for people who want to look it up) is exclusively proud of owning a patent it thinks is worth a lot of money. From its site:

We own the intellectual property that enables hardware-guaranteed network privacy—addressing a critical market gap worth $562 billion by 2032.

To me, it sounds like the CEO is trying to sell the company itself as a product to a larger investor. And that other privacy considerations, like jurisdiction, never factored into this.

Then I got to this part of the article, which seems to confirm those suspicions.

The idea to use SGX as a privacy shield comes from Andrew Lee, the chief privacy architect at VP.net. As the founder of Private Internet Access, which he sold to Kape a few years ago, Lee has a long history in the VPN space. However, he believes this new concept is a breakthrough.

So this company is run by somebody who sold out before.