Privacy

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/42502992

Mozilla Corporation has named its new CEO in replacing interim CEO Laura Chambers.

Anthony Enzor-DeMeo has been named the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation. Anthony Enzor-DeMeo was SVP of Firefox from 2004 to July 2005 and then from July until now was the GM of Firefox at Mozilla. He's written a public message today in his first day serving as the new chief executive for Mozilla.

Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."

Nanogram is designed for the enthusiest who wants complete data sovereignty on their social media platform.

Spin up your own instance on termux for Android.

Demo here.

Install instructions are at the bottom of the readme.

Urban VPN is a particularly bad offender. It intercepts all your conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI bots (glad I don't use any), and sends them to the VPN vendor for resale. This is nuts.

Disclaimer: I'm a paid customer of Infomaniak's KSuite (a Swiss 'ethical' cloud offering). Next to the cloud storage and email and a few other extra, I recently noticed they have a 'privacy respecting' AI called Euria (which they also claims to be green-ish): https://www.infomaniak.com/en/euria

Overall, I'm very satisfied with their services but I'm also not much into using AI and don't plan to change that, and I was wondering: how does one make sure an AI is indeed privacy-respecting? I mean, is there an independent audit of some sort like there are for VPNs?

I debated whether to post this as the privacy community already has excellent websites with https://www.privacyguides.org/ and https://www.privacytools.io/ (which is actually metric on the site).

However, I really tried to focus on newcomers who might be less technical. So I really hope that this can be a useful resource, whether it is for you starting this journey, or friends/family who could use the help.

OC by @FallenWalnut@lemmy.world

Award-winning Palestinian reporter Mohammed Mhawish, who left Gaza last year, joins us to discuss his new piece for New York magazine about Israel’s surveillance practices. It describes how Palestinians throughout the genocide in Gaza have been watched, tracked and often killed by Israeli forces who have access to their most intimate details, including phone and text records, social relations, drone footage, biometric data and artificial intelligence tools.

This all-encompassing surveillance system is “reshaping how people speak, how they’re moving, how they’re even thinking,” says Mhawish. “It manufactured behavior for people, so they shrink their lives to reduce risk, they rehearse what version of themselves feels safest to present, and that creates an enormous psychological burden.”

Mhawish also describes the terror of when his family’s house was bombed, killing two of his cousins and two neighbors in an attack he says was linked to Israeli surveillance of his reporting activities. “I was being watched and tracked,” he says.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/51545335

https://www.waterfox.com/releases/6.6.6/

The FIDO alliance, in charge of authentication standards such as the FIDO2 standard widely used in hardware keys, has announced a new digital credentials initiative aimed at standardizing and streamlining the adoption of “verifiable digital credentials and identity wallets.”

Visiting the US as a tourist could soon become significantly more onerous under a new plan being mulled by the Trump administration.

According to a Tuesday report in the New York Times, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) this week filed a new proposal that would force visitors to submit up to five years' worth of social media posts for inspection before being allowed to enter the country.

In addition to social media history, CPB says it plans to ask prospective tourists to provide them with email addresses they've used over the last decade, as well as "the names, birth dates, places of residence, and birthplaces of parents, spouses, siblings, and children."

The policy would apply even to citizens of countries that have long been US allies, including the UK, Germany, Australia, and Japan, which have long been exempt from visa requirements.

Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Times that the CBP policy would "exacerbate civil liberties harms."

Cope added that such policies have "not proven effective at finding terrorists and other bad guys" but have instead "chilled the free speech and invaded the privacy of innocent travelers, along with that of their American family, friends and colleagues."

Journalist Bethany Allen, head of China investigations at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, expressed shock that the US would take such drastic measures to scrutinize the social media posts of tourists.

"Wow," she wrote in a post on X, "even China doesn't do this."

In addition to concerns about civil liberties violations, there are also worries about what the new policy would do to the US tourism industry.

The Times noted in its report that several tourism-dependent businesses last month signed a letter opposing an administration proposal to collect a $250 "visa integrity fee," and one travel industry official told the paper that the CBP's new proposal appears to be "a significant escalation in traveler vetting."

The American tourism industry has already taken a blow during President Donald Trump's second term, even without a policy of forcing tourists to share their social media history.

A report released on Wednesday from Democrats on the Senate's Joint Economic Committee (JEC) found that US businesses that have long depended on tourism from Canada to stay afloat have been getting hit hard, as Canadian tourists stay away in protest of Trump's trade war against their country.

Overall, the report found that "the number of passenger vehicles crossing the US-Canada border declined by nearly 20% compared to the same time period in 2024, with some states seeing declines as large as 27%."

Elizabeth Guerin, owner of New Hampshire-based gift shop Fiddleheads, told the JEC that Canadians used to make up to a quarter of her custom base, but now "I can probably count the number of Canadian visitors on one hand."

Christa Bowdish, owner of the Vermont-based Old Stagecoach Inn, told the JEC that she feared a long-term loss in Canadian customers, even if Trump ended his feud with the nation tomorrow.

"This is long-lasting damage to a relationship and emotional damage takes time to heal," she said. "While people aren’t visiting Vermont, they’ll be finding new places to visit, making new memories, building new family traditions, and we will not recapture all of that."

Want to help us testing the upcoming Delta Chat release? choose your flavor and mind your backups:

:lemon: https://download.delta.chat/android/beta/deltachat-gplay-release-2.33.1.apk (google play candidate, overwrites…

Whether you’re tired of Instagram's negative algorithm, the ads, or need a break from social media, you’ve come to the right place. In this guide, we show you how to delete an Instagram account on any device - iPhone, Android, PC.

#deleteinstagram #pixelfed #fediverse

Last week I tried to watch the "Shut the Fuck Up PSA" from the National Lawyers Guild, and it was age blocked. I did try to log in, but now you have to VERIFY your age too (obviously I clicked off that shit).

But honestly, alternative frontends like Freetube and yt-dlp might not make the cut anymore:

Mpv crashed, and Invidious instances keep saying "video may not be age appropriate"

Edit: My state is soon to perform age verification on social media sites, so this is probably the cause. I'll just have to VPN to other states or countries until VPNs fail/are blocked.