chappedafloat

joined 8 months ago
[–] chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

More crypto discussions in general and I don't mean cryptography. I think because of those topics being almost dead here, it would be good to just have 1 crypto community instead of having different communities for every different blockchain/topic. Or maybe 2 communities to seperate shilling and speculating price from technological and political crypto discussions.

[–] chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf 1 points 5 months ago

I meant communities. I just mixed the words up

[–] chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf 2 points 5 months ago (5 children)

I dont think its so active at least not topics i'm most interested in. Privacy has only one lemmy instance that is active. Security has only 1 instance but no one ever discusses there, it's just sharing Security news and 0 comments. Talk about crypto is pretty much completely dead as well which is strange.

[–] chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf 21 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Be careful not to say anything positive about luigi because you're certainly going to end up on a priority list of people they are going to keep a lot of surveillance on. It's true, feds are terrified of people who seem inspired by things like this. If you say something really really nice about Luigi, the feds might even send you one of their female undercover agents to be your girlfriend for a while and spy on you.

[–] chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf 12 points 8 months ago

It's normal but people don't like it. Just ask the people you know if they are ok with all the mass surveillance, they don't like it. But it's just too difficult for them to do anything about it. They don't like this "small beginner steps" approach to privacy. They want complete privacy without effort or nothing at all and they don't want to pay for it. It's laughable and sad but that's my experience talking about privacy with people. But the point here i guess is that mass surveillance has been forced on us all. They create a new wonderful technology with lots of use case but then they also add in some mass surveillance on it as well as a bonus.

[–] chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf -2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You think i'm intentionally spreading misinformation and I think you are a fed. I won't argue more against you but anyone fair and objective can see that the mistake I made was a simple mistake to make. feds have as a fact been spying on our push notifications in secret and i thought that included signal's push notifications. Simple mistake which I already admitted to being wrong about. You are making this into a bigger deal than it has to be because you are a fed.

You also are intentionally lying (because you are a fed) about that is the only thing the topic is about. For example, if someone is using Signal on Windows OS then I think there's a high chance the conversation isn't private. But I think you already know all this but you pretend not to.

[–] chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

privacy is about making effort to protect it. With your logic you should just use google chrome browser and be signed in to google because it makes an easier experience. Then install alexa in your home and make it a smart home, it also makes life easier.

[–] chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

whonix docs is very good to learn about this stuff

[–] chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf 1 points 8 months ago (11 children)

Do you think it's better to use a VPN if you aren't using TOR Browser?

[–] chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

You can copy the part of the url watch?v=4sfIBRTcRpU and use it in the frontend you prefer.

[–] chappedafloat@lemmy.wtf 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Good suggestion about analyzing network packets. I don't know anything about how to do that except there are tools like wireshark which can help but I still have no knowledge on doing that. And I think you would need to make a script to monitor it for you because it would probably only (talking theoretically now) phone home very quickly on rare occasions, it wouldn't be continous. So your script would have to be able to detect these short and rare anomalies. I don't know anything about how to do any of this though but I will add it to my todo list down the road.

Another problem is you might need to get the NSA's attention first and make yourself a target. You also need to make sure there is no other way for them to spy on you, so they are left with only using intel me as their last resort.

So because I don't know anything about analyzing network packets I can't say if you're right but it does seem convincing. And it would be great for security in general as well, not only for investigating intel ME. I will definitely learn more about this later.

 

Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can't be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?

The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can't be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone's push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.

So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there's the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.

So I don't think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it's better than Whatsapp.

These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.

 

When it comes to Intel Management Engine, I actually think it's not a threat if you neutralize it. I mean to just set the HAP bit on it. Because if that isn't enough then that means all computers in the world which use Intel CPU can be accessed by NSA but if NSA had this much power then it seems obvious that they aren't using it and why wouldn't they use it?

There's a github project to neutralize/disbale Intel ME: https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner Disable is overwriting intel ME as much as possible with zeros, leaving only a little remaining to be able to boot the computer. The newer the intel chips are, the less likely it is to be able to disable it. But all chip sets can be neutralized which means to set the HAP bit which is an official feature. In theory we can't actually trust the HAP bit to really disable intel ME permanently. It's more like asking Intel to do what they have promised because it's proprietary. But I think it really does permanently disable it because otherwise NSA would be abusing this power.

That's why I think the newer laptop models are better because it's probably not necessary to disable, it's enough to just neutralize withthe HAP bit. And with a newer modern laptop they can have open source Embedded Controller firmware which is better than proprietary Embedded Controller firmware.

I'm interested to hear what you think as well.

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