The metadata in the headers can be avoided using Memoryhole and similar protocols which embed the headers inside the encrypted payload. The problem is again barrier to entry. Low-tech users generally can’t even handle app installs on desktops.

When you say “worry”, that’s not the right word for it. My boycott against Google is not fear-driven. I will not feed Google anything it can profit from as an ethical stance. Even if an expert linux tor user were on Google, I’m not sure we could exchange email in a way that ensures Google gets no profitable data. If we use PGP coupled with Memoryhole to strip out the headers, I’m not sure Google would accept a msg with a missing or bogus From: header. But if so, Google still possibly learns the user’s timezone. Though that may be useless if Google learns nothing else about that user. But we’re talking obscure corner cases at this point. Such an expert user would have no Google dependency anyway.

MS/google-dependent friends are generally extremely low-tech. They don’t know the difference between Firefox and the Internet. They don’t know the difference between Wi-Fi and Internet. Linux – what’s linux? They would say. At best, they just think of it as a mysterious nerd tool to be avoided. So what can I do wholly on my end to reach them via gmail without Google getting a shred of profitable data? Nothing really. So I just don’t connect directly with a large segment of friends and family. Some of them are probably no longer reachable. Some are in touch with people who connect to me via XMPP, so sometimes info/msgs get proxied through the few XMPP users. It’s still a shitshow because Google still gets fed through that proxied inner circle of friends and family. In the past when someone needed to reach me directly, they would create a Hushmail or Protonmail mail account for that temporary purpose (like coordinating a trip somewhere). But that option is mostly dead.

I just had to reach out to plumbers for quotes. All of them are gmail-served. All I could do is refuse to share my email address and push them to use analog mechanisms. They are not hungry enough for business to alter their online workflow or create protonmail accounts.

That’s exactly what I did with hushmail. I would tell low-tech folks to get a hushmail account then I would use hushtools.com to do all the key management, putting my key on the keyring and grabbing their key. So the other person did not need to know anything or take any special steps. That was best option of my time. But last time I checked hushmail was still entirely non-gratis.

Protonmail emerged when HM became non-gratis and messed with hushtools. But PM requires every one of their own users to do key management which creates a barrier to entry. I would have to walk a PM user through adding my key to my record in their address book and walk them through sending me their key. That effort is a show stopper for many. I might as well walk them through setting up a PGP-capable MUA. But then if they keep their gmail or MS acct the metadata still feeds those corps.

I give out my XMPP address and offer Snikket accounts. Some go along with it and some do not. I lost touch with some friends. Some people are in contact via phone but that’s not ideal some connections are lost as phone numbers change.

I used to push some people toward Hushmail until they dropped the gratis plans. Then for a while I pressured people onto Protonmail but then distanced myself from PM when the brought in Google reCAPTCHAs and killed off Hydroxide. Tuta is a non-starter because Tuta’s variety of e2ee is incompatible with open standards, thus forcing me to periodically login to a web UI (also due to them sabotaging their Android app by way of forced obsolescence pushed in the most incompetent way).

So it’s a shitty state of affairs. 2024 and simply sending a msg to someone has become a total shitshow.

I refuse to fund my oppressors

Bingo. I live by this philosophy.

Although more precisely: I refuse to fund feed my oppressors. The reason for s/fund/feed/ swap is that our oppressors profit from our data too. So e.g. I won’t even email a gmail user because my data would then feed Google (an oppressor because of how they dictate e-mail terms among other oppressions).

emphasis mine:

Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.

First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.

Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.

So in short:

• Boycott all U.S.-sourced GMO if you’re an ethical consumer. (note the EU produces GMO without Monsanto)
• Boycott just high-risk GMO techniques if you’re unethical but at least wise about the risks. (note this is somewhat impractical because you don’t have the transparency of knowing what technique was used)
• Boycott no GMO at all if you’re ignorant about risks & simultaneously unethical.

I really cannot stand that phrase because it’s commonly used as poor rationale for not favoring a superior approach. Both sides of the debate are pushing for what they consider optimum, not “perfection”.

In the case at hand, I’m on the pro-nuclear side of this. But I would hope I could make a better argument than to claim my opponent is advocating an “impossible perfection”.

Glad to see they are tagged. It could evolve more but the tags are the most important thing.

I think this project has some tools that might automate that:

https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare

They ID and track every website that joins #Cloudflare. It’s a huge effort but those guys are on top of it. A script could check the list of domains against their list. There is also this service (from the same devs) which does some checks:

https://karma.crimeflare.eu.org:1984/api/is/cloudflare/html/

but caveat: if a non-CF domain (e.g. example.tld) has a CF host (e.g. somehost.example.tld), that tool will return YES for the whole domain.

Manually adjusting availability is a can of worms that I don’t want to open

I would suggest not bothering with any complex math, and simply do the calculation as you normally do but then if a site is Cloudflare cap whatever the calculated figure is to 98%. Probably most (if not all) CF sites would be 100% anyway, so they would just be reduced by 2%. Though it would need to be explained somewhere – the beauty of which would be to help inform people that the CF walled garden is excluding people. Cloudflare’s harm perpetuates to a large extent because people are unaware that it’s an exclusive walled garden that marginalizes people.

Cloudflared services like ani.social are getting a “100%” available stat. That site may be up but it’s unavailable (denying availability) to something like ~1-3% of the population 100% of the time. So in principle it should never be able to achieve the 100% availability stat.

I understand it would be quite difficult to calculate an availability figure that accounts for access restrictions to marginalized groups, because apart from Cloudflare you would not have a practical way of knowing how firewalls are configured. But one thing you could (and should) do is mark the known walled gardens in some way. E.g. put a “🌩” next to Cloudflare sites and warn people that they are not open access sites.

The lestat.org availability listing is like a competition that actually gives a perception advantage to services that exclude people, thus rewarding them for compromising availability. I would also subtract off ~2% for all CF sites as a general rule simply because you know it’s not 100% available to everyone. They do not deserve that 100% trophy, nor is it accurate.

Im glad we agree. Because its the entire point. You are nitpicking where it suits you and thats not really honest conversation.Tor browser isnt the only way to access tor

TLS is useful very specifically in the case of banking via Tor Browser, which is the most likely configuration the normal general public would use given the advice to access their bank over Tor.

There are entire swaths of the world, billions of people, where phones are basically the only gateways to the inter.

I do not recommend using a smartphone for banking. You’re asking for a huge attack surface & it’s reckless. People will do it anyway but to suggest that people should avoid Tor for banking on the basis that you’re assuming they are using a phone is terrible advice based on a poor assumption. Use Tor Browser from a PC for banking. That is the best advice for normies.

The point is, again, that Tor and specifically exit nodes are more hostile than normal ISP relays.

And again, those hostile nodes get less info than ISPs. They have to work harder to reach the level of exposure that your ISP has both technical and legal privilege to exploit.

Saying selling metatdata that is unencrypted is the same level of malicious as a nation state going after you (life and death) or having your identity or bank account stolen is clearly pretty naive.

Wow did you ever get twisted. You forgot that I excluded targeting by nation states from the threat model as you should. If someone has that in their threat model, they will know some guy in a forum saying “don’t use Tor for banking” is not on the same page, not aligned with their scenario, and not advising them. You don’t have to worry about Snowden blindly taking advice from you.

It’s naive to assume your ISP is not collecting data on you and using it against you. It’s sensible to realize the risk of a honeypot tapping your bank account and getting away with it and regulation E protections failing is unlikely enough to be negligible.

You still have to deal with getting your funds back and paying for stuff to live in the interim.

If you’re in the US, you have ~2-3 bank accounts on avg, and 20 credit cards (US averages). Not to mention the unlikeliness of an account getting MitM compromised despite TLS in the 1st place. Cyber criminals choose the easier paths, just as 3 letter agencies do: they compromise the endpoint. Attacking the middle of a tunnel is very high effort & when it’s achieved they aren’t going to waste it on some avg joe’s small-time bank acct. At best you might have some low-tech attempts that result in no padlock on the user side. But I’ve never seen that in all my years of exclusively banking over Tor.

Thats a bad assumption.

Not in the slightest. Everyone is subject to mass surveillance & surveillance capitalism.

MOST people arent really concerned with it in the western world.

Most people don’t even have a threat model, or know what it is. But if you ask them how they would like it if their ISP told their debt collector where they bank so the debt collector can go do an unannounced legal money grab, you’ll quickly realize what would be in their threat model if they knew to build one. A lot of Corona Virus economic stimulus checks were grabbed faster than debtors even noticed the money arriving on their account.

And thats not a Trump thing. its existed WAY before trump. Snowden showed that and it was Obama, not trump, that went after whistleblowers harder than any predecessor before them.

You missed the source I gave. Obama banned the practice of ISPs selling customer data without their consent. Trump reversed that. That is wholly 100% on Trump. Biden did not overturn Trump, so if you want, you can put some of the fault on Biden.

W.r.t history, echelon predates Snowden’s revelations and it was exposed to many by Nicky Hagar in the 80s or 90s. But this all a red herring because in the case at hand (banking customers accessing their acct), it’s the particular ISP role of mass surveillance that’s relevant, which Trump enabled. Or course there is plenty of other mass surveillance going on with banking, but all that is orthogonal to whether they use Tor or not. The role of Tor merely mitigates the ISP from tracking where they bank, and prevents banks from tracking where you physically are, both of which are useful protections.

Further trying to make this about “party” sides is a bad idea. Its something all parties

You can’t “both sides” this when it’s verifiable that Obama banned the practice and Trump overturned it. While Obama’s hands are dirty on a lot of things (e.g. Patriot Act continuity), it’s specifically Trump who flipped the switch to ISP overcollection. Citation needed if you don’t accept this.

And there are some areas where straight access TOR is illegal and can get you in trouble.

The general public knows your general advice to use/not use Tor is technical advice not legal advice, and also not specific to their particular jurisdiction.

That’s not a magic bullet for secuirty.

It wasn’t presented as such. Good security comes in layers (“security in depth”). TLS serves users well but it’s not the only tool in the box.

There are so many ways to exploit connections. Look at what happened here on lemmy with vulns leading to takeovers of instances with xss of session cookies.

Tor Browser includes noscript which blocks XSS.

The primary difference is your ISP is not generally actively hostile. They may want to sell metadata but they aren’t actively trying to exploit you.

Selling your metadata is exploiting you. And this exploit happens lawfully under a still-existing Trump policy, so you have zero legal protections. Contrast that with crooks stealing money from your bank account, where, if it’s a US account, you have regulation E legal protections.

If your ISP (or in some cases a nation state is your isp) is actively tracking you, then there are other alternatives that may be better.

Different tools for different threat models. If you are actually targeted by a nation state, Tor alone is insufficient but it’s still in play in conjunction with other tech. But from context, you were giving general advice to the general public telling them not to use Tor for banking, thus targeting is not in the threat model. But mass surveillance IS (i.e. that of your ISP).

But to answer my your question my thesis is tor is not necessarily a privacy panacea.

Tor is an indispensable tool to streetwise users. Of course it is a tool among other tools & techniques.

The threat model an American or European has is much different than someone from Vietnam or turkey or China, which is also much different than someone from the Nordic countries.

Those threat models all have a common denominator: mass surveillance. It is safe to assume mass surveillance is in everyone’s threat model as a baseline. Of course there are a variety of other threats in each individual threat model for which you couldn’t necessarily anticipate.

Also. Those running an exit node can and do sniff traffic.

Sure, but if you stop there with that statement you’re just FUD-scaring people from using the service that does more for their privacy than conventional direct clearnet usage. Every connection that matters uses TLS so the exit node honeypot only sees where the traffic is going, not what’s in the traffic and not where it comes from. IOW, the exit node knows much less than your ISP.

It’s bad practice to login to stuff that’s important (like banking) over tor.

It’s the other way around. You should insist on using Tor for banking. It’s a bad practice to let your ISP track where you do all your banking.

Also, nation states can track you using a variety of techniques from fingerprinting to straight up working together to associate connection streams.

And your thesis is what, that we should make snooping easier for them by not practicing sensible self-defense?

A large number of tor nodes are run by alphabet agencies.

Let them work for it - and let them give the Tor network more bandwidth in the process.

I don’t know if it’s even possible, but it would be cool if I could use the fediverse over TOR just for the sake of supporting TOR.

Here are two #Mastodon onion nodes:

• iejideks5zu2v3zuthaxu5zz6m5o2j7vmbd24wh6dnuiyl7c6rfkcryd.onion
• 7jaxqg6lfcdtosooxhv5drpettiwnt6ytdywfgefppk2ol4dzlddblyd.onion

Maybe you misunderstand the enforcement part of the GDPR. It’s not made for you to get personal enforcement out of it.

You obviously have not read article 77. This article entitles individuals to report GDPR violations to a DPA for enforcement. Article 77 does not distinguish violations against an individual (which I suppose is what you mean by “personal enforcement”) and violations against many. Some of the violations I have reported can only be construed as violations against the general public. E.g. an org fails to designate a DPO.

The problem is there is nothing to enforce article 77 itself. When a DPA neglects to act on an article 77 report, there is no recourse. There is only a provision that allows lawsuits against the GDPR violators. But then when someone did that, and then claimed legal costs, an Italian court decided for everyone in a precedence-setting case that legal costs are not recoverable. Which essentially neuters the court action remedy. So we have an unenforced article 77 and a costly & impractical direct action option.

It works on the basis of multiple infractions being recorded and then escalating the agencies response level.

It’s not even doing that much, in some cases. The report has to get past the front desk secretary and be submitted into the litigation chamber before it’s even considered as something that would indicate a trend. If it doesn’t get past the secretary it does nothing whatsoever. Some of my reports were flippantly rejected by a pre-screening secretary for bogus reasons (e.g. “your complaint is ‘contractual in nature’” when in fact there is no contractual agreement, apart from the fact that the existence of a contract does not nullify the GDPR anyway).

I work with many companies as IT consultant and I can assure you, that they all FEAR the GDPR

So you’re only seeing the commercial response. Gov agencies & NGOs are also subject to the GDPR, which is where you see the most recklessness (likely due to the lack of penalty). On the commercial side banks also don’t give much of a shit about the GDPR because when they violate it there’s a shit ton of banking regs they point to and the DPAs are afraid to act against banks because of the messy entanglement of AML/KYC laws that essentially push #banks to violate the GDPR.

Enforcement of GDPR does happen and you can review every enforcement on a public website called enforcement tracker.

Indeed I’ve browsed through the enforcement tracker. It’s a good prop for making the public believe that the #GDPR is being well enforced. They are cherry-picking cases to enforce to convince the public that something is being done, but people who actually submit reports know better. We see the reports that are clearly going unenforced.

I have also personally requested information about me and my family through the rights bestowed by the GDPR

I have had article 15 access requests denied which I then reported to the DPA, who opened a case but just sat on it. For years, so far.

(edit) By the way, I suggest you leave Lemmy·world for a different instance. If you care about privacy at all, you don’t use Cloudflare nodes. I cannot even see the msg I wrote (which you replied to) because #lemmyWorld blocks me (which I give some detail here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/1435972). I had to reply to you based purely on your msg without context.

The weapons you mention are quite basic. Those don’t even begin to scratch the surface unless you’re using the internet the way most normies do.

I was thrilled when #wiby.me was first introduced. Then for a while wiby.me was itself a Tor-hostile Cloudflare site. I’m glad you brought it up because it prompted me to check again & it seems at the moment wiby is a user-respecting non-Cloudflare site. Note there was another search engine similar to wiby which I can’t track down right now… but it’s possible I’m confusing that other one with wiby. Err… I think both were unusable for a while.

(edit) The other site is search·marginalia·nu. That’s the one that became a despicable CF site. I think wiby broke down for tor users for a while but glad to see at the moment that it’s still usable. I just got good results when searching for a recipe.

I would bet it’s a slim enough minority of students who pay public transport on a per-trip basis that theft would not be from arbitrary break ins. A student would have to (recklessly?) use a high-end phone for this & be spotted putting an uncovered phone in the locker.

The best security is a good insurance policy. Not sure if high-end phones tend to have an insurance policy because I avoid them myself.

Perhaps not at all.

But the limitation of using #Selenium is a big one. Being forced to work in java, forced to use the resource hog of a modern gui browser, forced to reveal more browserprint info, being browser-dependent, etc. Selenium is my last choice when desperation is sufficiently high.

The problem is search engines have proven not to keep up with our needs. Sites trashed up with cookie popups, subscription nags, and CAPTCHAs are making it into the highest ranks of search results. Cloudflare sites in particular.

It is indeed another attack on #openData principles.

luckily there will always be people fighting to keep the Internet free

Google’s move makes the fight much more uphill for freedom fighters. The real problem is the masses of pawns who fail to vote with their feet. Some of them voted with their feet merely because CAPTCHA is inconvenient. Eliminating the CAPTCHA puts these #tyrannyOfConvenience users on the wrong side of the fight.