I know there are plenty of software missing from here. This is just a fun infographic I made, no need to take it seriously :)
OP would not recognize a threat model if it bit him in the ass.
I’ll go further than this and say that true security is where everybody has support enough to not want to steal your shit, hack you etc.
Yeah corporations and governments are still a problem, for now, but both of the above parties would be far more secure if they did mutual aid, supported progrms to help the impoverished etc etc.
Basically having a collective approach to security and not such a myopic individualistic one.
what’s Anubis?
A tool to slow down web crawlers (instead of making you solve captcha puzzles)
Anubis is so lightweight you’ll forget it’s there until you look at your hosting bill.
I don’t know if they realize this is implying it’s onerously expensive, lol.
What’s nuts is that what made Anubis’ author go down that path was Amazon Bot (I remember precisely because they are the bot that also blew up my logs and thus forced me to take action against LLM scrappers) and… a significant share of the Web is hosted on AWS. So… Amazon is actually probably MAKING money by scrapping, no matter how inefficiently. I already hated Amazon but this is even worst than I imagined. It’s probably not by design, to be fair, but it’s also probably not something they’ll invest into “fixing” as it’s making them money. What an absolute human centipede situation.
That amused me, too.
I think it plays fine for the intended audience, though.
For the folks looking into Anubis, that line plays well - because hosting costs are driven up by the kinds of spam bot visits that Anubis slows down.
The hardest online privacy is not operating in a way that just links all your “private” activity because you logged in around enough places to link them together and at least one place somewhere can be linked to your real identity
Pretty sure banks have a pretty good track record of “keeping your money safe”. Why the fork would anybody trust banks to keep their money safe if they can’t keep your money safe?
I don’t really understand why that statement is even on there?
Unless you mean to argue some anonimity point, which I could agree with considering e.g. Monero would be more anonymous than a bank.
But safe? I’d say the bank is quite safe to store money.
Money in the bank can be seized and frozen for all sorts of reasons. If you’re in the USA, then police can charge your money with a crime even if you haven’t broken any laws. It’s safe until it’s not.
Doesn’t have to be in the bank either; if you’re traveling with your life savings in cash, then if you get pulled over cops are likely to seize that money. Just because fuck you, that’s why.
Can confirm. about 15 years ago, my bank account was frozen for 3 weeks for child-support enforcement. Only they weren’t talking about my kid or even me. Some dude in Florida with my same first and last name was a deadbeat dad. So they froze my account because apparently, he didn’t have a bank account or something.
What’s super annoying about it is that we had different middle names, not even close to the same social security number, and not one person even contacted me before my bank account was frozen. I only found out because a check I wrote or something bounced. And I was like, WTF?
I was finally able to talk to enough bank people to clear it up. But it took 3 weeks. I never got an apology for it either. And the fuckers did not refund my insufficient funds fee. I mean, it was only $15 bucks, and it would have cost me more than that in my time to get a refund, but still…
So yeah, even here in the US, banks can suck.
any bank that has the capacity to close your account without you explicitly requesting it should not be considered safe.
fucking cip errors deleted my account
whoever invented cip errors should be defenestrated at the earliest convenience
Banks literally seize and freeze assets from people, e.g. Julian Assange.
Banks have also a track record of seizing countries international reserves like Russia, Venezuela, Iran, etc…
Banks keeping your money safe depends on what country you live in and how much its government has regulated them and/or provided some sort of backup in the case of a run or the bank going out of business.
The intention was more “Banks keep my data safe,” but I wanted to provide a clearer explanation that if your data isn’t safe, neither is your money. I didn’t have enough room to put my full thoughts.
where’s the shovel and double-ziplocs to bury your cash, silver, gold, platinum, and palladium? or the zippo to burn your prints off? get on my level, ho
You may be interested in this infographic instead ;)
Hey! I resemble this remark!
crypto currency
Well, unlike Bitcoin, Monero is actually anonymous, and sometimes you gotta make payments online.
You can’t do it privately with your card.
Yep, anonymous right up until its use burns the world to the ground.
Monero transactions consume orders of magnitude less energy than Bitcoin’s thanks to an ASIC-resistant algorithm
deleted by creator
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network has onion routing for privacy, like Tor.
When Bitcoin had a bug that allowed some guy to give himself a bazillion bitcoin, it was detected and patched before he was able to sell them. When Monero encounters a similar bug, it will only be detectable by the price going down.
I’m not super knowledgeable on how anonymous such routing us, hence I avoid it.
Don’t know why people bombarded you so much - the other side of total anonymity is that you really never know if anything got broken and someone earned off it.
My suggestion, however, is to use Monero for payments, and not as a store of value.
This is the correct initial reaction but given the extent to which the US monitors every single transaction everyone makes, it’s getting awful hard to manage the influx of feral hogs without having them streaming through your door.
proton VPN
lol. lmao, even.
What’s wrong with it?
proton has already shared user details with authorities.
Any compliant commercial service will share user data with authorities - you don’t get to operate a company and skip local laws. That’s a non argument.
What’s important is what “user details” they had on hand to share. If I create my service in such a way that I have zero data about you except some random useless string, I can “hand over all user data” to authorities and it would mean absolutely nothing for your privacy.
except they shared the IP address of an account even though they state “No personal information is required to create your secure email account. By default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account. Your privacy comes first.” on their homepage
It’s right there in your copy-paste my dude, “BY DEFAULT”.
The jackass(es) who actually was at risk went the extra step to enable IP address logging, which means that when Proton had to comply with a lawful court order, they actually had data to give.
Proton is a company like any other that has to comply with laws in the country they operate in, but unlike a lot of other companies, they don’t log data UNLESS YOU ASK THEM TO.
Moral of the story is, like has oft been repeated, know your threat model and plan appropriately.
If I understood correctly from Proton’s privacy policy, VPN does not log IP addresses but at least in some circumstances Mail does. This is from their privacy policy:
Due to limitations of the SMTP protocol, we have access to the following email metadata: sender and recipient email addresses, the IP address incoming messages originated from, attachment name, message subject, and message sent and received times.
One thing must be remembered: Even Proton must follow the law and rules.
And those are the limitations created by the fact that email was never meant to be truly secure, not in the way we define and expect security and privacy nowadays at least.
What anubis has to do with privacy or security?
Nothing, op confused anti AI with anti tracking.
It is though, there’s a reason Mullvad added DAITA into its protocol.
For starters, it’s open source. And I’m not too into the details, but the creator of Anubis even mentioned that they were interested in creating a non-javascript version for privacy.
Google’s reCaptcha, to which Anubis is being compared to by OP, is obviously far less private. It’s just another mechanism of control and data harvesting for Google. One of the ways that they determine if you’re malicious/human or not is to check if you have a Google cookie in your browser and are signed in. Not to mention fingerprinting (hardware and software info), browsing data, AI training ironically enough (the fucking streetlights), etc etc.
Anubis is relevant here because it is more private, among other things.
AI Datasets are a huge privacy breach once they start spilling them up
It stops bots from crawling your sites.
Yes, this was the intention. It helps protect your website’s data by slowing down web scrapers.
ig it’s a counterpart to recaptcha which is in the left panel
Security isn’t the size of the app, it’s how you use it :)
Security isn’t the size of the app
This could have two meanings, one of which I figure I should address:
- If you mean “size of the userbase for an app,” then yes, even projects that fly under the radar are much more secure than “mainstream” options. That’s the main purpose of this infographic.
- If you mean “physical size of the app on the infographic,” the reason they’re different sizes is simply because they were hard to fit on one page, and this made it look nice ;)
- Penis joke
Oh
What’s with the diss on Malwarebytes?
Mainly because it’s proprietary, privacy invasive by nature, and invasive.
It’s also a shit product riding on marketing laurels from its past glory days, like Norton. It leaves pieces behind that can cause malware to come roaring back.
It isn’t hard to just nuke a system or restore a backup people.
Assuming that your backup isn’t also infected.
They’re taking it too seriously lol
Proprietary sure, but how is it privacy invasive let alone invasive on computers?
What non-proprietary option is there? I can’t think of a single antivirus option which is actually remotely decent which is open.
ClamAV is an open source antivirus, but I would recommend against using an antivirus altogether due to their invasive nature. You shouldn’t need one with proper sandboxing and isolation.
ClamAV is slow to get updates and frankly not a great tool to use. AV is a must as isolation and sandboxing are only as good as the next exploit. Not too mention scams like phishing are not stopped by isolation.
I have this bad gut feeling about Signal and Proton, I have no evidence tho.
proton has already shared user data with authorities; you don’t have to go by your gut
Maybe it’s because the current administration uses signal to plan acts of war and proton’s ceo is supportive of said administration.
They don’t use Signal though. They use a clone called TeleMessage Signal which logs and archives all their messages on an Israeli server, and which a hacker was able to access before the service was suspended.
You can’t really help if someone forks and misuses software.
Ah, I believe this is what’s called “a conspiracy theory” if you had more details.
For Proton it is the “tech bro”-y feeling and for Signal it is wondering about financing. Also, if you are paying for your own audits there is an obvious conflict of interest.
I’m sorry - paying for an audit is somehow a conflict of interest? How exactly is that?
As someone who had to contract auditing firms every year, and personally sign off in their report as part of our compliance, I would love to hear how I should have …what? Won the audit lottery? Applied for some sort of government assistance? Prayed to an audit fairy godmother?
Who the F else is paying for our audit? I want free audits! I bet everyone does.
My guess is they think that since you’re paying for the audit the auditors won’t bust you for fraud, which is cute, since the auditors are asked to audit specific things that the company asks them to audit. They’re not released on the company like witch hunters, with wide open access to everything, cutting a swathe through fraud and criminality while people are furiously burning documents in the basement. So there is no conflict of interest, since the auditors are looking at what the people using them are asking them to look at.
I know, it’s just kind of laughably shouting they don’t know what either an audit or conflict of interest actually are.
The hardest part some times is finding an audit firm that isn’t stupid expensive, but also won’t do a shit job and give you a report that looks like some knock-off free LLM didn’t write it to maximize their own payday. I love a good audit report with findings, it means I didn’t waste money. But my shit is (well, was, at another place years back) locked down tight, so we didn’t ever expect anything terrible.
Same here, everyone was so stressed about “the audit” but we had written common sense processes and executed them as needed, with mechanisms in place to flag potential areas for improvement if we found gaps.
The audit was fine.
Some of those mentioned likely are compromised, but cannot figured out which. The thing, is to diversify our risk and the privacy minded to use different platforms (Proton VPN and Mullvad VPN for instance).
The good news, is that if an agency is compromising something, they will likely won’t use the intel gathered in court cases in order to leave it open to future prey, so that is good for vast majority of users. The very few that are relevant enough should not trust even the genuine privacy tools and resort to enhanced methods and combining methodologies.
My impression, and just impression, is that I would trust **Tuta **more than Proton (and not because Proton’s CEO that many interpreted wrong anyways) On VPN… a tad more trust on Mullvad. Signal, I would not use it for high stakes communication but OK for most people. GrapheneOS seems okay and we know for sure it does not leak info on a daily basics, but we have to be careful, it could have an obscure code dormant waiting for a trigger or could easily send data to an unsuspected server, Ironically, if I were Snoden, I would feel more comfortable using a Huawei Mate with HarmonyOS than a Pixel 9 with GrapheneOS… of course China spies too massively, but it has far less beef with Snoden than the US does, therefore not of much interest to Beijing.
Remember that overwhelming majority of FOSS goes without any audit, let alone a comprehensive one. This is what some trusted party should put AI checking ASAP all the FOSS out there!
Very interesting insights. Funnily I use all of the services you cautiously recommend, including GrapheneOS, but not HarmonyOS, hard pass on that one. As a German I am also legally required to prefer Tuta. :) I still have that OG 1€/Month contract.
Edit: Your last point is a good idea, although I think the more popular an open source app is, the less likely it is to be malicious. A lot more eyes on it and the xz backdoor was caught pretty much immediately.
Of course… for us normies… GrapheneOS is the way to go. Very high targeted individuals in the West should however consider HarmonyOS. Of Course the Chinese government has eyes on that one but not specifically targeting you… unless they use it to trade intel on someone of high interest for China but no much collaboration between West and China intelligence agencies today…
True, popularity increases the chances someone auditing. But, to a point. Ideally audit should be performed with every single update and on the servers, and there the premise of more eyes does not hold true no more. Then it comes trust. In a company like Tuta, the people behind showed their faces from day one, the same people are there, is a tight team so harder for a bad apple to do something. Considering both Tuta and Proton were good from inception (and I believe it may be the case), it would probably would be easier for an intelligence agency to penetrate Proton than Tuta, just for the structure that appears they have from outside. Now, Tuta made a horrible mistake once! In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, independently of one’s take on it, Tuta made the “Standing with Ukraine” (March 2022); that was a mistake, it may many doubt if privacy still their paramount over any other ideology. Maybe they have change since since no statements on Gaza… or maybe they agree with what is happening… who knows… that is why they should not make any statements at all, or clarify that while they have their ideologies in no case, ever will compromise their stands on privacy. To be fair, Proton did the same… nothing on Ukraine but on Gaza “We unequivocally condemn the terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israeli civilians […] We also condemn violence against civilians in Gaza”; so I guess both are comparable here! My trust for both is slim, as a company, and even their individuals.
But you do know that Tor/VPN is not really privacy, nor security? It hides your IP, but that’s about it. If you still login, and give any information, and that could just be your “fingerprint” you are not anonymous…
VPNs know who you are and what websites you visit, so no privacy nor anonymity there. With Tor… It’s complicated. That’s why we have guides like this: http://blog.nowherejezfoltodf4jiyl6r56jnzintap5vyjlia7fkirfsnfizflqd.onion/opsec.
Only a few take their privacy serious. They, sadly, believe in the ethics of the Tech giants…
I2P is king here but it has a limitation that makes it stronger but less practical. I2P doesn’t generally do outproxies. A few exist but they typically aren’t trusted or used. Instead, I2P tries to keep private by only routing around traffic the originated within its own network rather than piping things from clearnet from one place to another. An issue with arrives that do that is you can see traffic from a honey pot going into a black box and with enough monitoring where it ends up leaving that black box. It’s very difficult to track traffic flow within the network but once it jumps back into clear net you can find it again.
Now while you can argue that it doesn’t come out on clearnet, just originates from there, I counter that with Microsoft Windows telemetry, it might as well be clearnet. Windows is the dominant player at the moment so it’s most likely the traffic ends up on a windows machine. There are really benefits behind the telemetry date but they also means there’s a single point an authoritarian regime can apply pressure to to monitor whatever they want. With advances in AI, chewing through tons of collected data is much easier to do, so the idea of “they can’t stop all of us” is ridiculous. They will just pick off the undesirables in smaller chunks.
Ultimately nothing is completely safe but if you really value privacy, make yourself such an enormous pain in the ass that monitoring you becomes a chore.
Hopefully you don’t log in or give personal info to every website you use. Hiding your IP is still more private than not hiding it.
Do you know what your fingerprint is? And all the ways you are being tracked that is not about your IP?
You do give personal info to every website you visit - with the exception of a very few, who respect your privacy. If you think you need to log in, to give personal info, then you are sadly misinformed.
Encryption is a type of security, and Tor/VPNs encrypt your traffic. Accessing .onion sites over Tor is (at least in theory) more secure than accessing clearnet sites.
In theory - but it’s still primarily your IP you are hiding. And very few people only visits -onion pages…
math is always stronger than marketing
Well, usually not. Unfortunately.
Depends on how you measure and what
It’s not about what you use, but how you use it. PEBCAK Almost 100% privacy and security is offline at home, reading a book, if you bought the book with cash and not online and/or with credit card.
You can use Google, Microsoft, Apple and co however you want, the problem is, what you use
![[OC] What People Think Privacy/Security Is](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/30cec389-1586-4849-84ac-d8a9f4f0df5b.png){kind=link}