Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • self@awful.systems
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    19 days ago

    thatā€™s one of the problems Iā€™ve noticed in almost every online privacy community since I was young: a lot of it is just rich asshole security cosplay, where the point is to show off what you have the privilege to afford and free time to do, even if it doesnā€™t work.

    I bought a used phone to try GrapheneOS, but it only runs on 6th-9th gen Pixels specifically due to the absolute state of Android security and backported patches. itā€™s surprisingly ok so far? itā€™s definitely a lot less painful than expected coming from iOS, and itā€™s got some interesting options to use even potentially spyware-laden apps more privately and some interesting upcoming virtualization features. but also its core dev team comes off as pretty toxic and some of their userland decisions partially inspired my rant about privacy communities; the other big inspiration was privacyguides.

    and the whole time my brainā€™s like, ā€œthis is seriously the best weā€™ve got?ā€ cause neither graphene nor privacyguides seem to take the real threats facing vulnerable people particularly seriously ā€” or theyā€™d definitely be making much different recommendations and running much different communities. but online privacy has unfortunately always been like this: itā€™s privileged people telling the vulnerable they must be wrong about the danger theyā€™re in.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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      19 days ago

      some of their userland decisions partially inspired my rant about privacy communities; the other big inspiration was privacyguides.

      I need to see this rant. If you can link it here, Iā€™d be glad.

      • self@awful.systems
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        19 days ago

        oh I meant the rant that started this thread, but fuck it, letā€™s go, welcome to the awful.systems privacy guide

        grapheneOS review!

        pros:

        • provably highly Cellebrite-resistant due to obsessive amounts of dev attention given to low-level security and practices enforced around phone login
        • almost barebones AOSP! for better or worse
        • sandboxed Google Play Services so you can use the damn phone practically without feeding all your data into Googleā€™s maw
        • buggy but usable support for Android user profiles and private spaces so you can isolate spyware apps to a fairly high degree
        • thereā€™s support coming for some very cool virtualization features for securely using your phone as one of them convertible desktops or for maybe virtualizing graphene under graphene
        • itā€™s probably the only relatively serious choice for a secure mobile OS? and thatā€™s depressing as fuck actually, how did we get here

        cons:

        • the devs seem toxic
        • the community is toxic
        • almost barebones AOSP! so good fucking luck when the AOSP implementation of something is broken or buggy or missing cause the graphene devs will tell you to fuck off
        • the project has weird priorities and seems to just forget to do parts of their roadmap when their devs lose interest
        • their browser vanadium seems like a good chromium fork and a fine webview implementation but lacks an effective ad blocker, which makes it unsafe to use if your threat model includes, you know, the fucking obvious. the graphene devs will shame you for using anything but it or brave though, and officially recommend using either a VPN with ad blocking or a service like NextDNS since they donā€™t seem to acknowledge that network-level blocking isnā€™t sufficient
        • thereā€™s just a lot of userland low hanging fruit it doesnā€™t have. like, youā€™re not supposed to root a grapheneOS phone cause that breaks Androidā€™s security model wide open. cool! do they ship any apps to do even the basic shit youā€™d want root for? of course not.
        • youā€™ll have 4 different app stores (per profile) and not know which one to use for anything. if you choose wrong the project devs will shame you.
        • the docs are wildly out of date, of course, why wouldnā€™t they be. presumably Iā€™m supposed to be on Matrix or Discord but Iā€™m not going to do that

        and now the NextDNS rant:

        this is just spyware as a service. why in fuck do privacyguides and the graphene community both recommend a service that uniquely correlates your DNS traffic with your account (even the ā€œtry without an accountā€ button on their site generates a 7 day trial account and a DNS instance so your usage can be tracked) and recommend configuring it in such a way that said traffic can be correlated with VPN traffic? this is incredibly valuable data especially when tagged with an individualā€™s identity, and the only guarantee you have that they donā€™t do this is a promise from a US-based corporation that will be broken the instant they receive a court order. privacyguides should be ashamed for recommending this unserious clown shit.