Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy

D <nospam@example.net> writes:

On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
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D <nospam@example.net> writes:
>

On Wed, 20 Feb 2025, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
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Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:

In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.

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Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)

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What I don't tell, they can't post, and the same with what they
don't photograph. Although I guess that does leave a bit of an
information vacuum there which some nutcase could exploit to make
up missing personal info/photos on me if they so desired.
>

Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.

>
Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.

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For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.

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You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.

>
I think most little scripts should be documented (with a manual) and put
online.  It will make it easier for others to use and it will certainly
encourage others to improve it and share the improvement.  So you could
see your little script turn into a nice polished program simply because
someone saw the idea and knew what to do to make it a lot better.  Could
be a good source of joy.

>
You have a point! Sigh... so much one wants to do, so little time. =(
Let met tell you about my little scripts. I have my old backup script
utilizing rsync and replicating over tor, so it can go through
firewalls, and uses a hidden service for a permanent global address,
so it is not dependent on DNS or domain names. I once had delusions of
grandeur and thought about rewriting a small part of tor to remove all
hops since I do not need anonymity for that use case.
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I have my calendar sync scripts. They pull in ics from corporate
calendar and converts it to remind format.
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Then I have a slightly rewritten leafnode that pulls down usenet
articles and stores them in Maildir format so I can read and write
offline news in my favourite email client alpine.
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I also have some custom rss2email scripts, and a script that allows me
to take any url in an email, and fetch the page and email it to me.
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Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)

LOL!  It turns out I'm *highly* interested in your leafnode.  Please,
can you put a package somewhere and let me look at it, try it out et
cetera?  I've been thinking about doing something like that myself.  I
can probably just live with your changes. 

I think I once packaged noffle (and not leafnode) for myself, but I
think I stopped using noffle for a news server, too.  I think I use
leafnode now, but I use it only as a local news server.  I'd like to
have an NNTP server that's simple to use, easily hosts local news server
and also easily peers with a USENET server for just a non-huge list of
groups.  I actually would like to write this server myself.

Let me share with you an upload script to https://0x0.st.  This is a no
nonsense temporary file uploader.  It works well as a paste bin, too.
The script below takes a series of files from the command line and
uploads each one to 0x0.st.  If you specify no file, then it will read
from the standard in.  The webserver at 0x0.st will print a URL for each
file uploaded, which is the address where you file is then stored.

--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
#!/bin/sh
args="$@"; test $# -lt 1 && args='-'

for f in $args; do
  curl --silent --show-error -X POST -F "file=@$f" https://0x0.st
done
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---

The next script uses upload to invoke scrot, which is a screen shot
taker.  It will take the URL printed by upload and store it in X's
primary selection area, which you can paste anywhere with your mouse or
with a keyboard shortcut.  (This is done by xsel.)

--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
#!/bin/sh
usage()
{
  printf 'usage: %s [options]\n' $(basename "$0")
}
test "$1" = '-h' && usage && exit 0
scrot --border -F- "$@" | upload | tr -d '\n' | xsel
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---

So if you call this script as /screenshot/ then all you need to do is to
invoke it and wait a moment then press the mouse middle button to paste
the URL somewhere.  The bug in it is that you don't know when /upload/
finishes.  It would be nice if somehow we could get a sign somewhere
that the URL is already in X's primary selection.

For the upload script, I would also like to write a GNU EMACS procedure
that takes a region of text and feeds upload's standard input.  That's a
nice way to share a bit of code or output or something.  I'm sure these
things exist already somewhere.  But it's nice to do them and perhaps
it's easier to do then to actually find where they are and then learn to
use them.