riQQ's recent activity

  1. Comment on Chile’s new far-right head is latest Latin American leader to ride hardline wave to power in ~society

    riQQ
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    José Antonio Kast’s victory in Chile’s presidential election has been widely praised by leaders of the global right, with congratulations coming from the US secretary of state Marco Rubio, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Argentina’s Javier Milei and X’s Elon Musk.

    The son of a Nazi party member, a father of nine and a staunch Catholic known for opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, Kast won 58.16% of the vote in the runoff – more than 2m votes than the leftist Jeannette Jara, a former labour minister under the current president, Gabriel Boric.

    Kast is the first post-dictatorship president to openly declare himself an admirer of Augusto Pinochet, under whose regime an estimated 40,000 people were tortured and more than 3,000 killed. Among the many tributes he has paid to Pinochet, Kast said during the 2017 presidential campaign: “If [Pinochet] were alive, he would vote for me.”

    13 votes

  3. Comment on How Iran is running out of water in ~enviro

  4. Comment on Reality check: EU Council chat control vote is not a retreat, but a green light for indiscriminate mass surveillance and the end of right to communicate anonymously in ~society

    riQQ
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    He's legit. Former MEP and long time member of the German Pirate Party. He has been reporting on chat control and related topics for years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Breyer

    He's legit. Former MEP and long time member of the German Pirate Party. He has been reporting on chat control and related topics for years.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Breyer

    12 votes

  5. Comment on EU backs away from chat control in ~society

  6. Comment on Reality check: EU Council chat control vote is not a retreat, but a green light for indiscriminate mass surveillance and the end of right to communicate anonymously in ~society

    riQQ
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    “The headlines are misleading: Chat Control is not dead, it is just being privatized,” warns Patrick Breyer. “What the Council endorsed today is a Trojan Horse. By cementing ‘voluntary’ mass scanning, they are legitimizing the warrantless, error-prone mass surveillance of millions of Europeans by US corporations, while simultaneously killing online anonymity through the backdoor of age verification.”

    11 votes

  7. Comment on Communist and far-right candidates head to Chile presidential run-off in ~society

    riQQ
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    Chile's presidential election will go to a run-off vote in December between a Communist Party and a far-right candidate, after the first round on Sunday produced no outright winner.

    The election campaign was dominated by crime and immigration, as migration to the country has grown in recent years and candidates pledged to fight foreign gangs like Venezuela's Tren de Aragua.

    The Communist Party's Jeannette Jara, from the governing coalition, narrowly won the first round followed closely by far-right candidate José Antonio Kast.

    The result is expected to give a boost to Kast, as Jara was the only left-wing candidate running against several right-wing candidates, which split the right-wing vote.

    4 votes

  9. Comment on Mullvad - Shutting down our search proxy Leta in ~tech

  10. Comment on Mozilla Firefox gets new anti-fingerprinting defenses in ~tech

  11. Comment on Mozilla Firefox gets new anti-fingerprinting defenses in ~tech

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    Mozilla announced a major privacy upgrade in Firefox 145 that reduces even more the number of users vulnerable to digital fingerprinting.

    The new protections will initially be available only in Private Browsing Mode and Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) Strict mode. After testing and optimization, they will be enabled by default in the Firefox web browser.

    Now, ‘Phase 2’ protections are being rolled out, which block requests to discover installed fonts, hardware details, number of processor cores, multi-touch support, and dock/taskbar dimensions.

    Specifically, the new protections constitute the following:

    • Random noise is added to background images only when a site reads them back, not when they are just displayed.
    • Only standard OS fonts are used; local fonts are blocked, except for key language fonts like Japanese, Thai, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Hebrew.
    • Touch support is reported as 0, 1, or 5.
    • The available screen resolution is the screen height minus 48 pixels.
    • Processor cores are always reported as 2.
    27 votes

  13. Comment on The day my smart vacuum turned against me in ~tech

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    It all started innocently enough. I had recently bought an iLife A11 smart vacuum—a sleek, affordable, and technologically advanced robot promising effortless cleaning and intelligent navigation. As a curious engineer, I was fascinated by its workings. After leaving it to operate for the entire year, my curiosity got the better of me.

    I’m a bit paranoid—the good kind of paranoid. So, I decided to monitor its network traffic, as I would with any so-called smart device.

    All I did was block its data logging IP address—just the logs, not firmware updates or OTA channels. Simple enough, I thought.

    For a few days, everything seemed fine. It continued to clean, map, and obediently avoid the furniture. However, one morning, it failed to power on.

    8 votes

  15. Comment on Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking in ~tech

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    Cellebrite can apparently extract data from most Pixel phones, unless they’re running GrapheneOS.

    Despite being a vast repository of personal information, smartphones used to have little by way of security. That has thankfully changed, but companies like Cellebrite offer law enforcement tools that can bypass security on some devices. The company keeps the specifics quiet, but an anonymous individual recently logged in to a Cellebrite briefing and came away with a list of which of Google’s Pixel phones are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking.

    21 votes

  17. Comment on EU country grouping cleared to build sovereign digital infrastructure in ~tech

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    The European Commission on Wednesday gave the go-ahead for a group of four countries to establish a common organisation for building open source alternatives to much-used (non-European) software.

    France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands will work to develop open, European alternatives in “key areas” such as AI, cloud, cybersecurity, and – curiously – social networks.

    20 votes

  19. Comment on Aggressive bots ruined my weekend in ~tech

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    Interesting bit about smartphones possibly being abused for scraping

    Interesting bit about smartphones possibly being abused for scraping

    What's wild is that these scrapers rotate through thousands of IP addresses during their scrapes, which leads me to suspect that the requests are being tunnelled through apps on mobile devices, since the ASNs tend to be cellular networks. I'm still speculating here, but I think app developers have found another way to monetise their apps by offering them for free, and selling tunnel access to scrapers.

    17 votes

  20. Comment on Pete Hegseth announces Qatar will build air force facility at US base in Idaho in ~society