/cyb/ - cyberpunk and cybersecurity

When people are not satisfied with their life, they start wanting to change it in the most easy way. One starts to look for a new wallpaper for his desktop, another one jumps onto another distro. People do this because of this fresh and good feeling 'I CHANGED SOMETHING', when actually you didn't change a single thing. In your case, you started projecting your thoughts on anonymity and cybersecurity.

I don't see how your safety and anonymity could push you away from your family and friends. You are talking bullsoykaf, looking for a problem in the wrong direction. You just needed something to blame on your quality of life, and of course you found it.

What did you even expect from this thread? Some consolation words? Anyway, it is your right to do whatever you want.

>>3027
He's right.

>I've been pushing them away over this illusion of safety

I can see that you misunderstood the whole "anonymity and privacy" ordeal. For someone that spend and i quote "I've spent the past half decade absorbed into is a colossal waste of time" You missed the point in it's entirety.

The only thing i see here is that you're blaming everyone else for the lost of your privacy. In fact you should simply stop communicating with them through internet and move your ass to go check on them if family and friends are the only thing that matters too you in your world i don't see why you wouldn't go see them. Privacy as NEVER said that it would give you safety which is right from your part, is a total illusion. Security and privacy are two different world.

>Google tracks your location by using cellphone towers

I assume you're using a cellphone. Then you can only blame yourself for your soykaf op sec. You knew but you still didn't do soykaf about it.

Privacy mean you are going to lose in convenience. Security means (in the present time maybe in the future it will change) losing some of your privacy. The fact that you didn't grasp this at first blow my mind right through the roof.

It is all useless. It's as useless as you are. Get out into "~meatsp4ce~" and live.

>Google tracks your location by using cellphone towers
cellphone towers can't access window.location.href

tbh i don't think it matters much if google knows my physical location.
i basically go to work and back.
if they knew everything i did online, i might have a problem with it.

>>3032
> cellphone towers can't access window.location.href

I'm no expert but I don't think they would even bother trying to access that object when they could just use your differing radio frequency levels to approximate the location (i.e. 9-1-1 services)

>internet-connected surveillance cameras with unknown security setups, some of them outright send data to Chinese "cloud", some of them write to local disks or government server, some of them are available on the Internet after doing a port scan with default passwords
>every person besides you owns a spying device with always-on microphone, and countless combination of applications that spy on their own
>someone picks up a spying device and starts filming, doing "selfies", you get in frame, you get shadow-profiled
>every spying device not only answers to a corporation it runs software of, which is avoidable on individual basis, not exactly what OP is trying to tell us with his made-up straw man of location metadata leak to Google, but it also communicates with cell towers, which is their turn are owned by cellular telecom operators who sell their data to advertisers, government and city planning department
There is no way of escaping the electronic gulag in the city or ex/suburbs.
One has to JUST BEE HIMSELF out of existence to avoid this fuckery.

>>3026
Im not surprised you feel this way. If you try and force your opinions on privacy upon others, they will hate you for it. Tried and tested.
Lets take google for example, your best friends probably use it every day, in fact they love it. You say to them: <i>"Please stop using Google as they know everything about you, they control your emails, documents, calendars, personal photos, blogs, videos, maps, medical records, and personal finances and they every term you’ve searched for and every site you’ve visited. They also have aerial photos of your house and more money than God. They are evil, someday you will see!".</i> You probably thought you were being clever, but in reality you just lost a friend. It doesn't even matter if you are right if you criticize others. Nothing you do will persuade anyone, thats just the reality of it all and the more you talk about it, the more they will dislike you.

It really sucks having ZOGbots for friends.

It's always a tough decision to make. IMO you can have a balance between security/anonymity/etc and the "normal" social life. Your friends can be aware of your opinions regarding these issues and have a "social" life (web based and irl) with them. On the other hand you can also have your anonymous-based online social life with communities like this one. I use (as little as possible) Google for example, but when a friend does and for example uploads a photo on the Internet with us, I don't care. I am "normal" with the "normal" ones and "weird" with the "weird" ones. It's always a matter of perspective and how you balance those two things. At the moment you are here, means (and as you said OP) that you take security/anonymity seriously, but at the same time, most of your people, does not. Keep your balance and everything shall work the way you want.

>>3037
You underestimate how much data they have on you but people also over estimate how effective their data sorting is. Just go to any search and see how much unrelated junk comes up even for the most obvious things. A few years back you could ask for google to show you it's profile on you. It said I was middle age woman, which was way way off target and I never tried to confuse it, I simply liked the stuff I liked.

You can't control your data in this era unless you remove yourself from the internet. But that doesn't mean they can't build a profile out of you any way. People are just too easily convinced to sell you down the river and they will build a profile out of you.

>>3042
> It said I was middle age woman, which was way way off target and I never tried to confuse it, I simply liked the stuff I liked.

I've concluded that Skynet assumes much about an individual human (age, gender, politics, other interests) based on what music they listen to on youtube etc. I want to grill you on your listening habits but realize that might be inappropriate.

It really sucks when Google thinks you're a middle-aged woman, and refuses to give you technical results for questions you throw at it.

>>3042
That said, the data is stored forever. It will be effectively used at some point to create pertinent profiles.

>>3026
To be honest, the level of privacy people strive for on lainchans IS a waste of time for most of them. They work hard to cover their tracks or not leave any in the first place, but in the end they never do anything with the gained obscurity. They don't fight the state, they don't evade police, they don't become those who escaped the system on a DIY spaceship while the masses became slave drones. They might learn some things about security and so along the way, but most of their energy is spent on restraining themselves. A day may or may not come when all their effort pays off. Some people burn out in the process as they spend all their energy protecting rights, rights they need to live their lives well - something they don't have any energy left for.

>>3411
> They don't fight the state, they don't evade police, they don't become those who escaped the system on a DIY spaceship while the masses became slave drones.

How do you know this for sure? Granted, a percentage of them probably just want to hide their stash of… of…

>>3414
Just take a look at /feels/. Probably half of them can't even manage their own lives.

>>3411

Yep. It's easy to see that you almost can't use the internet anymore without being monitored & catalogued.

Ultimately, everyone is to blame. We threw it all in for convenience, and many of us continue to do so. I wonder how many here have Facebook, use Google services & Discord?

It really was only going to go one way. As soon as the field split off from the more scientific/engineering aspect & became dominated by corporate & business demands…'fuck everyone's privacy; we're here to make money'

I personally find working in the IT industry the biggest blight on my ability to stay 'underground' and maintain privacy. You're forced to play the game with their tools and maintain a sense of availability using their platforms.

>>3425
These could be entirely different groups of people. On an anonymous forum you can't know.

>>3447
Well I mean sure, I can't know anything per se. It's just that I don't see news of "foss privacy hackers" fighting the state either in mainstream or in foss privacy hacker news, but I do see a lot of slacktivism and ideology mishmash. Believing that the /feels/ people complaining about how lonely they are and the privacy hobbists who avoid all social media and can't start conversations IRL because nobody cares about their interests are totally different groups of people would be wishful thinking at best.

>Overall, I've realized that friends and family and just general relationships are the only thing that matter in this world, and I've been pushing them away over this illusion of safety I've made for myself.

I found this to be a particularly strong sentiment. My relationships with people are also very important to me. I have drifted away from every person I knew that I don't see everyday due to the increase in effort required to communicate with them. I have a flip i keep around the house, but I hate texting, and don't take it out with me every day. All facebook, most google, and all amazon domains are among a few of the sites I have on my routers black list. It's been an internal struggle prioritizing between friendships and my beliefs.

There are many people I'd like to remain in contact with, but I'm not going to use websites / software that makes me unhappy to use. They are not worth self inflicting unhappiness upon myself, as important as they continue to be as friends in my life. This is one choie I make.

Personally, I'm convinced my beliefs are what cause me to be unhappy with the software that communication with these people necessitates; and I'm convinced that I choose my own beliefs. The way I see it, being unhappy with a particular piece of software is a choice, so that's a second choice I make.

From looking at my behavior we can see that I have made two choices against those relationships that are still very much genuinely important to me. This was a source of cognitive dissonance for me for a while. I had to come to terms with the fact that my beliefs were more important to me than those relationships.

So I first asked myself, are these beliefs really more important to me, or am I just acting that way. Are there genuine emotions behind that decision, which lead to my behavior, or is there something else at play. After some introspection, I discovered they were.

Even after this realization I feel saddened often by this distance between me and people I really care about, but when the sadness comes it doesn't come with any confusion, guilt, or self loathing. That is a win in my book.