/cyb/ - cyberpunk and cybersecurity

if you're saying this here, you're saying it to the wrong crowd. The people here who use google have chosen to do it, aware of the other options. And there are many who have taken other options.

I'm curious though, about a few things. About 24 hours, as many of you have heard, or even noticed yourselves, there was a large outage of youtube and perhaps several other google services across parts of the world. This shook me as it made me realize how many people in my vicinity on the internet use youtube, in the space of say, 10 minutes there were several original reports of failure among my highly geeky hangouts. These are among people who have made efforts to break their selves away from google in many respects, so it saddens me to think many of us rely on this service.

Lately I've seen a couple remarks on news aggregators about PeerTube, I've heard of other folks pursuing similar video streaming services, but these usually lead no where. In email, in search, in all of these domains there are alternative services. In simple video upload, sharing, and streaming, our google is without peer, no one even approaches them.

Unfortunately services like PeerTube – and I havent looked greatly into it so forgive me – may be technically on a level with youtube, but they are without the content. People would use youtube if the interface was soykaf, hell for all I know the interface _is_ soykaf. But its got the stuff you want so you have to go there anyway and go there you do.

I'm not sure how we should fix this, its difficult, especially for people who care about law, to mirror all those videos to another service. But this is something that probably should be done.

>>3434
First time I'm ever hearing about PeerTube, but the lack of content that might being the barrier on entry and as far as I know the lack of any monetization. People have built their entire livelyhoods on Youtube, even people who speak for Linux and advocate for freedom such as Brian Lunduke mentioned this is one of his latest videos about Google+ going down. To make a living on the internet you have to use the biggest platform no matter how that platform might be against your morals. Such as many services and groups that promote privacy and freedom use social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (although I heard there's some hoops you can jump through to post on twitter freely).

>This shook me as it made me realize how many people in my vicinity on the internet use youtube, in the space of say, 10 minutes there were several original reports of failure among my highly geeky hangouts.
This is what happens when you put too many eggs in one basket. When all of your livelihood is in the hands of one large company it's not the most secure thing to do. Imagine this happening on a larger scale. Instead of 10 minutes google services are down for hours. The cost of lost, both monetarily and productively just because you decided to use someone's computer instead of your own. The use of decentralize services like federated social media sites are needed. The ability to speak with other computers on the same platform but in physically different places.

>>3434
> saying it to the wrong crow

Better to have those links here than having to look up everything on soykafty facebook.

And yeah, YouTube really is the elephant in the room. You can switch E-Mail/Search providers pretty much right away but YouTube just has too much content that is only accessible over there, especially when it comes to music (for me at least) and it'll take a really long time for any other service to catch up to this. Some goes for any monetized channel they are all just on YT and that won't change without similar payout options from other services.

As for privacy people on twitter they could at least mirror all their stuff to mastodon, I do that as well with my art. I think Mastodon is actually pretty healthy right now and growing fine, but this has nothing to do with de-googling.

Started to use Posteo and already loving it.
It's FSF approved and allows me to use Thunderbird and Mutt which really betters my workflow.

Email is problematic because it seems to be _required_ by many institutions (a problem that will worsen as companies try to move away from physical mail), yet everyone has conspired to make sure running an email server from your home is as difficult as it could possibly be. I do not want to pay a middleman for a domain name, nor do I want to pay for a 'business' connection for access to specific ports. It's absurd that people appear to be comfortable with having their emails analyzed and filtered. If intentionally opening physical other peoples' mail is a federal crime reading/analyzing others' emails should be too.

What does alice think of confidant mail? http://cwu7eglxcabwttzf.onion
I'm thinking of running a cmail server. I think it's a step in the right direction. Obviously, it won't be useful for everyday business activities unless it reaches some kind of critical mass, but at least it can be used now to communicate with other people who care about their privacy and who think the current state of email is not so good.

For search engines I like the idea of Yacy. I have heard some people complain about the results, but they don't do anything to help. What part of 'web search by the people, for the people' don't you get? If you're not getting 'good' results let yacy trawl your usage of Google, DuckDuckGo or whatever you use so that we can get 'good' results. Even if your access to a centralized search engine is anonymous you're still giving up a lot of agency by relying on them and allowing them to grow.

You can use torrents over i2p to share videos without fear of drawing the attention of copyright holders. Use Freenet if you want a temporary cloud solution. If you want to store files for a long duration you can. Storage is cheap. Store it on your own HDD. Use sshfs with friends to share your files directly if you want. Use the Freenet Messaging System for distributed forums, or Syndie. There are so many interesting pieces of software out there. Honestly, there is no personal problem if you're willing to just do things yourself or cooperate with like minded people.

You don't even always need a computer. A calender program seems superfluous.

Will installing LineageOS or others you mentioned delete my previous data ( pictures , videos etc. )

>>3439
Yes

doesnt searchx literally take results from google?

>>3441
It's like startpage, it uses Google results but a layer. You're not being tracked by Google. Searx also allows you to use other search engines. If you wanted to you can searx startpage. The reason it's so loved for privacy is the fact you can easily deploy this and make host your own search engine.

>>3441

searx is a metasearch engine that pools results from a large number of search engines together. this can include, but isnt limited to, google, duckduckgo, yacy, et cetera. Disabling google is very easy.

Startpage is litterally a google proxy, on the other hand.

>>3438
>I have heard some people complain about the results, but they don't do anything to help

I used to run several yacy nodes, putting a great deal of memory, raw disk space, and download bandwidth to sustaining a great number of crawled pages. It still sucked, rather badly. Even for the narrow domains I was focusing on.

Personally I haven't worked much on the code for it, but many of the people I've spoken to who have have made it sound also rather a mess.

Unfortunately its basically the only thing that fills its rolle very effectively. Other free search engines still need to be setup along with a good crawling setup, ok web frontend, et cetera, before they really can be similar (and many such engines also need patching and updating themselves). Nevertheless I legitimately question whether Yacy would be better than reassembling another similar tool from scratch in seperate.

Then again, maybe I just am prejudiced against java.

>torrents / i2p
Yes, I dont think the problem is sharing videos to geeky people. I think a large part of the problem is that the videos the average person wants to watch (films exepting), are already on youtube if they're anywhere. They can be moved to other platforms, torrents or other tubes or download and save on VHS, but to do this at a meaningfully large scale is quite a large project that no one has successfully done.

>cmail
I admit it, I'm a cynic.

Glancing over this in principal it looks, reasonable. Has some cool features and probably would be a nice step compared to email. But there are lots of other things that could be done to replace email and its rather well sedimented.

You can use PGP email the same, to communicate with likeminded privacy conscious people. In the wider world, people laugh even at people who simply attach PGP signatures to the bottoms of their emails. If this sort of thing will ever replace email, that day is a long way off I fear.

Thoughts on The Freenet Project ?

ZeroNet
Bitcoin
Starwels
Tor browser
Tails

>>3444
It's a great platform, but it's quite lacking in content. At least the last time I checked.

>>3444
>>3446

yeah, its cool but it was, empty. This is the same problem >>3434 notes with alot of ''alternative'' places. Tor's darknet is cool, but the content sucks. Freenet is cool, but very empty. Yacy is a cool idea, but either a straightup bad implementation, or its just lacking the scale to make it work.

What we need are not more things like freenet and tor and zeronet and the rest, what we need are more people in one or a couple of those places.

>>3446
I quite like Freenet, but it seems to be designed for a different age, one where one's main computer has no battery life concerns (i.e. desktops plugged in to a wall socket) and is left running 24/7.

Most personal computers these days are phones, tablets, and laptops. When one's main computer is running in some form of system-wide sleep mode most of the time, or is enforcing some sort of individual-program hibernation to save battery power, Freenet and similar networks can't propagate data properly on a mass scale.

>>3457
isnt the web designed this way, too ? Seems like both, if finding themselves with poor uptime, are well served by patience.

>>3458
Not really. Freenet is designed to encourage physical security among users. By default, only localhost can access a Freenet node. Technically one could set up a home server to run it, and access it from one's main computer on-demand web-server-style from within the same LAN, but that takes extra configuration steps and isn't officially encouraged.

And running Freenet on some VPS somewhere… no. Just, no. I ain't gonna do that anytime soon.

Would love to use OpenSourceMaps, but the problem is the lack of addresses contributed to the project. If I wanted to go to someone's home that I never seen before I would have to add it myself, and even check Google Maps to make sure the spot I added is correct just to get directions.

>>3434
>but they are without the content
It's the core problem with making an "alternative" IMO. There's a chicken and egg problem here. You need a reason for a large number of normal users to make the switch. But they won't come without content, and content creators won't come if there's no viewers. And for social media it's the same thing with the "network effect" making them only worth joining if there's other people you want to talk to on there, but they're waiting on that too.

YouTube has had its share of issues, but viewers only really care when either someone they like has their channel taken down/demonitized/etc (but that's usually just enough to make them shake their fist at GOOG for a few seconds before clicking on a different video), or if the service is offline. We really just need to hope for some big, repeating server issues with the big four that make everyday people interested in federated platforms.

Alternatives also often just attract the "undesirables" who were censored by the existing big players (e.g. people who jumped to gab, voat, 8ch). It'll get content, but it's not universally attractive. Which just helps keep people away from some of them. Federations can sort of deal with this, but I don't think average people will understand them well enough without some help.

PeerTube also has some tech/privacy issues, since it's p2p and built on torrents so your list of watched videos isn't entirely confidential AFAIK and you're automatically seeding them which may run into bigger issues.

>>3473
Addresses for houses seem to work well for me, but my issue is that it doesn't have things like traffic data that I'd need to actually replace Google Maps/Waze as my navigation tool.

Just wanted to say you can use invidio.us for youtube (or that script someone once made) and searx instead of literally anything else, iirc startpage sells info like duckduckgo does. Pick a searx site you have a good feeling for, it wouldn't surprise me if some of them would sell data.

Honestly, "ungoogled chromium" is the best out there. It has literally no spyware and has the funcionality that google chrome offers. I have tried most privacy browsers, and ungoogled chromium is still the best in functionality and privacy

Is protonmail to be trusted?

>>3547
No more than anyone else.

>>3543
tor-browser is better for privacy.
as far as 'functionality', they are comprable in many ways

>>3542
>find one you have a good feeling about
or just host your own friend-o. its litterally what, two shell commands and maybe a little config tweaking ? you can even run it over Tor, and it doesnt take that much resources.

or hell, open it up to other netizens and harvest the data off them, if you can find any buyers.

On top of privacytools, check out https://prism-break.org/en/categories/gnu-linux
For alternatives and what to avoid when facing botnet.

>>3547
Would use it over something like Google, outlook, etc. But I'm skeptical of how big they've gotten. I would stick to hosting your own or using services approved by FSF. No lie, riseup seems the best when it comes to email services.