Rikj000

YouTube has been cracking down on alternative frontends.

Vanilla Invidious currently doesn’t work well,
so most hosters paused and/or gave up.

Fijxu runs a fork of Invidious,
with their own modifications implemented to circumvent the blocks,
here’s the source code if you’re interested:
https://git.nadeko.net/Fijxu/invidious

I’ve got big respect for Fijxu,
he’s been doing a very good job of keeping Invidious alive + fighting against the YouTube crackdown lately, basically all on his own.

If you can please consider:

• Donating for their work/hosting
• Hosting their fork on your own
• Solving open issues with pull requests to their fork

All the above can help Fijxu,
since currently he’s mostly fighting a big tech giant all on his own.

If the fines regarding to it are in proportion with the revenue of the business, then it likely would make a lot of them think twice about doing so.

I agree that it’s hard to enforce the rules,
and that some would still ignore them.
However updating the rules give the abused people a chance of getting justice/consolidation for their stolen work, and diminishes the chance of companies breaking the rules.

It would not combat bit torrent (P2P) piracy.
But that’s also not that important imo.
Most pirates are rather poor folks,
just trying to watch/play some content which they can’t afford, they make up for a rather neglible amount of the profit that can be had.

However it would combat billion dollar companies that would use pirated content to train LLMs to sell further. All they need is x1 internal whistleblower about doing so, and they could be fined with an amount larger then the risk is worth.

No copyright law seems dangerous to me,
why create content if you can just steal it,
and earn on the back of the original creator without consequences?

I think I’d rather see it updated instead.
E.g. To hold AI companies and users accountable.
So they need explicit approval of copyright holders before they’re allowed to train upon / use their data.

I believe Briar currently is one of the best options out there, together with SimpleX.

However I lack usage experience with both.
Since no one I know makes use of them…

It was already hard enough to convince only a handful of my friends to start using Session and Matrix/Element (which are not the best options anymore), but I’m kinda doubtful about my success rate of making them switch once again…

My success with convincing people to use Telegram has been better though, since that’s the most commonly known, but nearly no one wants to install an app they never heard off before, just to chat with only me :P

Also “convincing people” lately goes smth like this for me:

• Do you have WhatsApp or Messenger so I can send you some pictures?
• No I don’t use apps that do not respect my privacy, but you can send em to me through SimpleX, Briar, Session, Matrix/Element, Telegram, Discord or email :P
• Upon which most choose Telegram or Discord as their means to contact me, sadly no one had Briar/SimpleX yet.

*Don’t Use Session,
if your threat profile includes government’s spending ±100k to crack your encryption, since their encryption is not the best out there.

Which they likely won’t for an average privacy conscious user, but they might for high ranking criminals.

It was a good read though,
I won’t invite new people to Session due to it.

But the title is a little click-baity,
“Session’s encryption is not the best”,
would be a more honest title.

deleted by creator

Oh did not know that, sad to hear.

They did remove traffic to the old Yuzu domains though, which now are in the hands of Nintendo, used to monitor which users use emulators.

Do you have other suggestions for promising successor forks?

Suyu, it’s the continuation/fork of Yuzu:
https://suyu.dev/

Also Azahar, the continuation/fork of Citra:
https://azahar-emu.org/

Been using VSCodium for a few years now, for loose file editing,
no complaints about it, imo it’s what VSCode should be.

uBlock Origin Filters to get rid of Copilot + AI feed bloat on Github
uBlock Origin => Open the Dashboard => My Filters => Add:

github.com##.copilotPreview__container
github.com##.AppHeader-CopilotChat
github.com##li.ActionListItem:has-text(Copilot)
github.com##li.ActionList-sectionDivider:has-text(Copilot)
github.com##li.TimelineItem:has-text(Copilot)
github.com##div.pb-4:has-text(Copilot)
github.com###copilot_free_global
github.com###copilot-button-container
github.com###blob-view-header-copilot-icon
github.com##a[href*="/resources/articles/ai"]
github.com##a[href*="/settings/copilot"]
github.com##a[href*="/features/copilot"]
github.blog##a[href*="/features/copilot"]
github.blog##a[href*="/ai-and-ml"]
github.blog##article.changelog-label-copilot
github.blog##article.changelog-label-models

github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(LLM)
github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(OpenAI)
github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(ChatGPT)
github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(GPT)
github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(Llama)
github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(Gemini)
github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(Grok)
github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(DeepSeek)

Also disable + block everything under: https://github.com/settings/copilot

This is actually quite good news!
Hear me out though.

Encryption has been under attack by government instances for a while now.

They always aim to weaken / backdoor it,
so that they can spy on all their citizens.

China abused the backdoor implemented by the US government,
which sends a message across the world,
being: “Do not backdoor encryption to spy on your citizens, or other countries might abuse it”

Hopefully this will put a stop to governments attacking encryption, at least for a while,
since now they’re reminded of the risks which it brings! :)

Afaik Qubes runs all software in containers,
which isolates them from each other,
which is great for privacy.

However, OP only asked for Chrome,
and I assume the jump to Qubes might be too big.

To only isolate Chrome,
I’d recommend a Flatpak instead.

Or even better Ungoogled-Chromium.

Regarding AI, I filled it in as following:

• What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?
  • Other (please specify): Fuck AI
• In your opinion, what is the most important work for Mozilla to do right now?
  • Other (please specify): Do not implement AI
• What is most important to you in AI?
  • Select nothing

SearXNG: https://github.com/searxng/searxng

It enhances and respects privacy,
is open source and self hostable,
and queries multiple configurable search engines (google, bing, brave, duckduckgo, …)

You can find a list of public hosted instances here:
https://searx.space/

However I prefer to slap an instance randomizer on top, so each of my queries goes through another public SearXNG instance, for more privacy, and mostly, to bypass rate-limiting after frequent queries.

For this I use:

• On Desktop - GimmeASearX:
  https://github.com/demostanis/gimmeasearx
• On the go - SearX NeoCities:
  https://searx.neocities.org/

deleted by creator

No, instead they raped his rights with some ToS…

Imagine living in China,
where the government is able to request data of each company in their country.

Imagine that China would setup an AI/LLM, to feed all private chat data into it,
and automatically flagging opposition of the government regime.

Imagine a white van appearing in front of your house and disappearing into a concentration camp because you got flagged after expressing your opposition to the government to your mate in a private chat.

All collected data can be abused like that,
or by other means (E.g. a country at war gets hacked, which could lead to leaking critical private information on political/defensive decisions).

To me the question is not if data collected on you will be abused, but rather when will it be abused?

Just having it stored somewhere imposes risks.

Privacy should be a basic human right.
Data collection could be massively abused by oppressive governments.

Not caring about it = Not caring about your rights.

Sure hope so.

Would be handy if they included a pre-written pdf to oppose this proposition + emails or forms to easily submit your opposition to each of the countries.

Instead it’s a general “contact your government”,
which 99% of normal people do not know how to do, me included.