manjalyc

Could you please point to what I've reworded that you believe is misleading or misconstrued, I will happily edit my comment and fix it - I have more or less directly quoted within context. I have omitted stuff because I didn't feel the need to include the whole privacy policy in a comment (which is why I linked it) but nothing I felt was misleading. If there is a critical point you feel I should include, let me know and I will add it.

As for this not being enough information to identify someone, it really is. Lets assume you use Google's DNS and no google tools, block all trackers, etc. (which the vast majority of people do not do). Lets say the authorities grab your computer, and somehow have access to Google DNS data (CLOUD Act) and want to see what you did online. They can already filter down DNS queries to 1000 people (and thats assuming all 1000 people use google dns, which again they do not). They can figure out what software performed queries based on EDNS data. Timestamps further filter down the dataset if you have a general idea of a person's schedule. With ECS they can further narrow down by service provider. All of sudden those 1000 autonomous ids have been significantly narrowed down using just general techniques, if you're targeting a person you will almost certainly be able to use the rest of the data to tie an ID to machine. If you use other google services or even just visit sites with google analytics that ID is even easier to compromise. Every piece of data collected is a piece of data that can be used to identify you, that's the price of convenience.

EDIT: Would like to mention even the act of an machine going offline, which will occur if an authority confiscates your machine will narrow down IDs as now you only have to look for IDs that stopped communicating with Google's DNS at time of confiscation.

Ah, I didn't want to get into the stupidity and sysadmin nightmare of systemd-resolved, but rest-assured even with systemd-resolved active most users can simply manage their /etc/resolv.conf file and systemd-resolved should respect it. It gets trickier when you don't have a network manager program or are use dhcp, VPNs, etc.

Completely agree, my issue is only with the presentation of data while not providing context for it which I feel is disingenuous in an argument that has no need to be disingenuous.

Universal practice is editing the resolv.conf file and then write-protecting it with.

  chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf

This always works, but certain applications NetworkManager have their own preferred way of doing things that I quite frankly do not care to learn.

This is a breakdown of some issues many people have with Google's Privacy Policy for their DNS.

Temporarily Logs (2 days):

- Google logs the IP address of every device sending a DNS query.

- For DNS-over-HTTPS, logs Content-Type & Accept HTTP headers

Permanently Logs:

- Client's autonomous system number

- User's geolocation within 1 km^2 and 1000 people.

- Timestamp

- Requested Domain Name

- Request Domain type

- Transport Protocol

- EDNS version, option

- and a few more, essentially everything but your IP address.

This is enough permanent information to successfully identify the vast majority of people even if they never permanently log your IP - and that's just by itself, not including if you use other google services. Other services such as Cloudflare DNS or OpenDNS provide a higher degree of privacy and can even be faster than Google's DNS.

Google's DNS policy: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

Cloudflare's DNS policy: https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/privacy/public-dns...

OpenDNS's policy: https://umbrella.cisco.com/blog/privacy-policy-update

> /etc/resolve.conf

It’s /etc/resolv.conf, and systemd overwrites it, Network Manager overwrites it (like every 10 minutes), dhcp overwrites it, etc. What do they overwrite it to? Most just get it from the router even if the router has no assigned servers. These days manually managing /etc/resolv.conf by hand requires hooking into every service that overwrites it on most systemd distributions. So really the people this change would affect are those with misconfigured routers.

My issue is why they didn’t go with a more private DNS such as Open DNS or even Cloudfare DNS. Google’s privacy policy is worse than either of the two. It seems the questioner asked in bad faith but I would’ve hoped Poettering would respond to the validity and dismiss the malintent instead of dismissing the whole issue.

Well that’s interesting, but could easily be do to an explosion of population. Anyone have historical per capita numbers? They seem to be hard to find.

You're completely right. Helvetica was just a suggestion as most newspapers use it and is widely supported, but he could and should add fallbacks (preferally sans-serif based). As for the kerning it appears something was messing up the spacing for his website and the combination of disabling kerning and letter spacing (even if counter-intuitive) seems to 'make it prettier' at least in firefox.

  body {
    font-kerning: none;
    letter-spacing: -0.00214em;
    font-family: Helvetica;
  }

> but I couldn’t put my finger on why

You probably shouldn't use serif, Helvetica is much easier on the eyes and more forgiving.

> But India is still a Semi Slavery society.

> The Hindu caste/social grouping system tells millions of people that they are contaminated and their fate is doomed upon birth.

Sure, maybe 100 years ago. But attitudes have been changing and there are numerous government programs designed specifically to bring up those in "lower castes" with the ultimate goal of equality for everyone. Indian culture is still very different from Western culture and far deeper ingrained into the average person. Change does not happen overnight. Everything happening in India in a broader view points to a trend of more equality and freedoms, not less. More governmental programs seek to address issues of inequalities, especially caste discrimination, than at any prior point in Indian history. Of course there are still issues, I won't argue there are no flaws, but calling it a Semi Slavery society these days is delusional at best, malintent at worst.

I would say the most important part, and where every company has shot themselves in the foot is the need for an account. With Zoom you can join meetings with just a link/code, and while it may seem trivial to us thats a huge plus for nontechnical people.

That and the fact Zoom had seamless integration with large meetings with relatively little-to-no performance/quality costs is a huge benefit. The luck of timing & advertising is what pulled it all together.

I would venture that the problem with Google's products is that they run in the browser and in spite of all the improvements in browsers these days its just not ready yet when you need the kind of quality and performance that huge meetings demand.

Also and perhaps more importantly, Google's approach is tied into its own ecosystem but anybody can join a Zoom meeting with just a link/code. Google had everything they needed but are too tied into the everything on the browser mindset and their own ecosystem to see they're shooting themselves in the foot before their horse is even out the door. At this point its too late, Zoom's aggressive pre-marketing, simplicity, and ubiquity is a real force now and everyone else is just playing catch up.

The source code is far smaller that I would've expected, tiny in fact - no seriously, its probably <2000 lines of actual code and looks extremely simple to audit and fix bugs. It seems the only real external dependency is libtorrent.

Honestly, if your not already amazed if not at the simplicity of this project, than you should be by the simplicity of fuse filesystems and the capabilities it exposes.

Hey, just wanted to say that this looks like a really cool and useful project. I work with a few medical databases and sometimes I just need a very quick breakdown of specific data and while I usually just write a short script, the utility and portability of this code looks fantastic to me. Which brings me to a question, how well does this program handle moderately large databases (~100GB-1TB) in your (or anyone else's) experience? In other words does it try to load everything into memory, or does it query as needed when given a database?