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It's a simple problem of where the market is.

India, Russia, and Brazil isn't the target market for people like Schneier. If you narrow the market to the US, Statista reports that Telegram has twice as many users in the US as Viber.

I'm from one of those countries where Viber is hugely popular (by far more popular than WhatsApp and Telegram), and I hate it with passion. Kind of like Telegram, its end-to-end encryption was also home-made last time I've checked, but at least it's turned on by default.

Specifically, it's the EasyPrivacy list that blocks it. That list is one of the default ones in uBlock Origin.

The beauty of Matomo is that you can configure it to read the data from the server logs. No need for me to bother with adblockers, tracking scripts, and how it all affects my website performance.

> malware blacklisting "services"

If you're thinking of Google Safe Browsing (used by both Chrome and Firefox), you're wrong.

It works the other way around: Google sends you the list of undesired domains, and your client prevents you from visiting domains found on that list.

Nothing needs to be shared with a third party for that functionality.

Same thing: convenience.

Find the phone, unlock the phone, find and open the app, find and click the control. That requires some effort.

Saying commands, having physical buttons at the expected location in your home, NFC tags.. there's a bunch of more convenient ways to do extremely repetitive tasks that would otherwise take you more time to do.

Buy a bunch of third-party apps (like Sunrise and SwiftKey) and slowly but surely integrate them into your own products (like Bing and Outlook) to gather more data?

I'm entirely used to one of them (SwiftKey) and I've tried several others as well. They've all offered amazing user experience, but I'm just not comfortable using Microsoft's Launcher for example.

I believe you're describing F-Droid.

Disclosure: I've used to work for OCCRP.

That's a platform designed for journalists that indeed contains a lot of scraped data and leaks. It cross-references them, so you can type in a name of the person/company and see the data points mentioning them. Some of the investigations got started precisely because journalists were able to use it to see a connection you can't see otherwise. It handles all the quirkiness that arises from dealing with different alphabets, and it accounts for multiple ways you could type a name from a different alphabet into Latin.

The administrators of it manage who gets to see which data sets for obvious reasons. Knowing nothing about this specific investigation, I assume that the data is currently only accessible to the pre-approved journalists (that work on this investigation).

The code of the tool is available on GitHub, and if you happen to stumble upon a security issue: https://www.occrp.org/en/responsible-disclosure

There are three major music publishers (UMG, Sony, Warner). As long as you have contracts with them, you'll have nearly everything.

Spotify's not the only competing service that has almost everything. Tidal, Google Play Music, Apple Music, they've all managed to get a deal with those publishers. Smaller players like Deezer even manage to offer the same service to 180+ countries (compared to Spotify's 20).

Netflix and others would also have nearly everything if the majority of the movies was produced by three publishers.

I can tell you the models that Google hands out in Advanced Protection packs at some privacy-oriented conferences:

1. Feitian FIDO MultiPass

2. Feitian ePass FIDO NFC

I find it hard to believe that tech-savvy people click on something on a new tab page instead of doing Ctrl+T -> first two letters -> enter.

Since there's a whole lot of space to fill in while doing that, it might as well show you a pretty picture and some task or something.

I would consider a completely white page as a waste of screen estate.

> and Windows its relatively simple too since they added BitLocker in 10.

Not really. OEM installs have it, but Windows 10 Home doesn't. If you're on an OEM install and decrypt the hard drive once, you won't be able to re-encrypt it without paying for a Pro upgrade. That mistake costs $100.

You can encrypt /home/<user> relatively easily, but you can't avoid having to type in two passwords if you want FDE.

You have to decrypt the hard drive to reach the login screen, and other users would have to do the same as well. You don't need to share any of those two passwords, since LUKS has up to 8 password slots I believe.

> Facebook spokesperson Jay Nancarrow told TechCrunch that the settings “are not new,” adding that, “the setting applies to any phone numbers you added to your profile and isn’t specific to any feature.”

They're not joking when they say this isn't new.

I remember a situation while I was still in high school (2011-2012 maybe?) in which someone tried to prank me by sending me SMS from a number I didn't have. I figured out exactly who it was using a simple Facebook search. The best you could do even then was to set it to friends-only, and the prankster didn't do that.

They're planning on rolling out the system nation-wide in 2020 and making it obligatory, and nobody knows how exactly that system will look like.

However, there's over a dozen of local projects already in place, whose participation is voluntary (Honest Shanghai[0] is one of them). Offer a couple of gift cards and cheaper rental cars and there's your test group.

It is a commonly-accepted opinion in China that if you commit a crime in a city X, you shouldn't be able to go to city Y and repeat the same crime. Limiting the movement of "criminals" is how you achieve that goal. There are other techniques as well, like naming-and-shaming "offenders" on public billboards in their neighborhoods.

[0] Some screenshots and a bit of details available here: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1554/new-app-rates-shanghai-c...

Yeah, there is — if you live in a western state.

There's mostly just originals everywhere else. While some of them are fun to watch, I find it increasingly difficult to justify its price.

What else is there? Hulu is US-only, YouTube Red/Premium is only available in about two dozens of countries, and you end up paying for Prime for nothing since most titles will appear as unavailable.

Music streaming... can be done, but video streaming is far from a viable option for the majority of the world.

Even the popular registrars accept Bitcoin payments and offer free whois protection. All that is left is a temporary email address and not using your own IP.

I'd call that reasonably anonymous. Pay attention to the TLD, because it might be against ToS to register some of them anonymously (mostly ccTLDs). There's plenty that don't have such restrictions.

Trying to convince me to set up a subscription upon any visit (and especially upon the first visit) isn't gonna be very effective. It requires thought and some calculations.

"Liked it? Pay me $2" is a way more simple decision to make. If I make it to the end of your content and see a PayPal.me (or Ko-fi) link, there's a reasonable chance I'm going to click on it. I can't say the same for links to Patreon.

> 3rd party ads are bad for privacy. But browser extensions are even worse.

Nope. I willingly installed a browser extension. Waaay more different than clicking a link to site X and 3rd party injecting itself.

> Besides, using this thing result in sending even more data to the advertisers.

That's precisely the point? Increasing the amount of noise so that the signal couldn't be detected?

> But this is not a solution. A solution would be to use bloated websites less.

Okay, the rest is just laughable. Between "install X and make your computer download less bloatware" and "don't install X, but publicly name-and-shame websites", the first one requires way less effort from me and provides me with the solution now, not after the social media backlash is big enough for the website owners to give enough of a crap.

Absolutely not.

Facebook comments aren't much better than YouTube, especially non-English ones that Facebook doesn't bother moderating at all. With about 97% of social market share in my country and a real name policy, it should be a brease to use it. It's absolutely not.

As for the prosecution, only if your country decides to give a fuck. There's a case in which a soldier called for a journalist to be raped and killed in a public Facebook post using his real name. He didn't face any consequences despite the story being picked up and screenshots of his public Facebook status shared all over the news.

Death threats, hate crimes, separatist movements, fake news... Real name policy stops absolutely nothing.

As someone who owns a 2-in-1 (Lenovo Yoga 900 series), it works almost perfectly out-of-the-box.

Screen rotation, pen support, virtual keyboard, they're all there and get the job done. The only thing that doesn't happen out of the box is that my keyboard remains activated when I switch to tablet mode.

I'm having way more issues with proper scaling on my 4K screen than I do with the 2-in-1 support.

Scroll a bit down and you'll see a "free plan" (above the FAQ).

It's not that easy to find, but it's there. As long as you don't care about using third-party clients (free plan has IMAP/SMTP disabled), it's a viable option. I've used it for a year or two before I've switched to FastMail and it worked fine.

Yes, your sample size is one.

Netlify is also built with React and its homepage loads amazingly fast (<1MB in size).

Use your own domain and just switch email providers?

Yeah, it costs a bit and requires some understanding, but at least among the HN crowd that's not an unsolvable problem.

Nextcloud uses it for at least three purposes: /.well-known/carddav (redirects to contacts), /.well-known/caldav (redirects to calendar), /.well-known/webfinger (for discovering users via ActivityPub).

That's how I refer to all the notifications that I didn't expect and don't need.

As far as I know, there's no universal term for them. Since we already associate darkness with bad UX patterns, "shadow notifications" as a subset of "dark patterns" has a nice ring to it.

Do you hide tweets liked by the people you follow? Shadow notifications? "In case you've missed it" sections?

After a few refreshes of my Twitter homepage in a short time span, I did a little research: I've edited the CSS to make the distinction of "liked" tweets more obvious. Over 50% of "fresh" content turned out to be likes by the people I follow that are in no way chronological.

You can fight it... for now, but I assume not for long. I've stopped relying on Twitter for that same reason I've stopped relying on Facebook.

Do they need to solve it or do they need to provide me with the tools to help me filter them out?

If you build a cockpit by measuring everyone's dimensions and averaging them, you'll end up with a cockpit that fits nobody[0]. I believe the same is true for feeds as well.

There's an amount of information that works for the average Facebook user. However, none of us are precisely on that average. By building algorithms whose mission is max consumption by the average user, they've made their product useless to everyone.

[0] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

On top of that, Facebook and I have a different view on what constitutes as an ad.

A Facebook page that I'm following paying money to reach me is an ad according to Facebook. To me, that's extortion.

On the other side, we have notifications about friend suggestions. You can't turn them off in the notification settings. That to me is an "ad" for Facebook itself, even if nobody payed them money. It's an undesired content that pulls my attention away from what I came there to do in order to promote a product.

AdNauseum[0] hides all the ads from you, but clicks them in the background to increase noise ratio. As you might assume, it's not available in the Chrome's extension store.

I've used a similar add-on for Google search (the add-on made some human-like Google searches in the background), but I can't remember its name now.

Facebook would be a pointless exercise, since the <div> names are automatically generated. You can't even hide the sidebars you never use using CSS because they'll all change their <div> IDs on refresh. That and the murkiness of what exactly is an ad on Facebook makes even the most thorough adblockers struggling to work properly even in an otherwise-ideal situation (a desktop browser with an adblocker).

[0] https://adnauseam.io/

You'd be absolutely right. Here are two statements for comparison . They're similar in context: both were published after a major crisis, during the pressure from the legislators, but before they actually talked to the lawmakers:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jun/17/bp-tony-hay...

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/03/21/read-face...

Even though the BP one is substantially more detailed, at least I've read it completely. I've skimmed over several paragraphs in the Zuckerberg's statement because they essentially say nothing.

Some part of it can be blamed on the medium itself, since Zuckerberg couldn't post links, subsections, nor visually-distinguishable lists in a fucking Facebook status.