FreeTube is a useful project as it allows you to “fallback” on a non-preferred frontend.

https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube

This allows you to continue to use Youtube irregardless of which frontend is (potentially not) working.

In ‘Settings > General’ you’ll want to select “Invidious API” as your “Preferred API backend” and specify your favorite invidious instance in the “Current Invidious Instance” field and click “Set Current Instance as Default”. This locks FreeTube into the specified instance.

Then, when you notice that FreeTube is issuing notices to you about your favorite Invidious Instance being down, you can wander back to ‘Settings > General’; hit the “Clear Default Invidious Instance” Button and wait as FreeTube magically contacts the “https://api.invidious.io/” page for you and selects a new, and hopefully online and working Invidious instance. (You may have to hit this button several times to roll a working instance, Hit the button, check the subs page and see if everything loads, repeat if it falls back on the Local API.)

When you run into instances where you can’t roll up a good Invidious instance; the built in Local API is running a NewPipe Extractor like API directly from your FreeTube client. Not the best; but at least it keeps things working while you wait for the Invidious devs to fix things up; and it still reasonably preserves as much of your privacy as it can while doing this to the best effort it can.

…Sadly this doesn’t work when Google manages a double combo of breaking both Invidious and NewPipe; but I have found that this is less often the case and the devs of either project are usually fairly quick about getting fixes out. Bless their hard work with a donation sometime maybe, if you can.

I find it frustrating that no discernable effort is being visibly made to pass this project on to another dev or group of devs.

Just unceremoniously announcing it’s going down. After a successful fundraiser at the beginning of this year.

I don’t know where the funds went, nor do I understand the abruptness of the closing of the project. I’m suspecting that this is a ragequit. Something happened somewhere quietly that led to the developer deciding that they cannot maintain any longer.

This is, in short, quite disappointing.

To anyone; if you do respond to this comment; do not try defend them. Instead, try to provide more context, or evidence that shows I have misread the situation. Arguing about how long he worked, or how passionate he was in the past, does not change the current facts. Provide more facts if you must argue.

Hearing this sort of law go into effect just makes me sadly want to ban anyone from the UK from my small communities.

I’d hate to be forced to do it; but I certainly would immediately start swinging the hammer with IP range bans and banning anyone who is clearly professing to be from the UK.

Unfortunately the kind of laws they’re trying to pass do nothing to fix whatever problems they have Online; and are basically meaningless political posturing. I feel sorry for people in the UK and strongly recommend they start using VPNs; as it’s the only way to ensure they won’t get snared up in the ensuing waves of bans when compliance with the OSA law that they let get passed is mandatory

The shoe is clearly on the other foot. It’s not so easy to manage when politicians are allowed to get so uninformed that they go out of their way to pass bad laws.

That’s not third person; those are specific pronouns that Fwy uses personally.

13

Wireguard can be configured to proxy specifically only any requests across the DNS and Encrypted DNS ports and protocols. It is extremely capable of being lightweight and not carrying all your traffic.

Fwy would recommend it; if you feel you can afford what they charge for their paid usage plan(s).

Fwy has used it for our own house; and it serves as the main DNS resolver for our PFSense box running in forwarding mode. Fwy is however transitioning to PFBlockerNG; and it’s own ability to block things via DNS locally; but will still be using NextDNS and probably Adguard’s DNS servers as backup/bootstrap resolvers once the plan Fwy has paid for is expired…assuming our house does not vote to keep NextDNS.

Either way; it’s only like about $25 a year if I recall correctly. Fwy doesn’t hate using NextDNS and it is a very good resolver; with lots of useful controls and portability as well as offering proper encrypted DNS service; which is invaluable on weird networks you may encounter when using cellular service or on the go via WiFi.

Seems like it’s time to start Geo-Blocking UK users. Ain’t nobody with an independent site got the time nor money to deal with the UK’s OSA laws.

Until this overbroad act is protested on the world stage; neither Brits themselves, nor their liberal leaders will prioritize repealing it. They’ll just shrug hopelessly and blame it on their Tories; much like Americans blame our own Republicans.

If you run a small community website and you have worries about this; make it felt. Countries that enact laws like this should be rebuffed; and their people excluded as much as is necessary to ensure full malicious compliance with those laws.

Further tip; Simple Login offers premium domains that aren’t listed and therefore have less negative reputation; as well as offering “Subdomains”.

I urge anyone who feels they can afford to pay for what SimpleLogin can offer to do so for those features; they’ve given me a pretty flexible subdomain which I use frequently. Wildcards are another helpful feature; particularly for subdomains; which allows you to “make up email addresses” on the fly and have them routed appropriately depending on whatever keywords you include.

@ #9; Whoa there. 100% is unreasonable. Still there’s room to start at a hard 90% at about 250 million and then incrementally scale until the tax is say, about 95-97% by about a billion.

Unfortunately you cannot tax anyone 100%; that would ultimately be unfair and demotivating and only motivate corruption to avoid the tax

lol you are so wrong.

Honestly I question the sanity of allowing a child to have an actual clearanced job and not brag about it to his friends. Mentally you’re pretty much a kid until you’re about 25 or so if you’re AMAB.

I’m concerned that higher clearances aren’t checking people for signs of stupid viewpoints before they’re cleared.

TL;DR: I think this video oversimplifies the analysis according to the cards and gives Graphene OS undue weight without going into sufficient detail as to why each scored under each category.

I actually don’t agree with this video; and firmly believe it is more than a little biased.

For example, the Pixel, AOSP and Android are given several undeserved points due to lack of proper information or understanding of how certain features work. I imagine this is the case too for the iPhone; if a bit less so.

The review apparently doesn’t deep dive into settings or attempt to maximize privacy by turning off unwanted ‘features’ when settings switches are available to the user; nor does it assume that you set up accounts in as private of a manner as reasonably possible or toggle off as many default-on consent switches as needed.

While I would support scoring and dinging each case or instance for “Privacy Settings that don’t actually work”…this video really doesn’t do a lot of legwork and leans on the anecdotal evidence of scary news stories too much.

Worse was the fact that the entire video felt like they were shilling for Graphene OS; which is known to have a slightly unfriendly maintainer and community surrounding him to say the least.

No mention of Lineage or other privacy oriented Android ROMs were analyzed. AOSP too, was unfairly lumped in and dinged for specific points of the Default Pixel configuration…and yes there are major differences between AOSP and Pixel Android; even though Google tries to be less in-your-face invasive than the other OEMs. Not enough credit is given for the “On-Device” smart features implemented properly on the Pixels.

Out of personal experience; I’d actually rate a proper Lineage OS install of 4 whole Android versions ago to be more private than stock. Not quite as private as Graphene; but not quite as invasive and much more enforcing of privacy. The debloating provided by a clean AOSP-like ROM, such as Lineage, as opposed to a “Stock Android” configuration from a major OEM is stark.

Most importantly I personally feel that the privacy model chosen for the video is far too thickly detailed for an average person. Most of the privacy concerns listed on each card contained concern points that might only tangentally apply or don’t apply at all to mobile phones. The way that each card was scored and applied felt low effort. None of the points on any of the card(s) were weighted with average users in mind.

I really hope someone goes into a much deeper dive; this video is basically clickbait that parrots the commonly parroted advice in the privacy community; which isn’t even good advice, it’s just ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ style advice which gives the user no room to make necessary ‘Privacy vs Convenience’ tradeoffs that they themselves could have made if they understood proper threat modelling.

Actually; (basically) SIP over (basically) IPSec sounds pretty correct. Wish the dense technical manuals I read had explained it that way; makes a lot more sense to me as a Net Admin type of IT person.

I do remember reading that the protocol was basically encapsulated. Dunno about any encryption; probably there’s not any at the IPSec level. I do know that the SIMs themselves probably contain certs that have some value; I just don’t know if they handle any encryption or if they’re just lightweight little numbers for authentication only.

If I’m understanding how 'WiFi Calling" works; it’s still “identifying you” to the cell provider the same way; via your SIM. The only difference is they don’t get an exact location because you’re not using any cell towers typically.

I do suspect SIMs and eSIMs are still doing all the heavy cryptographic signing done on a typical phone network though…they’re just not screaming your IMEI/IMSI all over open or even encrypted airwaves; nor is a WiFI signal triangulate-able typically due to it’s short range.

I am glad to see it when the selfish people at the top fall so far down the hill. They orchestrate their own falling typically, much like Ikarus in his waxen wings, falling when he flew too close to the sun in direct sunlight at the height of a hot summer’s day.

As for Google; I hope the DoJ not only pulls up all of the resultant weeds in the garden, but also makes sure to till and salt the soil thoroughly, so that no part of Google can ever hope to rejoin it’s other pieces to form a monopoly or ‘anything like a monopoly’ on anything, ever, again.

Google must rightfully suffer a most painful and enduring ‘Corporate Death Penalty’ so to speak; in order to ensure that no company ever gets so bold again. We must also repeat this with several other large companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple too; as well as a few other companies I’m unable to name because I’m unaware of how ridiculously massive and monopolistic they are.

This is exactly the kind of task I’d expect AI to be useful for; it goes through a massive amount of freshly digitized data and it scans for, and flags for human action (and/or) review, things that are specified by a human for the AI to identify in a large batch of data.

Basically AI doing data-processing drudge work that no human could ever hope to achieve with any level of speed approaching that at which the AI can do it.

Do I think the AI should be doing these tasks unsupervised? Absolutely not! But the fact of the matter is; the AIs are being supervised in this task by the human clerks who are, at least in theory, expected to read the deed over and make sure it makes some sort of legal sense and that it didn’t just cut out some harmless turn of phrase written into the covenant that actually has no racist meaning, intention or function. I’m assuming a lot of good faith here, but I’m guessing the human who is guiding the AI making these mass edits can just, by means of physicality, pull out the original document and see which language originally existed if it became an issue.

To be clear; I do think it’s a good thing that the law is mandating and making these kinds of edits to property covenants in general to bring them more in line with modern law.

They certainly make it easier to do so; by making it a switch you can toggle; which allows you to generate an identity; or choose not to and roll with the identity they’ve already seen.

Agreed.

Without concepts of privacy; things will soon fall into fascism.