EFF Pushes for Users to Install DuckDuckGo Software After Being Paid to Kill HTTPS Everywhere

I’ve been writing lately about how DuckDuckGo is shady and their business is questionable.

It seems that some donations went the EFF’s way and now they plan on killing off HTTP Everywhere permanently.

$25,000 a year buys them the Tor Project and $150,000 keeps the EFF in their back pocket. But where does the money for this come from, and what does DuckDuckGo get from it?

No company gives out millions of dollars a year and expects to get back nothing.

Is it just DuckDuckGo’s own advertising paying for this?

DuckDuckGo pretends they’re a startup, but that’s not true. They admit that they have been profitable since 2014, have over 105 million searches a day sometimes, and are growing rapidly.

— source baronhk.wordpress.com | Ryan | 10.16.21

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Advertisement

Truth about ProtonMail

1. Protonmail Behaves like a CIA/NSA “Honeypot”
2. Protonmail Does Not Provide “End to End Encryption”
3. Protonmail’s Was Created Under CIA/NSA Oversight
4. Protonmail is Part Owned by CRV and the Swiss Government
5. CRV, In-Q-Tel & the CIA
6. Protonmail Follows CIA Email format & Metadata Requirements
7. Swiss MLAT Law Could Give the NSA Full Access
8. Protonmail Uses Radware for DNS/DDOS Protection
9. Protonmail Developers Do Not Use Protonmail
10. Protonmail engages in illegal cyberwarfare
11. Protonmail has a history of Dishonesty

— source privacy-watchdog.io | Feb 18, 2021

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Turning WWW into an app store

Richard Stallman

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Engage in speech, dialogue, discussion and leading to re-examine ones own ideas

I find it so odd that the strong zeal for revenge and punishment if someone says anything that is perceived to be sexist or racist or discriminatory comes from liberals and progressives. There are so many violations [in cases like Stallman’s] of such fundamental principles to which progressives and liberals cling in general as to what is justice, what is fairness, what is due process.

One is proportionality: that the punishment should be proportional to the offense. Another one is restorative justice: that rather than retribution and punishment, we should seek to have the person constructively come to understand, repent, and make amends for an infraction. Liberals generally believe society to be too punitive, too harsh, not forgiving enough. They are certainly against the death penalty and other harsh punishments even for the most violent, the mass murderers. Progressives are right now advocating for the release of criminals, even murderers. To then have exactly the opposite attitude towards something that certainly is not committing physical violence against somebody, I don’t understand the double standard!

Another cardinal principle is we shouldn’t have any guilt by association. [To hold culpable] these board members who were affiliated with him and ostensibly

— source wetheweb.org | May 11, 2020

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Cancel We The Web?

The origin of Richard Stallman and the free software ideas he developed is from a time before computers became an integral part of ordinary people’s lives, the 70s. Many decades before our cell phones tracked our every movement, before smart homes brought mass surveillance into our living rooms, the idea of computers as serious tools of oppression seemed patently absurd.

Stallman was different. He detested and feared users’ loss of control of computing. To combat what he viewed as an unacceptable loss of users’ fundamental freedoms in proprietary software, Stallman formulated and then stuck by free software principles. By the early 80s, Stallman had founded the free software movement and become one of its most prolific contributors through his programming of the GNU operating system, whose goal was to be entirely free/libre software. He campaigned and coded for free software unpaid while his computer-science peers of lesser talents made millions.

Stallman’s following grew as his dire, crazy-sounding rantings of the early 80s have largely come true. So much so that there is now an international Free

— source wetheweb.org | Hannah Wolfman-Jones | May 11, 2020

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Google’s Dominance of Online Ads is a Big Deal

Here’s How to Fix It.

Most people know that Google dominates the online search market, but did you know that the company has become the biggest player in the digital ad market? That’s a problem not only for consumers, but potentially for society as a whole, argues former digital advertising executive Dina Srinivasan.

Last year, Srinivasan gained attention for her paper “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook,” which explained how the tech giant’s market dominance can harm the public, even though the product is ostensibly free. Now she focuses on Google and the enormous advertising empire that has grown into the company’s biggest money-maker. In her new paper, “Why Google Dominates Advertising Markets,” Srinivasan analyses the digital ad market and argues that Google’s monopolization and the giant regulatory gaps on matters like transparency and conflicts of interest have created an anti-competitive environment that can be harmful to newspapers, consumers, and, ultimately, democracy itself. She proposes that fairness can be restored by using principles applied to financial market regulation.

Lynn Parramore: After years of inaction, we’re seeing lots of headlines on antitrust actions against Big Tech. The Federal Trade Commission and the attorneys general of 48 states and territories have filed antitrust cases against Facebook, charging that it is able to abuse users’ data and violate their privacy. There are also several parallel suits against Google’s search dominance and chokehold on the advertising market. A good deal of the impetus to these suits comes from

— source ineteconomics.org | Lynn Parramore | Feb 22, 2021

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De-Googling: Chrome

Moving away from Google Chrome was probably the easiest migration in my de-Googling efforts. I’m not a huge user of bookmarks, history, or extensions, so those weren’t tying me down. On the desktop, I just switched to a combination of Ephemeral (as my defaut) with Epiphany/GNOME Web as my main “real browser.”

Ephemeral is a lightweight privacy browser that I develop for elementary OS, so of course I dogfood it and have it set as the default. A key feature is that you can pop sites open in your “real” browser with one click, so I usually have that set to Epiphany—the native GTK browser that comes with elementary OS, so it’s an obvious choice.

However, some sites don’t perform well in Ephemeral or Epiphany (usually due to unnecessary user agent sniffing), so I do keep Firefox around for that. And Firefox on the desktop has gotten really good. Since Epiphany supports Firefox Sync, it’s actually pretty easy to jump between the two as needed. I also occasionally install Chromium for testing web development in a Chrome-based engine, but I don’t use it for any real browsing.

On Mobile

For a long time, Chrome was the only browser I liked on Android; others either felt non-native due to scrolling physics (like Firefox used to), had questionable monetization incentives, or had too many features I didn’t care about.

— source cassidyjames.com | Aug 14, 2020

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60% of School Apps are Sending Student Data to High-risk Third Parties

Me2B Alliance, a non-profit industry group focused on respectful technology, today published a research report to drive awareness to the data sharing practices of education apps associated with schools and school districts in US. According to the research findings, 60% of school apps were sending student data to a variety of third parties, including advertising platforms like Google and Facebook. On average, there were more than 10 third-party data channels per app. Download the report, “School Mobile Apps Student Data Sharing Behavior,” at no charge.

— source me2ba.org | May 4, 2021

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UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet

UC Davis contracted with consultants for at least $175,000 to scrub the Internet of negative online postings following the November 2011 pepper-spraying of students and to improve the reputations of both the university and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, newly released documents show. The payments were made as the university was trying to boost its image online and were among several contracts issued following the pepper-spray incident. Figures released by UC Davis show the strategic communications budget increased from $2.93 million in 2009 to $5.47 million in 2015.

— source sacbee.com | 2016

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Failed On Cybersecurity Despite £1bn Spend

UK spy agency GCHQ has admitted it is losing the cybersecurity battle on a national level, despite throwing money at the problem. Alex Dewedney, director of cybersecurity at CESG – the information security arm of GCHQ – warned that it will take a lot more than cash to bring cybersecurity threats under control. The UK Government splashed £950m on cybersecurity over the past five years and George Osborne has promised a further spend of £1.9bn in the coming five years. Combined with the money being spent on protecting IT systems, a total of £3.2bn is expected to be spent over the next half decade.

— source techweekeurope.co.uk | 2016

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