Cadende [they/them]

jeez I wasn’t reading very carefully. I read that as “Only the RSS reader”

Only the RSS server will know the specific URL you’re visiting though.

and the site itself!

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s literally the same as browsing a website. Your feed reader isn’t a full web browser and as far as I know most don’t execute javascript. They will still generally fetch images, and fetching the feed itself is just an http/s request, but it may or may not always be a request to the same web server as the website of whatever publication you’re subscribing to. So IMO you’re already starting from a somewhat better position in terms of data leakage, since the feed isn’t loading analytics software or advertiser javascript or any of that stuff which feeds the vast majority of bulk data collection in the private sector.

One downside might be that if you have your feed reader set up to automatically poll for updates regularly, you may forget and it may do that polling on networks you didn’t intend to (when your VPN is off or you’re on school/work internet).

If you have a specific threat model, or a couple, that you want to guard against, it’s much easier to come up with solutions that thwart those exact threats, than just trying to be “as private as possible” all the time (very difficult, all technical solutions have tradeoffs). You could make the requests through tor. You could use a proxy to encrypt your traffic up to a server you control before going out to the various sites. You could use a VPN service.

Those all have different tradeoffs: tor exit nodes might be widely blocked from fetching content from a lot of sites, and it might be hard to connect to tor period on some locked-down networks, the server host and their ISP can still see some details about your traffic if you run your own proxy or VPN server, but it is another step removed from your local network/isp and the site both tracking you directly by IP, user-agent, etc. VPN services might be tracking you themselves, might be working with governments, but they, similarly to proxies, interrupt the tracking done by your local network or the websites in question, with the added bonus of blending in with the traffic of other users (but they are often blocked by local network admins, and occasionally by websites as well)

As an aside, RSS-based podcasts are a place where this tends to get interesting since the field is dominated by big distribution services. Assuming HTTPS is in use, most podcasts you might subscribe to can’t easily be tracked by your ISP or network admins, since they’ll blend in with all the other traffic going to say, acast, libsyn, iheart, whatever, and HTTPS blocks them from seeing the full URL or data in transit, only the domain name from SNI. They can only tell that you downloaded data from a podcast network, not what podcast it was

also sushi! (unless you count coffee and an allergy pill)

it was really good. best reasonably priced sushi I’ve had in years, place seems to be run by a single old japanese lady, just cranking out sushi to-go all day.

note that I said provider not developer. Obviously people don’t have much choice and their location isn’t a reason to cast judgment on them, but what jurisdiction a service provider operates out of is pretty impactful. I’m certainly not envious of the current political situation in the Kid Starver regime

I was going to say it’s pretty ironic that a privacy focused provider would be based in the UK what with their laws lately, but apparently email providers are exempted from the bill I was thinking of (no general carveout though, they name emails, SMS and MMS specifically. If you want to create a new protocol that does the same thing as email, or as SMS, its regulated as social media for some reason…)

Either way self hosting takes care of that problem. Neat!

Bit of trivia but I think I know why the 4 digit pin thing existed! It’s an out-of-the-box feature on freeRADIUS, I ran across it in a pfsense environment in the past. I thought it was neat (esp. in the absence of passwords, this was primary auth with public keys and then 2fa on top) but ultimately too convoluted for most users

TONY STARK JOHN CARMACK was able to build this IN A CAVE ON A 386, with SCRAPS 4MB of RAM!!

Alternate version:

TONY STARK TARN ADAMS was able to build this IN A CAVE on a PENTIUM with SCRAPS Windows 98!!!

on the mobile app? I don’t have that

idk what you’re using for last week view but it seems to be around 20% for big router nodes in the heart of the city here atm

maybe, in the future, if meshtastic takes off/just doesn’t die out. But if you’re complaining about the community being too small then clearly your area isn’t at that point yet, right?

My city is still not maxing out LongFast even with the very robust local infrastructure

wait so you switched off of LongFast, the channel where all the organic community is because it’s the default and has enough range to tackle decent distances, and are now posting about how empty it is as if MediumSlow is representative of meshtastic as a whole?

I can get hundreds of nodes in my city on LongFast, there’s a robust community mesh, but if I switched to MediumSlow I’d also get zero peers, because nobody uses it rn. Non-standard channels are only useful if you get organized (my local mesh has talked about switching over to a different channel as a group), or are using it for personal use with your immediate crew and have your own router nodes if necessary

Do people use this for any real application?

as far as I can tell in the hobbyist circles near me, no or rarely (things like communicating while hiking or camping are discussed but mostly in the hypothetical it seeeeems like). It’s treated like ham radio where I’m at, where it could theoretically be useful in an emergency but until there’s a major disaster to test it it’s just nerds pinging eachother just to see what they can do. amateur radio is actually useful though, not sure how meshtastic will fare.

It seems like there are more practical uses for people in certain circumstances outside of the city though. I’ve seen homesteads and farms pop up as little remote clusters on some of the online maps, and people talk about having a home base station on a tower or the roof and then they can communicate with eachother from out in the fields (tends to be pretty flat so the range is better). Still hard to know how well used it is in those scenarios

Personally I like the idea and would actually use it for local chit-chat with friends family and fellow nerds, but the reliability of message delivery even when you’re both connected to the mesh pretty well, seemed poor. I heard the newest firmware releases were supposed to improve message routing (not just using flood routing for all messages all the time) but I haven’t tried them yet. Even with how big the mesh near me is, all the meta chat seems to be happening on discord not on the mesh itself

On the other hand, I also came across posts where people were saying SD card read speeds on Android are just generally bad, especially on more recent versions were they are hampered by some kind of new file access system.

This is correct as far as I know (for android 10+). I ran into it with an open source maps app a while back and read up. Google intentionally kneecapped (and in later versions I thought almost eliminated) micro sd file access APIs for apps. For “security” reasons (not entirely junk but not entirely honest either) but it does just happen to align really well with their goal of forcing everyone to put everything in their cloud storage and access media by streaming not local storage

linkety: https://osmand.net/docs/user/troubleshooting/maps-data/