#internet security

[hedgehog-troops]

i know that everyone pushes that fandom is a safe place, and yes, usually it is. for your identity, but fandom is still the internet and the internet is never a safe place.

the internet is full of creeps, just because someone is interested in the same things as you does not mean that theyre not a threat, just because someone is queer doesn't mean that theyre not a threat to you.

this is coming from someone who got groomed for two years by another minor (though much older) within the lgbtq community because i, as a 12 year old, assumed that she was safe.

i have had people like 11/12/13 tell me that they saw my pronouns and assumed im safe. i may be. not every non-binary 17 year old on the internet is.

being friends with another minor, as a minor, may not seem like a big deal but the emotional maturity at 16/17/18 is vastly different from 11-15, and no matter how mature you consider yourself, you cant race ahead of your brain development.

you never know any true information about anyone on the internet, just what they want you to know. makinh friends with in your age range is the safest bet, but if youre forming other friendships, never rush into them, never give your address/full birthname/any sort of information that can be traced back to you.

also, people do often pose on the internet to entice and draw in people, dont let yourself fall for it.

internet security is important.

and the moment somebody gives off creep vibes, ghost and block. no need to confront them, no need to do anything. ghost and block. then inform a trusted adult.

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

EXPRESS VPN IS A SCAM

I signed up for Express VPN a few months back because I heard it was better than Nord (it's not, much slower, but that's another issue) and ended up canceling after my first month. Today, I got an email from them saying that my automatic subscription renewal had been turned back on and that they charged me $28 dollars. I thought the email might have been a phishing scam, so I went to the Express VPN site and check, and what do you know, my subscription that I canceled months ago had been turned back on and now expires in one month. I canceled it, again, and contacted customer support. Here's a screenshot of that conversation

Now what I want to point out here is that this chat has been edited by Express VPN. At first, there was nothing between "Please bear with me while I quickly review your account" and "Rest assured there were no charges made and that your subscription is canceled". When I asked my follow up questions, suddenly the part about "Thank you for waiting, this has been escalated to our internal team..." popped into existence, and the chat went dead. As I was typing this, I began typing a follow up question about the "internal team" but before I could even finish typing it up, I got another message saying that the internal team would be looking into the issue. They also never acknowledged that I wanted my credit card info deleted.

So far, I have no support ticket for this and no emails acknowledging that my complaint has been forwarded to a different support team. I searched around t he internet and found this reddit thread where other people have been having this same issue going back 4 years.

So yeah, Express VPN is a scam. It saves your credit card information and then randomly reactivates your subscription after you cancel it and charges you. Don't use Express VPN.

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Make your important passwords something embarrassing and fandomish. You'll never accidentally leave "Sensh1P@nty$hot" on a post it note in the office. You'll think twice before you give a scammer "B0++omD#anW1nche&ter"

(for screen readers: those say "Senshi Panty Shot" and "Bottom Dean Winchester.")

[musicofthenightphantomoftheopera]

KOSA IS BACK: UP FOR HOUSE VOTE. CONTACT YOUR HOUSE REPS AND SPREAD THE WORD

Below this video I’ll link the resources and call scripts again as well as the stop kosa link tree

We need to be annoying the absolute shit out of our house reps between now, and whenever the vote is. Call and email every day you can.

I got permission from my mom and my grandma to use their email accounts so I can email my house rep not just once but 3 times a day.

If you’re not American, but still wanna know what you can do to help?

If you know ANYONE who lives in America or have American friends, tell them about this bill and share this info with them.

Remember the only reason the bill has taken so long to get this far and has already gotten stalled is because we keep fighting like hell to kill it.

Spread the word!

REBLOG. DON’T JUST LIKE FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING

[not-mary-sue]

Not to sound like a YouTube sponsorship but now might be a good time to get yourself a VPN, especially one that's good at getting around geoblock. Paid ones do tend to be faster and have more selection but free services like Veepn (Edge only) and Proton's free version do the trick well enough.

[geezerwench]

[respheal]

Not sharing the post to avoid putting incorrect information right up top, but if you ever see a post like "[Service] has announced there's a hack!" or whatever, you can very easily check if it's a hoax by googling "[service] announcements" or "[service] news".

Here's where Discord posts their announcements: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/categories/115000193752-Announcements

Here's where Discord puts service status updates for issues like bugs or latency: https://discordstatus.com/

While these sort of hoaxes are technically not harmful in and of themselves, they're kind of like putting up a flag saying "I don't seek out official channels when a service I use is behaving strangely", meaning you may be a prime target for actual malicious activity.

[catgirl-catboy]

One of my old internet security posts is getting traction, so have another internet security post ^-^

2 emails. 1 for buisness/important things/life and one for social media, fun all that shit. Never the two shall cross. (also helps you with your work-life balance by not seeing fun stuff while being productive and productive stuff while having fun.)

With accounts connected to your buisness email, never post things online that you wouldn't tell... 1.) Your grandmother 2.) Your bully 3.) Your future employer If you wouldn't tell a stranger something, don't have it connected to this email.

For your fun email, don't post your face, full name, or ANYTHING about your job. You don't want those two connected to the average person looking you up.

Assume every discord server is a public space. Even if its private now, the admin might not keep it that way. If you wouldn't say it on the web proper, don't put it on discord.

Assume every screenshot is fake. It takes <2 minutes to fake a screenshot. Don't belive me?

NEVER use the same password. Remembering shit is hard, I know. However, it is much better to write it down/have it in a password protected file/use a password manager than lastpass than to risk having a hacker get into EVERYTHING.

Don't stick a USB drive into your computer unless you know where its been.

Never make your security questions something any person can google about you, like your mother's maiden name. Favorite book-type questions work better.

Less of an internet security tip and more of a general computer one, but BACK UP YOUR IMPORTANT FILES. A cheap flashdrive with all of your important documents will eventually pay for itself.

another more general tip, but have a backup charger before you need a backup charger.

[genderednipples]

Anybody with an eBay account: they're implementing AI training with their latest User Privacy Notice update

Opt-out is buried in section 12

[the-final-sif]

One of the things I think people as a whole don't understand about the internet today is that so much of what's wrong/dangerous/flawed about the internet exists because so much of the internet started as one person's hobby they built in their spare time or as a specific task for a specific function that was just useful/functional enough that literally everyone started using it. There's tons of biases built into the modern internet and some of that is carelessness but a lot of it is... just like. This was invented by a group of grad students fucking around for a few weeks. How the fuck were they supposed to know it'd be become the global standard and that nobody would bother to address or change these things?

Like, the whole reason that the US government gets the ".gov" domain name is because this entire system was invented in the US primarily for use in universities. Under the original system, you had to phone in to talk to the center who owned the list, tell them what name you wanted and then a person would type your name/ip onto the list attached to a nickname much like a phonebook. Then people slowly figured out domains and maintaining domain registries. And then the system became useful enough that more of the US started using it, and then people realized "oh shit, other countries want to use this too, guess we need to figure that out".

The "world wide web" or the thing we all know as the internet (and the reason that every website you visit has www in front), was invented originally by one dude trying to make his own job easier (Tim Berners-Lee). He thought it was pretty cool and shared it, and he was one guy who only spoke English and was just doing what he thought was going to work.

Like, this is a very lighthearted article talking about him, but I think it illustrates the point really well,

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has confessed that the // in a web address were actually "unnecessary". He told the Times newspaper that he could easily have designed URLs not to have the forward slashes. "There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time," he said. He admitted that when he devised the web, almost 20 years ago, he had no idea that the forward slashes in every web address would cause "so much hassle". His light-hearted apology even had a green angle as he accepted that having to add // to every address had wasted time, printing and paper.

via "sorry for the slashs"

We have an entire internet and infrastructure built rather haphazardly but also in such a way that going back and trying to change or fix things either requires an insane amount of work or could render vast swaths of the prior internet inaccessible.

Like, I think everyone here remembers Flash getting shut down and how much of childhood games got wiped off the generally accessible internet and relegated to projects like Flashpoint. It was really hard to see, but Flash was also a project started in 1996 (or 1993 if you count the OG version that turned into flash) that was supposed to be for a limited set of use cases, and not the medium on which major parts of the internet would run. By the time Adobe shut it down, Flash was incredibly dangerous with the constant risks of malware, it was buggy, slow, and there were a million better programs. It had to be killed to make way for better things, but because of how the internet was built, that death came at a pretty high cost.

So if you're ever wondering why it feels like the web is a bunch of dominoes ready to fall down at any time, it's because it is. And it does. And so many people spend so much of their time combating all the problems created by using systems that were never intended to handle everything they are currently handling because the alternative is a task of monstrous undertaking that would almost certainly turn decades of history to dust.

[ikiyou]

To all who use Twitter: they have just announced their intent to allow your stalkers, abusers, and harassers to be able to see your posts in order to monitor your behavior. I would create an account on BlueSky as a backup at the minimum.

https://twitter.com/XEng/status/1846605254864888180?t=Q2Wg1qAoFglgV1QecdHhMA&s=19

https://twitter.com/XEng/status/1846605255926010030?t=hf6JNufq6DhUipkvgkPuCA&s=19

Even if this is stopped by Google and Apple, the very fact that Twitter and the infant Elon Musk have this intent is criminal and hostile. Moreover, it is evil. Who allows abusers to see your posts by lying that it is transparency? Civilian users are not government and owe no one transparency.

[hearthfire-heartfire]

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🟨🟣🟨Queer folks 🟨🟣🟨🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈- it's time for an internet privacy check up

[shadow-redferne]

It's always: "Monitor your kids' internet use!" "Keep your kids off the internet!" "Don't share your age/full name/personal info online!" "Use the block button if needed!" "Get used to dealing with creeps/hate comments online" But never: "Learn to respect people's boundaries" "Teach your kids to respect people's boundaries" "Teach your kids to not post hate online" "Teach your kids to not scam people" "Teach your kids to not stalk people" "Stop scamming people because you find it fun" "Don't ask people for their passwords" (Because yes, it's important to teach online safety and internet etiquette. But I think it'd be more useful to just teach your kids (and ykw, adults too!) to *not* do the shit that made us need online etiquette in the first place!)

[melyzard]

Time for a new edition of my ongoing vendetta against Google fuckery!

Hey friends, did you know that Google is now using Google docs to train it's AI, whether you like it or not? (link goes to: zdnet.com, July 5, 2023). Oh and on Monday, Google updated it's privacy policy to say that it can train it's two AI (Bard and Cloud AI) on any data it scrapes from it's users, period. (link goes to: The Verge, 5 July 2023). Here is Digital Trends also mentioning this new policy change (link goes to: Digital Trends, 5 July 2023). There are a lot more, these are just the most succinct articles that might explain what's happening.

FURTHER REASONS GOOGLE AND GOOGLE CHROME SUCK TODAY:

Stop using Google Analytics, warns Sweden’s privacy watchdog, as it issues over $1M in fines (link goes to: TechCrunch, 3 July 2023) [TLDR: google got caught exporting european users' data to the US to be 'processed' by 'US government surveillance,' which is HELLA ILLEGAL. I'm not going into the Five Eyes, Fourteen Eyes, etc agreements, but you should read up on those to understand why the 'US government surveillance' people might ask Google to do this for countries that are not apart of the various Eyes agreements - and before anyone jumps in with "the US sucks!" YES but they are 100% not the only government buying foreign citizens' data, this is just the one the Swedes caught. Today.]

PwC Australia ties Google to tax leak scandal (link goes to: Reuters, 5 July 2023). [TLDR: a Russian accounting firm slipped Google "confidential information about the start date of a new tax law leaked from Australian government tax briefings." Gosh, why would Google want to spy on governments about tax laws? Can't think of any reason they would want to be able to clean house/change policy/update their user agreement to get around new restrictions before those restrictions or fines hit. Can you?

SO - here is a very detailed list of browsers, updated on 28 June, 2023 on slant.com, that are NOT based on Google Chrome (note: any browser that says 'Chromium-based' is just Google wearing a party mask. It means that Google AND that other party has access to all your data). This is an excellent list that shows pros and cons for each browser, including who the creator is and what kinds of policies they have (for example, one con for Pale Moon is that the creator doesn't like and thinks all websites should be hostile to Tor).

[tomato-face-xoxo]

anyone else get tumblr constantly trying to hack them??? i’ll be scrolling and then suddenly a popup going “SCANNING YOUR DEVICE FOR VIRUSES” will show up. like, this happens pretty often. is my tumblr broken or does this happen to other people? i’ve already cleared my cookies….