Yeah, batteries or cycling different banks at different overlapping intervals so the the household draw averages out to a more reasonable usage pattern. Easy for the criminals to defeat, resulting in false-positives in their detection scheme.
Transitioning Email is a hard thing to do. I suggest doing so gradually in a multi-step process:
Good luck, and take it one step at a time. Perfect is the enemy of good and all that.
Indeed. That tweet was just the icing on the cake. I agree that Proton is an issue in that it is far more vendor-locked-in than a standards compliant mail service, but in addition to that, over the years, they have very much over-sold the degree of security their system provides (military-grade encryption anyone?). Read any honest security researcher’s review of Proton and it’s full of caviates about a system where they both hold your keys and provide you with a web interface. If their marketing was more reasonable, I would maybe trust them more.
If you absolutely need end-to-end encryption and have the ability to direct your correspondent to a particular service (like Proton), I wouldn’t choose Email at all. If it had to be Email, you are looking at PGP or S/MIME in a client, but an e2e messenger that is hard to mess-up and has some metadata protections will be far superior in practice.
I did a lot of analysis paralysis and comparisons when I was looking for a very low cost provider that works with my own domain so I can get off Gmail and avoid future vendor lock-in. I wanted 100% standards compliant email hosting that will work perfectly with an actual, old-school email client workflow, plus some sort of web client I can fall back on if needed.
I also wanted EU or Canadian hosting and a non-US corp I’m sending my money to, plus lots of online indication they have been reliable for many years and have generally very good community reviews. I don’t actually see the value in the provider-based encryption of Proton/Tuta and think it creates a false sense of security because there is basically no reasonable threat model where their system seems to actually protect you - okay, come at me ;)
In the end, it was down to Runbox and Migadu. Both are 20-ish bucks a year with my custom domain and satisfy all my requirements. Migadu seemed very good, and comes with more storage space, but I prefer to migrate my archived mail off the mail server over time anyway.
Runbox has a really slick web client, doesn’t have the silly-low 20-email-a-day sending limit, and the clincher for me was that I can add secondary accounts on my domain for $8 a year! I may actually make some accounts for family on my domain at that price. I switched the domain over to Runbox a few months back, and regret all the time I procrastinated doing it.
Yeah, despite the wording, I suspect they are looking at the patterns of use with smart meters rather than just “high amounts?” Grow op houses would be easy to see, as they only use power when the lights are on, flat usage, because no one is actually living there. Do you run lights 24x7 with indoor growing? idk. The trouble is, any system like this will catch a few, then they will relax the constraints to “catch more” and boom, now you have false positives. The criminals will also figure it out and mask their usage better by cycling banks of lighting, using batteries, parking some EVs in the driveway or whatever. That cat-and-mouse game will just see increasing privacy invasion and more false positives.
fyi, the way you write seems like you are upset over something. It’s somewhat odd to write that on a website that is hosted by volunteers on a shoestring budget for thousands of users “against the onslaught on the net.” So you better understand, anything besides youtube videos (i.e., the majority of the content on the net) is fairly economical to host. Of course it depends on the system, but a small group can easily stand up something dynamic like a lemmy instance, and an individual can host their static blog for basically free -open to the wide internet. Youtube is hard because video uses an incredible amount of bandwidth. Google looses money on it, despite it being plastered with advertising. So even capitalism hasn’t figured out how to do it yet without being subsidized by another revenue stream.
And that was back when hosting, storage, and bandwidth were expensive. Those are basically free for text-based content now, and getting cheaper for audio and video. Nowadays, anything made by amateurs shouldn’t really need a “business model” at all, and anything made by professionals could be damned cheap, if there were no middlemen taking the majority of the cut.
Sure, the gov may not allow random API access to license plate registration data, but who knows how many license plates and associated identity are somehow scooped up by some data broker somewhere? You know those parking lots that require an app where you pay parking by entering your licence plate, then logging in with Google/Apple ID, and paying with a credit card? Fuuuuu
Besides Pi-hole, there’s Adguard. The “home” version works just like Pi-hole on a device on your network (but is a little slicker in my opinion), and a DNS service where you just set your router’s or devices DNS to their service (less private, but no dedicated device required). That’s an option that is not ideal, but far better than not blocking at the DNS level for anyone uncomfortable configuring a device on their network.
I’m sorry for being a broken record in this thread but holy crap yes! Right now you can embed a static ad in a web page relevant to the page’s content and adblockers will not block it!
Exactly, adblockers don’t block a static <div> on the page with some text, an image and a link. It’s only the user-tracking, obtrusive ad-networks they block. Every old-school form of advertising didn’t track users and did just fine. Even today, billboards are priced based on the amount of traffic on the highway, not based on checking inside each car and building a profile on each driver (though I wouldn’t put it past them trying to figure out how to do that soonish).
We had advertising supported media for 100-ish years before surveillance capitalism, obtrusive pop-ups/overs, and ad-network distributed malware were a thing. No one cared about blocking ads on the Internet until those 3 things started either. Even today, if you put your mattress ad as a static <div> on some mattress review website, adblockers won’t block it. It’s just that no one does that.
I wouldn’t mind unobtrusive ads targeted to the content of the page being viewed -but that doesn’t happen. Modern ad networks all work on surveillance, and are indistinguishable from what we used to call “spyware”. I have avoided spyware since the 90s.
I honestly wouldn’t care if you put your mattress ad on a web page I’m reading about mattresses. I might even click on it!
Largest boycott in human history.
The answer is always neoliberal free market ideology.
If that’s all it was, it wouldn’t be bad. Unfortunately the reason they want to use ai is because it will be more complicated than that. Think - you need to fly somewhere vs you are thinking of flying somewhere. Data brokers will provide the ai with information about your job, your (and your family’s) health, funerals, etc.
The software tech bro thing started with a letter from Bill Gates to the hobbyists that despite learning to program on freely available software, and copying a freely available language with his new version of Basic, everyone needs to stop sharing and pay to use software. They all have wet dreams of pulling out the ladder and owning everything. I wouldn’t put it past them to try to nullify copyleft or something like that.
Not always. Wide open fields get baked dry mid summer in a lot of local climates.
Not only that, but livestock can still graze under panels, on grass that often grows just as well with a little shade.
They over hype their marketing which can lead to a false sense of security. Reign in the marketing department and present their tools for what they are and they’d be more trustworthy.