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  • @[email protected]
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    3321 days ago

    Your actual browsing of lemmy is moderately private, provided you trust your server.

    But nothing else is. By design, it’s pretty easy for anyone who wants to track activity on any federated platform to do so. They’re extremely open.

    • Miles O'Brien
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      2921 days ago

      provided you trust your server.

      You shouldn’t.

      especially if you run it yourself. If you don’t have a loaded sawed off sitting near your server rack in case the machine spirit within grows too strong, you aren’t servering correctly.

        • Blaze (he/him)
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          421 days ago

          Hits home. I have a friend in sales, he got a connecter door lock the other day. There’s no way any of these get to my door in this life

          • @Passerby6497
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            521 days ago

            I’ve been considering adding a wireless door lock to my place, but my home automation platform is entirely self hosted and doesn’t reach out to the net for basically anything.

            • @grue
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              21 days ago

              My home automation consists only of (self-hosted and fully local) Home Assistant and some smart outlets I’ve flashed with ESPHome open-source firmware. I found some Nanoleaf Matter/Thread smart bulbs a few days ago on clearance, but even though I got them super cheap I’m debating on whether to return them because i’m not sure if I can trust them without being able to flash an open-source firmware.

              • aquafunkalisticbootywhap
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                221 days ago

                with matter devices, you can possibly do some fun networking, and block them from reaching the outside world completely. then you just need to trust your firewall

              • @Passerby6497
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                121 days ago

                I’m running HA too, but I’m rocking zigbee stuff with a bit of zwave for outside stuff. Works so well (when I properly program it anyway 🤣)!

            • @[email protected]
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              121 days ago

              I like the SwitchBot Lock because it sits over the existing thumbturn rather than completely replacing the lock. It still looks like a normal lock from outside, unless you get a keypad of course. I got one with a keypad so my dog sitter can come check on my dog and take her out while I’m at work.

              It’s not internet enabled by default. You can buy a wifi gateway from SwitchBot, but instead I have mine connected to Home Assistant using Bluetooth via a Bluetooth proxy.

    • mox
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      21 days ago

      Your actual browsing of lemmy is moderately private, provided you trust your server.

      Not exactly. Many of the big instances have Cloudflare (or similar) sitting between you and the server, providing the HTTPS layer while watching everything you read and write on Lemmy. In cryptography circles, we call this a man-in-the-middle.

      Your instance (sh.itjust.works) is one such instance, by the way, as is lemmy.world.

      • @[email protected]
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        421 days ago

        That applies to most of the internet, and Cloudflare has a long track record of not abusing that position, though.

        • mox
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          21 days ago

          Cloudflare has a long track record of not abusing that position, though.

          Well, Cloudflare is not all that old, and we can’t see what they do with our data, so I would say it has a medium-length record of not getting caught abusing that position. But that’s not the point.

          The point is that most Lemmy users’ actual browsing is in fact not private between them and their server. Many instances have a big network service corporation like Cloudflare watching everything read or written by every user, so that info is available to anyone with sufficient access or influence there, like employees and governments.

          That applies to most of the internet,

          Not exactly, but it does apply to a great many of the biggest web sites, so we could say it applies to much of the internet’s traffic.

          And that’s part of the problem. Cloudflare is in a position to watch much of what people do on the web, across many unrelated sites and services (often including domain name lookups), and trivially identify them. This includes whatever political, religious, or NSFW posts they’re reading on Lemmy, and who they are when they log in to their bank accounts.

          In any case, I replied not to be pedantic, but just to let our community know that they shouldn’t assume their reading habits on Lemmy are safely anonymized behind a made-up username, or confidential between them and their instance admins. If your instance uses a provider of DDOS protection or HTTPS acceleration, as many big instances do, then the walls have ears.

          • @[email protected]
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            20 days ago

            That’s fine, and in principle I understand the threat, but I think there are plenty of security experts who choose to just use cloudflare because some of the services they provide genuinely require their scale and they have a pretty steady history of making very measured decisions about where they need to leverage their position to improve security.

            There’s never been any indication that they’re collecting more than they need to or exploiting it beyond the scope of the service they provide, and several scenarios where they have refused to cooperate with governments trying to do invasive things. I absolutely think “moderately secure” still applies to traffic routed through cloudflare.

        • @[email protected]
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          221 days ago

          The whole point of Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole is to decentralize, so everyone routing through a single service (Cloudflare) seems to go against that.

          • @[email protected]
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            221 days ago

            The point is to not be compelled to a central service. Choosing a provider that does a better job is perfectly fine.