I don’t know if it’s accurate to describe Qwant as “private.” There is a bit to be desired with their privacy policy, such as them apparently sending your IP address to Microsoft

https://about.qwant.com/en/legal/confidentialite/

There’s also this bizarre section

If you have not consented or are not subject to the Services offered, we automatically collect technical data… Salted hash of the IP address…, market segment of a query, date and time of the visit, information about the country and chosen language…

Anonymized by Microsoft after 6 months.

Amazing how your post history illustrates you only care about one topic. Like the last time I saw one of your posts:

These articles are getting so obscure, that you probably had to peel through a good amount of stuff that people here would find way more relevant.

And based on other articles from this same website, they are American exceptionalists. And not competent about technology. Here is another article of theirs, “how autocrats weaponize AI”, which was published last month and refuses to mention the Trump administration among their list of autocrats.

The article is also extremely stupid, misrepresenting how Signal works.

Encryption apps like Signal use AI to ensure secure communication and protect activists from government surveillance.

I don’t know what the author was smoking when they wrote that, but Signal does not use any AI.

This is extremely context-specific. But it would definitely be nice if posts were still accessible even if they were removed from communities, especially if there’s a difference between somebody breaking a community’s rules versus breaking their instance’s rules.

For example: you might have posted something that is otherwise unobjectionable but off topic in a community. The only way for a moderator to remove it is to fully censor not just your post, but also every comment under it.

CEO: Why would we take your data, you directly fund us so obviously we will only focus on providing the best search experience

CEO: dumps money into AI and a T-shirt factory

Okay, so for those of us using third party apps like Thunderbird, everything is done using app specific passwords, which is great

The new feature for Email App Passwords for external email programmes

But if this is a new feature, how did third party apps work before? Could people just not use them if they enabled 2FA?

Edit: …a decentralized Monero exchange

There’s the Monero shilling I expect in every comment

In fact, if you Google “FOSStodon Elon Musk,” an interesting trend appears. Anything I clicked that was critical of Musk and posted to the instance this year was deleted

Holy shit. Can you provide some examples?

Carrotcypher freaks out about any anti-Musk article in any subreddit he doesn’t control, and many he does, but I didn’t think the moderation was happening behind the scenes on FOSSTodon too. Which is especially reprehensible because the creators, admins, and other mods of FOSSTodon all seem pretty resolute in condemning Musk before he went full fascist.

I noticed this stuff was more measured before mid January (almost right around the Trump inauguration) but it’s started expanding pretty rapidly. Maybe I need to put in a little extra legwork and figure out which news sites are being auto-censored based on his personal opinions faster than I had anticipated.

For your consideration, same moderator on the same subreddit

• DHS allows surveillance based on sexual orientation. Reddit’s privacy moderators ban any mention of it
• r/privacy moderator censors criticism of CEO James Dolan
• r/privacy moderators blacklist German tech news site Heise, censor posts critical of DHS
• On Reddit’s r/privacy, you can no longer criticize Facebook
• “NSA chief and deputy fired”, censored

Carrotcypher is one of the moderators of the FOSStodon server.

https://hub.fosstodon.org/team/

Carrotcypher also moderates over 50 other subreddits, and is often the top active moderator on them. Here are some of those subreddits, from most to less popular:

• r/opensource
• r/OSINT
• r/tails
• r/signal
• r/opsec
• r/KeepOurNetFree
• r/Mastodon
• r/Infosec
• r/europrivacy
• r/netneutrality
• r/snowden
• r/foss
• r/SimpleXChat

I presume the FOSStodon admins, as well as some of the moderators in the subreddits that aren’t fully taken over, are not aware of this activity.

Here are some other assorted notes:

• Here’s the same moderator on r/Mastodon, which they moderate, complaining about people who don’t like Elon Musk.
• Here is the moderator endorsing a law that forces teachers uncloset transgender children.
• Here is the moderator defending the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil

If the moderators aren’t capable of handling this amount of work, they should divest themselves from the communities they volunteered for. Especially if their leisure time on Reddit is spent losing arguments to other people on subreddits they run.

Now, or after a couple more posts? I have commented about this moderator’s political attitudes elsewhere but I still have a bit of a backlog of posts to release info about.

They also ban criticism of the US government, US billionaires, and Israeli spyware… I sure can fault them for doing this

https://lemm.ee/post/59706303

Yep, Carrotcypher is in the mod list.

https://hub.fosstodon.org/team/

I presume the admins just don’t know about this. They also moderate over 50 subreddits, including the Mastodon one. They tend to be the controlling moderator, or the top moderator that is regularly active.

Doing my best to compile more content about it…

Oh yeah, there’s more where this came from. I’ve got a little backlog of content

How does this affect people who upgrade? They just have Firefox plus a second browser?

Until the lawsuit between Steve Teixeira and Mozilla reveals the truth, I’m going to withhold my judgment about how fascistic Mozilla was internally.

Teixeira claimed Mozilla conducted an audit that found them pretty lacking in the equality department IIRC, and Mozilla’s own lawyers disputed many things but not that.

You can close a group and reopen it later.

I thought tab groups on the desktop were neat but ignorable… Until browser vendors started implementing stuff like this. Now it’s basically a halfway point between an open tab and a bookmark. Excellent for organization.

tl;dr the article says that

1. People were downloading sketchy Chinese VPN apps
2. China compels companies to share data with the government

This research is interesting, but right about now, the average American citizen is in way more danger from the US than China.

Consider switching up your exclusive “China Bad” posting a little. These articles are getting so obscure, that you probably had to peel through a good amount of stuff that people here would find way more relevant.

My YouTube alternative: still YouTube, but I screw them out of ad revenue with a dedicated account

Right, and they have the capability to create and moderate their own servers however they see fit. I just don’t think it’s appropriate for them to moderate servers that take a reasonable stance against bigotry.

For example, here is the FOSStodon page about their moderators:

The moderators are the unsung heroes of Fosstodon. They’re the people who work every single report we receive, and take appropriate action to keep Fosstodon a friendly and inclusive place for all our members.

It then goes on to list carrotcypher as a moderator.

This is especially concerning because carrotcypher has previously been more covert about their opinions and moderation decisions until approximately January this year.