Octopus Overlords

Daehawk wrote: Wed Jan 03, 2024 4:14 pm

gilraen wrote: Wed Jan 03, 2024 2:58 pm

Daehawk wrote: Wed Jan 03, 2024 2:35 pm All the WIKI sites have started to annoy me. You cant simply highlight a word or phrase then right click to copy it . You have to highlight and use ctrl-c. I never remember that and use my old highlight and right click...then it hits me i cant and i try ctrl-c..and of course that wont work with my right click menu open. So then i close it and do it right...three tries....every time..lol.

Wonder why the rightclick way doesn't work?

What do you mean the right-click way doesn't work? If there's a "Copy" option in the right-click menu, then it works. There are some sites that block that option to prevent people from stealing their content but then it would give you a message when you tried to copy it.

On all WIKI pages when you right click the COPY is greyed out and does not work. But ctrl-C still does.

Blackhawk wrote: Wed Jan 03, 2024 8:37 pm

Daehawk wrote: Wed Jan 03, 2024 4:14 pm

gilraen wrote: Wed Jan 03, 2024 2:58 pm

Daehawk wrote: Wed Jan 03, 2024 2:35 pm All the WIKI sites have started to annoy me. You cant simply highlight a word or phrase then right click to copy it . You have to highlight and use ctrl-c. I never remember that and use my old highlight and right click...then it hits me i cant and i try ctrl-c..and of course that wont work with my right click menu open. So then i close it and do it right...three tries....every time..lol.

Wonder why the rightclick way doesn't work?

What do you mean the right-click way doesn't work? If there's a "Copy" option in the right-click menu, then it works. There are some sites that block that option to prevent people from stealing their content but then it would give you a message when you tried to copy it.

On all WIKI pages when you right click the COPY is greyed out and does not work. But ctrl-C still does.

There are several gazillion different 'wiki' pages. And Firefox has a plugin specifically designed to prevent sites from disabling your right mouse button.

Max Peck wrote: Wed Jan 03, 2024 10:18 pm It seems likely that he is referring to Wikipedia.

Max Peck wrote: Wed Jan 03, 2024 10:18 pm It seems likely that he is referring to Wikipedia.

gilraen wrote: Wed Jan 03, 2024 10:23 pm

Max Peck wrote: Wed Jan 03, 2024 10:18 pm It seems likely that he is referring to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia definitely doesn't prevent you from copying text.

Blackhawk wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 11:50 am Is Wikipedia really a privacy concern requiring going through a third party front end?

Why should I use Wikiless instead of Wikipedia?
There are couple of reasons why you might want to use Wikiless:

• Circumvent censorship (1)
• You prevent Wikipedia getting your IP address (2)

1: Circumvent censorship
Many countries have censored Wikipedia pages, including China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia... https://wikiless.org/wiki/Censorship_of ... ia?lang=en

2: What's the problem of Wikipedia getting my IP address?
Short: If you trust that Wikipedia has not been infiltrated and/or you don't trust the Wikiless instance you would use, then you probably want to keep using Wikipedia instead of Wikiless because there are nothing to worry about giving your IP address to Wikipedia.

Long: We know from the leaks by Edward Snowden that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has identified Wikipedia as a target for surveillance already in 2009.[1][2] Wikimedia filled a lawsuit against the NSA in 2015 in order to fight against the mass-surveillance done by the NSA.[2][3]

Some points from the lawsuit legal documents:

• Wikimedia hired a full-time Traffic Security Engineer who is responsible for implementing and maintaining technical efforts to protect its users' reading and editing habits from mass surveillance-including, specifically, from the NSA's surveillance.[4]
• Wikimedia transitioned to HTTPS-by-default primarily due to NSA's surveillance.[5]

One of the documents revealed by Snowden shows that both Wikipedia and Wikimedia has been listed as a so-called "Appid" in the XKeyscore – a program that covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet" – to identify web traffic, meaning that wiki related web traffic is something that NSA finds valuable.[6]

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, and Lila Tretikov, former Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, has stated that, “[t]hese activities [viewing and editing Wikipedia articles] are sensitive and private: They can reveal everything from a person’s political and religious beliefs to sexual orientation and medical conditions.”[7]

Is it a far fetched idea that given the importance of the data what NSA (or other malicious actors) might gain from Wikipedia, that they haven't been able to infiltrate Wikipedia's servers in some way or another in the last 12 years? I don't think so. That's why I created Wikiless.

Non-Wikipedia related fun facts about the NSA:

• NSA pushed for the adoption of the Dual EC DRBG encryption standard which contained a backdoor deliberately inserted by themselves. The backdoor would have allowed NSA to decrypt for example SSL/TLS encryption which used Dual_EC_DRBG as a CSPRNG.[8][9]
• NSA spends $250 million per year to insert backdoors in software and hardware.[10][11]
• NSA classifies Linux Journal readers, Tor and Tails users as "extremists".[12]
• NSA intercepts routers, servers and other network hardware being shipped to organizations targeted for surveillance and install covert implant firmware onto them before they are delivered.[13]
• NSA has spied extensively on the European Union, the United Nations and numerous governments including allies and trading partners in Europe, South America and Asia.[14][15]
• “For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” said a 2010 memo describing a briefing about N.S.A. accomplishments for employees of its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”[16]
• At Microsoft, the NSA worked with company officials to get pre-encryption access to Microsoft’s most popular services, including Outlook e-mail, Skype Internet phone calls and chats, and SkyDrive, the company’s cloud storage service.[16]
• NSA has contacted Linus Torvalds with a request to add backdoors into Linux.[17]
• Under the PRISM program, which started in 2007, NSA gathers Internet communications from foreign targets from nine major U.S. Internet-based communication service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Data gathered include email, videos, photos, VoIP chats such as Skype, and file transfers.[18]
  NSA is cooperating with 'third party' countries which tap into fiber optic cables carrying the majority of the world's electronic communications and are secretly allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment on these fiber-optic cables. The foreign partners of the NSA turn massive amounts of data like the content of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, internet chats, data from virtual private networks, and calls made using Voice over IP software like Skype over to the NSA. In return these partners receive access to the NSA's sophisticated surveillance equipment so that they too can spy on the mass of data that flows in and out of their territory. Among the partners participating in the NSA mass surveillance program are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Spain.[19][20]
• GCHQ, with aid from the NSA, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing. The surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats (one image every five minutes) in bulk and saved them to agency databases.[21]
• The NSA has built an infrastructure which enables it to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process. The NSA relies on an automated system codenamed TURBINE which in essence enables the automated management and control of a large network of implants (a form of remotely transmitted malware on selected individual computer devices or in bulk on tens of thousands of devices). As quoted by The Intercept, TURBINE is designed to "allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually."[22][23]
• NSA "hunts" system administrators. The Intercept published a document of an NSA employee discussing how to build a database of IP addresses, webmail, and Facebook accounts associated with system administrators so that the NSA can gain access to the networks and systems they administer.[24][25]
• Angela Merkel has compared NSA to Stasi.[26]

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Anonymous Bosch wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 3:13 pm

Blackhawk wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 11:50 am Is Wikipedia really a privacy concern requiring going through a third party front end?

Why should I use Wikiless instead of Wikipedia?
Short: If you trust that Wikipedia has not been infiltrated

Blackhawk wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 5:37 pm

Anonymous Bosch wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 3:13 pm

Blackhawk wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 11:50 am Is Wikipedia really a privacy concern requiring going through a third party front end?

Why should I use Wikiless instead of Wikipedia?
Short: If you trust that Wikipedia has not been infiltrated

Infiltrated? Really?

Are Wikipedia or other sites surveilled by investigative agencies? Who knows. And, honestly - who really cares? I'm not doing anything on Wikipedia that hundreds of thousands of other people are. Do I prefer not to be tracked? Sure. But going to that level, hitting every site through a third party front end with multiple layers of security just so somebody doesn't know that I looked up how Cass Elliot died (it was not a ham sandwich) or that I browsed Amazon for T-shirts, or that I watched an Adam Savage video on YouTube.

If I were planning mayhem? Sure.
If I lived in China or Russia? Sure.

But for a run-of-the mill Joe?

Well, there's privacy (and I'm far more active and aware in that regard than the average user), and then there's paranoia.

Max Peck wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 5:41 pm You know who would set up a service catering to people who want to evade surveillance by the NSA? The NSA, obviously.

Just kidding. It would actually be the CIA.

Blackhawk wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 5:58 pm It was more that my argue-sense was tingling after your initial post up there, which implied that Wikipedia was a security/privacy risk that actually needed some sort of solution.

Anonymous Bosch wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 6:08 pm

Blackhawk wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 5:58 pm It was more that my argue-sense was tingling after your initial post up there, which implied that Wikipedia was a security/privacy risk that actually needed some sort of solution.

I know how to use words; if that were what I meant, I am more than capable of expressing myself without the assistance of your misguided argue-sense.

Blackhawk wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 6:17 pm If you say that there's a more privacy-friendly alternative to Wikipedia, and think that doesn't imply that Wikipedia has privacy concerns, then you might not be expressing yourself as clearly as you think.

Blackhawk wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 6:50 pm If those are 'privacy concerns', then we all need to be living in a digital bunker.

Blackhawk wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 6:50 pm If those are 'privacy concerns', then we all need to be living in a digital bunker.

hitbyambulance wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2024 3:45 am fwiw i'm fairly paranoid (by the standards of most people with whom i associate), but a front end for wikipedia also strikes me as a bit too far out there for most people. (and 'most people' themselves would just dismiss such measures out of hand)

Blackhawk wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2024 11:18 am Your views of privacy are absolutely your right, and I don't know you well enough to say whether they're justified or not. You do you - and that's awesome. But most of the time, those kinds of solutions are going to be excessive for the average user, and for some users they're more likely to create more problems than they solve.

Anonymous Bosch wrote: Thu Jan 04, 2024 5:53 pm …how you personally choose to balance security, privacy, and usability is entirely your prerogative, and is best decided based upon your own particular privacy and security threat model.

Blackhawk wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2024 11:18 am But most of the time, those kinds of solutions are going to be excessive for the average user, and for some users they're more likely to create more problems than they solve.

Blackhawk wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2024 12:37 pm People are long-since sick of reading this conversation. If you want me to explain why I used the word 'harmful', feel free to PM me.

Isgrimnur wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2024 3:30 pm Maybe those bottles can be recycled into something more useful. Like a watering can.

GreenGoo wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2024 3:27 pm Using a plastic bottle every time you water some plants seems to be the epitome of single use culture.

Sure, you can reuse the bottle. Why do you (global you) need a bottle in the first place?

Anyway, it's cute.

Daehawk wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2024 7:31 pm My friend gave me my taxi'n round town today to do everything I need to do. We ate at Five Guys. Not ate there since me and my wife did about 10 years ago. I dont remember the fries tasting this amazing.. My goodness. i brought the extra fries home and am eating them now. So good.

Isgrimnur wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2024 3:30 pm Maybe those bottles can be recycled into something more useful. Like a watering can.