this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
194 points (96.2% liked)

You Should Know

33392 readers
92 users here now

YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.

All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.



Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:

**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Partnered Communities:

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

Credits

Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

There's a bot that's tracks Lemmy communities for Active User Growth and Subscribers Growth each day and posts it to the following community.

https://feddit.nl/c/trendingcommunities

Check out the trending communities and join the ones you like!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.

[–] dan@upvote.au 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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