This is a good idea, as it might eventually lead to policies or laws that would reduce the spam.

I wouldn’t get my hopes up for resolution any time soon, though. Keep in mind that some of the biggest influence campaigns targeting US politics are run by foreign parties, and bulk text messages are cheap and consequence-free. Sadly, stopping it might require changing your phone number.

Yes, of course they could. Generating an image fingerprint is not all that computationally expensive by today’s standards.

Is it unique enough to track you? It doesn’t have to be, since online tracking generally keys off of a set of data, rather than a single item. But just for the sake of argument, consider that services like tineye and google images have pretty good success at matching images even with no additional data.

Is it (or will it eventually be) worthwhile for data collectors? You would have to ask them.

Indeed, protocol is independent from implementation language, but that isn’t the question at hand.

Do you know whether Beehaw will still federate with the lemmyverse (and therefore the rest of us) after moving to Sublinks?

That could also mean client API-compatible, meaning Lemmy apps would work with it, which doesn’t speak to federation.

Will it federate with Lemmy? I would miss you folks.

Who cares? It’s run by reactionary incels, transphobes, and racists.

Wait until you find out who runs Lemmy development.

Tell me you’re a novice without telling me you’re a novice.

Edit replacing my original comment:

Looks like that package has been replaced by org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze. That’s what I’m using, and it is receiving updates.

$ flatpak remote-info flathub org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze-Dark
         ID: org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze-Dark
        Ref: runtime/org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze-Dark/x86_64/3.22
       Arch: x86_64
     Branch: 3.22
 Collection: org.flathub.Stable
   Download: 156.9 kB
  Installed: 386.6 kB

     Commit: 5a19b0c0808f82290d1f64c95d2406a860329817e0f269b4aaf0a1bbba92323a
     Parent: 390f820d32df2f22e3a3165eb4d65071dcb93a357ae7730f4ca548b5d016b966
End-of-life: This theme has been replaced by org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze, see README for workaround on using system color schemes. https://github.com/flathub/org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze#workarounds
    Subject: Add EOL (fc4339ff)
       Date: 2022-02-22 00:21:51 +0000

Use Tor.

Do you mean Tor Browser? Because using Tor alone won’t stop fingerprinting.

Related: A very similar question posted by the same person yesterday.

How to turn them square?

I don’t think yt-dlp has built-in image cropping, so it’s just going to download thumbnails in the resolutions provided by the server. (See the --list-thumbnails option.) To crop what you download, consider a tool like ImageMagick.

KDE Connect also runs on more operating systems. It’s worth mentioning to friends who run Windows.

Obviously you need someone joining the room for the room metadata to be shared between homeservers.

Well then, your assertion that Matrix gives it freely is false.

Not so with Matrix, where a joining homeserver get full retroactive access to all the room metadata since the room’s creation.

This is false, too. Historical event visibility is controlled by a room setting. (And if you don’t trust admins of a sensitive room to configure for privacy, then you’re going to have bigger problems, no matter what platform it’s on.)

you really need to stop privacy LARPing

LARPing? I’m not the one stirring up drama with falsehoods and patronizing snark, am I? Farewell.

Matrix stores all this info and gives it freely to other servers retroactively(!)

Can you show me the part of the spec that allows a server with no room members to get private room info from another server? I’m skeptical, but if true, I believe that would be worth reporting as a bug.

network layer sniffing (which is anyway much harder to do)

You’re funny.

The network layer of all internet servers reveals almost everything you listed. Signal has the same problem, and there’s nothing they can do about that. The only way to avoid it is to use a completely peer-to-peer model (Matrix has started work on this, btw) and avoid communicating across network routes that can be monitored.

There might be one exception, depending on what you mean by “Accounts”: The user IDs participating in a room can be seen by server operators and room members. But then again, server operators can already see their users’ IP addresses (which is arguably more sensitive than a user ID), and I believe room members have to be allowed into the room in order to see them. For most of us, that’s fine. Far from a disaster.

Human behavior is funny, isn’t it? No matter what the topic, there are always people around who like to repeat criticism they heard from someone else, even if it’s so vague as to be useless (“metadata disaster”) or they don’t understand the details at all.

It’s not a disaster. A few minor bits of metadata (avatars and reactions, IIRC) haven’t been moved into the encrypted part of the protocol yet. If that’s a problem for your use case, then you might want to choose a platform with different flaws, or simply avoid those features. It’s already good enough for the needs of many privacy-minded folks, though, and it continues to get better.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch more than half of this.

tl;dr: This video is a misleading, sensationalist, bad-fath, hit piece. It’s constructed upon faulty logic, fear of things used or supported by governments, and a single anonymous person’s poorly-reasoned conclusions.

It’s a time-honored tradition among dictionary publishers.

Not a Google fan, huh?

Maybe a pool of big corp captive portal / connectivity test servers? For example:

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-devices/warp/deployment/firewall/#captive-portal

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/tags/android-9.0.0_r49/services/core/java/com/android/server/connectivity/NetworkMonitor.java#101