It sounds like you assume that if offline access was a fundamental right, the government would not only respect it, but the offline access would also be private by default.

For the former: we enshrine rights to assert protections. Otherwise what’s the point of governance? Like it or not we don’t have anarchy. It’s somewhat weird to talk about whether we assume the gov follows its own law as a criteria for reform. A gov may or may not respect our rights but the absence of respect for human rights would not be just cause to not create rights. Even if the gov disrespects a human right, there is still merit to being able to name & shame; to declare & publicise violations of rights. It gives transparency and exposes tyranny. Indeed human rights are disrespected plenty, but it would be foolish to sign up to scrap the rights. I would rather scrap the actors who fail to uphold rights.

Human rights were originally just symbolic. But they are increasingly upheld. In France, women won the right to abortion in 1975 when a court recognised that the human right to autonomy was valid.

The important question is: how is the presumption of disrespected rights used? Perhaps you are concerned that a presumption of respect of rights leads to inaction. However, I think the contrary. Assuming your rights are not respected leaves you with not even trying to exercise your rights. I.e. being a pushover out of hopelessness. I know quite well my rights are not always respected. I have experienced my rights being trampled 1st hand. I do not accept it. By not accepting it I continue to make demands. I insist on justice. I appeal bad decisions. Escalating the fight without quitting is the most effective approach to justice.

As for the latter, I think I explained that digital access can give privacy and it can cost privacy. Both at the same time. Privacy is multifaceted. It is senseless to speak of it as a single vague factor. Privacy is a collection of factors. Different ppl care about different privacy factors. I might be more violated if MS sees my email. You may feel more violated if your postal worker sees who you receive envelopes from. To each his own.

I just know that society tends towards efficiency, and offline methods are simply inefficient, so I expect it to go away in the future, unless there was some fundamental reason why offline access was necessary (and not indirect reasons, like the right to privacy).

To see fundamental human rights as “indirect” is to give a low priority to them. Offline access is essential to several human rights (self determinism, autonomy, dignity, and privacy, to name a few). Efficiency is not directly a human right. You could perhaps argue that efficiency is indirectly a human right if you try to argue that ineffeciency leads to fewer people getting public service. But that’s going to be a hard case to make when an exclusively digital service inherently excludes offline people.

What is the reason you want offline access to government services? Surely it’s not privacy, since you usually have to provide your government ID to interact with the service.

This touches on the idea that “privacy” is some kind of 1-dimensional concept. A public svc may need my ID for some task. That’s fair enough to the extent that it is true. But it’s unlikely that they need my IP address & realtime location. Of course such discussion could use the context of a specific situation. The abuses I frequently encounter is a gov blocking tor (thus forcing IP exposure) or pushing a precondition to service by demanding information that may not exist (phone number or email address).

My guess is that you want to avoid giving data to commercial entities, and also avoid interaction with commercial entities, like Microsoft.

You need not guess. I mentioned my boycott against MS which inherently entails not feeding data to MS. And indeed I generally demand that I minimise data supplied to commercial entities. Not only out of distrust, but I have 1st hand experience with being burnt by sloppy infosec practices. Cybercriminals have exfiltrated my personal data from commercial entities who had no just reason for having the data to begin with.

So it sounds like you don’t necessarily want offline access, you want to be able to interact with government services without any other dependencies.

In a hypothetical world, cybercriminals would not exist and data would not be abused. But we don’t live in a hypothetical world.

I’m positive most governments use Microsoft Word.

Fair assumption. Interesting as well to note that the Dutch gov financed an investigation of MS Word which revealed that MS was surreptitiously sending sensitive info to MS telemetry servers in the US. No other government in the world demonstrated that level of responsibility.

Despite the GDPR violations they discovered, I have little confidence that the leaks were fixed in MS Word. Nonetheless, the MS Word leaks are far less abusive than email passing in-the-clear via MS’s mail servers.

They’ll be using it to draft the paperwork that they send to you. They probably scan and OCR your letters for archival, and their scanning software is probably commercial and collects data. If your goal is elimination of external dependencies, then offline access is just the tip of the iceberg. And just because these dependencies are hidden, doesn’t mean one can ignore them. If that was the case you could just send your documents to a friend and ask them to send it to the government for you, and ask them not to tell you how they did it. That way you wouldn’t know if a commercial service was involved!

I know for certain that some gov agencies scan postal mail and email it. OCR is not certain but it’s a fair assumption. I prefer internal data abuses because it removes me from being at fault. If I send e-mail to a gov agency whose MX lookup leads to a Microsoft server and MS abuses the data, I have a hand in the abuse of my own data. A well-lawyered opponent would rightfully argue: “you handed your message to MS; you reap what you sow. If you did not trust MS with your message then you should not have handed your message to them.”

Real-life story: someone spotted CSAM on a Cloudflare site and reported it to CF. CF forced the whistle blower to reveal their identity as a precondition to treating the complaint. So they did. Then CF gave the whistle blower’s identity to the website owner without taking the site offline. The website owner doxxed the whistle blower publicly so their users would retaliate against the whistle blower. When the CEO (Matthew Prince) was confronted about this, he said the whistle blower “should have used a fake name”. Effectively, the whistle blower was held responsible for the trust they extended.

OK and as for offline methods to use commercial services, like games, I think in this case your goal is privacy. However I think this demand is fairly unreasonable as well. Obviously there are certain services that require online access, like real-time chat applications.

It depends on the game. If Tetris were to fail to install because the binary blob could not gather your personal details and a ton of hardware serial numbers to then send back to the mothership despite the game play not even having an online element, the connectivity requirement is unreasonable – abusively so.

The problem is that any company can construct artificial reasons for why they need online access, or even data collection. Youtube can say that they require personal data to curate your feed. You already mentioned that data minimization laws were ineffective. I don’t see how you can reasonable expect companies bend over backwards to provide offline access, when it’s far simpler for them to just make up a reason for why they need online access, or why they need your personal data.

You seem to be suggesting “it’s hopeless to expect corporations to comply with laws, so why bother?” Europe has decided for its people that data minimisation is a good idea; enough to warrant enshrining it into law. Enforcement is lax and sloppy but this is likely down to the law having quick dramatic effect. I believe enforcement diligence will gradually improve.

Of course corps will present their best excuses for why they process data abusively. The EDPB produces guidelines about what excuses are acceptable and which are not. And courts weigh-in on it and determine proportionality. If you are a company in Europe and want to avoid trouble, try not to fuck around with trying to process data in some compromising and unnecessary way.

I just want to make sure the government can’t ban encryption and anonymizing services like Tor.

That’s a low standard of privacy. Note that “ban” is vague here. I assume you mean that you merely oppose the gov legislating a prohibition on tor. But the reality is that the IT dude in the gov server room decides: “I’m tired of reviewing all these false intrusion alarms… I want my worktime to be easier going, so I’ll just block Tor at the firewall so I have more time to hang out at the coffee machine”. And just like that by someone’s off-the-cuff whim the whole public loses their privacy in the course of trying to get public service online, as there is no law explicitly stating that public services cannot block Tor.

W.r.t encryption, I don’t think any gov agencies outside of Germany even publish PGP keys for encrypted email. So the protection of encryption is effectively denied by all govs in most situations as a consequence of mere passive inaction.

I’m not forcing companies to perform certain actions, I’m preventing certain consumer actions from being criminalized.

Yet IIUC you are apparently okay with govs forcing people to engage with private companies that make reckless choices. It’s not a live-and-let-live stance. If it’s okay for companies to be reckless, then what gives? A right to avoid such companies (to boycott) is even more paramount.

The problem with offline is that it’s more expensive, and often less convenient.

We can nix convenience. There are three scenarios:

1. exclusively digital/online access
2. exclusively analog/offline access
3. ppl have a choice between digital and analog

In case 3, convenience is assured because people can choose whatever method they find most convenient. Case 1 is probably convenient to most unless CAPTCHAs and similar enshitification is in play, but the rest are marginalised or burdoned. Case 2 is unlikely because even if analog is on offer it still makes sense to deploy digital in parallel for the cost savings, as the bulk of users favor digital.

We can disregard convenience on the part of the public service workers b/c they are compensated regardless. Workers choose the gig they want to sign up for. So it boils down to cost savings w.r.t the public service side of this.

I don’t see a fundamental reason why offline communication must be available.

Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Art.21-2: “Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”

Saving a buck is not great rationale for denying fundamental human rights. There should be a good reason, like for example denying someone who needs a heart transplant their right to life because the list of those needing a heart is longer than organs available.

You could say: ok, we will give free Internet and hardware to all those who are offline, assuming they can handle it. It could only still be economically sensible if all such people are walking distance from a public library. But there are still other human rights to account for: the right to privacy (Art.12) and the right to autonomy (a derivitive right from Art.1 dignity/self-determinism).

Let’s assume that your country added a fundamental rule (for example for the USA this would be a constitutional amendment) saying that all goverment services should collect the minimum amount of data necessary to function. So they would have to support things like Tor, to avoid collecting IP addresses, etc. Would this be enough for you to waive the offline requirement? Because the world is always marching towards more efficient communication, and an offline requirement could hold society back for little benefit.

“Data minimization” is an important policy which has already been implemented in Europe (2016) and a few other places that have tried to do a GDPR-like policy (California, and Australia IIRC). In Europe it’s a bit of a disaster. Even though strictly speaking GDPR Art.5 is violated when public web services block Tor, they are nonetheless blocking Tor with reckless disregard and effectively laughing at complaints. People in some countries cannot even get /read/ access to legal statutes from Tor. There is a GDPR rule requiring data controllers to be diligent with infosec and implementing protective mechanisms to ensure this. Rightfully so, but the effect is that this becomes an excuse to shrug off the Tor community. They ultimately have a legal defense of claiming anti-Tor measures are to comply with infosec mandates (though in reality it’s sloppy lazy IT admins who blocks Tor).

I have little hope for competency prevailing. In principle, data could be secured without blocking Tor. But that conversation is quite far from taking place AFAICT. I’m almost certain the courts would take the lazy way out. What judge would risk forcing a data controller to serve Tor users and then being responsible for an attacker who uses Tor when exploiting some unrelated vuln?

I fear this is unavoidable. If you depend on certain services (like interacting with the government), then you simply can’t fully boycott that service or any dependency of that service.

If your choices are send email to the gov (who selected MS for their email supplier) or to send a letter, then boycott rights are sufficiently respected.

For example, if the government only accepted post mail, you would not be able to fully boycott the postal service.

A national post service is itself a public service. When the gov depends on the gov for service, that’s about as non-controversial as it gets. Someone who opposes the government should be more focused on leaving the jurisdiction they have contempt for.

If the gov were to do something stupid like outsource the national postal service to Federal Express (a private courier service in the US who finances right-wing politics), then having an alternative would be important. If the alternative is Microsoft, then it’s a choice between two shit options; in which case I would demaned yet another option, like fax.

But I feel like your idea of boycotts is also too extreme.

I find it obnoxiously extreme to force people into the marketplace to patronize a particular corporation. It’s not the same as the gov itself internally supporting harmful corporation, which is quite rampant in the US but out of our hands. When individuals are forced to directly lick the boots of an evil corporation, it’s an extra hightened degree of abuse. It’s an assault on self-determinism. I will not feed a baddy. I insist. Nothing is more tyrannical than forcing someone to proactively take an action that goes against their beliefs.

Americans do not have a fundamental right to consumer protection. But Europeans do. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union Art.38 states: “Union policies shall ensure a high level of consumer protection.”

Despite that right, consumer protection is still a shit-show in Europe. People rely on incompetent unmotivated consumer protection agencies to take action. So for me, the most important consumer protection is that which does not rely on the action of others – the right to boycott. I don’t know if a court would agree that a right to boycott derives from the right to consumer protection, but I am running with it. I will march all the way to the supreme court if I must, to push my claim on a right to boycott.

If you want to boycott Microsoft, and all local grocery stores used Azure somewhere in their infrastructure, would you stop buying groceries?

There are countless street markets and farmer’s markets selling their produce for cash. The only thing digital is the scale. Mom and pop shops have old fashioned cash registers. I would only imagine the supermarket chains use the cloud. The giants are not transparent enough for customers to even know what they use internally. Websites of 4 of the giants around me block Tor. One of them even uses Cloudflare which masks their hosting provider but I boycott Cloudflare anyway. Indeed I boycott the 4 chains on that basis.

I see boycotting as simply doing your best to avoid a company’s products.

In some cases I patronize the lesser of evils, depending on the level of despiration or need. In other cases I boycott entire industries. There are only 3 or 4 mobile carriers and I have a problem with all of them. If I despirately needed mobile phone service I would pick the lesser of evils. But I have opted to give them all the middle finger because I don’t really need the service.

All washing machines have undocumented kill switches. So I am hand-washing my clothes until that changes.

Analog systems need to be designed too. And they can be just as tyrannical, inconvenient, and invasive.

I’d have to say not even close. Do a search on /dark patterns/. There are countless abuses digital systems can push precisely because of the efficiency of automation. Analog systems entail manual labor which inherently limits the extent of tyranny and abuses due to resource limitations. Analog systems are also hard to conceal. You can’t stick a guy in a windowless office writing code to collect and abuse data on a large scale in an analog system. The demand for more human labor in analog systems means trusting more people to keep secrets.

I also don’t know what would be the analog version of a broken CAPTCHA that cannot be solved, which would block advancing to the next step.

Lack of competency is often simply lack of incentive. What incentive does the government have, for providing privacy-friendly services?

Indeed there is insufficient direct pressure on govs to protect privacy. Which is precisely why it is critical to mitigate the data collection in the first place. They can’t get your IP address from your postal letter. But if you concede to giving up analog methods, abuse has no limits. In the US there is no concept of gov transparency… no way to confidently know what they are collecting and what they are doing with the data.

Likewise, if they have incentive to track people, why would they provide an offline option, which is both more expensive and bypasses their tracking measures.

You seem to be answering your own question. Fighting to keep an offline option on the table is the only control you have on the abuse. They are limited by budgets. So if analog processing eats up a significant amount of budget, that’s less money that can be spent on mass surveillance abuses.

Based on your entire reply, it sounds like what you mainly want is privacy.

Privacy and boycott rights have become inseparable. Boycotting used to simply be a matter of not buying something. Now with surveillance advertising in play, boycotting requires privacy. Not feeding Microsoft requires not sharing personal data with MS, thus not sending email that traverses their servers.

It’s an important distinction, because I reckon that it will be easier to ask the government to enshrine privacy as a fundamental right, rather than offline access as a right, since offline access is much more expensive to provide.

Privacy has been a fundamental right in the UDHR since 1948, IIUC. From there, it barely has much effect. Snowden pretty much made it quite clear that you cannot rely on privacy as a fundamental right. Even if a privacy law could be respected in some hypthetical world, you still have CAPTCHAs, forced apps (JavaScript and/o

Sorry for necro but your ideology is fascinating. It sounds like you believe offline people deserve the same benefits as online people.

Not in the case at hand. But yes, I do believe offline ppl are entitled to the same benefits w.r.t. public services. E.g. our human right to healthcare and education is not preconditioned on being online. It’s inalienable.

W.r.t software sold on the private market, it’s more about standards. Standards of privacy, quality, functionality, and pro-consumer. With the video game, I’m not sure if I am more annoyed by the needless dependency on a WAN, or the anti-consumer way of doing business in general, which entails using the money of paying customers against them. Paying for deliberate anti-features and product crippling rewards corporations for being proactively anti-consumer… biting the hand that fed them. And so I oppose the idea of feeding enshitification.

Why do you believe this? Why shouldn’t the world move towards an expectation of online existence?

In Europe there is a battle emerging whereby some gov offices have decided it’s okay to exclude some people for being offline. Note that those same excluded people do not have a right to opt-out of taxation.

If I were to guess, your goal is not offline existence, but privacy, and doing things offline guarantees privacy, the same way that high-security environments use airgapped machines.

Privacy is one of many factors. Another factor, for example, would be that if I boycott Microsoft and the gov uses MS for email, I effectively lose my boycott privileges if email is the only means of communicating that the gov accepts.

Another factor is convenience. I find CAPTCHAs inconvenient, so I boycott them. My boycott against CAPTCHAs goes so far that I am willing to undertake a greater inconvenience in order to carry out my boycott against CAPTCHA pushers. And note that CAPTCHA is just one insideous¹ form of inconvenience. A local gov publishes their PDF community newsletter through some shitty 3rd party that animates the PDFs with JavaScript, so you can graphically see a visual of the page turning. That shitty protectionist js-forced service blocks people from simply downloading the PDF file. And I’ll be damned if I am going to support that kind of protectionism, so I insist that someone hand-delivers a paper newsletter to my door until they become competent. It’s unlikely that they will become competent in my lifetime.

Even if they manage to make the PDFs downloadable, they will fuck something else up. E.g. wget won’t work because they would arbitrarily decide to take an anti-bot posture without cause, and without realising that humans run wget.

¹ “insideous” because it puts humans to work for machines doing uncompensated labor which is potentially involuntary servitude in some cases. And performance of the labor often still results in DoS if the CAPTCHA is broken or if it discriminates against the incapability of the user.

But that’s just a means to an end. There are other ways of achieving privacy, like using vetted open source software that take privacy seriously, for example a fediverse client running in Tor browser.

Yes. In fact, well implemented tech gives more privacy than analog methods most of the time (cash payments being a notable exception).

Privacy does not necessitate being offline.

It does if the other party is too incompetent to get it right. The gov is not competent enough to publish a public key. It is not competent enough to maintain a server that allows Tor connections. It is not competent enough to design a webform that does not make email and phone number required fields.

The problem is not lack of possibilities. It’s lack of competency.

Going to a cafe to download articles to read offline, is not really offline either. It’s just an intermittent internet connection

The fetching is online (though not necessarily); the reading is offline. If I have a LAN with AP and no uplink, a friend or someone near my home could connect to the LAN and upload content, which would be an offline means of getting content. There are also ways to get info via SMS. The gov who uses a protectionist 3rd party to block PDF downloads and limit distribution to those running some proprietary JavaScript effectively blocks offline reading by someone like myself.

I suppose my ultimate thesis is that the gov should only be rewarded with digital participation if they competently deployed a service. An analog mechanism is always needed as an escape from the tyranny of poor design. Without an analog mechanism there is little incentive to implement a good design. Analog methods serve as an important quality control feedback mechanism.

apparently not, but thanks for the suggestion. There are 15 FOSS NAS platforms, but I don’t have my hopes up.

Qnap is apparently an option… I’ll have to look into that. QNAP is mentioned in the manual as a 3rd party behind the stock firmware, so I guess it’s not likely FOSS.

Did you talk to the sopuli.xyz admins about this?

I did not. But you seem to be correct. Unless there is a quite serious defect in Lemmy server, a sopuli.xyz admins would be the only culprit.

Can you please also edit the thread on the lemmybefree.net instance to remove the false accusation of our moderator who was not involved at all?

Done. Interesting to note that I was only able to edit that because I incidentally happened to save a link to that thread (as sopuli’s copy was apparently also tampered with).

makes it clear that dead naming her is not something she wishes for:

Not actually clear, but somewhat useful as far as knowing Manning’s wishes. And only /somewhat/, because it clarifies history (that Manning considered herself female during a time when presenting as male). Apart from that, Manning does not say that she expects history to be rewritten to refer to a name that predates the existence of that name. Manning’s statement is only clear about deadnaming today in the context of today. To describe a historic event or time period when the dead name was in fact a live name – that is not dead naming because it is not refering to today’s Manning. The death of Bradley and simultaneous birth of Chelsea occurred at a point in time. It would be like referring to Exxon before the merger with Mobil as ExxonMobil. It was Exxon the discovered climate change, not ExxonMobil.

Manning does not get to decide for everyone that historic records must be altered for ex-post-facto events, at the expense of historic accuracy and confusion. That’s the bigger problem. What do historians say? It’s a bad idea to, for example, let an event in 2015 change our accounting of what happened in 1995. If 2015 event were to reveal something we did not know regarding 1995, that’s fair enough. Some particular individual may have had a past false presentation while others not. We generally know what gender someone presents as, and when, but we don’t get the benefit of knowing what’s in their head (their introspective gender) unless you have someone like Manning actually declaring how far back their introspective gender goes.

It’s wrong to assume that all trans people had a false gender presentation before the change that goes back to birth. I had a roommate that had a flipping gender. One day female, next day male… using a male and female name interchangeably from one day to the next, also dressing feminine or masculine depending on the day.

The mod call seems right to me.

Can you elaborate? Why is there legitimate value in censoring my viewpoint? You want to generalize that most people don’t care about privacy (perhaps true, but it’s IMO an injustice to take this assumption as rationale for suppression of expression on the part of privacy advocates and historians)… that (without their input) their new identity can be tied to their past identity, and it’s okay for this generalisation to oppress people who want the contrary — so much so that it is okay to suppress the fact that a counter (privacy-respecting) viewpoint exists?

So this is either a technical glitch or an admin on your own instance sopuli.xyz removed in locally from your instance only.

Woah, holy shit. I am quite baffled that you were able to post an URL to a slrpnk.net-hosted page showing that it is not censored. I saw an entry in the modlog of the community, so I am confused on that. It seemed clear that the comment was censored from the slrpnk side. If it was censored from someone other than a mod or admin of slrpnk.net, that opens up possible tyrannical actions I was not even aware of.

And I must say, the Lemmy software is garbage if it can present a “modlog” that reflects actions by foreign instances without attributing actions of those instances. The modelog looks like a log local to the hosting instance. For that reason, I am somewhat skeptical of your claim that it was a remote censorship.

I’m not sure what the Tor Project advice is these days, but my phone is setup to have Netguard hijack the VPN option of AOS and force select apps over tor (to Orbot). It’s annoying because in fact it is impossible for me to run Netguard and Tor over a VPN. Because Netguard hijacks the VPN, I cannot use a real VPN. I can run a VPN (generally openVPN), but then I must give up Tor if I do that. Orbot can only run in parallel, but because Netguard loses the VPN slot I can only use Tor-aware apps in that situation. So ultimately what you’re thinking is not possible with my tool chain (of old versions).

My version of Orbot apparently pre-dates that. At the bottom of the orbot screen it says “trouble connecting? Use bridges [boolean slider]”, and the switch is toggled off. I don’t see mention of “Smart Connect” in the settings.

I am not going to keep track of your esoteric personal preferences. If you non-transparently keep this rule concealed, the consequences are on you.

Please put your bizarre new rule in the sidebar so people who accurately discuss past events do not get broad-sided by unexpected interventionalism. The norm is that people use the present gender for present tense chatter, which needs no explicit rule. But this zealous idea of inserting someone’s new identity into their past (prior to the current identity) at the risk of disrepecting their privacy really calls for some explicit wording. Feel free to name the rule of this niche scenario after me, if you want.

UPDATE

I see the new rule in the sidebar. I agree with it. It does not cover this corner case of the context of historic accounts.

I appreciate the tip but this does not explain the Debian-Orbot difference I experienced. I have not configured either to use bridges, yet I saw Orbot connect and Debian not.

A bridge would likely be a solution for Debian. My work around has been to use Tor over a VPN in situations where Debian’s Tor fails, but that results in a very unstable connection where the VPN falls over every 5-10 min and must be re-established. So I am tempted to try a Tor bridge to see if that’s more stable.

It turns out I was in fact getting 10 days ahead with the default weather source. I just did not realise it because I didn’t know the daily forecast scrolls further to the right.

Anyway, I’m sorted… thanks!

oh, even better! Thanks for pointing that out.

Oof! Good find. That apparently renders the app toast for all but self-hosters. I wonder if it has been down since 2023:

https://github.com/xddq/libre-weather/issues/5

Yeah I just realized the daily forecast goes 4 days out. I’m going to consider that good enough. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the tip. Someone suggested the Breezy Weather app but it seems to only cover the current day. I need several days… ideally a week ahead.

(edit) Sorry, I was wrong… The daily forecast goes 4 days out. That’s good enough.

I appreciate the tip but I do not find them on f-droid.org. If they are FOSS, do you know where they can be fetched without using commercial gatekeepers?

Thanks! But I should have mentioned that I need the forecast for the week ahead. It seems to only cover the current day.

(edit) Sorry, I was wrong… The daily forecast goes 4 ~10 days out. That’s good enough.

I am curious how many times have you gone to court?

I’ve been to court countless times, but only twice that I recall for choosing an analog lifestyle.

You obviously have access to internet or else you would not be here,

My gaming desktop is at home where I have no Internet. I /could/ bring a gaming laptop into a public library and do gaming there, but I should not need to. It’s an absurd injustice that I cannot game from the comfort of my home on a big screen because the game makers want to snoop on people arbitrarily.

you are on one of the more private places on the internet (fediverse) sure so the likelihood of “them” finding you on here is slim.

I have no idea what motivates this comment. I would certainly object to anyone outside the fedi finding me in the fedi, but this is entirely orthoganol to anything said here. What does the fedi privacy have to do with the freedom of an offline person to play a game?

If you are concerned about your privacy on line as I am sure many of us on Lemmy are look into getting an internet connection to your home, accept that you will have to pay taxes and invest in a really solid Pihole or Adguard home setup.

“Privacy” is such a broad concept spanning countless ways to achieve countless forms of privacy, it’s really bizarre that you make this suggestion. I cannot trace this suggestion to any specific privacy scenario that I have mentioned. A general change that like you suggest simultaneously grants some forms of privacy while compromising privacy in other ways. Also no idea what taxes has to do with this.

I have not used pihole but I know it is something I need to research. Adguard does not strike me as a like-with-like comparison, but my knowledge of the two is superficial. In any case, I struggle to see how these tools relate.

Perhaps you are suggesting that forcing all connections over Tor solves the privacy problem. I would first say: no it does not. We have no idea what info is sent when a closed-source blob phones home. But more importantly, even if I could sufficiently circumvent the snooping, I shouldn’t fucking have to. Snooping cannot be justified by the existence of circumvention hacks.