• 23 Posts
  • 157 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: February 20th, 2021

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  • rcbrk@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlI answered: Are VPNs essential?
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    4 days ago

    The article does not explain the primary design purpose of a VPN – providing an encrypted tunnel into or between two private subnets.

    For example, your home subnet is typically all 192.168.nnn.nnn addresses – a class of addresses which the wider internet does not route, and which your router/modem does not allow the wider internet to access unless explicitly permitted.

    Say you have a NAS on your home network, and you want to access it from your laptop while at a cafe; you could set up a VPN between your laptop and your home router, and it can make your home network appear as your local network to your laptop, giving you access to your NAS.

    Or between two office locations of a business – their database servers, accounting systems, printers, etc can all be freely accessible between offices without being exposed to the wider internet.




  • rcbrk@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.worldAustralia bans social media for under 16s
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    6 days ago

    The ban and age verification requirements apply to pretty much all services which allow communication of information between people, unless an exemption is granted by the minister.

    There is no legislated exemption for instant messaging, SMS, email, email lists, chat rooms, forums, blogs, voice calls, etc.

    It’s a wildly broadly applicable piece of legislation that seems ripe to be abused in the future, just like we’ve seen with anti-terror and anti-hate-symbol legislation.

    From 63C (1) of the legislation:

    For the purposes of this Act, age-restricted social media platform means:

    • a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:
      • i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end-users;
      • ii) the service allows end-users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end-users;
      • iii) the service allows end-users to post material on the service;
      • iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or
    • b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules; but does not include a service mentioned in subsection (6).

    Here’s all the detail of what the bill is and the concerns raised in parliament.


  • The likes of lemmy instances may be either small enough to fly under the radar, or handwaved away by legislators with “don’t worry it’s not the target of this legislation”, or even be given easy access to ministerial exemption …for now (maybe).

    The kicker comes in 10-15 years’ time when, say, a government’s donor inconvenienced by protests organised using a self-hosted forum then asks the government to crack down on the age verification requirements of that forum, effectively silencing it due to the requirements being too onerous for a small forum, or the userbase being unwilling to submit their IDs/faceprints/whatever.






  • I mean ntfy’s primary purpose is not dependent on UnifiedPush – all UP functionality could be removed and ntfy would still work as intended.

    Ntfy server knows how to be a UP gateway, and relays those messages to the ntfy app, which knows how to be a UP distributor.

    As far as I understand it, a client app using UP to recieve push notifications does perform a registration step with the UP gateway (via the distributor app which communicates with the gateway via its own transport), which sets up and responds with the api endpoint details, which the client app relays to its servers, which can then send UP notifications via the specified gateway.