Privacy

via Xamanismo Coletivo (@eliasulrich@hachyderm.io): “One guy in #Sweden built a #searchengine to fight Google, and it works.

Marginalia is an independent search engine with its own crawler and index that deliberately surfaces non-commercial, off-the-beaten-path corners of the web. No AI, no tracking, no cookies, and the whole thing is open source under AGPL. A refreshing antidote to the SEO-optimized sameness of mainstream search results.

via John Voorhees (@johnvoorhees@macstories.net): Hybrid compute for Perplexity’s Personal Computer is an exciting development that runs on Apple silicon Macs and blends cloud-based frontier models with local AI. Details on MacStories.

Perplexity’s new “hybrid compute” runs agent tasks in the cloud by default, but a local classifier flags potentially sensitive data and offers to route that portion to a model running on your Apple silicon Mac — and it works for sessions started from an iPhone or iPad, too. Data privacy is the next big blocker for agentic tools in regulated industries, so it’s good to see someone tackling it directly rather than asking customers to trust a cloud endpoint.

LocalSend is an open-source, cross-platform AirDrop alternative that moves files between Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS entirely over your local network. No accounts, no cloud, no trackers — just encrypted transfers at WiFi speed. (Found via a colleague at work.)

I’ve known all of this. And yet …

And yet … it’s still rather unsettling to see it laid out so plainly.

via Miguel de Icaza ᯅ🍉 (@Migueldeicaza@mastodon.social): “You opened this page. It already knows the following.”

via Natalia Panferova (@natpanferova@mastodon.social): Excited to share that @hishnash and I have just released our new app, Strolly!

Strolly generates fresh looping walking routes near you each day, using on-device pathfinding so your location data never leaves your phone. You can steer it toward areas you like, flag segments to avoid, and get time estimates tuned to walking, jogging, or running — a nice antidote to always taking the same route.

via Molly White (@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io): When people say you should “own your own data,” or that the future of the web is “ownership,” what does that mean?

Molly White untangles the many contradictory things people mean when they say “digital ownership” — buying media you can’t keep, controlling your own data, owning your audience — and argues we’d be better served by naming the specific rights we actually want. A clarifying read that cuts through both platform lock-in apologetics and crypto “ownership era” hype.

via Axel Rauschmayer (@rauschma@fosstodon.org): Still frequently impressed by how much mileage MozJPEG compression gets out JPEG images. I’m using it via https://Squoosh.app (a progressive web app).

Squoosh is a browser-based image compression tool that works entirely locally — your images never leave your device. It supports multiple formats and lets you visually compare before and after results. Worth considering as part of a site build workflow for optimizing image assets.

via TidBITS (@TidBITS@mastodon.social): How to Turn Off Smart TV “Automatic Content Recognition”

Smart TVs use automatic content recognition (ACR) to screenshot everything you watch twice per second, sending data back for targeted advertising — regardless of whether content comes from cable, streaming, or a game console. The Markup provides instructions for turning ACR off on Roku, Samsung, and LG TVs, though it takes between 10 and 37 clicks depending on the platform.

via Boris Mann: I’m slowly replacing various services with my #selfhosting Cloudron server.

The President of Signal Foundation speaks on various threats to messaging privacy around the world:

via Privacy International: It is easy to feel helpless in face of the many companies that profile us online. Esp when how they actually do this is complex & confusing!

via james: YourDigitalRights.org is proving useful to get companies with no “delete your account” button to delete my account after receiving a strongly worded email :)

via oisin: Here’s a nice privacy thing about cars.

via Dan Kennedy: News you can use. I took every recommended step with my Venmo account immediately.

via Robb Knight: This is cool. I project I built (and then sold to someone who abandoned it) has been resurrected and constantly updated for yearsL