Exactly right. Facebook will factor this in as am expected cost of doing business (if they didn’t already) and their stock will go up. This isn’t a penalty, this is just like paying a bribe. In the end, both are just lining the pockets of officials more interested in appearing to do something for the next news cycle so they can get re-elected.
But if you don’t consent, do they still let you use their services? I’m going to bet that, at best, it’ll be designed to make users think they must consent to use the service.
I love how there’s a whole generation of people who think that we went straight from email to to Slack and Discord. There was a whole, vibrant, ecosystem of XMPP and IRC services before these walled gardens showed up and supplanted open protocols in order to data mine their users.
I’m preaching to the choir in here, obviously, but we’ve been preaching this gospel for years and nobody cared. Not looking so crazy now. Unfortunately, the damage is done. Privacy has lost.
For me the tipping point was when ads started becoming malicious. As long as ads are not static and are being served by unaudited and unregulated third parties, they have no home on my browser. I feel bad about it because I understand that some independent sites legitimately need the revenue but unless they provide information about how they vet their ad providers or they only serve static ads, I’m going to block them.
Don’t just comment and complain, contact your antitrust authority today: US:
EU:
UK:
India:
Email template:
I would like to bring your attention to Google’s recent proposal to add a feature to its Chrome (Chromium family) of browsers called Web Environment Integrity. This provides a mechanism to reinforce Google’s already dominant browser market position by creating a technological control that can be used to nullify a user’s choice of browser, device and operating system. This technology also has the potential for abuse by preventing users from using browser extensions that can enhance security by blocking unwanted and potentially malicious content, as well as browser extensions that help vulnerable users with enhanced accessibility needs, such as color blindness and visual impairment.
Google’s dominant, near-monopoly position in the browser market already harms me as a consumer by reducing browser choices and preventing a competitive market for developing new browsers. Allowing Google to include this feature will reduce my browser choices and consolidate the browser market even further, and it is incumbent on [INSERT AUTHORITY HERE] to take action against this abusive behavior.
Have used both Zabbix and Prometheus for this. Highly recommend Prometheus over Zabbix if you can afford the time to learn it. It’s a bit weird at first but it’s so much easier to extend and manage then Zabbix in my experience.
You will need to set up Grafana to go along with Prometheus. But, again, it’s so flexible that you will end up being happier with it.
I also can’t recommend greylisting enough. If you haven’t already enabled it in postfix I strongly suggest doing so. It’s one of the easiest ways to reduce spam. By simply bouncing emails from new sources the first time and forcing them to retry, it cut my spam tremedously.
I have my mail server set up as a catch all so you can send to anything at my domain and it’ll land in my inbox. I use this to create usage specific addresses. If it’s something I know will produce spam, I just dev null anything going to that address. I can then also track where a spam source originated. For friends and family who email me regularly; they also know to append the current year to my email address, this allows me to rotate my email address every year.
I also run spam assassin and implement greylisting as well as blocking IP ranges from countries I know I’ll never receive legitimate mail from… it’s been an evolution.
100%. I’ve been running my own mail server for 10-15 years now and you’re spot on. I’ve wanted to migrate it to a more modern platform but I’m loath to relive the process of configuring postfix and dovecot. DKIM/SPF and Let’s Encrypt certs for IMAPS were also a bit of a headache to get sorted, and warming up the sending IP so gmail would stop sending me to spam… but once that’s all sorted it’s been very very hands off. I log in once in a blue moon to update it but otherwise it just sits and does it’s thing.
I’ve argued this for point for so many years and have become exhausted to the point where I don’t even bother any more.
Free software advocates, God bless them, are fighting a good fight but we will never see the average computer user giving up functionality for the sake of some computing ideology; whether that ideology be free software, privacy or security focused. I’m glad some people are willing to do so as I believe strongly that the world would not be where it is today if it weren’t for it’s existence offer the last two or three decades. But the reality is that 90% of the world views computers, phones and tablets as tools; a means to achieving an end, not the end in and of itself. There may be some subset of people who are willing to give up some convenience or utility if they believe strongly enough in one of these ideologies, but most of them will never care about the license of their software as long as it gets the job done. But this is precisely why we need people who do care about these ideologies because software freedom ultimately is important and people do benefit from it. It just needs to be as good as, if not better than, it’s non-free counterparts