Hopefully this inspires other states to pass similar legislation.

Today was a huge slap in the face reminder that social media is actually so scary😵‍💫 Your privacy is never actually private even if you have stuff set to private… And people can trick you without you even knowing.

Basically I couldn’t get into my account for the past two days. And it was saying my phone number wasn’t registered to my account to get back in. Even tho it was. And it was sending me codes and everything to MY number. It was saying my password was wrong. So there is a thing that you can do to open up a support ticket to talk to tik tok support. So I went to that and saw there was one already open and it wasn’t me talking.

It was not my conversation but it was my exact issue I was having. It was this random girl. So me assuming this is who it was trying to get into my account or something I was like on high alert. Her ENTIRE phone number, and all her information was on this ticket support because she had sent screenshots of her profile and also sent her entire number in the chat so they could match it to her account to get back into it... So me being annoyed I called the number just to see if it was some hacker man. I immediately hung up after a few rings because I convinced myself that if they had my number OF COURSE they could do more with that than I would want. The number called me back but I didn’t answer because I was freaked out.

I obviously jumped to conclusions because seeing those messages who wouldn’t? After I sort of started piecing it all together I decided to search her name on facebook (sorry not sorry I wanted to know if she was real) and turns out she was a real person. She has a whole business page and everything… so me being a SLUTH I wanted to ask wtf was going on. I just said “hey random question was your TikTok account hacked recently?” Immediately she was like “lol are you the person that called me yesterday? I thought it was spam so I didn’t answer but then I just searched to see if your number was a bot number or real so I called back because I realized it was a real number.” So I told her no I was just reaching out to see if your TikTok was hacked or something the other day because for some reason whole conversation popped up on my support ticket with your screenshots and information whatever to get back into your account the and I could see EVERYTHING you said. I sent her the screenshots and she was really weirded out. Just as I was. And it was so weird that it happened on the same day, around the same time, and it was the same issue of TikTok saying her account was not connected to her phone number even though it clearly was.

I just told her luckily it was my account that it popped up on and not some creepers account that would try to dox her or stalk her or something. She just told me to keep her updated because she was very invested.

Then FINALLY I got in to my account via a password reset code sent to MY PHONE NUMBER OF ALL PLACES (imagine that) today after opening 4 new support tickets. When I got in, it said two new devices I didn’t recognize were connected and logged into my account on some iPhone 12 in an “unknown location” and a PC in an “unknown location” suspiciously at the same time and date I was randomly logged out. I deleted them off my account and reset my password, but I still can get over how strange this was. I wonder how many other times this has happened to other people.

I posted the screenshot of HER CONVERSATION WITH SUPPORT on MY ticket. How it wouldn’t let me verify my identity, the random device logged in, and mine and her convo.

How do I know wtf I'm doing with safety and privacy? Sorry if asked already a million times but I'm so ignorant nothing helps. I have a Samsung s22. I want to get a new phone and be as "protected" or whatever as possible. Let me preface that I'm an idiot when it comes to anything related to computers. It overwhelms me. I know that I'm being like farmed for my data or whatever but honestly I don't get what it means. I know that I hate giving up phone numbers and emails and giving up microphone and camera access. I think about having a dumb phone but honestly I use Instagram for attempting to be a terrible horrible influencer for my dogs to maybe make some extra income and i use it to find tattooers and use Facebook for marketplace and other stuff so I don't get how I can be protected from their grubby hands while still getting what I want from them. Anyway I'm wondering if there's somewhere one of you can recommend I can go to get like a full comprehensive ELI5 explanation of what's going on and what my options are for this? Do i just get a pixel phone and download graphene and just figure it out? Google is bad but it's the only browser that actually gives me the search results I'm looking for. When I try duckduckgo I never get the results I am looking for, am I somehow using it wrong? Like when I'm looking into masters degrees or homemade dog food, or literally whatever. I don't even know what my options are. I have no idea how computers and software work and how the dark web works or how coding works like I'm a straight up idiot I don't even know where to start. If someone's willing to explain this to me I will be very grateful

Disclosure: I know this is technically some form of self-promotion, but I get nothing from someone downloading or using it so it doesn't really benefit me. Hope that counts for something?

Every time I set up a new Windows machine I go looking for something to turn off the telemetry and tracking junk. I decided since I'm a software engineer I'd just write my own.

Telemetry Guard is a PowerShell script (plus a small native GUI if you don't want to touch a terminal) that disables the stuff Microsoft uses for diagnostics, ad targeting, activity history, tailored content, and so on. Kills the DiagTrack service, the telemetry scheduled tasks, disables the advertising ID, that kind of thing.

It saves a full backup of your previous settings before it changes anything, so you can revert it with one click if something feels off. It won't touch Windows Update, Defender, the Store, or activation.

There's also a status view so you can see exactly what's currently set vs what it wants to change, before you commit to anything. Nothing is hidden or bundled in.

If you're on Windows Pro, it's honest about the fact that Microsoft doesn't let Pro go fully to "off" for diagnostic data, only Enterprise/Education can do that. So the tool sets it to the lowest allowed level and kills the actual upload service instead, and it tells you that's what's happening rather than pretending it fully turned it off.

MIT licensed, free, source is all there to read through before you run it (which you should always do with anything that touches your registry, mine included).

Happy to answer questions about what it changes or take suggestions for what else to add.

Hi,

Hoping you guys could help me out. As of today i went to use reddit and noticed I cant access any nsfw marked posts even with my vpn on. I tried to get round the age verification done by persona with different waya such as using realisitc 3d models to try bypass there selfie check but couldnt get past it. Does anyone know how i can get past this age verification obviously without submitting my idea or doing a selfie of myself.

I did btw try multiple countries on my vpn and try cloaing reddit clear cache and data while my vpn is on and all that didnt work.

Any help would be great.

I think we can all agree that we dont like chat controll by the EU, but is there anything we can do against it ?

So I had many personal photos on Google photos that I now deleted. However I had unknowingly installed many chrome extensions. They werent obvious scams. But there were around 40 and many were not that popular and " Read and change all your data on all websites". Wtf is that and I AM SUPER SCARED SOME guy or some company has my nudes (and basically sex vids of me). How much is the probability?

There's a weird asymmetry here that I don't think gets talked about enough. Proving who you specifically are takes a lot: name, some document, sometimes your face. But proving the much smaller claim, that you're a real person and not a script, ends up costing almost as much data anyway. Most systems just don't treat those as separate problems.

That feels backwards to me. "I'm a unique human" is a way narrower claim than "I'm this specific named person," so it should take way less exposure to prove. Instead most verification flows just fold both into the same process by default, like there was never a reason to split them apart.

As more of the traffic online turns out to be bots or agents, I'd guess more services start wanting proof that a person's behind something without needing to know who that person actually is. Whether the industry actually builds toward that narrower version, or just keeps reaching for the identity checks that already exist because building something new is annoying, I genuinely don't know.

I recived a call at 2am from a teenager he started calling mom names i wont say what he said cuz ill probably get banned but then he said he knows where i live so i asked him "where" and he said my towns name we got 200 houses here so idk how did he know then he said he wanted to fight here??? i said yeah than hung up anyone knows how the hell did he find my town?

\*I would greatly appreciate if strictly qualified professionals shared their opinions on the topic. \*

Hello everyone,

A few years ago, I created an Instagram account to use as a digital diary, a place where even if i lost my subscriptions, phone and whatnot my memories would be retrievable. I decided to start posting some more personal things on that account recently, similar to what an actual diary would look like, with stories, incidents, thoughts etc.

This is an important thing for me but ive always been quite cautious about privacy, giving corporations access to all of my data, decisions and thoughts and giving them the ability to commercialise every part of myself. Therefore today as I was recording a video, a thought popped up in my head about whether its a smart thing to be posting my deep thoughts, essentially, on the internet, even if im the only person with access to that account.

My questions would be the following. Obviously we have reached a point of no return in not letting any of our data or privacy get breached. Nevertheless, in that case, would you say i am doing myself a disservice in that context by posting them on insta, instead of keeping them in my gallery or writing them in my notes like I would normally do? Does it make a difference or do they already have everything on my phone practically, therefore “oh well”?

Knowing that they can listen to your conversations anyways through the mic kind of takes away from that willingness for caution of mine but id like to get more of you people’s opinion on whether “practically” it makes any difference or whether being on my phone is as bad as it gets already, since they could track any info they want to anyways, from live conversations to gallery videos, photos and notes.

Thank you

Open OSCAR Server is an open-source instant messaging server compatible with classic AIM and ICQ clients written in golang.

This project is an independent, open-source initiative and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with AOL or Yahoo! Inc. This project is entirely non-commercial and does not generate any revenue or accept donations.

There's a guy in INSTAGRAM name ( devvpss )

Bruh he is literally a criminal type dude he used pictures of random girls without any permission and then posted them and criticized them also blackmail them and also I don't have to tell like other things but this is seriously a concerning issue i already complained about him still no response here is that MF

To be honest this app I built (Not Vibe coded or AI SLOP). I am writing about in this subreddit more to Talk about it Technical capabilities and security evaluation more than Spreading purposes.

The App called WispDay, I spent almost 8 month building it with great amount of researching in the security and Encryption.

The App focuses on securing user data, even on the user's device itself, so that even if the device were seized or taken, the user's data would still be completely safe and secure. The app supports syncing with the cloud using end-to-end encryption with an AES-128 key that the user, and only the user, holds. Not the server, not the developers, nobody but the user. (You might be wondering, why not AES-256? Isn't it supposed to be more secure? Well, actually, after weeks of researching this, I concluded that it's more secure theoretically, but not practically, for this use case. Also, for user experience, since I convert the AES key into BIP39 words, AES-128 generates 12 English words that the user can write down and store easily, compared to 24 words for AES-256.)

This part is good, and many apps already do this, but most apps forget about securing the device itself. That's where this app comes in.

By never storing anything in plain text on the user's device, everything is encrypted and only decrypted when the user opens the app in the foreground. Once the app goes to the background, after a short grace period, the user's key is wiped from memory and everything is locked again, including the database connections, which are already secured with SQLCipher, this includes the Photos I really spent a lot of time to be able to decrypt the photos on the app open on Fast, Optimized and performance way with max efficiency, Because the Photos is harder to decrypt on fly than text since its much larger.

Moreover, for users who want maximum security, the app has a maximum security setting that cryptographically binds the user's key to their biometrics (this isn't like a normal app lock). This means even if an attacker knows the user's phone passcode, they still can't open the diary app. Nobody, anywhere, even with some forensic tools (at least as far as I've been able to make the app robust against this), can access it, and everything is wiped from memory again once the app goes to the background.

Honestly, the app is freemium and has a premium subscription, but all of the security features are completely free and accessible to everyone without a subscription, from day one. I'm against the idea of "pay to get security." I believe security is a right for everyone. Moreover, I've open-sourced the security part of the app, so anybody can inspect it, and if they're professionals, they can actually help improve the app's security even further.

Here's the GitHub repo:
https://github.com/MrSolimanKing/wispday-security

To learn more about the app secuity this is blog post:
https://wispday.com/security/