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European Commission has a "Wifi4EU" initative, provides 93k high-speed private access points across the EU, free of charge.

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  • Isn't Lebara less than that per month and includes roaming?

    I need to have a provider that uses the EE network for coverage reasons, I'm with ecotalk at the moment but I think all EE based networks have a roaming charge. To be honest I didn't know it was even possible to get a SIM contract like this for £1.99.

  • Leaving the EU is one of the stupidest self harming things we ever did.

    Who are you?

  • UK if I have to guess.

  • I get that but what the European Commission would do with this info? They would be able to tell that you visited Berlin in May or that you went to Portugal in June. And... what? They will not sell this data to advertisers because that would be just stupid. Would they share this data with police? For what purpose? Would Ursula von der Leyen use it to track her political opponents? See where they went on holiday? What would be the point?

    If the ability to track citizens doesn't ring a bell for you I have a bridge to sell...

    Of course it will be abused, not by the king of Spain but surely by other more subtle and indirect means. Sometimes it's the paranoia of a leader, look up Stasi in East Germany, they knew loads about their citizens, and they used it in lots of bad ways.

    So freedom of not being tracked is something you shouldn't not want because why allow it in the first place?

  • If the ability to track citizens doesn't ring a bell for you I have a bridge to sell...

    Of course it will be abused, not by the king of Spain but surely by other more subtle and indirect means. Sometimes it's the paranoia of a leader, look up Stasi in East Germany, they knew loads about their citizens, and they used it in lots of bad ways.

    So freedom of not being tracked is something you shouldn't not want because why allow it in the first place?

    I think you're just confused about the purpose of this scheme. This is not a plan to connect everyone in EU to a WiFi routers controlled by the government. Mobile data plans in Europe are cheap, people don't use public WiFi when they walk around. This is aimed at people that travel abroad and non-EU tourists. Even the tweet says "stay connected wherever your travels take you". If your idea was to use some app to automatically connect to all available public WiFis all the time I agree it's a bad idea. It will leak your precise location to many different actors. But this is not the plan here. It's to offer WiFi when you're traveling. And guess what? Everyone knows already where you travel. You use your ID to checking into a flight, to register at a hotel, in many places you have to inform the police about your stay and pay some fees not to mention that you spend money all the time when you travel. Worrying about connecting to a public WiFi in other country because EU will track your MAC is some tinfoil hat level paranoia, that's it.

  • Title is wrong. It's an old initiative, not even funded anymore. Ran from 2018 to 2020 with 120 Million EUR.

    35E/month per access point for 3 years, it's not too bad if they got actual use, if that means where ever you go there will be free internet at hand that can be relied upon and that will even save the precious RF bandwidth of cell phone towers and reduces cell phone subscription by an equivalent amount

  • 35E/month per access point for 3 years, it's not too bad if they got actual use, if that means where ever you go there will be free internet at hand that can be relied upon and that will even save the precious RF bandwidth of cell phone towers and reduces cell phone subscription by an equivalent amount

    if that means where ever you go there will be free internet at hand that can be relied upon

    Yeah if that were the case it could be useful. Unfortunately the map looks pretty bad: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints

  • I think you're just confused about the purpose of this scheme. This is not a plan to connect everyone in EU to a WiFi routers controlled by the government. Mobile data plans in Europe are cheap, people don't use public WiFi when they walk around. This is aimed at people that travel abroad and non-EU tourists. Even the tweet says "stay connected wherever your travels take you". If your idea was to use some app to automatically connect to all available public WiFis all the time I agree it's a bad idea. It will leak your precise location to many different actors. But this is not the plan here. It's to offer WiFi when you're traveling. And guess what? Everyone knows already where you travel. You use your ID to checking into a flight, to register at a hotel, in many places you have to inform the police about your stay and pay some fees not to mention that you spend money all the time when you travel. Worrying about connecting to a public WiFi in other country because EU will track your MAC is some tinfoil hat level paranoia, that's it.

    My man, you're just digging in aren't you?

    They can track some specific things, how hard is that to understand? No one said Vad Der Leen is going to track your whereabouts, except you trying to decredibilise the fact that they can track you.

    That's it.

    I feel it's you dreaming up a world where it would be useful and forcing that idea upon me and then calling me a security freak and paranoid, I did never say they will do it, I just showed you an example where people did.

  • most having infinite data

    That's a bold claim. Do you have some official figures to back that up?
    Where I live, I don't know of anyone with truly unlimited mobile internet.

    The cheaper unlimited tariffs cost around €30, but have at least one of the following restrictions:

    • Speed limit after x volume used
    • Poor network coverage
    • <15MBit/s speed
    • Significantly increased costs after 2 years of contract term
    • Cancellation by provider if consumption is too high
    • only a few Gb at full speed included in EU roaming

    Genuine unlimited contracts with stable network coverage and 300 Mbit/s usually cost around €80-100 per month here. And unlimited EU roaming is still not included by default.

    That's a bold claim. Do you have some official figures to back that up?

    I somehow assumed that if we have reasonable plans, limits and laws in east europe, surely you have it better in central european hub, you know? But no, I lazied out on checking the official figures, but where I live, I rarely hear about someone paying for limited plan, it's just not worth it to save 10€ and worry about hitting walls.

    Speaking of slow speeds, I live in semi-rural area and here's my speedtest: https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/11047555422 (on 5G)

  • Forgive me for not covering 100% of this advanced topic in my 3 paragraphs on Lemmy... Nuance gets long, and most people have attention spans of a squirrel.


    maybe it’s hard to distinguish between google services, but if you play some online game, chat over whatsapp or signal, or have a voip call, that’s an entirely different story.

    Already covered as

    That leaves just the raw connection analysis…

    Where specifics can't be divined... but other details might.


    these can probably be told apart by DNS requests

    Addressed already with

    DNS by default is often plaintext. You can setup your device to use DoH or other encrypted versions of DNS.


    when having a voip call, through a service that supports peer to peer calls (most do, and it’s default on), an observer may even be able to deduct something about who you are speaking with, like what general area they live at.

    Actually this is quite unlikely. ASNs are not as structured as you think. It takes an external database that specifically tracks DHCP'd ISP addresses. Case in point, when I moved to my new house... Google maps though I was a good 60 miles away from where I was... it was after repeated access to google maps and other service for about a month before maps started getting accurate with where I'm accessing their service from.

    And that point is covered with

    It would take a bunch of external additional data to actually tie you to anything directly, eg server logs or other sources… which usually means more than one party is already working together against you. At that point you’ve got bigger issues usually.


    then what if you have apps that try to establish connections to services at home.

    If you purposefully steer your car off the road... of course you're going to crash. If you're going to expose non-encrypted things onto the internet...

    At that point you’ve got bigger issues usually.

    I would suspect the untrusted wifi to NOT be the leading thing you'd want to care about in this situation. But even then... I would start making reasonable assumptions such as you're likely on a DHCP connection without static addressing... your site and resources will rotate IPs every once in a while. Makes tracking you even harder.


    with HTTPS you leak your internal domain names because of TLS SNI.

    Encrypted SNI (ESNI) / Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) exists... Cloudflare for example supports ECH, and they transit a LOT of data.

    But once again... would be outside of the scope of discussion here. Yes... an ISP can make an educated guess of where you're likely to be going... and maybe even make a reasonable guess of what you could doing... But certainly not the details of it.


    And this all ignores the fact that a random coffee shop isn't going to do full packet inspection to get this data to begin with. It's not worth it for them. They gain very little from collecting meta data without some bigger company backing them to do so... Which falls under

    It would take a bunch of external additional data to actually tie you to anything directly, eg server logs or other sources… which usually means more than one party is already working together against you. At that point you’ve got bigger issues usually.

    Edit: Typo that changed meaning. Fixed.

    Forgive me for not covering 100% of this advanced topic in my 3 paragraphs on Lemmy...

    Quite obviously the problem is not that you did not write an 560 page essay, but that you were misleading by basically saying "nah, it's fine, nothing could leak, everything is ultra secure nowadays".

    If you purposefully steer your car off the road... of course you're going to crash. If you're going to expose non-encrypted things onto the internet...

    did you just ignore a whole lot of points here? DNS, SNI? smb clients? whatever else? its not like I'm using HTTP. things are largely encrypted, the rest is out of reach!

    Encrypted SNI (ESNI) / Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) exists... Cloudflare for example supports ECH, and they transit a LOT of data.

    how many sites exactly support that configuration? do you need additional configuration for that in e.g. nginx? if so, most selfhosters probably don't have it, because it's talked about almost nowhere.

    and is it finally enabled by default in firefox? will firefox just retry without encryption when the connection fails?

    But once again... would be outside of the scope of discussion here. Yes... an ISP can make an educated guess of where you're likely to be going... and maybe even make a reasonable guess of what you could doing... But certainly not the details of it.

    it is certainly in scope. the discussion is not about security and your accounts getting hacked by evil EU, but privacy and data mining, for which all of these is a treasure trove.

    And this all ignores the fact that a random coffee shop isn't going to do full packet inspection to get this data to begin with. It's not worth it for them.

    probably not the coffee shop but the networking equipment, where even cheaper models include some form of "smart cloud security"

  • Title is wrong. It's an old initiative, not even funded anymore. Ran from 2018 to 2020 with 120 Million EUR.

    One of their access points has saved my skin twice now in the past 2 months, so I'm happy it exists.

  • My city runs it's own wifi hotspots all over the city, and it is quite a nice feature, especially if your data plan isn't very good.

    Your city can probably afford it, but some can't, or won't. Initiatives like this get the ball rolling.

  • I'm sure we could invest in all of them and money wouldn't be the problem.

    So the initiative here is the initiative itself.

  • if that means where ever you go there will be free internet at hand that can be relied upon

    Yeah if that were the case it could be useful. Unfortunately the map looks pretty bad: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints

    They seem pretty evenly distributed to me ?

  • My man, you're just digging in aren't you?

    They can track some specific things, how hard is that to understand? No one said Vad Der Leen is going to track your whereabouts, except you trying to decredibilise the fact that they can track you.

    That's it.

    I feel it's you dreaming up a world where it would be useful and forcing that idea upon me and then calling me a security freak and paranoid, I did never say they will do it, I just showed you an example where people did.

    Sure, if you're just trying to say that they can technically do something you're right. I just thought that we're discussing if it's safe to use this service or not. The fact that they can technically track you is inconsequential to the security here but you're right, they can do it.

  • Forgive me for not covering 100% of this advanced topic in my 3 paragraphs on Lemmy...

    Quite obviously the problem is not that you did not write an 560 page essay, but that you were misleading by basically saying "nah, it's fine, nothing could leak, everything is ultra secure nowadays".

    If you purposefully steer your car off the road... of course you're going to crash. If you're going to expose non-encrypted things onto the internet...

    did you just ignore a whole lot of points here? DNS, SNI? smb clients? whatever else? its not like I'm using HTTP. things are largely encrypted, the rest is out of reach!

    Encrypted SNI (ESNI) / Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) exists... Cloudflare for example supports ECH, and they transit a LOT of data.

    how many sites exactly support that configuration? do you need additional configuration for that in e.g. nginx? if so, most selfhosters probably don't have it, because it's talked about almost nowhere.

    and is it finally enabled by default in firefox? will firefox just retry without encryption when the connection fails?

    But once again... would be outside of the scope of discussion here. Yes... an ISP can make an educated guess of where you're likely to be going... and maybe even make a reasonable guess of what you could doing... But certainly not the details of it.

    it is certainly in scope. the discussion is not about security and your accounts getting hacked by evil EU, but privacy and data mining, for which all of these is a treasure trove.

    And this all ignores the fact that a random coffee shop isn't going to do full packet inspection to get this data to begin with. It's not worth it for them.

    probably not the coffee shop but the networking equipment, where even cheaper models include some form of "smart cloud security"

    The fact that I addressed some of these items literally line by line and you bring it up again as if I didn't address it tells me that you're arguing in bad faith. Have a good day. Find someone else to complain to.

  • They seem pretty evenly distributed to me ?

    Sure there are a few everywhere, but the big gaps are the issue.

    For example in your screenshot if you zoom in on Poitiers you'll see there are none there, only in the two northern neighbor communes Neuville de Poitou and Jaunay-Clan. Similar for Nantes, none there, they are all in Saint-Sébastien-Sur-Loire and Thouaré-sur-Loire, the center and all the other suburbs have nothing.

  • Sure there are a few everywhere, but the big gaps are the issue.

    For example in your screenshot if you zoom in on Poitiers you'll see there are none there, only in the two northern neighbor communes Neuville de Poitou and Jaunay-Clan. Similar for Nantes, none there, they are all in Saint-Sébastien-Sur-Loire and Thouaré-sur-Loire, the center and all the other suburbs have nothing.

    Ah ok yes I see what you mean, Poitiers has none and is clearly some big place

    While "Le Bourg" probably a rich place, has a whole bunch of them

    Of course getting the density of Poitiers for all of Europe on 120 million for 3 years is never going to happen on this approach.

    Even though 35$/month per hotspot is reasonable. It's just not the right approach.
    In reality nearly every single building in Europe has an internet connection and wifi routers.

    Since there is not really such a thing as "keeping the RF spectrum of wifi to oneself"
    The logical approach would have been to socially engineer the default that ALL wifi hotspot would offer any random guest, free throttled courtesy internet access. Something that the ISPs have fervently opposed, something industry has made sure would not happen, at least not by accident. Through hardware design and the dissemination of horror stories. A more competent state would have used this money to just massage the existing infrastructure in opening up to their fellow citizens rather than try and build a parallel infrastructure with brute force money.

    I hope they get their shit together and strong arm vendors into a more pro-social private infrastructure, since that essentially free at this point for all intents and purposes.

  • Sure, if you're just trying to say that they can technically do something you're right. I just thought that we're discussing if it's safe to use this service or not. The fact that they can technically track you is inconsequential to the security here but you're right, they can do it.

    Yeah I was 100% into the technical details, I live in the EU and doesn't feel the surveillance state emerging quite just yet 😁cheers

  • That's a bold claim. Do you have some official figures to back that up?

    I somehow assumed that if we have reasonable plans, limits and laws in east europe, surely you have it better in central european hub, you know? But no, I lazied out on checking the official figures, but where I live, I rarely hear about someone paying for limited plan, it's just not worth it to save 10€ and worry about hitting walls.

    Speaking of slow speeds, I live in semi-rural area and here's my speedtest: https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/11047555422 (on 5G)

    Sorry, that wasn't meant to sound so accusatory. I guess I (and probably a lot of other downvoters) are just very frustrated because your assumption doesn't hold true, at least for Germany. I'm very envious of the Internet infrastructure that has been built in Latvia and Romania, for example. I would like to see the same here, but the government already considers 50 MBit DSL to be progressive.

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  • The Decline of Usability: Revisited | datagubbe.se

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    R
    I blame the idea of the 00s and 10s that there should be some "Zen" in computer UIs and that "Zen" is doing things wrong with the arrogant tone of "you don't understand it". Associated with Steve Jobs, but TBH Google as well. And also another idea of "you dummy talking about ergonomics can't be smarter than this big respectable corporation popping out stylish unusable bullshit". So - pretense of wisdom and taste, under which crowd fashion is masked, almost aggressive preference for authority over people actually having maybe some wisdom and taste due to being interested in that, blind trust into whatever tech authority you chose for yourself, because, if you remember, in the 00s it was still perceived as if all people working in anything connected to computers were as cool as aerospace engineers or naval engineers, some kind of elite, including those making user applications, objective flaw (or upside) of the old normal UIs - they are boring, that's why UIs in video games and in fashionable chat applications (like ICQ and Skype), not talking about video and audio players, were non-standard like always, I think the solution would be in per-application theming, not in breaking paradigms, again, like with ICQ and old Skype and video games, I prefer it when boredom is thought with different applications having different icons and colors, but the UI paradigm remains the same, I think there was a themed IE called LOTR browser which I used (ok, not really, I used Opera) to complement ICQ, QuickTime player and BitComet, all mentioned had standard paradigm and non-standard look.
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    B
    That’s not the right analogy here. The better analogy would be something like: Your scary mafia-related neighbor shows up with a document saying your house belongs to his land. You said no way, you have connections with someone important that assured you your house is yours only and they’ll help you with another mafia if they want to invade your house. The whole neighborhood gets scared of an upcoming bloodbath that might drag everyone into it. But now your son says he actually agrees that your house belongs to your neighbor, and he’s likely waiting until you’re old enough to possibly give it up to him.
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    J
    Copyright law is messy. Thank you for the elaboration.
  • The AI-powered collapse of the American tech workfoce

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    roofuskit@lemmy.worldR
    The biggest tech companies are still trimming from pandemic over hiring. Smaller companies are still snatching workers up. And you also have companies trimming payroll for the coming Trump recession. Neither have anything to do with AI.
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    L
    I made a PayPal account like 20 years ago in a third world country. The only thing you needed then is an email and password. I have no real name on there and no PII, technically my bank card is attached but on PP itself there's no KYC. I think you could probably use some types of prepaid cards with it if you want to avoid using a bank altogether but for me this wasn't an issue, I just didn't want my ID on any records, I don't have any serious OpSec concerns otherwise. I'm sure you could either buy PayPal accounts like this if you needed to, or make one in a country that doesn't have KYC laws somehow. From there I'd add money to my balance and send money as F&F. At no point did I need an ID so in that sense there's no KYC. Some sellers on localmarket were fancy enough to list that they wanted an ID for KYC, but I'm sure you could just send them any random ID you made in paint from the republic of dave and you'd be fine.
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    J
    This is why they are businessmen and not politicians or influencers