YouTube has been cracking down on alternative frontends.

Vanilla Invidious currently doesn’t work well,
so most hosters paused and/or gave up.

Fijxu runs a fork of Invidious,
with their own modifications implemented to circumvent the blocks,
here’s the source code if you’re interested:
https://git.nadeko.net/Fijxu/invidious

I’ve got big respect for Fijxu,
he’s been doing a very good job of keeping Invidious alive + fighting against the YouTube crackdown lately, basically all on his own.

If you can please consider:

• Donating for their work/hosting
• Hosting their fork on your own
• Solving open issues with pull requests to their fork

All the above can help Fijxu,
since currently he’s mostly fighting a big tech giant all on his own.

I believe Briar currently is one of the best options out there, together with SimpleX.

However I lack usage experience with both.
Since no one I know makes use of them…

It was already hard enough to convince only a handful of my friends to start using Session and Matrix/Element (which are not the best options anymore), but I’m kinda doubtful about my success rate of making them switch once again…

My success with convincing people to use Telegram has been better though, since that’s the most commonly known, but nearly no one wants to install an app they never heard off before, just to chat with only me :P

Also “convincing people” lately goes smth like this for me:

• Do you have WhatsApp or Messenger so I can send you some pictures?
• No I don’t use apps that do not respect my privacy, but you can send em to me through SimpleX, Briar, Session, Matrix/Element, Telegram, Discord or email :P
• Upon which most choose Telegram or Discord as their means to contact me, sadly no one had Briar/SimpleX yet.

*Don’t Use Session,
if your threat profile includes government’s spending ±100k to crack your encryption, since their encryption is not the best out there.

Which they likely won’t for an average privacy conscious user, but they might for high ranking criminals.

It was a good read though,
I won’t invite new people to Session due to it.

But the title is a little click-baity,
“Session’s encryption is not the best”,
would be a more honest title.

Lately these lyrics come to mind ever more often:

White Americans, what?
Nothing better to do.
Why don’t you kick yourself out?
You’re an immigrant too.

Song: The White Stripes - Icky Thump

deleted by creator

Are you certain that they still are voting this week?

Nvm, indeed the timeline on Patrick Breyer’s site mentions:
12 December 2024: EU interior ministers to confirm mandatory chat control (chat control 2.0) proposal https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/#timeline

Are you certain that they still are voting this week?

I thought it was last week and that it was stopped again (for now at least),
see the message by Patrick Breyer here: https://lemmy.ml/post/23312136

But if you still want to take action anyways, which can’t hurt,
I’ve found following Change.org petitions regarding it:

• https://www.change.org/p/against-the-adoption-of-mass-surveillance-of-messengers-e-mail-and-chats-in-the-eu
• https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-defend-our-privacy-vote-no-to-chat-control
• https://www.change.org/p/stoppt-die-chatkontrolle-grundrechte-gelten-auch-im-netz

Afaik Qubes runs all software in containers,
which isolates them from each other,
which is great for privacy.

However, OP only asked for Chrome,
and I assume the jump to Qubes might be too big.

To only isolate Chrome,
I’d recommend a Flatpak instead.

Or even better Ungoogled-Chromium.

Regarding AI, I filled it in as following:

• What is most important to you right now about technology and the internet?
  • Other (please specify): Fuck AI
• In your opinion, what is the most important work for Mozilla to do right now?
  • Other (please specify): Do not implement AI
• What is most important to you in AI?
  • Select nothing

SearXNG: https://github.com/searxng/searxng

It enhances and respects privacy,
is open source and self hostable,
and queries multiple configurable search engines (google, bing, brave, duckduckgo, …)

You can find a list of public hosted instances here:
https://searx.space/

However I prefer to slap an instance randomizer on top, so each of my queries goes through another public SearXNG instance, for more privacy, and mostly, to bypass rate-limiting after frequent queries.

For this I use:

• On Desktop - GimmeASearX:
  https://github.com/demostanis/gimmeasearx
• On the go - SearX NeoCities:
  https://searx.neocities.org/

I like the hammermann concept the most,
it looks more professional then Diego’s,
very clean and modern looking :)

Imagine living in China,
where the government is able to request data of each company in their country.

Imagine that China would setup an AI/LLM, to feed all private chat data into it,
and automatically flagging opposition of the government regime.

Imagine a white van appearing in front of your house and disappearing into a concentration camp because you got flagged after expressing your opposition to the government to your mate in a private chat.

All collected data can be abused like that,
or by other means (E.g. a country at war gets hacked, which could lead to leaking critical private information on political/defensive decisions).

To me the question is not if data collected on you will be abused, but rather when will it be abused?

Just having it stored somewhere imposes risks.

Privacy should be a basic human right.
Data collection could be massively abused by oppressive governments.

Not caring about it = Not caring about your rights.

Sure hope so.

Would be handy if they included a pre-written pdf to oppose this proposition + emails or forms to easily submit your opposition to each of the countries.

Instead it’s a general “contact your government”,
which 99% of normal people do not know how to do, me included.

Never give up,
each eye you poke out is one less they can use for data collection.

It’s a slow process and they’ll grow more eyes,
but the less they have on you,
the more private you’ll be.