Nix and related tools just brings up the interactive man pages. I hate it!!! Stop making me rtfm

I once dm’d the maintainer of an open source project who got kind of upset at me for not posting an issue in GitHub. I got it, it made sense and the guy explained that it was all about visibility.

Name and shame!

Well that was a trash take.

I’m not judging, not sure how or why you think you’re failing but it’s not coming from me!

I’m like you, I use Bear for when I’m lazy and emacs for everything else. Two polar opposites but at least with Bear I can collaborate with my wife without complication.

I looked at their test app and nothing looks like zero knowledge to me in the settings. The closest thing I see is private vault but that just sounds an extra layer of password locking (and encryption too) but not in a way that would prevent the company itself to see its contents (confirmed here). The dev in that thread failed to disabuse the user of that notion will leads me to believe the term is being knowingly misused.

Zero knowledge is supremely annoying to implement and also very risky because if your users lose access to their private encryption key that they have to write down during signup, their data cannot be retrieved and it’s gone forever. That means if you specifically were using that feature, you would know it from all the nagging during signup about those risks.

And again, there’s a very simple way to test this. Just try logging in from a new device. You should not be able to see any decrypted notes without either entering in that private key or having another device be online to share it. If you’re thinking maybe the private vault is a secret key only you have, just see the github issue above. It’s not.

Having said all that…

I’m not advocating for zero knowledge in every service. I mentioned it because the marketing bugged me and felt misleading. I honestly have no idea if their app is good or not but it does look pretty. Just make sure you trust them with what you’re putting on their servers.

/edit I’m sorry I want to make sure I’m not spreading misinformation and stumbled on this thread where the author claims they cannot read any of the users’ data on their servers but then everyone else in the comments is debating whether it’s just end to end encryption or some other derivative marketing term. Honestly I’m just gonna say it “I don’t know”. If it’s zero knowledge and you didn’t get a special string on top of your password then that means your password is your key and password resets should be impossible or come with a side of “losing all of your notes”.

That’s fine, I was just trying to add the the conversation.

There’s this page that actually explains the encryption as it is: https://vericrypt.notesnook.com/ Zero knowledge is mentioned here and in a few other places. They’re misusing the term as a marketing device, knowingly or not I couldn’t say.

As for how I know? It’s easy enough to check zero knowledge by logging into the service. If a password is enough to display your notes, the service is not zero knowledge. There should be a second set of credentials known only to the user that gets entered with each new login to actually decrypt the contents of your notes. If you’ve ever used matrix chat you would either enter in the private key yourself or match some emojis on an already authenticated client that would then pass that private key in a peer-to-peer fashion.

I haven’t verified this myself but I can clearly see from the website how the encryption is described vs the marketing terms being used.

Notesnook makes that claim. Why wouldn’t you consider that relevant when it’s the first thing you’re presented with on their website? And don’t even mention self hosting, that’s not only the last item on their roadmap but it’s also been there for a very long time with no updates.

Not sure why you’re getting defensive, this has nothing to do with you.

Just fyi notesnook is not really “zero knowledge”. They’re misusing that term.

So, actual locker room talk then?

is that even legal??

I have no idea but the whole experience was so surreal…while navigating the myriad of places it might be I noticed that clicking certain links would automatically sign you up for new services and newsletters. I should blog about it.

ehhh? I have no idea how a bug like that happens, it could be my paranoia watching these huge companies play with their consumers that way to not believe it was a bug, but if you read the whole article that “bug” didn’t happen to everyone’s iPhone and Apple responded saying they were “investigating” the issue but never really commented on it afterwards.

That’s what makes me think it was a bug. So I did have analytics and significant locations turned on but the latter is encrypted and sent to Apple but cannot be used by them, only by your device. The analytics though I’m sure I turned off.

Interesting. still annoying tho especially with the whole Flipper Zero shenanigans.

This one is stupid on Apple’s part. They’re definitely trying too hard to protect their users from technology and it’s driving me mad to be honest. I know for a fact some of my calendar events are disappearing (because they end up in calendar trash) but have no idea why or which device is causing it and I’m really just about to go all in on thunderbird and say fuck it.

The last article I get but the analytics being reenabled was a bug right? I say this as someone who has done every manner of transfer, upgrade and OS update possible on all manner of Apple devices…my settings have never been changed.

One thing they did do recently maybe is flip the checkboxes for analytics to be automatically enabled when they’ve had it opt in for like a decade. Definitely not happy about that.

Bluetooth and WiFi never turns back on unless you’re doing it from the control center…in which case it doesn’t really turn off so much as disconnect you from your current AP and put Bluetooth in low energy mode.

If I’m wrong I want to know. I recently went nuclear on Microsoft’s privacy team for constantly emailing me promotions despite being unsubscribed to everything. I’m on a list now where even if I do sign up for a newsletter, I won’t receive it lol.

/edit Jesus what the fuck. My settings got reset! Thanks for the heads up…wtf is this shit??

Apple reenabled what settings?

Maybe you’re a dev on the Reddit team and own a lot of shares for what you know is about to go public?