https://docs.privatemode.ai/security/#verifiability

They've been around since the beginning of 2025 as far as I can say, but it's hard to find any information about them. Did anyone actually use them? Are they truly verifiable EE2E AI provider? Can't find any writeups on this service and they seem to be quite what I was waiting for since the beginning of the AI boom.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106215

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Even without personal details you can collect quite a lot of data - ip address that uses certain VPN account, which servers it talks to while using vpn, at what hours, at what intervals, also all the plaintext data exchanged between client and server. A lot of data that someone (who might already have your ip address mapped to your personal info, for example your ISP, or an online store where you shopped something before you turned on the VPN) would be willing to pay good money for. And companies like money.

How did they prove that? Is such proof even possible?

I've been on ubports for 3 years and while it also has some weird caveats like read only rootfs, no working package manager (due to read-only fs. however ubports has pretty cool support for lxc containers where you can use apt). Due to chronic lack of time I haven't been able to sit down on my phone to play with it a bit (for example id like to install waydroid), but it seems a lot easier than android. For example, while there isn't an app for call recording, some guy worked around it by writing a systemd user service as a workaround[1]. This is exactly the type of thing I'm thinking about when talking "linux phone".

For me as a linux user, the difference if ubports was a human, I'd think that perhaps they were sick, whereas if android was a human, i'd shoot them in the face :)

[1] https://forums.ubports.com/post/75157

I get that the distribution is geared towards steam+proton usage, but I was disoriented to see that one creates "an operating system for gamers", which will most certainly run a lot of windows executables, and then won't include wine in it. There is lutris preinstalled and the documentation also hints towards installing winezgui from their appstore (which is what I did), but I wonder why wasn't that obvious for the developers of bazzite that after installing the system, user would just want to download a game, double click the executable and play.

On the other hand, wine tends to be quite heavy package (503MB installed size according to arch repo), perhaps that's the reason for not including it.

My experience as a administrator has been pretty good, perhaps it's because from the beginning I was optimistic, it suited my needs as I wanted a selfhosted, modern and fairly convenient communication platform. From what I recall, most problems during configuration were caused mostly by bunkerweb (or rather my inability to correctly set it up to proxy requests correctly and not hijack the 4xx and 5xx HTTP codes). Synapse itself has been a pleasure to maintain, but also bear in mind that I did not tinker with with it, I basically set it up and let it run for about a year and then added MAS and livekit.

Yeah, disk usage sucks, for about 5-10 active users and 1.5 year usage my postgres "schemas" folder clocks at 10Gibs. It doesn't include the media_store catalog where synapse keeps media (images, videos). The homeserver is federated and I joined a couple of big rooms in the past. Mechanics mentioned in the links below do help though:

https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/v1.40/admin_api/purge_h...

https://github.com/matrix-org/rust-synapse-compress-state

Clientwise also sucks, but I think enough has already been said on this matter. But it's good enough to keep my nontechnical friends using it. They do hate it, but not enough to kick me in the arse. Would love to say that this proves that element clientside is usable, but I also have to admit that my friends are just hella good guys who would even write pigeon mail to me if I stopped using anything else for communication :) for me as a techie, element is obviously alright. Clunky, but works. I think clients simply need more time.

What irritates me is the Matrix authentication service (MAS), it's kind of a separate service for matrix homeservers that handles logins specifficaly. You can't use element X without it. However when it's enabled, you cannot log in from your client, instead a web browser opens and shows the login panel where you have to authorize, and then it should return to the client. Except in my case it simply doesn't :( I observed that for some reason chromium based browsers won't redirect back to the element app, and it doesn't know that the authorization has been granted. I managed to bypass it by copying the URL and opening it on firefox, but in one instance even that didn't work.

But other than that MAS problems everything has been fine from administration standpoint. I think it simply needs more time, as it already has traction, I see that a lot of new projects seem to include a matrix room in their social/communication channels, frequently it's the only option besides the bugtracker. And I'm willing to wait patiently :)

edit: added links for people who also struggle with disk space usage

Although it'd be great if you explained what exactly happened, perhaps it wasn't a result of taking vitamin D itself but rather some external thing. Judging by "painful experience" I assume kidney stones, which could be caused by too much calcium or genetic preference. not a doctor or an expert on the topic though, just open for a discussion :)

1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.

2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/signal-operating-costs/

Also PGP emails were just an idea that seemed the most basic for me to illustrate an example of selfhosted encrypted messaging. Probably they lack more security features than just post-quantum, compared to the other messengers anyway :)