Onihikage

I agree, investing in a company is fine. It’s when you have the ability to trade your investment without any consequence whatsoever that the madness begins. Investment is supposed to be risky for both the company and the investor! But we’ve managed to externalize that risk into a market in which no single actor can be held responsible when a company is looted and destroyed by greed. Publicly-traded shares are now an entirely tax-free substitute for money - but only for the rich who have turned this system into a game to enrich themselves.

My favorite response to that currently is "Okay, send me your email password and show me all your credit cards. Oh, why not? You’ve done nothing wrong, so you have nothing to hide, right?

Audile is on F-droid, though it uses AudD for the actual music recognition backend. I’m not sure it’s possible to have a FOSS backend for this kind of service.

The dreaded onosecond happens to the best of us.

Try clicking the sign in button, then navigating back to the video without actually signing in. Seems to work every time I’ve tried it so far.

It’s an intersection of two well-known memes, the first being a particular Nancy comic strip and the latter being Loss. Funnily enough, it’s actually featured in the KYM article on the Nancy strip.

Yep. In fact, Amazon devices can connect to other Amazon devices over their Sidewalk meshnet and get the wifi password that way. I’m never getting anything from Amazon more complicated than a screwdriver.

Tweet not found, not even when I change the URL to go directly to Twitter. Was it deleted?

Router-level VPN is going to be more difficult to configure and cause more problems than just having it on all your devices. There are some games where online play just refuses to work if connecting through a VPN. Some mobile apps are the same. When a website blocks your currently selected server, and the usual solution is switching to another server, that’s going to be more difficult and more tedious when it’s configured at the router level. In addition, if you do something like using a self-hosted VPN in order to connect remotely to a media server on your home network, that becomes more difficult if your home router is on a different VPN.

If you’re trying to keep local devices in the building from phoning home and being tracked, a PiHole or router-level firewall might be a better solution. I think if you’re running a pfsense or opnsense router and are a dab hand with VLANs then maybe you could get what you’re looking for with router-level VPN, but it’s a huge hassle otherwise. Just put Mullvad on your computers and phones and call it a day.

Web ads are a security risk that even the FBI has acknowledged, so your friends should be aware that having uBlock Origin installed is nearly as important as having virus protection.

Regarding profiles, having two is generally recommended - your main profile with no Google services, and a secondary profile only for apps that absolutely require Google Play Services. Personally, I just dump everything in one profile and deny nearly every permission to anything Google, and on top of the sandboxing that’s enough of an improvement over stock Android that I don’t bother with two profiles.

They advertise E2EE as a feature

They can call it E2EE as much as they want, but it’s a lie. It’s encrypted in transit and at rest, at least on the user’s device, but unlike true E2EE, they can decrypt and view any conversation they want to.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-privacy-protections-for-its-2-billion-whatsapp-users

I wouldn’t trust any phone with GrapheneOS preloaded unless it was directly sold by GrapheneOS themselves. Especially not from a site that phrases things in an almost uncanny way.

You can add swipe (glide?) typing into HeliBoard. From their github readme:

• Glide typing (only with closed source library ☹️)
  • library not included in the app, as there is no compatible open source library available
  • can be extracted from GApps packages (“swypelibs”), or downloaded here (click on the file and then “raw” or the tiny download button)

The only reason HeliBoard doesn’t include this themselves is presumably legal liability plus their dedication to the app not having any network permissions at all.

Someone is bound to start selling conversion kits for regular cars eventually - turn your 20 year old gas dinosaur into a zippy EV or hybrid, no spyware required. We can already do it with two-wheelers, and Edison Motors is well on their way to making kits to turn big trucks into hybrids.

Odysee takes a lot of curation to even be usable. You can block whole channels easily and they won’t show up for you anywhere, but once you’ve blocked all the RWB you’re left with mostly tech, gaming, and reactions. And this is despite Odysee/LBRY having been around for years.

This is the one of the few real things that make VPNs a security tool - security from thugs using a MITM attack on your phone. This is also a reason to avoid SMS messaging and port your number to a VoIP service instead of a direct cellular number, as VoIP traffic would be routed over the encrypted VPN tunnel with everything else instead of through the traditional cell network which is vulnerable to these attacks.

If government agents want to know what you’re saying and doing without your consent, you should leave them no choice but to get a warrant and do some actual work.

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol, hypermedia, and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. It allows users to host and receive content in a manner similar to BitTorrent.

Not at all - you could just be a US citizen coming back from a brief trip across the border.

A few congress critters have been trying to get bills passed to curtail this overreach for almost a decade, but unless I missed the news, none of them have succeeded.

A few months ago, Proton’s CEO Andy Yen was interviewed on The Linux Experiment and reiterated in the segment starting at 49:27 that he does want to have an F-Droid version, but because Proton encrypts notifications sent through Play Services such that Google can’t get at the metadata, and because third-party notification frameworks are typically much worse for battery life than Play Services, they consider F-Droid a lower priority than some of the other things they’re trying to get done, such as feature parity between their mobile and desktop apps. It’ll come eventually, especially as Yen himself seems to want it, but since they’re completely private and have no investors, they don’t have infinite money for developers, so they have to prioritize sustainable growth.

Highly recommend watching the full interview, Yen seems to have a good mindset about the whole thing, doing what he feels is best for privacy and ownership of identity in the long run, even if he has to temporarily compromise in some places in order to get there.