The world can no longer trust American tech. If that sounds dramatic, take a step back and consider the facts. The United States is a nation in the thrall of authoritarianism, owned and operated almost completely by a far-right doomsday cult intent on betraying every alliance, every contract, every promise
  • The Bard in Green ( thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz ) English
    7·
    2 years ago

    It’s Trump-proofish

    • I approve of Matrix and Nextcloud.
    • Proton unfortunately is probably the easiest option for now. We need better self hosted / anonymous email servers, but spammers and scammers have probably ruined that for everybody forever and fuck them all to hell for that. Best option is to just abandon email for anything sensitive.
    • All the alternative social media is better, but they can still absolutely feed the lot of it into an LLM and then ask the LLM to print out a list of “likely dissidents.” I would be shocked if this isn’t coming soon to a United States near you - then again, I’m one to talk posting this on Lemmy, using a username I’ve used for close to two decades, from an instance that runs on a server I rent from a corporate cloud host.
    • OS should be Whonix, Tails or Qubes.
    • Browser should be Tor Browser (or at least get a mention). PRACTICALLY, for most people, I would recommend Brave over LibreWolf (for reasons of stability, compatibility, more frequent security patches and the fact that the Mozilla project has been unfortunately going to shit lately). Yes the company sucks, but the browser consistently scores top marks on real world privacy and security tests.
    • No mention of FDE or post quantum crypto. Quantum chips are coming effing fast, if they’re not already here. I have reason to believe both the US and China can currently make practical use of Shor’s algorithm, although only in a targeted and VERY expensive way… but Moore’s Law man, plus I can’t prove it and I can’t say more. Post quantum doesn’t seem to be on most people’s radar (most troublingly, the Tor project).
    • Anything to do with phones is literally fucked, like “This is fine” dog level fucked. If you MUST be mobile (like basically everybody trying to do basically anything), you must accept you’re probably NOT really fascist proof, unless you go to some pretty extreme lengths and REALLY know what you’re doing.

    As far as your average normie (or even above average competence tech saavy user) goes, this is close to as Trump proof as you’re likely to get right now without help and support. So great, but it has holes in it a fascist regime could drive a brigade of tanks through, and unless you EITHER have that help and support OR really know what you’re doing, you should be thinking about that REALLY hard, every day.

    We collectively decided decades ago that centralized services are more convenient and better able to connect us to the people and content we want to be connected to (although we were very deliberately herded in that direction by oligarchs). Now we will pay the price.

    tl:dr; The only infrastructure we can trust is our own. Not liking that, and not having the skills or resources to do anything practical about it (tragically, terrifyingly) doesn’t make it not true. Plus needing to stay connected to the people and resources we can ONLY access through third party services and infrastructure, continues to make us reliant on those services and infrastructure, unto our own ruin.

    • ReakDuck ( ReakDuck@lemmy.ml ) 
      1·
      2 years ago

      Im trying to find a replacement for Proton, as the new CEO likes trump and seems pretty far right…

      I am afraid that they will start enshitification soon

    • madame_gaymes ( madame_gaymes@programming.dev ) English
      1·
      2 years ago
      • Chromium forks are troublesome. I’d suggest Mullvad Browser or LibreWolf instead.
      • Qwant is nice, but SearXNG aggregates qwant together with several other engines. Then there’s a new up-and-comer called Mwmbl.
      • Proton is yet another ecosystem that pretends to be for privacy while actually doing the opposite. Instead, Tuta or Mailbox (only downside to mailbox is no free accounts).
      • No comment on payment systems, I don’t trust any of them except maybe a local Credit Union.
      • Practically any Linux, don’t limit suggestions to one distro when there are many with varied support and out-of-the-box options.
      • Mullvad VPN + Mullvad Browser were made for each other, browser being co-developed with Tor Project, and is the highest rated in terms of defeating browser fingerprinting (even over Tor), and they have pioneered DAITA. I see many, many mixed thoughts on Surfshark. It is mainly a cheap and better alternative to Nord or Proton, but Mullvad is only $5/mo and you get so much more.

      None of the above are USA-based apart from Mwmbl, but it is non-profit and wholly FOSS.

      Test your browser fingerprints: