I have had a very bad experience with Mailfence where emails from well-known domains do not arrive (no, not even in spam) and I never got any response from their support when I asked for their assistance to receive 2FA codes that I needed. Also, Indeed emails consistently show up in the spam folder, no matter how many times I mark them “not a spam”. Sure, I may not be a paying customer but why offer a free tier if you cannot provide a reliable service? This has caused problems for me and if I had known beforehand I would have went somewhere else.

I think it is naïve to assume that your product and vision would replace the existing commercial products and law enforcement strategies. IMHO, it is more likely this will simply end up existing alongside the stuff the exists today and what that means is that less powerful people and organizations now will also have access to this technology and will now be able to abuse it for a variety of motivations and agendas alongside the powerful organizations that are already abusing it (to some degree) today. In other words, IMO proliferation of this technology is not going to end up being anywhere close to a net positive.

I would rather put my trust in a good VPN provider than the big CAs. And HTTPS only and DoH is not going to protect you from fingerprinting using your IP address.

If you want to defend against fingerprinting, you should use multiple browsers to segment your browsing activity, not depend on one browser to have some kind of Wunderwaffen against fingerprinting. The idea is to not have your real identity tied to parts of your browsing activity that you want to keep private.

Personally, I do use Vivaldi as one of my browsers. I use it for accessing Apple services (e.g. iCloud Drive and Mail), but it is not one of my main browsers.

How is LineageOS without all the Google spyware not significantly different from a regular Google Android phone, of which you in the US at least cannot even unlock the bootloader of, let alone install an official Lineage OS port? Also, this is a $300 device, not a $1000 one. Just because you can buy a Pixel and, if you make sure you buy the correct one at least, can unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM if you have the skills and knowledge (and time) to do so, does not make this phone a “scam”.

There is a big difference between a product that is sold at a substantial premium and an actual scam. A scam would be someone selling some cheap Chinese phone rebranded as a privacy phone without any significant differences from a regular Google Android at $1000. This is clearly not that.

Yes, but where can you buy that Y28s with an AOSP ROM out of the box? Can you even install an AOSP ROM on it? Furthermore, those Asian phones likely will not work with US VoLTE. The whole point of this phone is that it is a solution for people who do not want to deal with flashing another ROM and want something that “just works”. Rob Braxman also sells Pixels with AOSP ROMs (previously CalyxOS, now something else, I believe). The point is not getting the best value or the most revolutionary or amazing device ever.

I normally don’t read it but another poster sometimes shares some of their articles on World News and I don’t think their world view exactly aligns with that of Axel Springer. Their articles sometimes can contain quite revealing information, so I think they should be read critically. I am running an ad blocker anyway so it is not like they are getting revenue from me.

Imagine if half of liberal America was prosecuted for calling Trump “orange cheeto” or saying he has small hands. WTF is this even.

How does Monero particularly help American money launderers as opposed to money launderers in general? Also, very strange to go look through someone’s comment history so you can use that to make some unrelated remark…

I just did some quick research on Matrix and it is even worse than I thought LOL. It was literally developed by a company that was originally founded in Israel and suspected by two different non-allied governments of espionage for the Mossad. And that is just what I could find within a couple minutes on Wikipedia.

cash benefits money launderers as well. What kind of argument is this even? I guess the government should just be able to track all your transactions all the time? Reminder that the government that is in power at the time in a given country decides what is and isn’t “illegal”.

The article focuses on Lower Saxony, which is in West Germany. These cases are not about inciting violence or denying a genocide but about saying something about a politician that that person doesn’t like. Many American liberals would be prosecuted under these laws right now for the stuff that is said on e.g. Reddit, presumably BlueSky and Lemmy.world. Reminder that this sort of stuff also affects pro-Palestine activists and in fact from what I gather that is in fact the case in Germany today.

Glad I am not banking with any of them.

It’s not owned by Meta and it’s relatively well-known. It’s older than Signal.

I don’t really understand the logic, but there are plenty of reasons to not be using Google Maps, so I will give my two cents.

I have had the best luck with MagicEarth. I still use Google Maps sometimes when I need to use the most reliable navigation or if MagicEarth can’t find something. When I was driving professionally I found out that sometimes MagicEarth (OSM) got residential addresses right when Google Maps did not but also vice versa. I have used HERE Maps (HereWeGo) in the past and also tried OSMAnd.

I bought an old Sony ereader on eBay a couple years ago but the battery is shot and apparently replacing it requires soldering?! I had been thinking about bringing it to a phone repair shop to get it fixed but now I think that is probably a no-go. Yesterday I researched how repairable the Kobo ereaders are and based on iFixit they seem pretty horrendous, even the newer Clara BW that has an OEM repair guide and official OEM parts available on iFixit (although it is marginally better than the old Aura HD). Now I am thinking I may just forego ereaders altogether. The repair situation with laptops, tablets and phones is bad enough nowadays. I don’t want anything to do with something even worse than that. I would get the PineNote but I am too poor to pay $400 for an ereader.

I have just been using my old iPad (with the low contrast feature enabled for bedtime reading) but obviously that is not great for privacy so I would have to use another device for some books. I could use an old OnePlus that I have but it has an AMOLED display so it’s not great for reading but maybe I can mitigate that with the right software and configuration.

I would just buy paper books but unfortunately that has its privacy issues as well, at least in my case. If one is in a shared living situation it can hard be to keep private what you are reading if other people are nosy. And even just buying paper books anonymously can be impossible if you cannot buy what you want to read with cash at a brick and mortar store. I have no idea how you anonymously order books online (and I am not talking about some dark web marketplace that accepts Monero and has 10 books). It is probably possible if you have enough money to throw at the problem, which I don’t.