I’m not super knowledgeable on how anonymous such routing us, hence I avoid it.

Don’t know why people bombarded you so much - the other side of total anonymity is that you really never know if anything got broken and someone earned off it.

My suggestion, however, is to use Monero for payments, and not as a store of value.

Monero transactions consume orders of magnitude less energy than Bitcoin’s thanks to an ASIC-resistant algorithm

Well, unlike Bitcoin, Monero is actually anonymous, and sometimes you gotta make payments online.

You can’t do it privately with your card.

(not me downvoting)

I understand the concern with locally made software. However, I’d rather see something open-source come from the US than something closed source come from my own country.

Speaking of Konqueror, what about Falkon? It is the newer option by KDE team, and works on a more modern engine. And, it works on Windows.

Of course I mean pure ungoogled Chromium, without bloat on top.

Not only browser code consists of millions of lines, it is also audited by thousands of people, and, importantly, changes can be highlighted, which doesn’t allow for them to go unnoticed.

Successful mass attacks with OSS typically require much more skill and resources as you need for you malicious code to be written in a way that stays unnoticed (and eventually, rather soon, it will be discovered, with all consequences).

With closed source programs, integrating malicious code is easy, and this code can stay there unnoticed for ages, so they are 100% “trust me bro, I don’t do anything bad”.

So, yes, OSS is more secure.

Firefox is open source, and while it takes some shady practices to fund it (it sure isn’t cheap to run your own damn engine alongside everything on top), I take it as a more tenable compromise. It’s not about free as in beer freedom, it’s about basic security.

You can also have degoogled Chromium which is open-source if you’re into it.

Kinda, but I would like to tailor my experience a bit more than “all or nothing”.

IceCat is directly a GNU project, so it’s highly ideological - which is important and respectable in a way, but then it gets adoption to near-zero because most sites just don’t work out of the box, and to make it work properly means completely removing all safeguards that make IceCat make sense. There’s little in between.

I’d rather have something like LibreWolf, but without phone-home functionality, or at least a switch to turn it off. Out of all Firefox forks I know, only IceCat respects user privacy in this way - 0 connections on startup, and then only connection to actual site and whatever it requires.

Opt-in telemetry (ideally - leveled) and manual bug information sending are totally fine, though.

Nothing in the browser should be proprietary. Any proprietary part is a possibility of malice, and browsers are mission critical.

Brave? Hard no. Vivaldi? Also no.

Also, where are qutebrowser and Zen?

qutebrowser and IceCat are real top of the game when it comes to privacy. But then, they break some of the sites functionality, especially IceCat who seems to be going under the “if your site doesn’t work, it’s your site’s problem” motto.

“We do not provide bulk information to any government”

So, only on the most important politicians and nuclear scientists?

And if you’re a real fan of Synology ecosystem, there is Xpenology basically porting DSM onto any hardware you want, compatible with all apps. Iirc, the only thing NOT working is QuickConnect (for obvious reasons)

Not only that, but it also affects the decision making. For example, quite recently Russian maintainers were removed from the Linux kernel, citing “compliance”.

It’s easy to imagine same thing happening to Chinese maintainers, for example. And then from other countries. This, too, can strongly affect not just Linux, but FOSS landscape as a whole.

Thanks for bringing up the European foundation, I’ll look into it!

The Linux Foundation itself is in the US jurisdiction - just sayin’.

Which is why I repeatedly called for the Foundation to move into Europe, potentially into Finland, back to its roots.

With general respect to what is written, I don’t like the “it’s encrypted so it’s a non-issue” approach. Sure, data has to be exchanged for many operations - including crypto transactions - but the best model of privacy is when the unnecessary data does not get sent anywhere in the first place.

Encryption can and eventually will be broken, it can also be implemented wrongly, the devices themselves can be hacked or taken by somebody etc.

Not sending the data always beats sending the encrypted one as far as privacy is concerned.

Doesn’t it mean there’s only 1 node NSA has to attack - your VPN?

Kinda renders Tor over it pointless.

It’s easier to make cigarettes than vape juice. Everyone can produce them.

No reason to believe it’s any hard to build a similar monopoly on that, too

Also true

So, it is a drug, but it’s not right to call it one?

There’s no indication they use cameras in there. It’s most likely just a sensor for vape smoke, similar to your common fire alarm.

And if it makes bathrooms a place where everyone can breathe without inhaling nicotine, I’m all for it. This is not a serious privacy concern.

Doesn’t Phillip Morris profit from vapes, too?

Bringing vapes as a popular nicotine delivery system is literally the way tobacco companies are able to proliferate and return smoking into fashion.

Also, smoking should be prohibited as well. Not only because it hurts the smokers themselves, but because others are affected without their consent.

Lemmy generally has a pro-drugs sentiment, which is certainly unsettling.

Also, can I visit bathrooms and not get into clouds of vape smoke, pretty please?

Nicotine is a drug.

Alcohol too, btw.

A bit more politeness goes a very long way.

Try being more civil, this will earn you way more support, especially since you want to change people’s minds.

I see - thanks for clarification!

Got confused because beforehand there was GNU IceWeasel (now GNU IceCat), which is now separate from IceWeasel. Quite a shitshow.

I was under the impression IceWeasel changed to IceCat.

And, honestly, from all I could remember, the default protections are so strong a good half of sites doesn’t even work properly lol

Typical GNU maximalism.

(But yeah - it really blocks all the bad stuff and doesn’t do anything you don’t ask it to do, not even call for updates by default)

That’s so cuuuuute

A teenager making a simple and cute calculator and deciding to share it with the world and the world takes that, people contribute, and project emerges

This is actually inspiring

There’s much more to company’s popularity than just the product quality.

Google, along with some others, pays money for browser developers to be the default engine - so that people never bother to try something else and actually see how good or bad Google is compared to everything else.

Facebook (Meta) is known for predatory business practices like forcing startups to sell out or have their concept forcefully stolen and them destroyed.

Amazon dominates by plunging the prices of their in-house products below payback to drive the competition into bankruptcy, then acts as a monopoly, driving prices up.

There’s plenty more such examples, but let me stop here for now. Giant corporations have powerful levers that are only available to them as they approach market dominance. And when they get 'em, fair play is over.

Essentially Arch Linux graph minus something.

Fair enough; however, to me it’s only optimal when there are no alternatives.

But to each their own.

A local open-source one, preferably.

Can’t help but mention Yandex is 100% as evil as Google is.

Out of popular choices, DeepL is probably least evil. Reverso is often a nice pick, too, especially Reverso Context.

There are also things like LibreTranslate, though the quality is generally lower (but can absolutely come in handy for simpler requests)

I straight up refuse to legally purchase any media that is officially unavailable for DRM-free download.

Such behavior on the side of creators and publishers cannot be tolerated.

Pirate it. They deserved it with such policies.

If some piece of media is unavailable without DRM/Internet connection - feel free to pirate it.

Often times, this is the only way to restore control over your media. And it’s a sign that we’re only able to tolerate it so far.

Then, your pirated media can be placed wherever you like - and taken offline if you want to.

Also, Linux is your best friend. No, seriously. No one proposes to insert any form of DRM in there, and everyone is free to fork unwanted changes, so it never has to come. You decide what you want.

Government always tries to establish as much power imbalance as possible