Yandex is pretty much as evil as Google but on a smaller scale. I appreciated it for allowing easy burners, but recently I have not seen options to register any new account without a phone number.

Imagine the assumptions someone would make about you after receiving mail from such a domain lol

I remembered it as being AWS. Checked their blog, and the article about their spending mentions renting space in AWS and Azure too, indeed.

Wasn’t Amazon involved here as well? It is another “nation-state”.

Last I have seen, it still requires a number to register - it just doesn’t have to be public.

What gets me the most is the requirement of a smartphone to register. No way I am trusting my non-public chats to a phone, so that means either Waydroid/VM (which creates issues with copypasting) or signal-cli (which is fairly inconvenient).

Session is also sus because you effectively cannot host a node, last I have seen. They claim it is “against a Sybil attack” but all it does is making sure only people wih large disposable funds can have nodes, and the effect might be the exact opposite.

Simplex is more interesting in this regard because while I am concerned with initial centralization (the default servers), they made hosting your own easy. But I personally stick with imperfect yet trusty XMPP.

There can still be a bribed insider. And social engineering can get people to behave way off-protocol I guess.

Not quite Europe, but here we have mandatory KYC on simcards too (you can get an illegal anonymous one still, but this is a different story). Guess what, it does nothing to prevent simswapping, it very much still happens.

Unless you mean “accidentally being somewhere in the background of a stranger’s photo”, yes. I usually opt out of being photographed, was never forced into this.

Commercial VPNs are intended to hide your identity across the web and to hide your non-HTTPS web traffic from your ISP.

You’re forgetting a demographic that is probably bigger than this - people who don’t care and just want to go to blocked sites.

I do not blame Proton for complying with a request - it is a completely expected action from a company. However, I would blame them for advertising that makes them seem safer than they are for people who don’t know better.

Oh, nice! Where was the VPN server, if you remember? Also heard of it being possible on a real Android device, but not on an Android VM so even harder to fake.

Doesn’t Gmail require a phone number upon registration? One of the worst choices for “burner” mails.

No thanks, I would rather not have to use Waydroid and deal with Google’s services because of course you didn’t make the app available on your website or on F-Droid.

AND only available on mobile.

I personally use it for my domain name and a VPS. Not exactly illegal or requiring personal information.

As for cards that “you can buy in brick and mortar stores” - a) they will be affected by the same sanctions as normal cards, b) not even a thing in a lot of places (like, the only ones I have seen here are only sold at certain banks and only payable with a bank card). But yea, might indeed work well in certain cases!

Crypto IS usable as an alternative to regular card payments though. If it gets illegal - what do we have left for online payment? Bank system, which is very hard and illegal to use anonymously, and is subject to sanctions/seizures/whatever. There is cash by mail, which is not always feasible. GNU Taler looks interesting, but seems like it not implemented much yet.

I daily drive osmand. Where do you need tinkering there?

Yea, I got this from your comment. I was wondering about different jurisdictions where this is not as easy - thought someone in the comments had such an experience.

The thing I wonder about is whether such an account can stay in your possession even after you no longer have the sim. Where I live, the simcards that don’t require ID are illegal and thus you cannot guarantee that you’d stay in possession of it permanently. And even if it were legal - you’d have to be adding or spending funds to retain the sim.

In a lot of situations this is sadly not plausible. Here it is pretty much as dominant among younger generations as Whatsapp is among the older ones. Like, my uni group has all its communication there: technically could leave, but I would need far more organizational and social skill than I have now. So I just isolate it from private information and treat as public.

And even if centralization wasn’t a concern, there would be a massive issue: much harder to maintain several accounts. I cannot imagine using the same account for things related to my real identity and to my online one. Also would not like to expose my encrypted conversations to a smartphone: thus, the public groupchats are on a separate account that I log into on both devices, while personal messages are left on laptop only.

For groceries and most regular purchases (including online stores), there is cash. But I do use Monero for a legit reason - paying for my VPS and domain.

Yes! I don’t get why Matrix is the one that’s more popular now. My Prosody is botherless, consumes little RAM and does not have storage concerns like Matrix does. It just does all the messaging basics. It needs more love.

This was a completely different thing - the report was about what data they collect or have the capability to collect, rather than how easy it is to remove the telematics unit and which functions would be impacted by it. The suggested measures against this were pretty basic, no mention was made of actual modifications.

It is weird to see people recommending projectors as a replacement for TV. That would require having a fairly large room so that a large wall surface could be dedicated to the projection. Not to mention that it would be uncomfortable to use with lights on…

Yes!! It frustrates me so much when the proposed answer is “buy an older car”, which is not a longterm solution.

It would be cool to have an iFixit-like score for each model.

The shadowban I am pissed about is Reddit. The comments would appear for me just fine, but not visible outside of my account. Given that I have pretty much only commented about very neutral, even childish topics - I blame my email, which is on my own domain.

I thought they could already do that with ease.

The only passphrases I actually fully remember are the ones for drive LUKS and for the password manager databases.

Log in to your password manager? KeepassXC just needs a decryption password. AFAIK you can set up additional protection but none of that include email.

Even viewing comments has been broken on Newpipe and frontends for a while.

My main issue with Peertube is that for some reason, after just a bit of its use the internet connection on my laptop just shuts down until a reboot. It was present on both old and new laptop, and while the same thing happens when I torrent sometimes - only Peertube does it consistently. Would really like if there is a fix for this.

But yea, I agree in that the answer is not a platform, but a selfhostable solution.

Ah, okay. But given the invasiveness of the app - I now really wonder if it is possible for it to detect and shut down registration from desktops this way.

I did open an account once (for the free vpn), but ditched it very soon because it could not use a normal mail client. I need all my mail in one place, and I need convenient PGP however rarely it does happen.

Can it be used without a smartphone, like in an Android VM?

What about something like Waydroid to avoid spending extra money? Wonder if these are detected on registration.

Signal’s UX is NOT good unless you want to expose your encrypted conversations to a smartphone (of which far from all can run a private OS). All because of no desktop registration. You either have to use inconvenient signal-cli, or an Android emulator which creates its own troubles.

I know I might not be relevant because I am not in the US (and in a big city), but I pretty much always order from online stores to the stores’ offices. Not only to not surrender my address, but also because usually they allow paying in cash upon reception (big Amazon-like aggregators are an exception but I usually avoid them), and this also does not cost extra unlike a delivery to your door.

I don’t like that it does pretty muh the same thing as XMPP but more inefficiently. Like, my Conduit, already a lighter than Synapse implementation, consumes around 100 megs of RAM compared to Prosody’s 30.

Also it is worrying how prevalent the central matrix.org instance is. Like, the network is federated, but if you defederate from the single central one - things might break.