I use a calyxos device to share VPN, as of a few months ago.
Hotspot & Tethering
- Allow clients to use VPNs
Oh wow I totally missed that. It works great! Genius!
Thank you for that. Suddenly it makes repurposing one of my old cellphones a very simple and viable proposition.
(and I’m posting this from my laptop connected to the hotspot connected to the Calyx VPN 🙂)
get a older cell phone. Put lineage OS on it, or calyxos… share your VPN over hotspot, these are the only two ROMs that I’m aware of that allow you to do that
That’s what I thought too. So I tried it on my CalyxOS phone and… it doesn’t work: the hotspot doesn’t route through the VPN. And from what I read, it’s by design.
I have an old Nokia 4.2 running LineageOS. I might try that one.
end-to-end VPN
Incidentally, do you know if the GL.iNet devices can act as a VPN server too?
At this point, I think China is well known for infiltrating local businesses and forcing them to sell networking gear with trojans.
The US is better known for surveilling people indirectly by exploiting corporate surveillance data collected by big tech monopolies doing their bidding for them and by directly “tapping the line”. I don’t think US officials asking US companies to compromise their products and keep quiet about it would fly in the US. At least not yet. But I wouldn’t put it past them either.
To be honest, of all three, I’d rather purchase something made in Europe, even for a premium.
What software do you use to forward the texts automatically?
Actually I kind of had the same idea but for the whole phone - i.e. leave a cellphone with phone features at home (so voice and texts are received on this static phone that never gets used for anything else) and forward calls and texts on another cellphone with data only. But I don’t think there’s anything to set that up easily.
Using things like Signal and WhatsApp may reduce your footprint further.
I use Signal with most of my family and friends. The phone things is for random people or companies that need to call me, and the texts are mostly to get notification when I receive a parcel, or confirmations for appointments, that kind of things.
WhatsApp, being owned by Facebook, can fuck right off.
Well, I know it’s all going through the internet anyway nowadays, so yeah it’s technically always voice-over-IP even if I use the cell network. The only difference between normal calls and WiFi calls is how it connects to the internet really. I just don’t want the extra baggage that comes with staying connected to the cell netowk method of getting on the internet.
And of course what I referred to when I said VoIP is pure VoIP providers that sell you a number and access to a SIP server, independent from your cellphone provider.
The TOR network itself is safe - at least assuming the TLAs don’t control at least half of the nodes, which is far from impossible. But let’s assume…
The weak point comes from the browser: that’s how the fuzz deanonymizes users. The only safe browser to use on TOR is the TOR browser, and that’s the problem: it disables so many unsafe functionalities that it’s essentially unusable on a lot of websites. So people use regular browsers over TOR, the browser leaks identifying data and that’s how they get caught.
Here’s a little story that shows how much society has become dystopian:
Back in the 90’s, I worked in France for a while. When I was there, a case was brought up against the state that had violated a CNIL rule: some dude was cheating on his taxes by claiming he lived at some address. Tthe French fiscal administration sued him because they obtained a file from the electricity company and another from the water utilty company showing that the consumption of both electricity and water were so low it wasn’t consistent with the dude actually living there.
The case was thrown out, the dude walked and the state was fined because it had violated a rule that clearly stipulated cross-referencing files for the purpose of extracting secondary information that wasn’t available in each single file was a violation of privacy and civil liberties.
I shit you not. This used to be a thing.
Can you imagine this today? All the Big Data sonsabitches cross-reference billions of files ALL THE TIME and nobody bats an eyelid anymore.
If you’re old enough, you remember sovereign states taking privacy seriously. If you’re not, you don’t. And that’s how Big Data gets away with what they do today because fewer and fewer people remember a time when it was unacceptable.
To evade taxes of course.
Have you ever asked yourself how it’s possible that ALL the fucking ultra-rich almost without exception do philanthropy?
It doesn’t make sense: most of those millionaires and billionaires are psychopaths who essentially don’t give a shit about their fellow man, acquired their wealth by exploiting and shafting others for the most part, and don’t give a shit about how that makes them look: why on Earth would any of them do philanthropy, let alone all of them?
It only starts to make sense when you understand philanthropy is yet another tax loophole.
I have been hating this man’s guts since the mid 90’s and somehow it never lets off. Most hateful people manage to become a little bit more likeable as they age. Even this disgusting piece of human refuse Bill Gates might pass for a somewhat okay human being if you wilfully overlook why he truly does philanthropy.
But Larry Ellison? Hell no. He never changes. he’s just consistently the worst year after year, decade after decade.
Runbox, a privacy-focused email provider out of Norway. Our family has been using it for many years with zero issues. The prices are very decent.
It’s not the only thing that leaks timezone data, and the fix is identical: have the machine pretend you’re in UTC.
For example: if you enable Resist Fingerprinting (RFP) in Librewolf, it will lie to websites and pretend your timezone is UTC - because of course timezone is one of the factors used to fingerprint you - and all the sites you visit that show you your local time, or depend on your local time for something or other, will show you the wrong time. And that’s how you know it works 🙂
That is not the reason: Signai is very good but it’s not the best. The reason why it’s more popular is because it’s good, ubiquitous and easy to install.
In other words, it’s a well-known app you can confidently tell your computer idiot friends and family to install on their phone and start communicating with them 5 minutes later. What’s what makes it popular.
You know, in fairness I’m onboard with your line of thinking ultimately.
But ask yourself: what’s running on your computer? Do you know all the people who supplied each and every bit of code on your computer?
I run Linux myself: EVERYTHING I run is made by randos who decided to code something and give it away for free. And 99.99% of them ultimately have no motive other than selflessly give back to the community. This has been solidly proven for many decades and it continues to be proven.
If you run Windows however, you KNOW you run an OS made by a for-profit with no principles and no regards for your rights and your privacy for the sole purpose of extracting as much money out of you as they can, directly or indirectly.
Which one would you trust ultimately? Randos you don’t know but have an unbroken record of doing the right thing, or companies you know have a proven track record of trying to shaft you at every opportunity if they can get away with it?
Ultimately, it’s a question of trust. You seem to trust no-one. I submit that you should look at the actions of whoever supplies the software you use and decide whom to trust based on what they do, not what they say or what your guts tell you.
In the specific case of GrapheneOS, Micay is an abrasive and toxic SOB (I know, not his fault, he’s on the spectrum, but that’s just an objective fact) and the community he created around him continues to be toxic to this day after he’s stepped down. And I disagree with some of the technical choices he made for GrapheneOS with respect to security vs privacy. But I would trust the software he writes any day of the week because he’s never done anything to prove me I shouldn’t trust his code. If he ever sneaks in analytics, ads, or some automatic updater that doesn’t ask permission in his code however, I’ll blacklist his ass forever in a New York minute. But he hasn’t, and neither have any of the GrapheneOS contributors.
So if you think GrapheneOS works for you, you should use it because I believe it is trustworthy.
Calyx, for instance, isn’t as good as GrapheneOS, they do a lot of snitching on you (including to Google and Mozilla) and they overlook critical details such as this one
Okay, let’s unpack the pack of BS shall we…
- Your first link points to a page where all the connections made by CalyxOS are explicitely listed and explained in detail. Pray tell: how do you interpret that as snitching?
- Your second link points to a 3-year old, closed Git issue that ends with this:
Resolved in CalyxOS 4.9.4, June 2023 Feature Update.
Please go spread your FUD someplace else.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this project was involved in some way.
You still don’t elaborate why you wouldn’t be surprised. Have you seen something suspicious from the GrapheneOS people? Evidence of shenanigans?
If GrapheneOS is sketchy, I’d really love to know. Honest. Even if whoever makes the allegations is clutching as straws: as least there are straws.
Or can we safely assume it’s just a vague feeling you have for no particular reason?
As a CalyxOS user myself, I was about to reply with some comparison points, and then I thought… Why bother. I’ll just get downmodded and dragged into another pointless argument with people who think it’s vitally important that they should be right and I’m wrong.
So my take is this: whatever works for you.
You like GrapheneOS? More power to you.
You like CalyxOS? You’re a rockstar.
You like IodéOS, LineageOS or /e/? Cool!
What matters is not to run Google’s surveillance stack. That’s what’s important! Even if your deGoogled OS of choice isn’t quite entreprise-grade, it’s still 95% safer and 200% more honest than anything with straight Google on it.
I am doubly pissed off:
- Mozilla opts me into an analytics scheme without requiring my permission. That’s bad.
- Mozilla partners with fucking FACEBOOK to spring this shit on me? Now THAT takes the cake!
But… I would be pissed off if I used straight Firefox, and I don’t: I use LibreWolf, and I have no doubt they’ll strip this latest round of Mozilla nonsense from the LibreWolf browser.
I don’t know… I have a love/hate relationship with Mozilla: on the one hand, they’re pretty much the only thing that stands between the final overrun of the web by the Google monoculture and still having some kind of a choice what you use to hit the internet, and they make one of the only email clients worth its salt in Linux. On the other hand, every time they decide to do something, it’s always a screw-up, and it’s been like that for decades. Surely in their position, they should know what not to do to piss off everybody all the time, and yet… What a weird bunch.
Some players seem to be unaffected by Google’s latest latest round of shenanigans. For example, NewPipe with MX Player as an external player works fine for me, both from home and from work, while NewPipe’s internal player doesn’t.
Also, remember that possibly only half of everybody is affected, as Google is probably still A/B testing their new nasties.
That is not a typical form of employment. I’m sure there are edge cases where that sort of thing is workable. But for most people who work for an employer, that’s not an option.
Besides, I’m almost certain people who have cash-only or Bitcoin-only forms of income will be repeatedly audited like nobody’s ever been audited. The taxman doesn’t like cash transactions. I know that because I have a few friend who run cafes and bars in France and Belgium, and they’re audited ALL.THE.FUCKING.TIME for one reason and one reason only: most bar patrons in those countries pay in cash, and it’s super-easy for bar owners to whisk some of that money away from the cash register.
That’s the catch: you can’t not use Google at all if you’re online at all, because Google has managed to insert itself into every little corner of the internet.
And that’s how the surveillance trap has quietly snapped shut on all of us without most of us noticing anything.
George Orwell had it wrong: the surveillance isn’t conducted directly by a tyrannical dictatorship but subtly, indirectly by the private sector in cahoots with the government. And the date he predicted was 40 years off. Other than that, he was right: we live in a full-blown dystopia now.