European. Liberal. Insufferable green. History graduate. I never downvote opinions and I do not engage with people who downvote mine. Comments with insulting language, or snark, or other low-effort content, will also be ignored.
There is nothing inherent about technology that means it must be used for evil.
Sure. In theory. But there are things we know about humans and their weaknesses, and these things are not going to change overnight (except perhaps in the fever dreams of some Marxists, of whom you might be one). Technology of this power did not exist before, and now it does. So technology is indeed the proximate problem.
While this is essentially true, IMO it’s become a bit of a distraction. The immediate problem we face today is technology.
In the 90s, people believed technology (i.e. the internet) would protect liberty against power (or “security”). We thought that removing the barriers to information would put our rulers in a goldfish bowl where we could keep an eye on them. It was a reasonable expectation. But it turns out to be us in the goldfish bowl.
It seems those with power simply have more time and resources available for surveillance. And now the technology is reaching a point where rulers will soon have awesome tools at their disposal, and they’re sure gonna be tempted to use them.
Our problem is technology. Not sure how to put a positive spin on this. Technology itself will provide some solutions. But IMO it’s more important than ever to get involved in politics. In any appropriate way.
The valid answer is that the Chinese police state has no authority over individuals in the West and is unlikely to share information with Western law enforcement given the geopolitical situation. In narrow terms, that makes for an inadvertent privacy win for individuals in the West.
But the problem you describe is certainly real (whatever other seem to think here) for countries in China’s sphere of influence, in Asia, Africa, Latin America. For them, China is already selling off-the-peg solutions for mass surveillance. If your country’s homegrown dictator gets his hands on this stuff, it’s going to be harder than ever to get rid of him.
For us the problem is rather that China is pioneering and normalizing practices that will certainly be adopted and copied one day by our own police forces with our own technology.
Yes, Twilio. There may be other providers but this is the market leader. I have rented a number for years for this purpose. In their interface you can plug a script into the number to redirect all SMS messages to an email address. No need for any physical phone or SIM. I am always mystified that so few other people do what I am doing.
2 USD a month for a European mobile number. Canada may be different but for many countries you will need to submit documentation to prove identity and your right of residence there.
As others have hinted, there’s a tension here. Confiscating big tech’s access to your email is a major privacy win. But putting your actual name in your email address is… not so much. At the very least you won’t even have the option to obscure your identity from a correspondent. If you have a website at that domain, it too will be chained to your email identity, thus telling your correspondent all about you.
These realizations led me, personally, to ditch my whole setup of own-domain email. If the domain is going to be a pseudonym, might as well save some money and just use a pseudonymous handle at the email provider’s domain. That’s what I now do - with one of the privacy-respecting email hosts, of course.
Then it’s a hassle to change host later, you say? Yes, a little, but here arises another paradox: from the perspective of privacy, it’s actually an advantage to changing one’s email address from time to time.
if you’re not sure, try to use a VPN and HTTPS everywhere and use firewall to lock down all your exposed ports
If beginners are reading, don’t panic. This advice should be taken with a grain of salt. I remember being a beginner and getting this kind of advice and how it caused me a whole of lot of completely unnecessary anxiety.
VPN: all but unnecessary for security purposes (it’s useful for geo spoofing). If you really don’t trust your wifi, then start by manually setting your DNS (to 1.1.1.1 or whatever) as others have said.
HTTPS everywhere: sure, and this is now the default in your browser.
Firewall: totally unnecessary to fiddle with this on a home PC. It will be hard-set in your router anyway, there’s nothing to worry about.
Absolutely. The 8-hour sleep is probably just a marketing invention, related to modern electric light. In pre-modern Europe it was common to get up and do housework in the middle of the night.
I share your suspicions but I’d go further. The bed industry has always struck me as an obvious scam that plays on people’s nebulous health anxieties and also on the tempting cognitive fallacy that, since an 8-hour night is the same amount as an 8-hour workday, the exact physical makeup of your bed is somehow as important as your career or something. It all strikes me as almost completely irrational. People slept for aeons on straw and somehow survived. A bed is a soft flat object, any other abstract properties are just marketing IMO.
As a regular traveler I have slept in a lot of beds. Maybe 300 (sic) in the last decade, of all quality levels. For me it makes all but no difference to how much sleep I get, the only thing that bothers me is when the springs are literally sticking out. So this is all completely anecdotal and I do respect your own anecdote. But I can’t help noticing that I see it repeated in lots of bed adverts.
Trying very hard not to come to the conclusion that if you waste 2000 bucks on a connected bed, you have only yourself to blame.
Seriously. Unlike dumb TVs, dumb beds are not going away. Buy one for 400 bucks and donate the remainder of your bed-buying fortune. Your body won’t notice and €1600 can do a lot of good.
Been using Mailbox for years without any issue. German reliability. But the fact that one of Proton’s directors revealed that he agrees with 75 million Americans does not mean that a whole company, based in Switzerland and with many other stakeholders, has “gone rogue”. I’m not getting into a new fight about this here but I really think American progressives need to drop this religious approach to dissent and heterodoxy and just relax a little. It will be okay.
Nobody should be using a bank which requires a mobile app in the first place. iOS is proprietary closed-source software and FOSS Android-based OSs likely won’t work because of the the SafetyNet lockdown.
We do not currently have decent privacy on mobile, period. If you can’t do everything on the web, change bank.
BTW I did just this myself. Opened a Revolut account and then closed it after discovering that the web app was not fully functional. Here in Europe at least, I believe Revolut is exceptional in its obnoxious attitude to user privacy.
Same situation. But notifications is pretty easy to solve. Just set them to go to some private email.
As for accessing the app privately, also easy enough: don’t use the app, use the web interface on a private browser profile.
That’s not possible on mobile without user-agent spoofing the browser to make it appear like a desktop. But then if it’s only messages “every now and then”, that should not be problem. Just keep to desktop, your quality of life has improved already! That is just my own experience, of course.
Well said. And I think there’s more. In the Anglosphere and the USA in particular, government and state are often conflated, but they really are two different things. The former is the cockpit, the latter is the airplane.
Things are different in European cultures. In Latin languages, for example, the government is understood to be the body of politicians in control right now, whereas the state is a sort of expression of the people’s will and therefore has much wider legitimacy. Two very different things. I believe it’s similar in German.
I sometimes wonder if this semantic quirk has exacerbated the general skepticism of English-speakers towards collective action.
The military penal code however, does indeed have life imprisonment
Interesting. It figures. And Breivik will never be truly free, I get that. But in a sense his punishment is a lifetime of ostracism, which is pretty terrible for a human being. What’s more interesting to me is that almost nobody was clamoring for capital punishment in Norway as they surely would have been pretty much anywhere else.
On Hitler, yes of course I know I have an unconventional take. But I really think most people are not thinking straight. If you have a principle, you stick to it, you don’t drop it because “wow that one was so bad”. My principle is that it is not right to tie down a captive human being and forcibly snuff out their life. The abstract fact of what they did or didn’t do is completely immaterial. For me, capital punishment is a moral abomination of the first order. End of story.
Did you know that the Norwegian shooter (who killed a very large number of unarmed young people with an automatic weapon in 2011) is already 2/3 of the way thru his sentence?
This was my point. Americans didn’t understand this and still don’t. Cultures have different conceptions of what purpose is served by punishment.
I have a tangential question. Would it not make sense for an OS, in this case Android, to have some proper mechanism for installing apps (in this case APKs) directly from a website (as lots of people have been doing fastidiously from signal.org by necessity)?
After all, this is all about trust. With software, assuming that you trust the developer, the goal is to be sure that nobody interfered with the developer’s compiled software - and who better to guarantee that than the developer themself, at their own domain? DNS resolution is already based on the “web of trust” principle, which is why you can trust your bank’s website. Arguably F-Droid performs a valuable role as a curator and selector of good software, but is there any good technical need for it to actually distribute the software?
As you and others have said, privacy is just much harder on mobile than on desktop. Mobile hardware and software is generally closed-source and locked down. On a tiny screen web apps are also at a genuine UX disadvantage to native apps, which offer much weaker privacy protection.
The pragmatic not-quite solution is to do roughly what you’re doing already. NB: maps are actually pretty easy - many people find that OsmAnd and Organic Maps are superior to the corporate options.
But the optimal solution is to move some of your computing back to desktop, i.e. probably to a laptop. This way you get more control over the hardware and software. And it’s already some kind of privacy win just because the thing is not in your pocket all day. It’s really not that hard and you might even find you appreciate the change! I did.
IMO the big sticking points are the messengers and transport tools - these are where you get genuine convenience from corporate spyware in your pocket. For all the rest, I’m not convinced, personally. For mapping and fitness etc, there are F-Droid apps which work great offline. For everything else including banking, just do it in your web browser while seated comfortably at home. As far as I know, no bank except Revolut insists that you use its app. If you want to do NFC payments, that may require a locked-down OS but not an app and it can be done in airplane mode (I do it regularly).
There are ways to get better privacy on mobile but nothing approaches the benefits of just using your mobile less and your laptop more.
Yup, messaging was the original killer app for mobile computing and nothing has changed. Just being able to arrange a rendezvous while out and about, hard to deny that this one was progress. Added to that are a couple of newer use cases like ride-hailing and payments (tho this latter doesn’t actually require a connection). But most applications are not better on a tiny screen on a street corner IMO, and the fact that several billion people seem to disagree is more explained by social media and addiction than anything else!
I’m not a luddite, I do actually have the thing in my pocket and use it too. But as you say, the point is balance and moderation.
Realistically, there’s going to be no way to stop this. It’s too useful. It works and most people appreciate it. I know this because I have visited southern China recently. I’ve seen the train stations and coffee shops where people now think nothing of leaving their belongings completely unattended. This level of surveillance effectively makes petty crime impossible. It’s widely seen as progress, in a way it is progress, and there’s no going back.
The challenge remaining is to keep some level of democratic accountability over our governments. That’s feasible but it’s not going to be easy.