This is the one of the few real things that make VPNs a security tool - security from thugs using a MITM attack on your phone. This is also a reason to avoid SMS messaging and port your number to a VoIP service instead of a direct cellular number, as VoIP traffic would be routed over the encrypted VPN tunnel with everything else instead of through the traditional cell network which is vulnerable to these attacks.
If government agents want to know what you’re saying and doing without your consent, you should leave them no choice but to get a warrant and do some actual work.
Not at all - you could just be a US citizen coming back from a brief trip across the border.
A few congress critters have been trying to get bills passed to curtail this overreach for almost a decade, but unless I missed the news, none of them have succeeded.
I mean, yes, I daily drive Firefox myself. If one must have a Chromium-based browser, however, Vivaldi is very much not-Google, very much not crypto, and is all around pretty based. It’s a solid choice for a secondary “I’m going to need something chromium on rare occasions” browser.
They’ve been shadowbanning VPN users for years. It’s not a policy I expect to change.
It’s stored with zero-knowledge encryption, which means the server only receives enough information to authenticate the user, but otherwise has no ability to decrypt the user’s files. Proton has an explainer.
A few months ago, Proton’s CEO Andy Yen was interviewed on The Linux Experiment and reiterated in the segment starting at 49:27 that he does want to have an F-Droid version, but because Proton encrypts notifications sent through Play Services such that Google can’t get at the metadata, and because third-party notification frameworks are typically much worse for battery life than Play Services, they consider F-Droid a lower priority than some of the other things they’re trying to get done, such as feature parity between their mobile and desktop apps. It’ll come eventually, especially as Yen himself seems to want it, but since they’re completely private and have no investors, they don’t have infinite money for developers, so they have to prioritize sustainable growth.
Highly recommend watching the full interview, Yen seems to have a good mindset about the whole thing, doing what he feels is best for privacy and ownership of identity in the long run, even if he has to temporarily compromise in some places in order to get there.
Not cars per se, but with a few tools and a kit, you can convert a bicycle into a pretty great pedal-assist e-bike from the comfort of your own garage, cost-competitively with pre-built e-bikes, especially if you already own the bike you’re converting. Everyone has their own preference for the ideal bicycle, and there are plenty of DIY e-bike build guides on the web, so that might as well be open source.
Authy is pretty bad. They had a data breach that exposed users, they make it really hard to migrate your secrets to another app (God help you if you lose your phone), and they’re completely closed source.
The best option is probably Aegis Authenticator, but at least do a cursory search for “[authenticator name] controversy” before choosing an authenticator.
90% with my normal setup, but I highly doubt it’s correct because:
- literally everything in uMatrix except first-party scripts is blocked
- it goes up to 93% when I turn off uBO, yet the page loads way more slowly which makes no sense
The site does say uBO on Firefox has unknown issues, so I’ll attribute it to that.
iOS up to at least version 16 has leaked VPN traffic for years. If you only turned on the VPN to make the purchase, that might be how Amazon still knew where you were. The only workaround (always-on VPN mode) apparently is an enterprise feature in iOS that most users don’t have access to.
Alternatively, since it worked on a desktop, your VPN’s mobile version or iOS support may be flawed. The ones I hear the most about from privacy advocates are Mullvad VPN, IVPN, and Proton VPN. If it’s a free VPN, well, you get what you pay for. If it’s one of the ones I mentioned, they might be interested to work with you to figure out how Amazon was bypassing them, if the issue can still be replicated, or they might already know.
Someone is bound to start selling conversion kits for regular cars eventually - turn your 20 year old gas dinosaur into a zippy EV or hybrid, no spyware required. We can already do it with two-wheelers, and Edison Motors is well on their way to making kits to turn big trucks into hybrids.