That’s pretty much it afaik. Owner sold it, new owner didn’t know what to do with it, owner bought it back.

To correct some oversimplifications in this thread, let me just summarise some facts:

Crypto is exactly as worthless as money.

Not all crypto is bad for the climate, see for example Etherium and Solana.

Crypto has legitimate uses, especially as a replacement for traditional bank transactions, which to remind everyone, are basically made up numbers and ‘trust me bro’-s. And I will explicitly include smart contracts and NFTs here, just to annoy people who don’t get them.

Not all crypto is private. In fact, it was designed to be the opposite, hence most crypto isn’t private at all.

While not all crypto is private, even less ways to spend or exchange crypto are private. A simple and also very private thing is cash.

Connecting to any trustworthy VPN at the very least:

1. Encrypts your connection entirely and ensures you are connected to a party you trust
2. Limits snooping in your traffic to one party you trust

Which is objectively not a scam and a desirable thing to do. Not as desirable as hosting your own VPN, but 100% better than not having one, no matter what some guy on the internet says.

Yeah, Element is super easy to use.

You just need to chose a Matrix instance, create an account with username and password that have nothing to do with what follows, log in (not that), generate keys, ideally back up those keys (which you could ignore, but you are prompted to), then it bothers you with cross-signing (which you can also ignore, except you kinda can’t, depending on you contacts, so log in again and confirm the devices), then chose another, unrelated instance to be discoverable via mail/phone (which again is optional, except if you want to be or don’t want to explain how adding via domain + name works), than add mail or phone number and activate it and boom, you are golden. Except you are not, because if you want Element X, well, you still have no push notifications, which just require you to… Oh, create another account, neat!

Meanwhile on Signal you do what? Punch in your number, confirm, optionally set a PIN, optionally enable backups, done. Yeah, that’s not as private, and missing online massage backups, I know, but it’s also a 1-3 step setup without any alarming prompts, telling you to do non-straightforward stuff that could very well compromise your privacy. Or having to dig through options and make choices and handle keys you don’t understand.

Do you need a reminder that 123456789 is a popular password and 2FA commonly considered a nuisance? Matrix is complicated enough to confuse even (non-ITSec) IT people.

As a professional software developer, I consider Matrix/Element to be quite user-unfriendly (and anecdotally also quite buggy)

Edit: Some clarifications. Describing this easy process was kinda confusing for silly ol’ me

Conversations is very simple

There are some fairly good solutions tho. Matrix is still kinda half-baked (specifically thinking about 2.0 and Element X) and Conversations has limited capabilities, but they are fairly easy to use

Edit: Although I would really wish Matrix had a ‘normie-mode’, with secure and reasonably easy to handle defaults

Cool

In much of Europe speaking out can get you arrested. Many of us don’t believe in universally free speech, starting at insults and hate speech.

In the US maybe, in the EU? Only if you want to get sued and then forced to re-hire them.

You know there is Matrix, right?

Ingl, I think the only way to stay sane these times is to ignore what they say and look at what they do. As long as his products are up to my standards and values, I’ll just ignore whatever he says to appease whomever

Probably doesn’t want to get banned in the US… Or so my copium tells me.

Silver lining is that Proton is owned by a non-profit.

You can make an argument for confidentiality making it harder to find exploits in your code. If nobody cares enough to report them to you, or if you don’t have the resources to fix them, open-sourcing your code just exposes them.

This is pretty much only an argument if you use stuff that would be irresponsible to use in the first place tho

Pixel 8a was <400€ on black friday. I know not everyone can afford this, but even 5 years ago that wouldn’t have been that much for a phone

Have you installed Steam as a Flatpak? In that case, maybe it tries to read the file system on the SSD, but has no permission to access it/its mount point

“Ok, so would you send me nudes? I’m not looking at them, I would just like to have them.”

I would love to call the headline clickbaity bs, but it’s technically accurate and somehow this makes it worse and better at the same time.

This is so stupid. Messengers offer easy access to E2EE, but they are not the only way to make it work. So doing this changes nothing, even assuming you need E2EE to distribute illegal material.

And I want to stress this is not even true. Or can I not just go on the internet and download a movie, which is definitely illegal and aggressively persecuted?

I’m using Proton Pass aliases and they work like a charm. With the browser plugin, it’s easily feasible to generate one for every single thing you sign up for. I would argue that there are some advantages over DDG (although I haven’t used their service in for quite a while):

1. Proton applies E2EE to incoming mails
2. If the mails go to your Proton account anyway, removing DDG means removing a proxy that could read your mails or be an attack vector to do so
3. Afaik you can secure your proton account way beyond what DDG offers (password + 2FA + Sentinel + extra password for Mail + extra password for Pass) if you want to
4. Convenience: You can manage everything in Pass and it tells you right away what you created an alias for, allows to create accounts from it etc.

Is it a total game changer? Probably not.

I adopted a lot of customisations from Garuda to my EndeavourOS setup. I got fed up with Garuda because it constantly broke.

Bootloader broke twice, desktop broke all the time, and when I needed to load a snapshot and it simply didn’t work, they finally lost me. Never had any of these issues with my current setup, really a surprising contrast, given that Endeavour is also Arch based.

Anything connected via USB should work, as long as they don’t require a special driver. I have a Gulikit controller and it seems to work in all configurations - although you might need to remap some stuff depending on what exactly you use.

Nintendo and Xbox layout both work fine for me.

Justice he dicides on and can get away with.

There are some FOSS SMS clients tho. I used to use Simple SMS, but there were no updates for 12 months.

Maybe try Deku SMS: https://github.com/deku-messaging/Deku-SMS-Android

It seems to have at least some traction for what it’s worth.

I’m gonna go with no, because of containerization and permission management. On your computer, any program can do pretty much anything, unless you explicitly take measures against this. On a smartphone, you get a lot of control over your apps. In newer Android versions you can even completely disable cameras and microphones (even if only in software).

I would use a throwaway account and avoid giving Google any personal data tho. Of course they could still figure stuff out, but it’s harder and unreliable, not to mention super-duper illegal (at least in the EU), so I kinda doubt they go the extra mile.

If you play DRMed AAA stuff, that’s still true unfornately (if you can’t do VM with PCIe passthrough).

Personally I just opt to not play these games. The market dicides in the end.

Yes, what I meant is actually a kind of pepper. Although I would like to point out that literally the only difference is that it’s stored elsewhere.

It does, I’ll give you that. However, I will hold the fact that their maximum is actually reasonable against that. The minimum of 8 is more concerning imo

I’m just gonna go ahead and say it: 16 Characters are sufficient and 20 pretty damn secure.

That is assuming they do stuff right and there are no vulnerabilities, which they won’t and there are. However they may manifest, they are a greater concern at 16+ characters, especially if they don’t offer 2FA.

The reason is that even if machines become powerful enough that 16 characters can be bruteforced, which they can’t atm, you can effectively defend everything against bruteforce attacks by other means. Including but not limited to limiting login attempts, salts and pepper, multiple encryption layers etc.

With just a salt pepper you can make a 16 char password effectively a 24 char password… Or a 2.000.000 char password. Assuming it is not stolen alongside that is.

Edit: Changed ‘salt’ to ‘pepper’.

It can toggle ANC on and off, not sure if it can also enable voice through. That is available by a single tap on your earbud(s) tho

You can use Sennheisers without an account - and I think even without the app altogether. Not exactly sure tho.

They have a feature where they toggle sound presets depending on your location. That’s the only thing that requires an account, as well as access to your location. It’s opt-in however (and pretty useless imo).

Ok, fair enough, but at that point you’re basically deploying your own password manager which most people would consider a little over the top :D

And besides that, it’s not like you COULDN’T write a fairly capable and cross-platform anti-cheat…

StEaM DeCk OnlY sUpPoRtS VAC, EAC aNd BaTtLe EyE, ThAt’S nOt EnOuGh AnTi ChEaT fOr MuH GaMe

The simple answer to SSO is: Just don’t.

It has it’s place in companies, but there is no good reason for private use, except maybe a little convenience.

On the other hand, you open yourself up of to your data being collected left and right and increase the chance it gets compromised by it being shared.

Never change a running System.

Basically every other German outlet

Want to butt in here quickly and bring attention towards the fact that crypto currencies in general are not meant to be privacy preserving.

You are literally broadcasting transactions, making it impossible to leave no trace.

Funny how you can create a microkernel only to then fuck up privileges so bad that software (e.g. graphics drivers, anything running with real-time prio) can easily crash your system without recovery.

The architecture of Windows is both, remarkably good and weirdly underutilized.

I don’t bother with 2FA for Ente. It’s supposed to add a layer of security, no need to add yet another layer just for the sake of it.

They do have desktop apps at least. I’m happy with it so far, totally second the recommendation.

Regarding your general question: I would argue that a separate 2FA app is a must, since you can not only secure your password manager with it, but also remain protected if it is breached somehow.

Having 2FA and credentials in one place partly breaks the rational between having 2FA at all.