What’s the issue with Liberapay? I’ve never used it.

Even if it’s utterly pointless I prefer the anonymity

Cryptocurrency proponents are quick to remind me that cryptocurrency transactions are not anonymous, and are in fact highly traceable by virtue of being stored in a public ledger.

and some sites default to reoccurring donations and emails when using a card

Meaning, they try to mislead you into donating more than you intend to? Doesn’t that make them crooks, unworthy of your donations?

Is there a reason you didn’t use your credit or debit card?

As far as I can see, the only application of cryptocurrency is to facilitate crime: money laundering, ransom, paying for contraband, etc.

I haven’t had any of that, but I do notice that F-Droid can’t seem to automatically update itself without erroring. Something about failing to parse the package; I forget the exact error message. I wonder what the problem is…

Play’s reputation for being full of malware stands directly at odds with your assessment.

Hobbyists are rarely incompetent. They actually take pride in their work, and aren’t just trying to quickly slap something together for a quick buck.

Not sure what gave you the impression that most phone apps have gone through professional QA, but I very seriously doubt that they have.

As for mishandling user data, it’s a lot easier to avoid doing that when user data never leaves the user’s device in the first place. Proprietary apps collect user data for profit; free and open source apps often don’t.

Because the “simpler life” involves allowing spooks and marketers to read your conversations and use the data to brainwash and/or Minority Report you.

You are under attack. Defend yourself.

Because I don’t want to have sixteen different messaging apps on my phone.

I’m not really understanding why this is an issue. Can you explain?

Cryptocurrency in general is a scam.

as a gen zer myself I would follow it up with WHY? give me a reason WHY.

So that spooks and advertisers can’t read your messages and use the information to help them brainwash you. Isn’t that reason enough?

Then maybe they aren’t worth talking to.

“Not your keys, not your crypto.” Doesn’t only apply to cryptocurrency.

It’s a matter of time before E2E doesn’t cut it and law enforcement and governments possess keys.

That’s why you only use open-source E2EE like Signal. There’s no way to slip in a back door without a bunch of people noticing, sounding the alarm, and forking the project.

if they haven’t circumvented that to spy on you yet

You mean the government breaking encryption? If the government could break encryption, it wouldn’t be trying so hard to make encryption illegal.

Why would you want SMS in Signal? The whole point of Signal is to be secure. SMS is not secure.

Proprietary messenger programs, even if they do encrypt your messages, probably do so in a way that allows the vendor and the government to read them.

Desperate circumstances call for desperate measures. Smoking will ruin your life.

Getting my friends to use Jitsi was actually really easy, because Jitsi actually worked, and Google Meet didn’t (people’s voices were breaking up very very badly).

Gotta love it when opportunity knocks.

And that’s why the world is rapidly going to hell. Everyone is under attack and almost no one is willing to so much as lift a finger in resistance.

The display server has no way of verifying the process ID on the other end of the Unix-domain socket connection, and therefore cannot verify the executable image. It also cannot verify that the settings app hasn’t had any malicious code injected with ptrace, LD_PRELOAD, or the like, since the injected code can remove any traces of that before connecting to the display server.

But does it work without prompting the user?
Also, I’m not too familiar with how it works, but afaik global hotkeys on KDE are implemented by the display server/compositor/whatever it’s called itself, and not sourced out to a different program.

Right, but they’re configured by an unprivileged program: the settings app. Presumably, a keylogger can pretend to be the settings app.

My point is that both on Windows, and on Linux systems that use the X11 window system instead of Wayland, any program can log your let presses with basically no effort.

On Wayland, they probably still can. Wayland’s core protocol doesn’t allow it, but extensions to enable things like global hotkeys can almost certainly be used for shenanigans.

Also, if the keylogger is running under your user account, it can insert crafted .desktop files wrapping around your apps, ptrace your apps, you name it. Sandboxing as in Flatpak can stop this sort of thing, but if you run an app outside such a sandbox, and it’s malicious, game over.

Can GrapheneOS be used with MicroG? I vaguely remember that being an option.

A broken clock is right twice a day, as the saying goes.

Good luck with that. The only such protocol I know of that people actually use is Tor, and it’s a US government honey pot.

Somehow, I don’t think ruthless authoritarians are going to care about what the little people think.

You don’t have privacy if some criminal has access to your phone.

Why would I want to have future relationships with shameless criminals?

Those are some insultingly low offers, considering they want to malwareify (that’s totally a word now) hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

I am. This shit places children, especially LGBT+ children, in danger.

I won’t even use phone NFC for payments. Card, cash, or I’m taking my business elsewhere.

Good luck with that when the site is your bank, your doctor, or your government.

That will never happen. Americans are far too obedient.

Don’t kid yourself. Congressional gridlock stopped those bills.

Congress has been trying to destroy the Internet for almost as long as the Internet has been publicly available. No matter how many times it fails and the Internet survives, it always comes back and tries again, over and over, forever. I fear it’s only a matter of time before it succeeds.

And make no mistake, a law against end-to-end encryption will make cybersecurity in general illegal, leaving every online operation wide open to attack by cybercriminals. Such a law won’t merely take away your privacy; it’ll take away the Internet altogether.

Not just Chromium, but the proprietary binary Chrome. Chromium can still be modified to block ads.

Since when was PWA proprietary?

Impossible: get a smartphone that is neither Google nor useless.

That’s a good way for me to never visit your website again.

Good luck with that when all websites do this.

And there it is: the Halloween Documents, 2nd Edition. Here we go again.