Depends on your local laws and such, but in most European countries you can get a prepaid SIM card for a couple of euros/pounds/whatever at any supermarket, making them practically free. If you need a temporary number for a scammy special offer or any situation where your number is publicly visible (Gumtree, etc) it’s a no-brainer IMHO.

If your phone suppprts running two SIMs at once, it has two IMEIs so as far as the network(s) are concerned it’s two distinct handsets unless they deduce otherwise.

A fun aside: years ago I did some work for a small phone company (the company was small, not the phone) and they gave me a SIM with 100 numbers in a block and access to a portal I could manage them with. Sadly, I forgot to pay the annual £10 renewal fee.

IIRC that rule applies to debit cards only, which most businesses pay a flat monthly fee to handle, as opposed to credit cards which charge a percentage. Also, fuck AMEX.

A lot of the convenience of the modern UK high street baking sector is because of Girobank, the 1960s Government’s successful attempt to force modernisation on the banking industry. When I hear about the ass-backwardsness of other country’s banking arrangements (especially the US) I give a little thankyou to Girobank.

Edit: Also, yes, tourist ATMs are predatory bullshit.

I maintain that it’s cheaper to buy better and keep longer, but, yeah, Vimes’ Boots strike again.

So I was about to say “I love my Fairphone 5 and recommend it wholeheartedly but it’s not supported by Lineage is yet, which is really frustrating, especially after its been out nearly a whole year”, but then I checked and - well, I’ll be damned - LineageOS does support the FP5 now so I know what I’ll be doing later on: eating chicken wings. But after that, upgrading my FP5 to LineageOS.

It’s plaintext all the way down.

*Whomstnt’ve

I don’t know who NetZero are/were, but a number of UK ISPs were selling email and browser keywords to advertisers in the early aughts, including big players like BT and FreeServe. Some even tried to launch a project that would use DPI to inspect all web and email traffic and dynamically inject ads into email and webpages.

Even then, Hotmail, Y! Mail and your shitty ISP’s shitty POP mailbox were reading the contents of your emails and selling adverts based on the contents. At least with GMail they gave us the dignity of a nice UI and adequate storage.

Internet things.

Yeah, there’s still plenty of places where AirBnB is competitive. When I’m in cities in France and Germany an apartment tends to cost about the same as a hotel room. Outside of cities hotels tend to cost a lot more.

The UK government is still trying and has been very open about their contempt for objective oversight foreigners.

…yet.

dictatorship or an undeveloped country

Right-Wing Government: why not both?

You don’t trust the US Government? Good. But the beauty of open-source projects like Tor, Signal, 7Zip, etc is that you don’t need to trust them.

Mind me asking what server you use? I’m looking to self-host myself.

These are all excellent. Can I add my recommendation: buy a domain name and set up so all emails sent to it are diverted to your real mailbox. Then, when you sign up for services you can give them, say, ebay@yourdomain.eggs, youtube@yourdomain.eggs, bankname@yourdomain.eggs, etc. This makes it easy to tell who is selling your details since the only people who know, say, amazon@yourdomain.eggs is Amazon, plus it makes it harder for them to associate your identity on one service with that on another service.

It’s generally not much data. A 1GB/mo SIM with ten years service can be had for less than a €10 if you’re buying in bulk.

Some risks are necessary :)

No, it’s zero-trust all the way down!

not really about IT not knowing

All true, and I’m sure your IT doesn’t care as long as you’re not taking stupid risks

If you’re going to be that deranged, at the very least be discreet

…

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… a folder full of photos of a sales rep’s feet taken under the table at a meeting… a bookmarked playlist of adult baby porn labelled “Potential Suppliers”… I watched a modded BitTorrent client try to fake VLAN tags for unrestricted Internet access. All those moments will be lost in time, like that expensive label printer from my locked desk drawer… time to get another coffee…

That might not be enough. I could monitor that on all the devices I manage, if I need to. There are tools to dump browsing info as it’s being committed, or it’s easy to pipe all the traffic from your machine through a VPN to a firewall I manage with a trusted cert injection into your device and inspect the traffic in transit. If you don’t want your employer to see what your up to, don’t use their infrastructure.