Be as uninteresting as possible. Millions if not billions of people’s information of this sort is out there.

If you didn’t have the screen sharing requirement, I would suggest Mumble. It does everything else you want and the ease of install is like “apt get and edit a config file.” The server configuration to get the rooms and privacy settings you want is a whole different story, it’s the OPPOSITE of intuitive, but once you figure it out it’s quite robust.

The right tool for the job as described is definitely Matrix, but it does take some advanced troubleshooting (in my experience) to get it working. Some folks I know say the Ansible playbook just works, but I’ve been part of three deployments and that’s NEVER ONCE been my experience. Maybe the Ansible playbook “just works” if you’ve been using Ansible regularly for years and sometimes dream in yml. That’s not me.

IMHO, when compared with the ease of install of Mumble (or even Lemmy), the difficulty on installing Matrix is somewhere in between a joke and something that should be a mild point of embarrassment to the dev team (who built a great tool, so I’m not out to shame them here).

But right now, we have a situation in America where activists and organizers BADLY need alternatives to third party hosted apps… and the team has built this great tool that only fairly hardcore sysadmin / devops folks can get working. The difficulty of installing / maintaining is the biggest obstacle to the immediate, swift and widespread adoption of Matrix by US activist groups. I should know.

Neither did he last administration and neither will the next.

That’s like saying that neither tepid bath water nor boiling tea water are “cold.”

Saying it again here: The only infrastructure we can trust is our own.

Even if there are still a number of services that are strongly above average trustworthy, they are ALL under attack in multiple “free” countries.

It’s Trump-proofish

• I approve of Matrix and Nextcloud.
• Proton unfortunately is probably the easiest option for now. We need better self hosted / anonymous email servers, but spammers and scammers have probably ruined that for everybody forever and fuck them all to hell for that. Best option is to just abandon email for anything sensitive.
• All the alternative social media is better, but they can still absolutely feed the lot of it into an LLM and then ask the LLM to print out a list of “likely dissidents.” I would be shocked if this isn’t coming soon to a United States near you - then again, I’m one to talk posting this on Lemmy, using a username I’ve used for close to two decades, from an instance that runs on a server I rent from a corporate cloud host.
• OS should be Whonix, Tails or Qubes.
• Browser should be Tor Browser (or at least get a mention). PRACTICALLY, for most people, I would recommend Brave over LibreWolf (for reasons of stability, compatibility, more frequent security patches and the fact that the Mozilla project has been unfortunately going to shit lately). Yes the company sucks, but the browser consistently scores top marks on real world privacy and security tests.
• No mention of FDE or post quantum crypto. Quantum chips are coming effing fast, if they’re not already here. I have reason to believe both the US and China can currently make practical use of Shor’s algorithm, although only in a targeted and VERY expensive way… but Moore’s Law man, plus I can’t prove it and I can’t say more. Post quantum doesn’t seem to be on most people’s radar (most troublingly, the Tor project).
• Anything to do with phones is literally fucked, like “This is fine” dog level fucked. If you MUST be mobile (like basically everybody trying to do basically anything), you must accept you’re probably NOT really fascist proof, unless you go to some pretty extreme lengths and REALLY know what you’re doing.

As far as your average normie (or even above average competence tech saavy user) goes, this is close to as Trump proof as you’re likely to get right now without help and support. So great, but it has holes in it a fascist regime could drive a brigade of tanks through, and unless you EITHER have that help and support OR really know what you’re doing, you should be thinking about that REALLY hard, every day.

We collectively decided decades ago that centralized services are more convenient and better able to connect us to the people and content we want to be connected to (although we were very deliberately herded in that direction by oligarchs). Now we will pay the price.

tl:dr; The only infrastructure we can trust is our own. Not liking that, and not having the skills or resources to do anything practical about it (tragically, terrifyingly) doesn’t make it not true. Plus needing to stay connected to the people and resources we can ONLY access through third party services and infrastructure, continues to make us reliant on those services and infrastructure, unto our own ruin.

I host servers both out of my home, out my wife’s office and I also have some cloud servers at Digital Ocean.

If you’re worried about data loss (and you should be) you need offsite backups. I have actually lost data to a fire (in 2009) and to a hard disk crash when I didn’t learn my lesson the first time (in 2014). Never again.

I have backup servers at both my house and my wife’s office. If you don’t have a wife with a convenient office for this purpose, you could probably find a self host buddy to host your backup server (and maybe you could host your buddy’s back up server, a friend and I used to do this years ago). You could also encrypt everything and then back the encrypted files up to the cloud, secure that the fascists almost certainly can’t decrypt them, even if they get their hands on the raw data.

You can automate this. There are tools that can help. I’m kind of a power user and I just use rsync, scp, minio and database replication to automate my various backups, so I’m a bad person to ask about the easier to use tools that can do this. However, either of those communities I posted are full of people with better answers and I know that less DIY back up tools exist.

Whilst I’ll agree with your statement some people prefer a service to use rather than self hosted.

Great! They can prefer that. Lots of people (most people probably) even need services, because they lack the skills and / or equipment.

That doesn’t change the simple truth of “the only infrastructure we can trust is our own.” My goal with that statement is to educate people as much as possible NOT to trust the third party services they’re using, even if those services supposedly care about privacy and security.

I’ve also seen a huge outpouring in recent weeks of people who are suddenly very eager to learn about and use self hosted infrastructure (or get access to someone else’s self hosted infrastructure). For some reason, I wonder what that could be. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I for one intend to encourage the shit out of it.

The barrier to entry to get Self Hosted Matrix working is unfortunately pretty high. Matrix is a great tool, but getting it working requires advanced skills and (in my limited experience) hours of troubleshooting.

That being said, I’m associated with an organization that wants to help activist groups self host matrix. If you know a group with need, check out https://rmfuni.org.

Given everything going on in the world, I can’t say this often enough:

The only infrastructure we can trust is our own.

https://lemmy.ml/c/selfhost@lemmy.ml

https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

Who says they aren’t? Elon has zero problems with double standards.

I’m actually doing two classes on alternating weeks, but they’re both

“Here’s basic opsec principles and now we’ll talk about a bunch of tools that are useful specifically for activism in (against) the current political climate.”

I’m doing a basic class where we’ll just try to help people organize in safer ways (Telegram is like the number one organizational platform right now). One of our goals there is to try to set specific projects / organizations up with dedicated Matrix servers and help them get non-technical people to use them.

We’re also doing a more advanced class where we want to help people set up their own hardened laptops and (for those able to secure the hardware) GrapheneOS phones. That will probably be like Unit 2 of that class. We want to start with threat modeling and help people figure out the tools they specifically need to do their work.

UPDATE:

I’ve had a chance to read through it.

• It’s short, to the point, an easy read, covers a lot of bases. I think that makes it an excellent starting point for people at the beginning of their journey.
• It doesn’t contain a lot of specific information, but I think it’s a good thing to have literature that’s just a general overview as a starting point.
• Stylometry is far from an exact science (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11707938/). However, I bet this won’t stop the current administration from using it (and possibly falsely accusing people because of it), so it’s good to know about.
• This will be extremely useful as I’m creating my lesson plan and I will probably pop it out to the class on day one as suggested reading.

Overall: Great resource and very timely. Thank you.

I would add, that if you’re planning to make a lot of use of tor, and run tor hidden services locally, syncing the Monero block chain over tor (possibly to multiple local machines) and solo mining on old slow computers is a great way to generate a bunch of random tor traffic.

I’ll read through this. I’m teaching a free class on cybersec / opsec to members of local activist organizations starting next month, so resources like this are potentially really useful.

Scratch under the surface of every for profit privacy / anonymity service, you find shitty libertarian cryptobros who probably post racist memes on 4chan while whining about feminism in the man-o-sphere. That doesn’t speak to the nature of people who care about privacy, it speaks to the nature of people who care about privacy and also want to do capitalism.

LinkedIn is a crime against humanity.

Username checks out.

The same FBI that keeps telling Congress end to end encryption needs to have legally mandated back doors in it?

“The DOJ is pushing radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case”

I have a feeling that this is going to become the standard defense against ANYTHING the robber barons don’t like in both the courtroom and the media in coming months and years.

People HATE the company, for good reason, but it consistently scores top marks for actual privacy implementation.

That went well.

• Theoretically Yes, if your Linux partition is not encrypted, any OS can read it. Password protecting it doesn’t do anything to conceal your data, just keeps people from logging into your system while Linux is booted. If this is a security / privacy related question, there is nothing to stop a program running under Windows from reading the data on your Linux partition except

• Practically No, depending on the filesystem you chose (if you went with the default, it’s likely ext4 but could be something more exotic). Out of the box Windows lacks the software / drivers to read most Linux filesystems. If this is a “can I access my files” question, you probably need to install something like this to read your data from Windows. Note that the reverse is not true. Most distros other than light weight distros like Alpine are perfectly able to read the NTFS file system out of the box. Sometimes they can’t write to it unless you install additional tools (like OOTB Debian probably can’t, but I’m pretty sure OOTB Linux Mint can if you change a setting and IDK about OOTB Ubuntu / Fedora / Arch).

The easiest way to share data between Windows and Linux is with a 3rd partition formatted to FAT32, as both Linux and Windows have no problem reading from / writing to it without additional software.

EDIT: The other poster is absolutely correct. The modern way to do this is with exFAT. What can I say? I’m a crusty old engineer.

It’s very likely that adware / spyware / malware targeting Windows users will NOT be able to read Ext4 or other Linux filesystems, unless it’s specifically targeted to do so, so you do have that added “security through obscurity” protection.

My TV set is a 7 year old Dell All-in-One PC running Linux Mint. It works great. It doesn’t try to sell me shit. Ads be hella blocked.

Hmm. Driving porn viewers who value their privacy underground couldn’t possibly have any negative consequences I can think of.

this.

Yes, but nothing real came of them. The US government has a long and well recorded history of spending money on pseudoscience, even well after it’s been debunked, as long as there are True Believers in the chain of command.

And the conspiracy theory community has a long and even more dramatic history of taking those mole hills and turning them into mountains (especially if grifters can sell books and / or T-shirts and / or weird copper sculptures that are supposed to “protect” you from it).

Look, I grew up with parents (and a wide community) who believed in psychic shit, crystal healing, telepathy, getting messages from the Akoshic record, what evs. It’s NOT real and also believing it is NOT harmless. You’re gonna find PLENTY of misinformation about what people “believe” but if you look into any of it, you’re going to discover that somewhere along the line someone channeled something or someone like David Icke or Garahm Hancock or Rudolph Steiner or Drunvalo Melchizedek or Raël is involved, or someone is selling tickets to their lecture or psychic seminar.

Honestly, only if this is a roleplay community. We’re getting into the realms of crackpots and conspiracy theories here.

That sounds like pseudoscience to me.

On the other hand, there have been rather dramatic advances in brain / computer interfaces and using machine learning to interpret electrical signals from the human brain. The good news there is that every brain is different, the machines need to learn each brain individually (a model trained to pull dream images out of my brain will pull just gibberish out of yours).

So far, the researchers would need your close cooperation in order to train a machine to understand even a little bit of what’s going on in your mind. This tech is nowhere near being used for interrogation.

I think making hay out of this problem when it’s a niche case nothing burger, especially in a thread full of linux hate, is… Call it what ever you want but…

As I said earlier, I wasn’t trying to be insulting, you were coming across in a certain way in the context you were posting in.

Linux has always been a DIY operating system, for very good reason. The compatibility decisions you’re talking about were made for very good reasons. There’s an easy solution, anyone having this problem (SUPER rare for most users) can reach out and use.

Got 7yuv running on Linux Mint in under 15 minutes. If you consider using Docker to be cheating, consider me a cheater, but I stand by my statement that this is a niche problem affecting a niche group of users, there are even easy solutions.

Give me an example or two of a GUI program that you’d want to run, that doesn’t have a maintained version that will run fine in a modern environment, that you’re actually frustrated because you can’t run it.

We can bitch about how dependency systems work all day. I want to try to install something with a sane use case and see what we’re on about, since this is literally a scenario I have barely run into. I gather that for me to run into it, I would have to practically go looking for it. Which to me, sounds like a very specific problem for a very specific subset of users, not a general problem worth paint brushing the entire ecosystem with.

Why do you think I’m angry? You (and my buddy) are just comically wrong, don’t wanna learn and get frustrated and mad when you run into trouble, like a cartoon character trying to open a can with a hammer.

I use Linux for everything, it’s stable, easy, fun I’m WAAY more comfortable in it than I ever was in Windows. Your opinion doesn’t change how well Linux works for me and has for decades. It’s definitely NOT shit, you just don’t know what you’re doing.

You’re like a dude talking to a professional race driver saying “Why drive manual, automatic is SO much easier, and therefor better and manual is harder and therefor shit.” Like dude, you’re talking to a room full of professional drivers. Like think about that for a second before you keep going the way you have been.

Seriously, give me some examples. I’m genuinely curious because I’ve run into this problem like… once, ten years ago. Twice, if you count trying to run Heroes of Might and Magic III for Linux that came out in like… 1999, and I eventually got that to work too (I needed an emulator) and I’ve been an almost exclusive Linux user since 2001.

I said disingenuous because my lived experience is like “wtf is this guy doing wrong?” and so you REALLY come across like you’re just trashing Linux and talking out of your ass.

I’m not trying to be insulting, just giving you feedback about how you’re coming across.

Your surround sound, I’m sure it could be done. I’ve set up some pretty successful visual / audio stuff with Linux. I did IT for an Indy film festival four years in a row and we used Linux for all kinds of stuff (mostly because the festival was broke and didn’t want to spend money on new computers or software). We would run into hardware and configuration issues and our philosophy became “if you can’t solve it in two hours, distrohop.”

For the rest of it, I couldn’t agree more. If you need the tools that lock you to the platform, you need the platform FOR THOSE TOOLS. I have Windows and OSX machines (although it’s been like a year since I couldn’t do something on Wine, even if it’s glitchy). My Windows machines dual boot and I haven’t booted the windows partitions in literally 6-8 months. One OSX machine gets used almost exclusively for video conferencing (just because it’s in a convenient place) and for Garageband. The other OSX machine literally… just runs linux VMs that I can connect to over the network for various projects. I had other plans for it originally, but someone gave me a 6 year old Dell all in one that now runs Linux Mint and performs better than my actual Roku TV anyway. It’s a bit smaller than the TV, but it doesn’t matter to me. The TV disappeared into my wife’s office and now she’s the only one that uses it.

I genuinely had an experience like this myself. I suggested Linux as a solution for something to a friend of mine who was a physicist doing a start up. This was around 2015-2016. He went on an angry rant about frustrating Linux was and nothing would work. His last experience with it was in 2002.

Bro do you even alien?

Highly disingenuous comment. I run older and newer software side by side in Linux all the time. It mostly just works.

Are you using snap or something?

My Ubuntu box I use for browsing/watching videos and listening to music just barely works and was frustrating to get properly configured.

Something is wrong. Have you tried Linux Mint? -Someone who has used Linux as a daily driver since 2001.

Ah. I forget that real world paper exists, my ADHD brain can’t make functional use of it.

Funny. But, as it runs on Windows, it’s definitely not the most private.

I suggest Emacs or vi running in a Qube.

I always find these breakdowns to be a little bit disingenuous. Like, you could do this same analysis on the whole email system, or on the whole world wide banking system, including ATMs, or on the energy usage of all DNS queries or even on global ActivityPub activity, not to mention shopping on Amazon or browsing Facebook. People DO do these kinds of breakdowns on generative AI, for exactly the same reasons, and reach the same kinds of conclusions.

Having a global computer network is INCREDIBLY energy intensive, with a massive carbon footprint. It’s not shocking that a given application of that network is energy intensive, with a massive carbon footprint. These kinds of analysis are put together by people who already don’t like cryptocurrencies (for all kinds of reasons both valid and ridiculous) who then go cherry picking MORE reasons not to like them.