There are a lot of issues with your post imo.

First, cash is going away, soon. Sweden has done it years ago. Europe is now playing catch up.

Second, a universal digital currency will remove all system heterogeneity. Yes money is already digitalised, but across several proprietary environments. I can and have set up several accounts across several banks so my spending cannot be fully tracked by a single corporate entity. This will be moot once everyone has to use the same harmonized system.

Third, one of the sponsors of the universal European currency has been caught talking about time limited digital currency. As in, spend your money or it just disintegrates after a set amount of time. Which really destroyed a lot of trust in the endeavour

They’ve been around a bit now. Everyone seems to be pretty satisfied. Desktop app could use some improvements, which is already on their roadmap

Money transfer platforms are even worse than chat apps in terms of how acceptance dictates usefulness. You might convince a couple of friends to use xmpp instead of whatsapp. But its near impossible to get major outlets to integrate new payment methods. Especially if that platform advocates privacy and therefore doesn’t offer a return on invest based on user data. I don’t think we’re gonna see true alternatives without government regulation, and even then…

Strictly speaking, if being trackable is an issue for you, you shouldn’t run around with bluetooth enabled in the first place. And incidentally, no BT means no find my device either.

• I’m a privacy-minded programmer
• I’m (…) aware of how these AIs function
• I am not overly concerned about them

Objectively, these three statements form a paradox. At least one statement has to be false.

I second disroot. Been happy with their service.

Let’s see what europes e2ee ban will bring. Proton is one of the “high risk” services mentioned in the bills debate. Might not be too long before you have to host your own mail server if you want privacy in europe.

Privacy matters most in the individual case, with people who know you.

That statement is subjective at best. My friends and coworkers knowing where I live certainly isn’t my concern. In today’s day and age privacy enthusiasts are definitely more scared of corpos and governments.

isn’t worth it yet.

You’re thinking too small. Just in the context of the e2ee ban planned in europe, think what you could do. The new law is set to scan all your messages before/after sending for specific keywords. Imagine you get automatically flagged and now an AI is scanning all your pictures for locations and contacts and what not. Just the thought that might be technically possible is scary as hell.

You’re misunderstanding the post. It’s not about whether or not someone could guess your location from a picture. It’s about the automation thereof. As soon as that is possible it becomes another viable vector to compromise your privacy.

Torrenting/seeding works great with Mullvad, which doesn’t have port forwarding

I never understood how movie-web got so popular when services like FMovies exist.

3 reasons for me:

• XMPP implementations have been around so much longer than signal, to me signal would be “just another messaging app”

• XMPP doesn’t require my phone number. Signal might give you the option to use usernames with your contacts, but still requires a valid number for registration last I checked.

• I can self host an XMPP server instead of trusting/depending on someone else.

The encryption itself isn’t outlawed. The law would force all app and service providers (signal and proton for example are mentioned as high risk entities) to implement backdoors. The user to user communication stays encrypted.

But you can make it a lot harder and economically unattractive for them

The article makes some good points. Most people downvoting it probably just see a title that attacks their favourite game distribution platform, if there even is such a thing.

Personally, I treat Steam like a rental service, because that’s what it is. Meaning I exclusively “buy” games on Steam at deep 80-90% discounts. So, when the enshittification inevitably hits the fan, I can jump ship without feeling like I’m loosing too much.

It’s a false dichotomy to argue that a service can’t have a free privacy respecting offering.

I don’t believe anyone is arguing that it’s technically impossible. But reality is pretty clear that it’s implausible. Targeted ads reel in too much money.

I think the real fallacy is getting used to services being free at all. You need to pay a monthly fee for basically every utility, but as soon as it’s in the digital world people expect that to change. What makes a search engine or mail provider so much different than your ISP or cable provider? You want competent services that respect your privacy? Pay for alternatives like Kagi and Proton.

In other news, water is wet. Honestly though, people expecting “free” services from big corpos are naive. What do they expect the servers and admins/devs are payed with?

Uses a lot of battery power.

He does that on all his posts. I immediately recognize him each time he comments. I don’t know if he’s just trolling or he really thinks it’s gonna keep the LLMs away. In any case, it’s funny as shit.

I doubt they would be able to. I was interested and looked around a bit. There’s even a whole chapter in their documentation dedicated to adding extractors. First paragraph of that chapter is basically ‘‘do not add piracy websites’’