kbal

Pick one that has a wireguard config generator, so you don’t need to use any client software besides the normal linux wg client.

I’d also look for one that accepts anonymous payment methods. Even if you don’t intend to go to the trouble to use that yourself, it’s probably a good sign if it’s available. Mullvad is pretty safe and served me well until they stopped doing port forwarding. Proton, windscribe, azire, and airvpn were the ones that seemed most recommended when I went to look for a new one a few months ago.

I think that’s just some scrabble players angry at all the non-words

Only 1 in 100 Americans knows that HTML was named for “hot metal” after a type of ancient torture device.

Well, she’s not wrong that we need more influential people fighting back against this latest push in the global coordinated effort to put an end to communications privacy. It’s really quite alarming how little attention it seems to get most of the time. Civil society seemed much more robust when it fought off similar attacks in the 1990s. I do hope that the “VC community” isn’t our only hope.

But of course Signal can’t interoperate with another messaging platform, without them raising their privacy bar significantly

Signal is supposed to be free software. You could probably manage to interoperate at least with other operators of actual Signal-Server instances, if you wanted to.

More importantly, you don’t need to be on an airplane to use airplane mode.

Kids should focus on the one thing AI can’t do: Stand-up comedy.

“Piracy shield” sounds pretty stupid. It needs more of a catchy name. “The Great Melonian Firewalls” maybe?

Whittaker says that, for better or worse, a phone number remains a necessary requisite

Worse. It is for the worse. We sure did wait a long time for this half measure, Signal.

Every once in a while I wonder what things are like back in the land of Microsoft. That this message doesn’t give the user even the slightest hint about what it wants to do more specifically than “improve your experience” tells me all I need to know.

I’m just glad I checked the comments here before wasting even one second watching the video.

This isn’t really the right decade for that.

Price discrimination just means charging different prices to different customers based on what you think you know about them. Its benign form would be a market vendor asking higher prices of individual people who look like they can afford it, and then really fleecing the tourists who look like they’ll fall for it. In that form it looks perfectly wholesome compared to what the big corporations get up to today: Supermarkets selling smaller package sizes in poor areas at lower sticker price but higher unit price, airlines asking different ticket prices depending what they know about your web browsing history, et cetera. I do not rate it a good thing overall. Even if we take it for granted that international borders are a thing, and services can’t be intermediated or subjected to arbitrage, the rich man in a luxury condo in Brazil paying less for some thing than the minimum-wage worker in New York does not strike me as reflecting any kind of justice.

But this is the Internet. International borders are not supposed to be a thing here, and still aren’t for the most part despite the best efforts of the most repressive governments to change that. The cost of shipping data from one side of the world to the other is effectively zero. The system where it’s broadly true that different parts of the world have vastly different purchasing power is an injustice, it’s not something we should be attempting to replicate in cyberspace. I can route my network packets so that they appear to be coming from any region I choose, and so can anyone who can afford Netflix in any country. It’s not a freedom I want to give up so that big streaming services can extract maximum revenue from each national market separately.

I’ve met quite a few vegans and far as I know none of them avoid gluten. I also know someone with celiac disease, who would never even contemplate going vegan when he already has so many dietary restrictions to put up with.

They’re not absolutely mutually exclusive groups, but pretty close to it I think. Slackware users who install everything through Snap are the real gluten-free vegans of the linux world.

It’s just another form of price discrimination, a crude attempt to extract maximum value from everyone according to their demographics. If they could charge a different price based on the size of your bank account they’d do that as well and it would be to my advantage. It makes a mockery of the idea that market price reflects the value of anything, and therefore of capitalism itself.

Now that you mention it, my policy from now on is to avoid any Internet service that tries to charge different prices depending on what country it thinks you’re in.

For me it’s seemed more gradual over the past few years. I keep around a lightly sandboxed firefox install with a clean profile for the occasions where it’s worth going to that much trouble to see whatever cloudflare is blocking.

It also serves to remind me every now and then how much worse the default browser UI is compared to the one I’ve adjusted to my liking.

They reported three posts! The scale of damage that must’ve been done to the vital ebb and flow of our corporate social media discourse is practically inconceivable, you might think.

But I’ve done even worse: I have reported more than five posts from spammers to fediverse admins who subsequently removed them. Tremble before the might of my awesome power of censorship, fedizens!