eclic.ro is an exclusive Cloudflare site just like change.org is. Exclusivity is obviously quite lousy for democracy. Better alternatives are here:

https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/140

privacytools.io always was shit show even before the infighting. They put their own endorsement site on Cloudflare. Despite a collossal pile of dirt emerging on #Signal:

https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/issues/779

PTIO continued endorsing Signal non-stop, refusing to disclose the issues. That was also before the breakup. Dirt was routinely exposed on PTIO endorsements and it never changed their endorsement nor did they reveal the findings on their website.

Now both factions are hypocrits just as they were when they were united. The original PTIO site is back to being Cloudflared (nothing like tossing people coming to you for privacy advice into the walled garden of one of the most harmful privacy offenders), and Privacy Guides has setup on a CF’d Lemmy node. The hypocrisy has no end with these people.

Interesting, but that does not help because Mint jails all their docs in Cloudflare.

Also worth noting that #Ubuntu and #Mint both moved substantial amounts of documentation into Cloudflare (the antithisis of the values swiso claims to support). I have been moving people off those platforms.

BTW, prism-break is a disasterous project too. You know they don’t have a clue when they moved their repo from Github.com to Gitlab.com, an access-restricted Cloudflare site. There are tens if not hundreds of decent forges to choose from and PRISM Break moved from the 2nd worst to the one that most defeats the purpose of their constitution.

It might be useful to find dirt on various tech at prism-break, but none of these sites can be trusted for endorsements.

The prism-break website is timing out for me right now. I would not be surprised if they were dropping Tor packets since they have a history of hypocrisy.

If you look in their bug tracker, it actually reveals that they ignore dirt that has been dug up on their suggestions.

As others have mentioned there is little in the way of justification for these suggestions, and while I happen to agree with plenty of them, I’d personally like to see more reasoning, if not to appease people that already have opinions then to help newer users understand their options.

Indeed. In fact it’s actually worse than you describe. Swiso witholds negative information. They don’t want to inform people. They want to steer people. For example, swiso’s endorsements for donation platforms have some quite serious problems:

https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/141

swiso is also aware of the serious issues with Qwant and the serious issues with DuckDuckGo. Not only failing to remove them but also failing to inform. Qwant and DDG are both Microsoft syndicates!

(if anyone is interested, one of the most privacy-respecting search services is Ombrelo¹, which is largely unknown to the world because PTIO, swiso, and prism-break don’t do the job they claim to do)

And swiso is aware because that’s their bug tracker.

/cc @Imprint9816@lemmy.dbzer0.com

¹ https://ombrelo.im5wixghmfmt7gf7wb4xrgdm6byx2gj26zn47da6nwo7xvybgxnqryid.onion/

There are a few good alternatives and swiso has been aware of them for ~4+ years:

https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/140

After reading the article it’s not as great as I was hoping for. From the article:

“We’re obviously going to be interested in having the books sell as successfully as possible, but we’re not going to harm the fundamental mission of the library to provide free and easy access to the content on our shelves. We’re not going to sacrifice that mission. Just because we’re operating Angel City Press, we’re not going to buy 500 copies of every title and put them in every branch library. That’s not prudent. That’s not what a good library would do.”

So it’s still a profit-driven press. This is a conflict of interest but the library seems confident they can negoiate that fairly.

I was hoping the press would become non-profit and then be used to print and distribute creative commons licensed content. I have a friend (who shall remain unnamed but who is well known) who would like to release their work into the commons and give up all rights apart from attribution. In principle a library-owned press would seem ideal. But I guess this is not the right tool for the job. It also seems the books this press will print are LA-specific anyway.

StreetComplete shows me no map, just quests on a blank canvas. OSMand shows my offline maps just fine, but apparently StreetComplete has no way to reach the offline maps. I suppose that’s down to Android security – each app has it’s own storage space secure from other apps.

In principle, we should be able to put the maps on shared SD card space and both apps should access it. But StreetComplete gives no way in the settings of specifying the map location. And apparently it fails to fetch an extra copy of the maps as well in my case.

Protonmail failed to satisfy F-Droid’s inclusion criteria because it requires gms (playstore framework) and because it uses Firebase messaging.

Since I’ve disabled gms in my device I’m not sure how Protonmail would work for me. Someone tells me I might simply lose push notifications capability. But I am confused because Snikket pushes notifications just fine on my device.

it’s worth noting that protonmail has an onion and their clearnet server also accepts tor connections. So users can control the leakage of their IP… but only if they’re willing to solve countless CAPTCHAs.

I’m on the edge of quitting protonmail. The issues:

• #CAPTCHA hell. At least for Tor users.
• no app in f-droid
• API shenanigans and/or CAPTCHA breaks hydroxide (the foss bridge)
• protonvpn: you can no longer fetch all the configs in one download. You have to click “download” >120 times now to get all the configs
• account locks if you do not login frequently enough (i think every 6 months)
• if you supply your login creds but get a CAPTCHA and say fuck this, and walk, it does not count as a full login needed to reset the expiration clock
• the CAPTCHAs are graphical which forces you to enable images in your browser; but when you do that you get images that junk up your screen and waste bandwidth
• no public keyring. Hushmail was better in this regard. An advanced user could upload their PGP public key to Hushtools and then encryption just worked for hushmail users contacting that person. After Hushmail started charging, I would tell the normies who need comms w/me to get a gratis Protonmail account. But then I have to send them my public key and they have to figure out how to attach it to my profile in their phonebook. It’s a show-stopper in many situations.

I would say mostly true.

I moved to a region where my lifestyle (accounting for wages, tax, cost of living) was effectively cut in half. Yet it was still the right move. My initial thinking was I will live anywhere for a year to get a different experience - I can always bounce back if I don’t like it… if the pay reduction bothered me. I ended up staying ~10 years.

A big factor is where you are in life. Fresh out of university, it’s important to gain ground right away and perhaps get the house paid for, or nearly so. But once you’re a senior dev and at a point of calling yourself “privileged class" with a decent sized 401k built up (which is great to convert to a Roth while abroad), you’re only cheating yourself out of life experiences by continuing to chase the money. Some research concluded around ~10 yrs ago that people’s overall happiness improves as income increases up until the $55k/year mark. Beyond that, income doesn’t matter much. Of course that would be a little higher now with inflation but I guess the OP has cleared that figure.

I think it was around 15 years ago I started researching typical incomes around the world and I noticed that Japan paid SWEs double the US average. Cost of living was about 50% higher in Japan but it still worked out that a US→Japan move would have been a lifestyle upgrade. So there are some rare exceptions.

I think you would benefit most by moving abroad. Staying in one country your whole life is very one-dimensional. If you move to another country, esp. overseas, you will look back on your current boredom as wasting your life and you will regret not having done it sooner. Go for just one year. You can always return if you don’t like it. You might be someone who says “I went for 1 year, but stayed 5”.

But first move to a purple swing state like GA or PA for just a month or two, then move your stuff into mini storage. Two reasons: you get to experience a different part of the US, briefly, and you can register to vote in a place where your future votes will count the most. Because that’s the state you will vote in while abroad. OTOH, isn’t Texas on the edge of being a swing state? It’s probably not a bad place to vote from.

Now that Google is ending the Google Cache, archive.org is really the only service we have for archiving the whole web. This has to change.

similar study reported by the ALA. (pdf research paper which also cites PEW research center)

Interesting excerpt:

Gen Z and millennials’ high use of Amazon’s audio-book and ebook paid subscription services poses a challenge for libraries articularly because of “Amazon-exclusive” licensing, which prohibits some authors from distributing their work outside the Amazon ecosystem.

from the article:

Younger generations tend to be more values driven than older ones, and libraries’ ethos of sharing seems to resonate with Gen Zers and millennials – as does a space that’s free from the insipid creep of commercialism. At the library, there are no ads and no fees – well, provided you return your books on time – and no cookies tracking and selling your behavior.

Actually we need to work on that.

Libraries do little to nothing to make browsers defensive w.r.t the intrusive web and some libraries even block Tor, which enables ad surveillance corps to monetize your data. PCs are usually all Windows (which has some baked-in surveillance) and often the systems are hardened so users cannot deploy¹ any kind of self-defense tools. Network users are sometimes blocked from using egress Tor traffic (iow, nothing that threatens the library itself). Library patrons are distrusted more than the surveillance advertisers on the other end. So patrons have to contend with both a spammy web and having their hands tied by excessive nannying.

I was unable to fetch the Debian OS at the library because the ISOs are no longer on the official mirror sites. Someone had to setup a server on a non-standard port. One particular library branch decided it was a good idea to arbitrarily block uncommon ports (WTF). And because the security was outsourced without support, the librarians were helpless.

Although to some extent these barriers might not put off millennials because they never experienced the free, open, and ad-free internet we had ~2—3 decades ago.

1. sure it would be a recipe for disaster to let users install anything willy-nilly, but patrons should be able to lodge a ticket requesting a tool config they need.

There are maker spaces devoted to that around the world called “fab labs” equipped with CNRs, 3d printers, welding gear, etc, but the hourly prices are insane. A library seems like the wrong place for that sort of thing but I’m sure the price is right.

I recall reading in a kbin bug (which reported that votes are public and should not be) that Lemmy votes are not. So I could have been misinformed… i did not look into it.

So everyone is stupid trying to run lemmy the way they can

Some people are more skilled than others. Skilled admins know how to avoid CF. Skilled users know how to find instances that are run by skilled admins (non-CF). Unwise users give up something for nothing and needlessly trust and empower a demonstrably abusive tech giant.

Because privacy is more important on a public forum than fighting the bots.

Of course. Privacy is about control not just security. Those bots CF fights are beneficial. The fight against beneficial bots has collateral damage on humans caught in the cross-fire, evidenced by countless discriminatory CAPTCHAs, driven by some protectionist asshole who doesn’t want their data scraped. The fight against bots is harmful to human users; not just because of the discrimination against blind people but also because we lose the benefits that beneficial bots bring us.

But someone for some reason should give you a server for free. … So you won’t contribute, won’t help just nag about everything. ok.

Of course. Money isn’t free. Your expectation that a developer not only contribute labor to the commons but also spend their own money is a perversely absurd demonstration of self-entitlement. If you want a tor version make it yourself and use the high-speed connection you already have to test with.

But you CAN solve the issues of lemmy because you CAN fork it, but you won’t.

Fork it for what purpose? Adding Tor support is useless on a capped uplink.

You trust some random guy from Finland more than everyone else,

Citation needed. I’ll trust any random person more than Cloudflare because CF has proven to be untrustworthy.