MKinley

Just wanted to say thank you for this tool! I hope you keep it online as I want to use this for my kids as they grow up to teach them this when they reach it in school.

Also, as it stands right now as of this post I found the UI to be fine, the speed was decent and did a good job of following the path without taking too long or being too fast, I think its at a good balance right now.

OK thanks! I will try those out!

Camscanner was one of my favourite apps! I had even paid for the pro version back before it sold. Then when it sold that actually meant nothing, and now I have a "pro" app that is useless essentially.

If anyone has good alternative suggestions I'm open, I haven't tried to look as I don't use it much anymore.

If I am understanding you correctly, dark patterns are meant to be a psychological hit to you, it's not tech savvyness but clarity of mind and knowing that most every big business out there wants to make money off you and will do anything to get that money. This is a huge reason I am not on Facebook (among others, including the standard ones), and other social media platforms. I investigate claims myself, and do not trust what is thrown at me. Perhaps this is the biggest reason dark patterns have never worked on me. Also keeping a strong privacy/security setup that you don't compromise on helps too.

I agree, and I believe this is in part because it is these kind of people that malware is targeted at. We, the tech savvy, will be smart enough to not do something because we pay attention at permissions or what extensions, programs, tools, etc are doing or want to do. The tech illiterate still do know how to use Google, search for what they want to do, click on the first thing that looks like it will do what they want, download and use it. If it doesn't do what they want, it remains there and they go and repeat these steps until they find exactly what program, etc does what they want, all while the bad ones remain installed, doing bad things.

My wife fell into this category when we first met, after I began teaching her even just some basics and she learned to question things and be more careful, I haven't needed to "diagnose" her computer in a long time (I still do regular maintenance, but irregular issues never come up anymore). So I would say that education is the biggest key in this regard, teach them to start with a zero trust model.

This is a terrible mindset to have. When I was a manager I took every opportunity to praise my employees (with meaningful compliments and feedback) and discouraged negativity. During a management team meeting I even stood against the others on promoting someone because he was always negative and I pointed out how inefficient his coworkers were around him and that he would only continue that, it didn't matter how good he was himself at the job, he needed to be encouraged to change for the better. After working with him for a while and helping him see how he was hurting others and himself, he changed his mindset, and was later promoted, I continued to coach him even after I left that location.

My basic point is this, even those with the wrong mindset can be swayed with the right mindset, as long as it is sincere.

Very good point, and I would add that line can be moved based on individual circumstances. I've seen people complain about issues with a service, but the moment I offer an alternative and a way to migrate (painlessly for me to do, and I typically offer to help them) suddenly all is good with their service and they're sticking with it. I've even pushed a little further in the past to say I will do ALL of the work for you, just sit back and relax and in a couple hours done. Most still refuse and I don't get why once all barriers have been removed.

The carting around and updating is made simpler with a tool I have found and love, free file sync. One of the few tools I buy into (even though its free).

Yes I do, offline and offsite backup of important and valuable data stored on a HDD at my parents. Not the most seemless or user friendly options, but the privacy and security of my data is more important.

I have also considered looking into mirroring my data on a trusted hosting provider for some day when I can afford to pay.

Google's "business" model has been in question for years now, I now am extra glad that I already downloaded all my data from Google, acquired my own domain and set up a nextcloud server. If I need more space, I buy another/larger hard drive, and never need to worry about data collection, services shutting down or prices changing.

I am not in law enforcement myself, but do some online investigations, and like many others in my field we use YouTube-dl to save a copy of video evidence relevant to a case we are working on. It can be instrumental for archiving the evidence if it is ever removed or taken down, can also be used to grab extra info (CC text log is one example) and then manually searched for specific strings. This tool has made ma y investigations pay off in ways they never could have otherwise.

> I’m wondering if my experience is an outlier or if this is pretty much what everyone experiences today?

I experience very much the same issues. While I do occasionally have great conversations over IM with select few people, most are similar to what you describe, write a long letter and only receive a few sentences or less. I myself though do still prefer in person conversation, too much inflection, tones and meaning is lost in text based conversation, it is even taken the wrong way a lot as a result.

Could you share a link to your project? I'm curious what it is.

One option I also think we are forgetting, Services like ProtonMail and Tutanota. Both are private and encrypted, both are free (with an option to pay for more services). These services are out there, but general knowledge of them is not so high. I believe more users would switch to them if they knew about them. My own parents came to me asking if there was something they could do after being creeped out/scared by big techs privacy invasive tracking and stalking. They weren't aware of the availability of other services and yet they went looking when it got bad enough. How much sooner for others if they were aware of these alternative services? We could all argue back and forth about both sides, but I believe that both sides would be truly surprised about what would actually happen.

edit: typos

I don't comment often on here, but just wanted to say thank you for this tool. I will be thoroughly checking out https://idbloc.co and making good use of it! It looks like it will be simpler than using disposable emails, and definitely better than creating random emails!

Have you tried Open Street Maps? You can get their app from F-droid.

Edit: Maps (Offline OpenStreetMap maps) - https://f-droid.org/app/com.github.axet.maps