mickotron

Bitcoin transactions are more transparent and publicly traceable than cash, Bitcoin sucks for illicit transactions. Monero should be the crypto of choice for criminals because it is untraceable.

Should've used signal

I always wondered why its not n*x

I think some are missing the point when we say "RSS as a Facebook alternative".

Yeah, current feed readers will not replace Facebook.

RSS as an exchange medium of content (in my naive opinion) can replace Facebook. It's just that a project needs to build around it.

Follow friends? Click "Follow" in UI, it subscribes to their feed. Live streams? Live stream link can be contained in the RSS feed, subscribers see it in their feed. Facebook groups? Same as users, just a subscription to an RSS feed. Security? Perhaps feed content is encrypted, and only Friends can decrypt? Exchange of keys at Friending could provide this functionality?

It would take a lot of work to make this decentralised, secure, private, and usable to regular users. But I think this kind of model sounds much nicer than what is currently on offer. What do others think?

A recruiter called me out of the blue years ago when I was looking for a job, probably from LinkedIn. I didn't know much about contracting so I was just curious as to what he could do for me.

He called me once screaming at me because he thought I was not being exclusive to him with regards to a particular job. I told him quickly where to go, it was him who called me, grow up and stop wasting my time. To this day I have no idea what he was smoking that day cause I'm as bewildered now as I was then about what he was on about.

Install grapheneos! My pixel 3a is rocking it, yours should too ;)

This is the way. From another happy grapheneos user, and project sponsor.

Early 2020 I installed grapheneos on my phone. It had the awesome side effect of not allowing me to install social media apps. I mean, you really can if you want to, but why would you?

I explained to my Facebook friends that I was leaving and why, and that they can get in touch via sms, email, or signal. I had left Facebook before in the early 2010s for a few years, but had been back for a few years.

I found most people did not want to interact outside Facebook messenger. It has been really hard to get people to migrate over to signal. Even my family chat is no longer used on signal, even though they all have signal and I created the group, they prefer Facebook.

Businesses and even government use Facebook day to day for services and information. It really annoys me because it excludes us people not on that service. It is so presumptuous to assume that everyone is on Facebook. And its really dangerous to think that it should be a prerequisite for participating in the real world.

I really enjoy not participating in the "fake life" rat race. Some people may not report this phenomenon in their feeds, but as a guy in early 30s, its a common thread. Even if people don't consciously do it, it seems that is the accepted way to interact and post about life events. The reflex of taking a photo firstly to share with others online, to change how they perceive you. I did not enjoy all the aspects of how social media was influencing how we interact with our peers, so I quit.

I would love a secure decentralised social media option. Where I can post and others can subscribe, not matter their client or service. I wish that businesses and governments can do the same, and I don't have to be on Facebook to receive information about Covid vaccine rollout.

Running 2011 macbook as mostly daily driver, was daily driver for much of its life, has run linux most of its life.

But in the case of university classes, you are in fact buying them, it ain't free. So the shopping cart actually does make sense even if its a terrible use of another use cases' interface.

Just started $5 on github, cheers for the reminder

Binary Eye is a QR scanner for android that is open source, and available on Google Play and F-Droid.

Reading this via Feeder from my phone.

Yes, the governer general is the "commander in chief", and the governer general is the queen's power proxy, so technically Lizzy is the head of the armed forces, despite polite conventions.

They can tell that you got a phone number and use signal. Apart from when you first and last used signal (timestamp), as in sent messages, that's about all the info signal has on you, and can provide. That sounds pretty good. Even if it is tied to a physical identity. The fact that your content is sufficiently encrypted and cannot be tied to your identity, even by signal, means what you say is anonymized.

This is actually very cool, I'm checking it out. Thanks!

Signal still works with notifications and everything without GCM or any google aervices. I have grapheneos on my pixel phone and signal works flawlessly.

But yes it would be nice if they used something else other than GCM for the vast majority.

Umm... Chat backups in signal are a thing. Settings > Chats and Media > Chat Backups.

Is there a specific feature of chat backups you are missing on Signal?

Same issue here, and I don't use PayPal after they asked me to provide info to Equifax to continue using it.

They aren't on liberapay as far as I can see.

Crowdsourced. The crawling and downloading was able to be coordinated and performed by a bunch of people at the same time.

Early in my Ops career I wrote a log handling script for Windows servers. It was a re-write of an existing one that pre-dated a lot of us. My version used an xml configuration file, but this iteration of the script did not properly validate the configuration items read from the file. Also, Powershell had this weird xml parsing bug that if a parent had a commented child element, it would show up as an empty child element.

So I came in one afternoon shift and my colleague said "your script destroyed two Production servers last night". These servers were critical for monitoring Police radio GPS coordinates.

"Impossible! It should only work on directories we configured it for!"

I sat there looking at horror at the debug logs, and sure enough, it read the empty child element, changed directory into "", looking for files with "" name pattern, which for Powershell resulted in C:\Windows\system32 and all files. It proceeded to zip and remove "old" files. On a reboot, they did not come back up.

To add insult to injury, when they rebuilt those servers manually, the same script with the commented out config was deployed, destroying the servers again. They realised that the script was the issue and decided not to deploy that the second time.

So I learned a lot about config validation and defensive coding in the months following the incident.

WSL is nice but still lacking. I prefer Windows VM on Linux host.

One thing I do like is the 9p "interface" between Windows host and WSL, and the improvements they made to file sharing between the two.

Free market and competition relies on the consumer being able to make an informed choice. How can they if there are no published prices, and then no way for these entities to compete?

It is designed this way like a cartel, inflate prices, nothing free market about it.

Healthcare cannot be delivered for profit and still put patient outcomes first, period.

I have mostly degoogled by planning then doing a big bang. I wrote out all the things I depend on, all the things I need to migrate, the alternatives, etc. I researched the alternatives and made a decision to implement it. I then did it in stages.

Currently I use my new pixel 3a with grapheneos, no google services, fastmail + k9, ddg, cloudflare dns, signal etc.

I still need to sort out office suite. Collabora does have android apks that should just work but I am waiting til it gets into f-droid.

The one thing I haven't migrated is Chromecast. Once that is done I will be pretty happy.

Note that you will never be totally free of Google. You will still be subjected to google analytics, captcha, dns, chrome (and derivatives), etc. The idea is to be less dependent on their services, reduce Google's capability to harvest your data, and ultimately reduce their influence, power and control.

I only have my bank app, RSA token app (needed for work, nonnegotiable) and music app (Deezeer) from Aurora. Blokada blocks trackers well enough. Yes it is a compromise but atm, like you have indicated, no-compromise is not very usable.

I have keepassdx version 2.8.7 installed and it has magic keyboard. Go to settings > Form filling and play around with magic keyboard settings.

Yes F-Droid has some outdated apps, and it seems to by default install an older app version. You can check and usually you can upgrade to a newer version if it's in the repo. Otherwise, some apps or authors do have their own repos you can add.

Hi,

You can get access to your bank app via Aurora store, available on F-Droid. It is a front end to google play store and allows install/update of the apks. It also shows you the report on what trackers are known in each app.

Note that without google services, some app functionality that relies on it may not work, like notifications. The alarm app is bundled with AOSP so should work, weird.

Keepassdx works fine with Vanadium for me. Magickeyboard is amazing for auto type.

That being said maybe the pixel 4 builds aren't as mature. I am running on Pixel 3a and it has been smooth sailing. A phone experience I have long been waiting for.

Also the project is not as well resourced as big companies, so some bugs and rough edges are expected . Support the project financially if you want a viable open source and secure mobile os.

This year I have completed by goal of being mostly google free. I have yet to replace the Chromecast. Other than that, the transition is complete. I don't want to be held hostage by a single monolithic company with more resources than most nation states.

My dad is not in the IT field or anything remotely similar (marine bio/fishing/navigation). Yet he has run gnu/linux as the OS for his primary machines for 10+ years. He has only the basic understanding at a high level but he surprises me with how he can "get by" and remain productive.

Okular can "edit" forms. I have been doing this on Linux and Windows for a while. Not the most usable but it works. What I can't do in Okular, I do in Gimp.

I will use Firefox for editable form pdfs but for those that don't have editable forms, I will continue to use Okular/Gimp.

I actually stumbled across the ability to edit forms in Firefox only recently. I was like... What? This is amazing! For some reason the pdf i clicked on opened in Firefox and yeah, surprised.