Thanks for this comment. I had not come across that hardening guide. It is extremely well written, and it’s worth a read, even if you have no intention of trying to harden your system, just to see what’s out there.
I’d consider most of it overkill for my threat model, but there are some things I’ll probably implement or try out just because they look pretty neat.
Absolutely proprietary, which is why you’re hearing about bitwarden instead from the linux crowd.
It’s one of the first services I started to selfhost externally. I’ve not had a single problem with it, and it’s easily the best, most useful piece of software I host.
I’m not sure how 1password works with families, though I see it’s 5 dollars a month for 5 members. I can tell you that with bitwarden (and selfhosted vaultwarden) it’s super easy to manage passwords for your family through organizations. I have it set up so I have access to all my parents’ passwords, and I share access to relevant passwords with my partner, but I don’t have to clutter their password manager with hundreds of passwords for random crap they don’t need.
If you can.actually get people to switch, you should look into simplex chat. It has a lot of really good features, you can run a CLI application on any servers you might have to send you notifications really easily, and it’s being rather actively developed. A quick look at their website will show you how dedicated to privacy they are.
My personal opinion on totp is that it’s better to store them in bitwarden than to not use them at all, especially if your password is good and you’ve enforced two factor for registering a new device to bitwarden. It’s definitely not the best way, but a lot more people can be convinced to right click and paste in an otp code over authenticating to a device, a totp app, and manually typing it in.
It’s pretty important to remember that each device that you’ve installed the bitwarden client on has a local copy of your passwords, and you can always export your passwords too. So yeah, you need to have good backups in place if you self host vaultwarden, but I think it’s one of the lower risk services to run in terms of actually losing your data.
In that case, you’d be connecting to the vps without a VPN. So the company would have your ip, and anonymous payment won’t do anything about that. It would help your blacklisting problem, and your WiFi censorship problem though. Just stick with a reputable company. I use hetzner and dedipath and i’m happy with both of them.
Yeah, this trust shift argument doesn’t work the way people think it does. A VPN does just shift trust from your ISP… and your ISP is known to sell your data. And you’re paying the VPN provider not to do that. And most of them are audited. And they’ll stop making money if people find out they’re selling the data.
Another problem with phone number requirement. EU phone number? Get out of here. Otherwise you’re right. With a vpn, what’s to stop you from continuing to use it.