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.

Red pocket on eBay. 30 bucks for a year of service with 200 minutes 1000 texts and some data every month. Cheapest i’ve found, but i’d love it if someone showed me something cheaper.

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.

Dunno what those cost, but a pair of IR blocking safety glasses are like 15 bucks or less, blend in a whole lot better, and won’t make you stand out like a shining beacon in video.

I have Pokemon go installed in a separate profile on grapheneos. Doesn’t do anything unless I open that profile, and it’s not attached to any identity.

I wasn’t aware that you could do that on regular android. I can’t confirm it because i’m using grapheneos, and I know it doesn’t have that setting.

A hot spot also doesn’t share the same VPN connection.

Good tip. Until an app can reasonably look up an address, it’s not a very good map/navigation app.

Twice in a neighboring city i’ve been routed to the wrong location. They use street/avenue for ns/ew so maybe the map had them backwards. My input was correct and it found an address both times.

And it doesn’t work. You have to know an address, and even then sometimes it’ll route you to the wrong location. Anyway, that was my experience using it for a few months. About a 20% success rate where I live.

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.

How does it stay on your device? I’m notified if a contact of mine uses signal. That means if someone has my.number in their phone signal will let them know I use signal. I don’t really want someone to be able to confirm that I use a service.

Thanks for this. I’d not seen locus before and i’m definitely going to check it out.

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.

Pulling your contacts lets it get a pretty good fingerprint of who you are, from who you talk to. It can already get that from who you actually message, but it’s getting a lot more information about you from pulling the whole list and not just who you talk to through telegram.

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.

I’ve had issues with updates. Maybe I should give it another look.

Certainly way too buggy if you’re selfhosting. At least that was my experience. And if you’re not, the privacy component really goes away.

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.

What are you wanting to host? There are some ways to limit what they have access to, or increase the amount of work to access it, but it’s pretty dependent on the actual services.

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.

It’s a great app, and the amazfit watches have really good battery life. Some will even let you answer your calls, which I find makes me stress about my phone a lot less.