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Joined 2Y ago
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Cake day: Aug 04, 2023

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Yeah that’s completely dumb. Two megalomaniac corporate overlords fighting… Corporate abuse? Sure. No doubt.


Dems had a choice between the progressive wing (Bernie Sanders, etc), versus corporate Dems, but in the end money won and constituents lost. Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.

Ok, so he endorsed the republican party and not its de-facto leader. Please explain how that makes a difference?


So what exactly is your point?

I read the articles, saw his tweets, and think that endorsing a fascist politician from the US doesn’t sit well for a privacy and freedom of speech endorsing platform.


They run a proprietary protocol that works in China and Saudi Arabia, where other protocols are known not to work. I’ve lived in China for 7 years, and Astrill never once let me down, while Express, Nord, Proton and a bunch of others hardly ever worked.


They all claim to be anonymous. And yeah, nobody can independently validate the no logs policy, even Mullvad that has been security audited doesn’t let anyone near their production environment, so what they release to the testers might not be identical to what they use live.

Calling TOR anonymous is a big stretch through, a bunch of commits to the code have been traced back to the CIA if I remember correctly, and various intelligence agencies worldwide are running exit nodes and log everything they can get their hands on. Whether they can decrypt it with current tech is another story, but you better believe they don’t just delete it.


Email:

VPN:

  • astrill (expensive but awesome)
  • mullvad

Cloud storage:

Rent a small server / vps and set up your own nextcloud instance. Even some packages meant for webhosting work, as long as you can install custom php applications. I’m using all-inkl.com (private plus package) and got 500GB allocated to my nextcloud instance.


There’s plenty of mail & vpn services out there, so why bother sticking with the one you don’t agree with ideologically?


If you happen to be a student or know someone who is, register an account with studentbeans.com and get a 50% discount independent of any special sales days.

Edit: It’s even 62% for the full proton suite, 50% was only for the VPN (which I got).


That article is a wild mix of paranoia and conspiracy theories.

Never expected to read about burning witches, Kill Bill, covid, and government control in one setting.

I guess the author has some good intentions, but the way he presents his stuff makes him seen like a crazy person.

And most of the cons aren’t inherently negative.


That announcement was the biggest eye-roller all week.


It’s just not fun anymore, covid really killed the vibe. And the fact that they cut tax incentives for foreigners doesn’t help with that.


Proton Desktop is not linked to your phone in any way, so enabling stealth there doesn’t have any impact on your device unfortunately.

Interesting to hear about Mullvad, maybe they did change the protocol around! My backup had always been Windscribe, they give you 10 GB traffic for free, but the reliability in China went downhill over the last year.

But my days are numbered now anyway, will be out end of July, and still got Astrill prepaid until November or so, so not going to experiment too much now.


You need to go to settings and under protocol select stealth. The other connection types are blocked in China.

Mullvad doesn’t work here at all.

The most widespread one is Astrill, though it’s quite pricey. Used to be the only one that works consistently; but Proton is a decent alternative.


I’m not familiar with it, but proton has a free plan where you can’t choose servers yourself but are assigned one at random. If all you care for is browsing protection and not bypassing geoblocked content or torrenting, that’s all you need really. And they are very trusted.


Why not use Firefox Relay? It’s a mail forwarding service with 5 aliases in the free version, and unlimited in paid. I’m using that in combination with my gmail account and it works beautifully.

If you only occasionally need a vpn, the free tier in proton is probably sufficient (but you can’t select servers, they will be assigned at random), and you could use windscribe as a backup (you can select servers in the free tier yourself, but traffic is limited to 10GB per 30 days).


I have yet to see a single Threads post in my timeline, or a comment from anyone. And I deliberately chose an instance that does not defederate from anyone.


Has been the norm in most Asian countries for well over a decade.