• 3 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • There was a post on some Lemmy community or other yesterday which stated that most Americnas support ideas like universal healthcare (55%) and getting rid of guns from private ownership (mid 60% IIRC).

    In that thread someone said it was awful that even amongst progressives the support for universal healthcare was so low and the very few responses to that were basically - :shrug: we’ve been lied to what are we gonna do about it?

    The responses to the gun ownership stat were numerous and declared support for ‘second amendment rights’.

    When even US progressives are passionately defending the biggest cause of child death in the USA in 2022 but are apathetic about universal healthcare, that’s a uniquely US problem that speaks very much to the level of thinking power available.





  • In terms of data, put TailsOS on a USB drive, configure persistent storage, download VeraCrypt over TOR, install that, encrypt everything tutorial

    What you do with the drive (or drives if you make copies) really depends. If the climate is very wet and warm where you live then storing them outside is going to need very good protection to keep them relatively cool and dry. You’d also have to find somewhere that you can absolutely guarantee isn’t going to get redeveloped or otherwise built on, or conversely, knocked down/demolished for as long as you’re away.

    A long term self-storage company might be an idea, or a bank vault, where you’ve paid for (for example) 10 years in advance. Of course that means you have to be absolutely sure the company won’t go bankrupt or be seized by the corrupt regime you’re hiding the data from. You’d also have to have someone else set these up in their name or it could be seized along with you. You then have to hope they don’t get seized, or get dementia or die.

    If you have comrades abroad in a safer country, maybe physically mail them the drives before the corrupt regime starts noticing you? Then of course you also have to hope they can return them and haven;t forgotten, died etc.


  • Depends on your threat model - mine is to make it as annoying and difficult for data sellers and advertisers to profile me as possible so in that scenario a reputable VPN service makes perfect sense.

    There’s no such thing as total privacy and each service/software is simply a piece of the puzzle. If my government really wanted my data I’m sure they could find a way but making it as difficult as possible for techno-fascists is fine by me.



  • What assurances do you have they won’t go full proton in the future?

    Absolutely none. That applies to all services that exist now or in the future. The only way around that is self-hosting but that path has its own issues including a very steep learning curve if you want to be secure as well as private. Maybe this could be a longer term project to work towards?

    For services:

    • Mail - Mailbox.org seems the best option right now
    • Calendar - don’t know.
    • Drive - either Cryptomator used with literally any service or a dedicated service like Filen
    • VPN - Mullvad
    • Password Manager - Bitwarden
    • Documents - I just use LibreOffice offline or CryptPad occasionally if I’m collabing with someone.

    In truth none of these are perfect. Privacy has got a lot harder recently as Proton and StartMail/StartPage have politically shit the bed and the UK seems determined to kill encryption which means I have to avoid really good services like IceDrive just because they’re in the UK.

    EDIT: Calendars. Mailbox.org’s included one works fine. You can sync using CalDAV. The process for Thunderbird (desktop) is here.

    The process for mobile is a little more complicated. First you need Davx5 to actually get the data, but thats all that app does. It’s not a Calendar app. It does work with the native Android Calendar but I used FossifyCalendar.

    So install both of those then login to your Mailbox account in a browser and create a Calendar (or use an existing one). Get its unique URL by looking under the heading ‘My Calendars’, clicking the three bars icon, click ‘Properties’ and you can then copy your CalDAV URL.

    On your Android device open Davx5, tap the plus icon then specify ‘login with URL and username’ tap ‘continue’ then paste in the URL you copied earlier, your email address and your email account password, tap ‘login’ and that should work.

    Now, switch to your Calendar app. I used Fossify Calendar so if you are too, open that up, go to Settings, scroll down to the CALDAV section and turn on CalDAV sync. It might switch to your new Mailbox calendar now, but if it doesn’t, tap ‘Manage synced calendars’ and activate it there.