European. Liberal. Insufferable green. I never downvote opinions: jeering is poor form. I ignore questions by downvoters. Comments with insulting language, or snark, or gotchas, or other effort-free content, will also be ignored.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • The valid answer is that the Chinese police state has no authority over individuals in the West and is unlikely to share information with Western law enforcement given the geopolitical situation. In narrow terms, that makes for an inadvertent privacy win for individuals in the West.

    But the problem you describe is certainly real (whatever other seem to think here) for countries in China’s sphere of influence, in Asia, Africa, Latin America. For them, China is already selling off-the-peg solutions for mass surveillance. If your country’s homegrown dictator gets his hands on this stuff, it’s going to be harder than ever to get rid of him.

    For us the problem is rather that China is pioneering and normalizing practices that will certainly be adopted and copied one day by our own police forces with our own technology.





  • it depends how secure you want your network to be. Personally I think UFW is easy so you may as well set it up

    IMO this attitude is problematic. It encourages people (especially newbies) to think they can’t trust anything, that software is by nature unreliable. I was one of those people once.

    Personally, now I understand better how these things work, there’s no way I’m wasting my time putting up multiple firewalls. The router already has a firewall. Next.

    PS: Sure, people don’t like this take - you can never have enough security, right? But take account of who you’re talking to - OP didn’t understand that their server is not even on the public internet. That fact makes all the difference here.




  • Been using Mailbox for years without any issue. German reliability. But the fact that one of Proton’s directors revealed that he agrees with 75 million Americans does not mean that a whole company, based in Switzerland and with many other stakeholders, has “gone rogue”. I’m not getting into a new fight about this here but I really think American progressives need to drop this religious approach to dissent and heterodoxy and just relax a little. It will be okay.


  • Misinformation. OP is advocating that you shoot yourself in the foot.

    The CEO said something silly on Twitter which revealed either that (a) he shares an exceedingly banal opinion with literally half of America or (b) he’s not above a bit of preemptive sycophancy to advance his (positive) anti-trust agenda.

    There’s nothing particularly scandalous in the offending tweet:

    • Implying that the Democrats are now “the party of big business” is arguably true (and very boring)
    • Implying that the Republicans now “stand for the little guys” is dumb but also arguably true, unfortunately - the working classes swung to Trump in the recent election while the Democrats are fast becoming a party of high-earning elites (which is why they lost)
    • Saying that the antitrust actions began under Trump I is, well, true

    Proton is not owned Zuck-like by its CEO. It’s controlled by a foundation with other stakeholders on the board, including the inventor of the Web himself. In its niche it is still by far the best option. Ditching it for a nebulous non-existent alternative because the CEO expressed a dumb and extremely commonplace opinion is just silly and self-defeating.

    PS: to be clear, OP is peddling misinformation because it’s not true that “Proton took the stance” of anything. It’s the personal opinion of the CEO that’s at issue. It’s a major distinction. I find it disappointing that people interested in privacy would have such little respect for a private individual’s right to have their own thoughts.

    PPS: to be extra clear, my comments are about the post above, not stuff that people are reading elsewhere. But the substance stands. See discussion for detail.