leraje

leraje, 3 days ago

Marginally, I would think but if it’s the plugin of the VPN you’re actually using I think the necessity probably outweighs the (pretty low) risk.

leraje, 3 days ago

Always been reasonably aware, but what made me cut as much closed source and mainstream stuff as possible was the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica Scandal.

leraje, 4 days ago

I think (disclaimer: not an expert at all) that RAM is much faster to access than a hard drive so if anything it should improve.

leraje, 4 days ago

Few times, yeah. Last time was August this year

leraje, 4 days ago

Going by rate of blog posts by year they don’t seem any noisier than usual. The opposite if anything. 18 this year and there’s only 3 and a bit months left of the year whereas in 2018 they made 60.

leraje, 4 days ago

Didn’t really have a choice:

…Regrettably individuals have frequently used this feature to host undesirable content and malicious services from ports that are forwarded from our VPN servers. This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.

Blog post

Big issue there is hosting providers cancelling them. Can’t operate a business without that.

leraje, 4 days ago

The code on the card is covered so Amazon might know you use Mullvad but they have no way of knowing what your account is.

Mullvad know your acct but they have no way of knowing how it is you paid other than maybe it being a scratchcard which they don’t track anyway.

leraje, 4 days ago

All those things you listed simply confirm that a particular person bought a Mullvad scratch card. There’s literally no way to associate that data with a particular Mullvad account. To do that they’d have to have a record of the card batch number and somehow have accessed the code underneath the scratch-off panel and then find a way to match those numbers against your Mullvad acct.

leraje, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

If you’re a Mullvad customer then they already know your IP and from that they could identify you pretty easily. But that’s true of all VPN providers, but they claim they don’t log and I seem to recall them saying they don’t keep a record of scratch off card numbers (why would they?). Either way you have to trust them and based on the fact they’re totally open I do.

leraje, 4 days ago

Per year, I pay just less than €90. That gets me email, VPN, cloud storage/backup and domains. €7.50pcm is acceptable to me.

leraje, 4 days ago

I assume what you’re getting at is that there has to be an element of trust in that the server being remote you can’t be 100% sure it’s untampered with?

Much the same rationale can be applied to VPN’s, private email, private domain registration. At some point you have to do your research and decide if you trust the provider or not. There are providers out there that allow anonymous renting via Monero payments etc and also allow you to install OS’s based on an image you control as oppose to the standard ones they offer. If you combine that with private domain registration and connecting whilst on a good VPN that’s much more private than something like GMail.

And yes you could do all that from a home based server but then you’re dependant on your ISP always being up etc.

leraje, 4 days ago

one-note weed pine cone

Single greatest description of the taste of IPA I’ve ever read.

leraje, 5 days ago

They won’t need to. Signal, WhatsApp, Session and iMessage (Apple) have already said they’ll withdraw their products from the UK market. Meta are making similar noises regarding Facebook Messenger.

leraje, 4 days ago

The current state of the legislation is this: the gvmt started out by saying “you must do this”, then when it finally sunk in that it wasn’t technically possible right now, they then said “OK, we get its not possible right now. As soon as it is, you must do this.”

Some people have said ‘no problem, its never going to be possible to break encryption’. This is not accurate. When quantum processing becomes a reality, which is realistically not too far away now, encryption will be trivial to crack. That’s the point the rest of the world need to worry because you’re right, every other gvmt in the world will follow the UK’s lead.

leraje, 4 days ago

IBM think otherwise

leraje, 4 days ago

This is very good news, I’ve never been more happy to be wrong.

leraje, 5 days ago

The original intent - to stop kids accessing harmful content on big tech media sites was the sole original intent. That’s now morphed into the legislative tool for mass surveillance that’s just been passed. That original intent wasn’t a Tory idea as such, but two researchers. The addition of more and more draconian elements most definitely was from the Tories. Including the red Tory currently leading the Labour party.

leraje, 5 days ago

re your 2nd point, that’s most certainly not been scrapped. The language has changed to basically say, they’re aware thetech doesn’t currently exist to do this but as soon as it does, it must be done. It’s a temporary reprieve at best.

leraje, 5 days ago

And that’s another part of this bill - discussion of ‘illegal immigration’ is now forbidden.

leraje, 5 days ago

Starmer’s a big fan of this bill. He in fact proposed adding VPN’s to the list of tech.

leraje, 5 days ago

Unknown at this stage. I suspect it’s being kept intentionally vague so they can shutdown whatever they like but leave up the GB News/Daily Heil type propaganda.

leraje, 5 days ago

It is still in there.

leraje, 5 days ago

Of course it will. As soon as quantum processing becomes a reality, which is getting nearer and nearer to happening, encryption will be simple to crack.

leraje, 5 days ago

And enough room to be justifiably concerned about it being reintroduced whenever they decide. The point remains however, it’s most certainly not been scrapped.

leraje, 5 days ago

Again, the necessity for encryption backdoors has not been removed, simply paused.

leraje, 4 days ago

Yeah, I just discovered that on a different thread. Something of a relief, I admit.

leraje, 4 days ago

Kids using the ISP in their homes, using wifi in a public place etc.

leraje, 4 days ago

They’ve banned the use of Hetzner

leraje, 5 days ago

Says the guy clearly suffering from dorcelessness syndrome.

leraje, 4 days ago

I’m not feeling dorceless, which is a key symptom. I will however remain vigilant. Unless that is also a symptom.

leraje, 11 days ago

They began when Liz Truss absolutely fucked the economy.

leraje, 11 days ago

I’d recommend the Aubrey/Maturin series (Wikipedia link) by Patrick O’Brian to everyone.

When they were first suggested to me, I was very unsure - a series of books set during the Napoleonic Wars, set mostly on ships sounded pretty dull. But when I started reading them, they swallowed me whole. They are adventurous, fascinating and very detailed but also full of heart, life and often very, very funny which was a surprise (pun intended for those who’ve read them).

You don’t need to know anything about the Royal Navy, sailing or the time period, all will be laid out to you - it’s the same as realising you don’t need to be a medical expert to enjoy ER or House - and really, although ship-life is vividly portrayed, the cornerstone of the series of books is the unlikely friendship between Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.

As I read in a literary review of the series: “There are two types of people in the world: Patrick O’Brian fans, and people who haven’t read him yet.”

The first book in the series is Master & Commander (the movie that was made about the novels with Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany took its name from this first book). I urge you to do yourself a favour and give it a try.

leraje, 14 days ago

So much with anything privacy comes down to trust. Any piece of software’s technical ability to keep you private is of course important but when it comes to a very large (in terms of code and use) piece of software, being able to trust the motivations and intent of the people behind it is also very important.

It’s now reached the point that I personally don’t feel I can trust the person leading the company, or the intent behind the software(s) the company makes.

Brendan Eich is a homophobe and an antivaxxer. It’s hard to trust in the common sense of a man who thinks in these ways.

Brave has been caught inserting affiliate links and ads that track and just recently of selling other people’s data. Any one of these things, taken in isolation is bad enough but this is now a pretty much established pattern of very questionable behaviour.

I also forsee a time when the browser is going to have to make some concessions to it’s Chromium base. I know they’ve said the change from Manifest v2 to 3 won’t affect ad blocking as their Shield won’t be an extension but built in and that they’ll also carry on supporting v2 but the issue goes beyond merely adblocking and they’ve been unclear on exactly how and for how long they’ll support v2. As long as they’re Chromium based browser, they are dependent on Chromium and the whims of Google developers. It’s hard to see a good future for Brave.

leraje, 15 days ago (edited 15 days ago)

Its honestly pretty easy. Read through the guide making sure you understand each point before you do it. Several times if necessary. Any point(s) youre unsure of, just ask.

leraje, 16 days ago

I can also vouch for PhotoGIMP. It’s the closest thing to Photoshop I’ve used and certainly made things much easier for me when I transitioned.

leraje, 16 days ago

Several hundred years

leraje, 16 days ago

This is a temporary reprieve, that’s all and is only one part of the overall bill, which will almost certainly go through Parliament successfully.

leraje, 17 days ago

Some people see a product described as ‘smart’ and their common sense immediately leaves their body.

leraje, 17 days ago

I use this for just about every non-official (e.g. govmt or banking) account I set up.

leraje, 17 days ago

They provide useful tools for self-hosters (I x-posted this to !selfhosted)

leraje, 18 days ago

2010

Much, much longer than that.