kbal

Pick one that has a wireguard config generator, so you don’t need to use any client software besides the normal linux wg client.

I’d also look for one that accepts anonymous payment methods. Even if you don’t intend to go to the trouble to use that yourself, it’s probably a good sign if it’s available. Mullvad is pretty safe and served me well until they stopped doing port forwarding. Proton, windscribe, azire, and airvpn were the ones that seemed most recommended when I went to look for a new one a few months ago.

Did they change the headline, or did you come up with the more click-baity one just for us?

Well, she’s not wrong that we need more influential people fighting back against this latest push in the global coordinated effort to put an end to communications privacy. It’s really quite alarming how little attention it seems to get most of the time. Civil society seemed much more robust when it fought off similar attacks in the 1990s. I do hope that the “VC community” isn’t our only hope.

But of course Signal can’t interoperate with another messaging platform, without them raising their privacy bar significantly

Signal is supposed to be free software. You could probably manage to interoperate at least with other operators of actual Signal-Server instances, if you wanted to.

I would not blame this on the new CEO unless there’s some evidence to support it. Wanting to incorporate more ads into the browser is one of the things the previous CEO was known for, and maybe that brilliant idea being met with hostility was one of the things that persuaded her to depart from the role. Whatever this new feature was to be, it most likely had its origins during her tenure.

It seems highly likely that you have mischaracterized the meaning of browser.shopping.experience2023.ads.userEnabled but it doesn’t matter. The mere existence of browser.shopping.experience2023.ads.userEnabled is damning enough on its own.

That’s not the difference between this and the usual kind of enshittification. The users are one side, the advertisers (and google) are the other. Nothing unusual there. The difference is that this time it’s driven by desperate grasping at straws, rather than barefaced greed.

It’s not that easy being free Having to wonder if you picked the right instance When I think it could be nicer being Zucked or Musked or Spez’d - or something much more profitable like that.

It’s not easy being free. It seems you vibe with so many other federated things. And people tend to pass you over 'cause you’re not standing out like influencers in the feeds - or big brands in the web.

But free’s the color of fedi. And free can be cool and friendly-like. And free can be big like an ocean, or dank like a meme, or round like a blobcat.

When free is all there is to be It could make you wonder why, but why wonder why? Wonder, I am federated and it’ll do fine, it’s pretty good most of the time!

And I think it’s what I want to be.

I’ll just go ahead and assume that the downvotes are because it’s fucking twitter (and @firefox@mozilla.social is still 404) not some kind of animosity towards furries.

Whittaker says that, for better or worse, a phone number remains a necessary requisite

Worse. It is for the worse. We sure did wait a long time for this half measure, Signal.

Every once in a while I wonder what things are like back in the land of Microsoft. That this message doesn’t give the user even the slightest hint about what it wants to do more specifically than “improve your experience” tells me all I need to know.

I’m just glad I checked the comments here before wasting even one second watching the video.

This isn’t really the right decade for that.

Price discrimination just means charging different prices to different customers based on what you think you know about them. Its benign form would be a market vendor asking higher prices of individual people who look like they can afford it, and then really fleecing the tourists who look like they’ll fall for it. In that form it looks perfectly wholesome compared to what the big corporations get up to today: Supermarkets selling smaller package sizes in poor areas at lower sticker price but higher unit price, airlines asking different ticket prices depending what they know about your web browsing history, et cetera. I do not rate it a good thing overall. Even if we take it for granted that international borders are a thing, and services can’t be intermediated or subjected to arbitrage, the rich man in a luxury condo in Brazil paying less for some thing than the minimum-wage worker in New York does not strike me as reflecting any kind of justice.

But this is the Internet. International borders are not supposed to be a thing here, and still aren’t for the most part despite the best efforts of the most repressive governments to change that. The cost of shipping data from one side of the world to the other is effectively zero. The system where it’s broadly true that different parts of the world have vastly different purchasing power is an injustice, it’s not something we should be attempting to replicate in cyberspace. I can route my network packets so that they appear to be coming from any region I choose, and so can anyone who can afford Netflix in any country. It’s not a freedom I want to give up so that big streaming services can extract maximum revenue from each national market separately.

It’s just another form of price discrimination, a crude attempt to extract maximum value from everyone according to their demographics. If they could charge a different price based on the size of your bank account they’d do that as well and it would be to my advantage. It makes a mockery of the idea that market price reflects the value of anything, and therefore of capitalism itself.

Now that you mention it, my policy from now on is to avoid any Internet service that tries to charge different prices depending on what country it thinks you’re in.

Whichever one you prefer (I’m on Pleroma’s side in this fight) ActivityPub is what’s here to stay.

For me it’s seemed more gradual over the past few years. I keep around a lightly sandboxed firefox install with a clean profile for the occasions where it’s worth going to that much trouble to see whatever cloudflare is blocking.

It also serves to remind me every now and then how much worse the default browser UI is compared to the one I’ve adjusted to my liking.

… and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance.

In what way did they invest anything significant in the mastodon instance? I had been sort of waiting for them to do something interesting with it after all the fanfare with which it belatedly arrived. As far as I could tell last time I looked it was just a bog-standard and rather small instance that hadn’t visibly changed since some engineer took a day or two to set it up last year. What’d I miss?

They reported three posts! The scale of damage that must’ve been done to the vital ebb and flow of our corporate social media discourse is practically inconceivable, you might think.

But I’ve done even worse: I have reported more than five posts from spammers to fediverse admins who subsequently removed them. Tremble before the might of my awesome power of censorship, fedizens!