Yeah withdraw cash from an ATM and use it. The system sucks, but it’s not trivial to change for a myriad of reasons.

There’s no real way to do it. Unless you know someone who can trade you XMR<->cash and you somehow convince your employer to (break laws and) pay you in those forms, you can’t avoid it. At some point, you’ll have to get money on a real bank account, which requires real information to open.

As far as I know, modern cards don’t just send your CC info to terminals, they do some form of a cryptographic handshake (probably a pubkey signature or similar) which gets confirmed by your bank. I believe Caveman was talking more about online shopping, where you have to enter your card number, expiration date, CVC and often your name too.

That’s why I love virtual card systems like MB NET. You just generate a random virtual card for every purchase (or a recurring one for each subscription vendor, for example) and move on. Your bank still knows what you’re doing, of course, but vendors can’t correlate anything. Preventing your bank from knowing where you’re spending your money is much harder, for very practical reasons: fraud detection. The only real way is to use a secure crypto coin like Monero, but very few places accept it and you still have to deal with volatility.

Ah right, Molly. Have yet to tried it, but looks interesting.

I think I’m too afraid of moving my main stuff to Molly, lest I lose something :P But the UnifiedPush and multiple mobile clients is enticing.

This is a good suggestion. Docker is more mature and has more resources, so it’s better to learn the ins and outs of containers. After getting comfortable with it, you can move to Podman and have a much better time tackling its peculiarities regarding permissions and rootless.

I used Docker for years and only recently decided to give Podman a try, porting my Lemmy instance to it.

Yeah that’s a bummer. Signal has multi device support but only for desktop and iPad (yeah, not Android tablets), but you always need to have a master phone device.

It’s been an issue for so long, but this is Signal, they do whatever the f they want.

encrypted email

Besides being a form of messaging (so the text somewhat contradicts itself), typical email is a deeply insecure protocol.
In my opinion, it’s probably impossible to secure without making a new protocol or making such drastic changes that it might as well be considered one.

Here are some key concerns regarding the usual PGP-powered encrypted email:

• Email, at a simple level, works much akin to physical email — there’s an “envelope” containing important info regarding the communicating parties, which can’t be encrypted, otherwise the mailing servers wouldn’t know where to forward the messages. This essentially leaks a lot of metadata that can be almost as valuable as the message body itself.
• There’s no forward secrecy — one of the best cryptography features that has become pretty much a commodity in modern systems is forward secrecy, which prevents attackers from decrypting older messages after gaining access to one of the keys.
• While not an issue with the protocol itself, it’s the sad reality and we need to consider — most people use GMail, Outlook and the like, which ultimately need to read your emails in plaintext, for better or worse reasons (search is incredibly useful, but some big players don’t stop there of course :p).
• Another thing is the fact that it’s incredibly easy to have an imbalance of encryption, i.e. someone is encrypting their messages, but others aren’t. With the very popular email culture of quoting (be it top or bottom posting), an unencrypted party in the the conversation can leak important information.
• PGP is… peculiar, so to speak. I has a lot of issues, mostly stemming from its age (which could also be a source of robustness and security, due to being very battle-tested, but I don’t think that’s quite the case with PGP/GPG), tries to do too much and typically has a clunky UI, which impedes wider and proper adoption by less technically people.

This isn’t to say people should definitely stop using and promoting encrypted email, since it can be useful.
It’s just it gives, more often than not, a false sense of security and can lead less proficient users to send sensitive data through this medium which isn’t nearly secure enough for such use cases. Preferably, people with such threat models should opt for better alternatives, most suggested in that article (such as, but definitely not limited to, Signal, SimpleX, Matrix+Olm, XMPP+OTR/OMEMO, sharing files via MagicWormhole, encrypting with tools like age).

On a slightly tangential note, I think someone should make a Matrix client with an email client interface. I started working on a new traditional chat client (completely nonfunctional still, very much in-dev), but I’ve been honestly thinking more and more about making one looking like an e-mail client, where there isn’t much focus on instant room-based chats, but rather on longer-lived 1-to-1 and list-like exchange of messages.

Yeah Mullvad’s system is better than Proton’s, since the latter asks you to place your username inside the envelope. Mullvad’s random token is better in that regard.

More info on Proton’s cash payments: https://proton.me/support/payment-options#cash

Disclaimer: I’ve never paid in cash on either of these services.

I believe proton also accepts cash payments. At least I’ve seen that in their mail service.

For hosters, legality has to be considered.

I think security is a fair point, given caddy’s younger age compared to nginx, but I wouldn’t say it tried to do too much.

Why do you say that?

I’ve used both plenty and only once I thought Caddy was harder: caching. It requires you to install a plugin that also doesn’t have the easiest of configs. I think there’s a new and simpler one nowadays, but haven’t tried it yet.

I now use Caddy by default for everything new I make/host.

I’m not familiar with any service that works at the international level, but over in Portugal, the biggest ATM network, Multibanco, has had a service called MB NET (now integrated with the newer MB WAY app), which allows you to create temporary cards with 3 different behaviours: one-time, monthly, multiple uses. The first one always has 1 month of validity, while the others only expire after a year, and you can define a maximum capacity.

It works perfectly well in foreign online services, but you have to have a card from one of the associated banks (presumably from their Portuguese branch?).

Can’t use cash online, (nearly*) anywhere.

• Mullvad is the only service I know that accepts payment through mailed cash.

Another commenter said goldwarden implements that through the Remote Desktop XDG Portal, which only GNOME and KDE support at the moment (wlroots doesn’t implement it yet).

Oooh, that looks very neat, thank you!

BitWarden is really good. Has (nearly*) everything I want, works well across all platforms and the free plan is very featurefull. Even though I don’t really use any of the premium features, I still pay for the plan, to help fund development, it’s only 10€ a year.

• I say nearly because I’d love to have some form of autocomplete in Linux Wayland, outside of the browser extension. I believe one of KeePass apps does this (but only for X?)

While it’s not on the main F-Droid repo, they distribute it in their own repository: https://app.futo.org/fdroid/repo

What does Windows do? Genuine question, I’ve not used it since the 7 days. Regarding Linux, that’s true for stuff installed through regular package managers and whatnot, but Flatpak is pushing a more sandboxed and permission oriented system, akin to Android.