Random Dent

Brit here. It’s always been like this, at least for my whole lifetime. I remember in the 90s they were trying to get biometric ID cards going with people’s fingerprints and retina scans on them, and the government has been pretty consistent with trying to undermine encryption, harvest everyone’s metadata etc. Best I can tell, we seem to be the testing ground for any Orwellian nonsense that gets dreamed up, before it gets shipped out to the States and other places.

I did poke around a bit more and found that I didn’t have the direct mode on, so it was hopping around. Switching that on and doing a direct connection made it much better, like 50Mbps. But that’s still only 25%-ish of the regular speed, whereas I thought it’d be about 50%. But way better than like 2% of the original speed which is what I had before lol.

As a side note, I don’t know if I maybe have something configured wrong but is DAITA supposed to absolutely massacre your connection speed? I assumed it would be slower but my connection goes from ~190Mpbs to 3Mbps when I enable it.

Yeah I like my Kobo too. It’s never done anything sketchy as far as I can tell, plus you can sideload things, and if you plug it in via USB it just shows up like regular drive so you can do what you want with it. And also Libby is awesome lol.

As with most irritating Windows features, I assume there’ll be an option to turn it off hidden in some obscure place, which will either not work, or it’ll turn back on after a random amount of time.

I got exactly that number too, but also when I looked at the detailed results section lots of it was incorrect. It got that I was on some sort of Linux and using some sort of FF variant, but things like time zone, plugins, screen resolution and system fonts were all wrong.

So sending out 17.49 bits of largely identifying bullshit is still okay I think lol.

I probably will end up with tons eventually, I haven’t been doing it for too long and I don’t sign up for many things lol

I use addy.io to create aliases for different things, and then set up filters in Thunderbird to mark them as they come in so, for example, if I make an account at xyz.com and then I get a bunch of unrelated spam marked as coming from xyz.com, then I know they’ve been selling my info.

I probably have about a dozen or so aliases currently, but they’re pretty loosely organized.

Even if his vision for the future worked perfectly (which it won’t) and wasn’t abused (which it will be, rampantly and immediately), it’s still a complete dystopian nightmare lol

I get blocked from Google and reddit on Mullvad, but I see that as a Google and reddit problem, not a Mullvad problem lol.

As a non-American, sometimes you open your phone and there’s a meme with no context about a candidate being shot in the ear, or people eating cats, or transgender aliens or babies being aborted after they’re born or the president trying to buy Greenland and you just kind of go “Oh, America” and go about your day lol.

Yeah Windows out of the box is really dumb/myopic. If it’s not Fat32 or NTFS, it doesn’t exist lol.

I remember being really surprised when I learned this lol. My SO had an old Windows work laptop that they’d forgotten the password for, and just out of curiosity I tried running a live Linux USB to see if we could access anything, and discovered that we could see everything from every user on there, and that login passwords really didn’t do anything at all. It was a real “we should encrypt all our drives” moment.

Yeah same here, I’m on lemmy.ml using Mullvad and never had an issue. If an instance ever did block it though I’d just leave, that’s also why I never use reddit anymore lol.

https://xkcd.com/538/

Veracrypt has something like this too! You can create a hidden volume with a separate password, so you can put some benign files in the main volume and hide your actual stuff in a second one with an alternate password.

Yeah that’s my preferred method too. Bitwarden’s password generator can create passphrases too, so I have it just create random ones for pretty much everything. The only ones I have to remember are the ones to unlock Bitwarden itself, and the one to unlock the decryption when I boot my PC up. So like two sentences essentially. I literally don’t even know what the passwords are to anything else lol.

You could try Tails maybe? I found that a lot easier to set up that Qubes personally.

Currently Grayjay is working for me, but Freetube isn’t. Hopefully Google settles down with its YouTube fiddling soon so the app makers can just crack it once and we can all get on with it lol.

I’m not sure if Proton is the same, but with Mullvad you can be super anonymous with cash. You can get an a code from their site and literally just write it on a bit of paper, stuff it in an envelope with some cash and mail it to them with no other way of identifying you. I haven’t tried it personally but apparently it works lol.

From their site:

Can I really pay with cash?

You bet, and please! Stay anonymous all the way. Just put your cash and payment token (randomly generated on our website) in an envelope and send it to us. We accept the following currencies: EUR, USD, GBP, SEK, NOK, CHF, CAD, AUD, NZD.