irotsoma

Can’t speak to this incident, but i do agree that in general, free VPNs are not safe because usually they are funded by selling your personal information and web traffic data or performing MITM attacks to inject ads and thus compromising security, even if that’s not the intention.

That being said, Rise Up is a donation funded organization and is specifically run by a nonprofit promoting activism, so really it all comes down to your trust that org. The cost of bandwidth required to run a VPN is high, their site mentions it costs them about $60/person/year. So that money has to come from somewhere. If you’re paying, and it’s a reasonably trustworthy company, then it’s unlikely they will be willing to risk selling your data. But if you’re not paying, then the incentive to not sell your data just isn’t there, thus it requires more trust, IMHO.

Also, if they are a legit org and I take their product without paying, I’m taking that money from activists in places that truly need VPNs to stay safe from arrest or murder, so I generally don’t feel it’s moral to use it just to save money, but that’s me.

Not OP, but for me the issue is if you want to override the default and make it opt-out, especially sine the opt-out process isn’t that well documented, then you should realize that support is a necessary part of that process and fix problems as they arise rather than resorting to name calling and hostile behavior when something you published is broken. It’s a responsibility of taking on that kind of project. Either that or make it explicitly opt-in and give users a warning like with beta version opt-in notifications that the packages are not official and issues may not be fixed as quickly as the official releases.

Because with stores, the evidence would be missing products. Very easy to see. With bugs like this, a million people could have abused it, or one. Either way that data is likely available to all who want it.

A better comparison is, store posted list of their customer’s addresses on the back door. No clue how many people walked by there much less if anyone copied it down.

Problem is that knowing the link between a person’s profile and their email now means you know the link between their account and their accounts in many other places. That information could be used to offer the person different prices at stores, attack them for being a minority or activist, to hack their account because their password was leaked from another site that uses that email,or all the other things these cumulative leaks add up to.

That’s what backups are for. No matter what solution I use, I would need backups. I used to use LastPass, but that just relied on LastPass to do the backups. I backup the database, but you can also periodically export the data and back that up somewhere securely on your own if you want it in a different format.

I got an ASUS Zenbook about a year ago for about $1,500: model UX3404VC-BB99T. But it looks like it’s no longer available:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-14-120hz-oled-touch-laptop-evo-intel-13-gen-core-i9-with-32gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3050-1tb-ssd-gray/6548463.p?skuId=6548463

It has pretty decent specs. Intel gen 13 Core i9, nice looking touchscreen, 32GB of RAM, etc., and it all works out of the box with Ubuntu and now Fedora. It did have some issues with plain Debian, but that’s fairly common with Debian and newer hardware.

Although that particular laptop is not around anymore, there might be some other Zenbooks as I have found they tend to be Linux-friendly in general. And ASUS gets a lot of hate for whatever reason, but I’ve always found them to be good for the price.

Selfhosted VaultWarden with Bitwarden browser apps and KeyGuard on my phone, which I like better than the Bitwarden app.

It’s not a private messaging platform, it’s an anti-censorship messaging platform among other things. If you’re looking for privacy, this probably isn’t the application for that. Though it is somewhat possible to make it more private, that’s not the primary use case. If you’re looking for a platform for public conversations where corporate interests of the day won’t cause your messages to be censored, then Matrix might be useful. But moderation of spam, hate content, etc., is also not going to be robust in general.

Anytime there is an update, files are often deleted during that process so they can be replaced with new files or because those files are no longer part of the new version being installed. If an error occurs during this process, it is possible that an application will appear not to be installed because it’s broken.

Anyway, most software does at least partially “uninstall” when it is updating, so if the install fails, then it’s always possible that an update will have uninstalled something. That’s just updates regardless of operating systems, package managers, etc.

I mean, bugs are a part of all software. Stability is about reliability. That if you boot up your computer you are less likely to spend the first hour or two troubleshooting unless you just did a major upgrade. I’m not saying Arch is unstable, just less stable.

Mine has those, but it was a different model that had the hardware required to do WiFi. Likely it’s not included and unless the device was designed to modify, it’s likely that the motherboard doesn’t have a way to add it easily and there won’t be much space to do your own WiFi card and soldering if the board does have the connections and support in the firmware/BIOS. Best bet would be a USB WiFi card.

Arch is more cutting edge and thus less stable in very general terms. And is would be a learning curve for someone used to Debian based distros.

But the shithead exec is supportive of fascists which means privacy is secondary to the desires of the current regime. That’s just a standard part of fascism. And if the current regime is allowing untested backdoor code to be inserted in the Treasury department and NASA and the CDC and most major social media to strip out protections for people they don’t like, climate change, etc. Just imagine what someone who actually supports them ideologically would be willing to do.

Yeah, the system was on a single server at first and eventually expanded to either a docker swarm or Kubernetes cluster. So the single server acts as both a docker host and an NFS server.

I’ve had this happen multiple times, so I use this pattern by default. Mostly these are volumes with just config files and other small stuff that it’s OK if it’s duplicated in the docker cache. If it is something like large image caches or videos or other volumes that I know will end up very large then I probably would have started with storage off the server in the beginning. It saves a significant amount of time to not have to reconfigure everything as it expands if I just have a template that I use from the start.

Unlikely at least in the near future. The remnants of Dodd-Frank and anything that Biden did are high on the list for Trump’s chopping block.

I use NFS shares for all of my volumes so they’re more portable for future expansion and easier to back up. It uses additional disk space for the cache of course, but i have plenty.

When I add a second server or add a dedicated storage device as I expand, it has made it easier to move with almost no effort.

I think mailcow only supports Pushover for notifications, but it may have changed.