privacytools.io always was shit show even before the infighting. They put their own endorsement site on Cloudflare. Despite a collossal pile of dirt emerging on #Signal:

https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/issues/779

PTIO continued endorsing Signal non-stop, refusing to disclose the issues. That was also before the breakup. Dirt was routinely exposed on PTIO endorsements and it never changed their endorsement nor did they reveal the findings on their website.

Now both factions are hypocrits just as they were when they were united. The original PTIO site is back to being Cloudflared (nothing like tossing people coming to you for privacy advice into the walled garden of one of the most harmful privacy offenders), and Privacy Guides has setup on a CF’d Lemmy node. The hypocrisy has no end with these people.

Interesting, but that does not help because Mint jails all their docs in Cloudflare.

Also worth noting that #Ubuntu and #Mint both moved substantial amounts of documentation into Cloudflare (the antithisis of the values swiso claims to support). I have been moving people off those platforms.

BTW, prism-break is a disasterous project too. You know they don’t have a clue when they moved their repo from Github.com to Gitlab.com, an access-restricted Cloudflare site. There are tens if not hundreds of decent forges to choose from and PRISM Break moved from the 2nd worst to the one that most defeats the purpose of their constitution.

It might be useful to find dirt on various tech at prism-break, but none of these sites can be trusted for endorsements.

The prism-break website is timing out for me right now. I would not be surprised if they were dropping Tor packets since they have a history of hypocrisy.

If you look in their bug tracker, it actually reveals that they ignore dirt that has been dug up on their suggestions.

As others have mentioned there is little in the way of justification for these suggestions, and while I happen to agree with plenty of them, I’d personally like to see more reasoning, if not to appease people that already have opinions then to help newer users understand their options.

Indeed. In fact it’s actually worse than you describe. Swiso witholds negative information. They don’t want to inform people. They want to steer people. For example, swiso’s endorsements for donation platforms have some quite serious problems:

https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/141

swiso is also aware of the serious issues with Qwant and the serious issues with DuckDuckGo. Not only failing to remove them but also failing to inform. Qwant and DDG are both Microsoft syndicates!

(if anyone is interested, one of the most privacy-respecting search services is Ombrelo¹, which is largely unknown to the world because PTIO, swiso, and prism-break don’t do the job they claim to do)

And swiso is aware because that’s their bug tracker.

/cc @Imprint9816@lemmy.dbzer0.com

¹ https://ombrelo.im5wixghmfmt7gf7wb4xrgdm6byx2gj26zn47da6nwo7xvybgxnqryid.onion/

There are a few good alternatives and swiso has been aware of them for ~4+ years:

https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/140

StreetComplete shows me no map, just quests on a blank canvas. OSMand shows my offline maps just fine, but apparently StreetComplete has no way to reach the offline maps. I suppose that’s down to Android security – each app has it’s own storage space secure from other apps.

In principle, we should be able to put the maps on shared SD card space and both apps should access it. But StreetComplete gives no way in the settings of specifying the map location. And apparently it fails to fetch an extra copy of the maps as well in my case.

Protonmail failed to satisfy F-Droid’s inclusion criteria because it requires gms (playstore framework) and because it uses Firebase messaging.

Since I’ve disabled gms in my device I’m not sure how Protonmail would work for me. Someone tells me I might simply lose push notifications capability. But I am confused because Snikket pushes notifications just fine on my device.

it’s worth noting that protonmail has an onion and their clearnet server also accepts tor connections. So users can control the leakage of their IP… but only if they’re willing to solve countless CAPTCHAs.

I’m on the edge of quitting protonmail. The issues:

• #CAPTCHA hell. At least for Tor users.
• no app in f-droid
• API shenanigans and/or CAPTCHA breaks hydroxide (the foss bridge)
• protonvpn: you can no longer fetch all the configs in one download. You have to click “download” >120 times now to get all the configs
• account locks if you do not login frequently enough (i think every 6 months)
• if you supply your login creds but get a CAPTCHA and say fuck this, and walk, it does not count as a full login needed to reset the expiration clock
• the CAPTCHAs are graphical which forces you to enable images in your browser; but when you do that you get images that junk up your screen and waste bandwidth
• no public keyring. Hushmail was better in this regard. An advanced user could upload their PGP public key to Hushtools and then encryption just worked for hushmail users contacting that person. After Hushmail started charging, I would tell the normies who need comms w/me to get a gratis Protonmail account. But then I have to send them my public key and they have to figure out how to attach it to my profile in their phonebook. It’s a show-stopper in many situations.

I would say mostly true.

I moved to a region where my lifestyle (accounting for wages, tax, cost of living) was effectively cut in half. Yet it was still the right move. My initial thinking was I will live anywhere for a year to get a different experience - I can always bounce back if I don’t like it… if the pay reduction bothered me. I ended up staying ~10 years.

A big factor is where you are in life. Fresh out of university, it’s important to gain ground right away and perhaps get the house paid for, or nearly so. But once you’re a senior dev and at a point of calling yourself “privileged class" with a decent sized 401k built up (which is great to convert to a Roth while abroad), you’re only cheating yourself out of life experiences by continuing to chase the money. Some research concluded around ~10 yrs ago that people’s overall happiness improves as income increases up until the $55k/year mark. Beyond that, income doesn’t matter much. Of course that would be a little higher now with inflation but I guess the OP has cleared that figure.

I think it was around 15 years ago I started researching typical incomes around the world and I noticed that Japan paid SWEs double the US average. Cost of living was about 50% higher in Japan but it still worked out that a US→Japan move would have been a lifestyle upgrade. So there are some rare exceptions.

I think you would benefit most by moving abroad. Staying in one country your whole life is very one-dimensional. If you move to another country, esp. overseas, you will look back on your current boredom as wasting your life and you will regret not having done it sooner. Go for just one year. You can always return if you don’t like it. You might be someone who says “I went for 1 year, but stayed 5”.

But first move to a purple swing state like GA or PA for just a month or two, then move your stuff into mini storage. Two reasons: you get to experience a different part of the US, briefly, and you can register to vote in a place where your future votes will count the most. Because that’s the state you will vote in while abroad. OTOH, isn’t Texas on the edge of being a swing state? It’s probably not a bad place to vote from.