stupid_asshole69 [none/use name]

I could see your point if we completely ignore the circumstances surrounding the technology. The best metaphor I can think of is star trek. It has to be envisioned as a post scarcity environment for the technology that’s portrayed to be positive and not some new kind of repression or extraction.

If we lived in a world where the labor saving technologies that comprise smarthomes weren’t used to justify getting worked to the bone even more than you already are or to make it acceptable for energy prices to do anything but rise or to continue to allow climate inappropriate bottom of the barrel housing to be built in places like phoenix then I’d have a different view.

I see smarthome technology as a relatively simple tool, but my understanding doesn’t stop at the recognition that “it’s a hammer”, it extends out to “who is swinging it?” and “why do my fingers hurt so much?”.

It’s just really easy to make that criticism of smarthomes because all their benefits are easily, cheaply and efficiently replicated:

Put your standby stuff on power strips and turn the little red switch off when you’re not using them. Alternately, don’t do this because they’re designed to be left on standby, the power drain is negligible (even if you completely dismiss my reply and block me, buy a kill-a-watt type meter so you can know for sure) and stuff like the ps4 can get fucked up if you turn it off without telling it you’re about to.

Make checking your doors part of your nightly routine. It doesn’t matter a bit if all the doors are locked if one of them is not quite shut or the electronic lock fails for some reason. Before you say you’ve never seen that happen, I have seen it happen hundreds of times in my workplace.

I’m willing to concede that minmaxing the hvac is something smarthome technology is good at, but it can be implemented by itself, apart from the smarthome ecosystem and can be replicated by opening and closing windows, putting on or taking off a coat or just - and I know I’ve ambiguously alluded to this already - not having a climate inappropriate home to start with.

You can get the same effect of dimming lights by switching from bright overheads to dim lamps instead. It’s really cozy.

A few summers ago our local power company sent around mailers asking us to “beat the peak”. We put the washing machine on one of those old electromechanical timers and set to go off in a few hours and turned it on. The dryer was harder, because it requires a button press but we just put up a clothesline in the yard instead of messing with some simple way to automate it. You don’t wanna be running that thing while no one’s around anyway.

All simple, sub 5 minute tasks that give a better understanding and arguably a better routine to the household and require little to no computing or automation. Except for not putting stickbuilt houses in places that they don’t make sense. I can’t help you there.

To reiterate: the technology itself isn’t the problem, it’s the world it’s a component of that makes me dislike it. In a just and sustainable world smarthome shit would be good.

And what the requests are, I don’t care if some cdn is carrying Mozilla’s homepage requests, for example.

Nah, I don’t think smarthomes are a technology that is good in the slightest.

The only benefits I’m aware of are automated operation of appliances and more efficient climate control. Both are basically ways to negatively impact people’s lives by increasing the amount of suffering that’s acceptable in daily life and make modular, unsustainable, climate vulnerable housing economically viable respectively.

I’m open to learning if there’s more, it’s just a repulsive, regressive, screw-turning concept on the face of it.

Yeah it’s unimportant how many requests go out.

A secure browser ought to phone home on startup (and honestly with as little overhead as requests incur nowadays, on tab open) and make sure it’s updated to the latest version, do a dns sanity check, etc.

I don’t even mind Firefox having ads in the default homepage.

There shouldn’t be smarthomes. It’s a really bad idea.

Not much, what’s updawg with urnetwork?

I think that argument made in a vacuum, devoid of any analysis about the companies, software and their history could apply equally to any phone (including graphene and fdroid and calyx and postmarket and etc).

So it’s not useful to bring up when someone is asking about specifically ios, since it’s a hypothetical problem that applies equally to all phones and their software and the solution to it is putting the onus on the user to audit their software, operating systems, microcode, hardware and everything else or to determine whose audit of those systems to trust.

I think it’s especially not worth considering under a material analysis of the interests of the company that makes rich people phones and advertises their system as secure and private and generally has longer time to exploit for the different law enforcement processes and provides bare minimum compliance and isn’t primarily selling user data.

On some level we have to acknowledge the tremendous logical leap required to compare apple and pretty much any other major manufacturer and say “they could have backdoored it and they could be listening right now”. Yeah, I guess they could have done that. They have less incentive and more to lose than any other company and it would take a massive internal conspiracy, but I guess it’s possible.

I want to just take a line or two and make it clear that I’m basing all the above on the material circumstances of the company, not on any misplaced love for them or their products. I have android, ios, windows, linux and macos computers and use them equally.

I clicked the little rainbow star to see what people not federated with my instance are saying.

You’re getting a ton of bad input and inaccurate or irrelevant information.

Do not rely on community consensus to establish proper use guidelines.

As another person stated: signal chats don’t go to icloud. You have nothing in the slightest to worry about on that front.

People are bringing up prism and push notifications. It is mandatory for companies operating in the us to comply with us government prism spying requirements. Turn on ADP. Read past the slide presented as supposedly damning evidence against one or another company if you want to understand better law enforcements processes over a decade ago. Push notifications are plaintext and represent cause in some cases. This is not unique to apple. If you think you are one of those people, turn them off.

Turn on lockdown mode. Update your phone. Turn on automatic updates. The ways people physically and remotely compromise ios are often stopped by those three things.

If you don’t already, restart your phone daily. It puts the phone in a restricted state called before first unlock that requires that non resident programs have to reload and in almost all cases have to reestablish themselves to the host os.

If you’re worried about your signal chats getting recorded, turn on the disappearing feature. The other person is the weakest link, not the technology. Do contact verification. Assume your chats are infiltrated and talk to people about illegal stuff in person like the scions of American industry do. This is not unique to apple.

Be safe out there.

That makes a lot of sense.

TBH, I would go with a cloud service in your situation. You’re using icloud now and if you can avoid changing away from it you should. Theres a snap (ugh) that purports to do this natively, but even on a nearly 15 year old thinkpad I can spare the clock cycles and memory to bring osx up in a vm and do it normal style.

I say a service, and you said you’re interested in syncthing (which is very useful) but I’d stick with icloud or something more like it.

I was in a disaster we never thought would happen. My self hosted server was rendered inoperable by it. My offsite backup on the other side of the county was completely destroyed. If it weren’t for cloud backups I’d have lost data. Connectivity was sparse and if I had been privacy focused in the immediate hours I would have recognized then that it was entirely provided by spare bits of dubious infrastructure brought in by the government.

Cloud services like bitwarden and icloud saved by butt. They were prepared for this unimaginable situation to a degree I couldnt have been. When I had a dead phone battery and no laptop, both were able to be accessed securely on other people’s computers and public terminals.

I wouldn’t worry too much about the privacy aspect. Once you have ADP on in iCloud you’re safe from lawful orders and interception is handled by transport encryption like tls, wireguard or whatever. Your pc is a concern but open source versus closed source isn’t the security panacea people make it out to be.

An open source package called winring0 -yes really, it says it in the name- that was abandoned by its developer 15 years or so ago for being a terrible security nightmare was found recently to be in lots of windows rgb drivers shipped by manufacturers today.

That is to say, you can’t really protect yourself from manufacturer and maintainer error or maliciousness. You choose to trust them and have to accept what you get until it’s too spicy and the whole system needs to be ripped out and replaced.

What I would do for privacy is audit my behavior and set up key (or password!) rotation. It’s easy to make sure your secrets are isolated from each other and regularly changed.

If you’re really concerned then make sure you have whole disk encryption (and understand how to recover data from the encrypted disk when the computer it’s attached to fails!). If that doesn’t feel like enough, store your db and any flat files encrypted as well.

In short, don’t change your working system. Change the way you interact with that system to meet your new needs.

What’s your current note taking process? Like do you pull out your phone and type stuff into it or do dictation or what?

I went the other direction and have a composition book or two a year worth of notes. If I want to give one to someone I just tear out a page. If I want to send one in email or a message I just take a picture of it.

I keep a little pocket notebook in my pocket and a big composition book in my computer bag.

What got me to that point, and the reason I asked about your current note taking, is trying to find what you’re talking about and realizing that it’s a pain in the ass, I don’t really use it or want to use it, it’s too ungainly to draw or scribble in, I don’t like it and it’s never at hand when I need it.

A little pad of paper in my back pocket, a pen and a sharpie in some other pocket and taking a few minutes a day to copy (manually sync lol) what gets jotted down in the moment to the composition book is easier and more manageable for me than a complex system that requires a computer.

I was just in a major natural disaster last year and while there were lots of things I didn’t prepare for and couldn’t have imagined, paper notes kept me sane and worked phenomenally.

They’re reputable. Don’t give anyone any data you aren’t comfortable being leaked. Eventually it all comes out.

The only complaint people have is that the devices are expensive and phone home which they should. You’re buying a piece of internet facing technology, you should want it to check in and make sure it’s up to date etc.

Seriously, make sure you turn on automatic updates and change default passwords.

Mullvad didn’t pull port forwarding because of people abusing torrenting. They pulled it because interpol resorted to telling everyone to block their servers after mullvad wouldn’t/couldn’t assist in its investigation into csam sharing across forwarded ports using stuff as simple as the windows file and printer sharing system.

What caused them to pull port forwarding was the threat of being dropped from the routing table over stonewalling a police investigation into csam, not torrenting.

This is well documented and reflects the experience of many mullvad users including myself over the time period that it occurred. Saying that the decision had anything to do with torrenting is just false.

Air has worked really well for me. It’s not as straightforward to set up as some others, but it’s had better uptime than my server.

Boycotts are useful alongside militancy. The Montgomery bus boycott for example, was powerful because it gave an alternate path to resolve disputes that were playing out through marches and demonstrations that faced violent opposition.

Boycotts do not generally succeed at their aims if they are not accompanied by that militant wing.

I don’t know of any actions taken by proton that align with the ceos positions you oppose, for example: selective logging and reporting targeted at people in opposition to the trump government. I don’t know of any militant opposition or public demonstrations against those actions even if they did exist.

So I don’t think a boycott of proton would be effective at its goals even if they were explicit and achievable.

More broadly speaking, political action needs to be weighed against the negative repercussions it can bring; which is why in America, for example, lots of political demonstration tends to be younger people with less to lose.

When weighing that decision against having access to a privacy focused (if you don’t give them any identifying information) service, it may make more sense to abandon the boycott in order to get the service.

You could also just use airvpn, but it’s a little spartan and has a different feature set.

Anyway that was the whole point, that it’s easy to jump into an ineffective type of boycott that really hurts you by exposing you to prosecution and also doesn’t actually accomplish your political goals.

You can’t forward ports on mullvad. You know if that matters to you. Airvpn and proton allow port forwarding.

We are swiftly reaching a time where boycotting companies run by people you disagree with will negatively impact your ability to function. Consider abandoning this type of purchasing in the future.

Private trackers: they’re easy to get into. Ipt will probably temporarily open signups this month, mya is always open afaik and plenty of others have signups where you just have to take a test they give you the answers to. Once you’re in you just gotta maintain a ratio by seeding instead of just downloading all the time and climb the “tracker ladder” to get to the ones you want.

Mya is the one most people start with now.

On VPNs: you have to understand your own security, just like anything else. Ones like mullvad refuse to keep information about you (your login credentials are a random string of numbers and they do cash transactions similarly anonymized), and ones like proton allow you to use information that isn’t tied back to you (it’s your responsibility to make sure that information can’t be tied back to you!). It’s worth learning about them now even if you’re not in a position to pay for one because knowing will help you make good decisions when you are in that position.

If you aren’t gonna use a vpn then require encryption, disable dht and pex, use doh or dot and only use private trackers.

Require encryption, distributed hash table and peer exchange are options in your client. Requiring encryption means a mitm observation of your traffic won’t show you are doing torrenting. Turning off dht and pex prevents someone who’s not a member of your tracker jumping into the swarm and clocking users. DNS over https or tls makes requests to get the ip of a website from the url encrypted, so a mitm observer can’t even see that you went to the bad website to ostensibly do bad things. Private trackers get you out of the low hanging fruit category where enforcement is usually focused.

Of course, anyone who monitors traffic patterns will know you’re torrenting, so laws (or a change in laws or enforcement strategy) can still get you.

If you read all this way and you want to know what the solution is, it’s not i2p or tor, it’s a vpn service. I know you said you don’t want that, but it’s the solution to your problem. You figured out yourself that i2p and tor don’t suit your needs already.

Good vpns have infrastructure that makes it impossible to keep logs and will pass independent audits. They will also not have a history of turning over users data or otherwise acting badly.

I use airvpn for torrenting. It works fine as long as you’re not in Italy.

If you want to understand how a person can trust and afford a vpn, ask away. If you cannot or do not want to use a credit card, use a vpn service like mullvad or proton that accepts cash.

E: edited for a typo

That client doesn’t support it, but for your purposes, bind will do the same job.

Can you just set a bandwidth cap on your client or would your server still not have the cpu power to serve video?

What are you running this on, and are you transcoding, btw?

The internet as it’s been experienced by most living westerners is a product of a unipolar post Soviet world. Cryptography is widespread because it allows for transactions over a new medium.

Alternately, if you want to be crazy, https intentionally builds a web of trust too complex for users to interrogate and acme normalizes accepting new certificates without any real scrutiny and tor is only secure if the exit and entry nodes aren’t communicating or storing data.