them vets are the main foment vector for what we now know as the white supremacy movement. not that the sentiment wasn’t prevalent, but it was disjointed groups, churches, cults, klan, militias, prison gangs, etc., each pushing their own thing with only limited local reach.

the influx of large swaths of radicalized and trained MAMs was the igniter. all those power squabbling groups started coming together under one banner and they had a new tool - computers.

early on, they realized you can reach a whole lotta more folks with the new tech than the usual zines and the like. so they formed armored truck robbing gangs, and used the proceeds to buy home computers for establishing a network of BBS all over the country, pushing their shit to previously unreachable corners. I mean, if that’s not a michael mann movie, I don’t know what is…

for more, kathleen belew - bring the war home, available at anne’s site or wherever you pirate your shit.

not to shit on you specifically but I see this over and over, folks asking how to be “secure”. secure against what?

if you’re into this, you need to set up a “threat model” i.e. what are your threat vectors and then you build your defenses against that model. a defense against blanket surveillance doesn’t handle targeted threats. a successful defense against your government doesn’t preclude other nation-state actors getting at you.

like, if your threat vector is e.g. your SO “inspecting” your phone, you set up a passcode and you’re safe against that threat. but, if there’s a toddler going around smashing stuff, your defense isn’t valid. defense against that vector is placing your phone high up. but that defense isn’t effective against SO.

I am sure any messenger recommended here can be successfully red-teamed, be it design flaws, operator error, the famous wrench comic, or whathaveyou. but that doesn’t mean it’s ineffective in your specific case.

you’re ignoring the important part - who that’s coming from.

analyzing a new shit-sandwich from the shit-sandwich-shop to determine “does this one have shit in it” is a valid academic endeavor, but hardly something you’d spend one second of your life pondering.

don’t need any such “proof”. the whole industry has lost any and all benefit-of-doubt privileges, for ever. they don’t get an opportunity to gain a foothold in mi casa and possibly be in a position to do harm.

I don’t get the idea that after all the shit they pulled someone’s like “well maybe this new thing’s nice”.

those are immoral people with zero compunctions about doing anything that hurts you, your community, and humanity as a whole. we are in an adversarial position and you’d do well to remind yourself of that constantly.

I gave up on mine for a privacy unrelated reason: they often reboot the thing remotely, for updating or whatnot. not a big deal per se, the problem - my local network stops working, and that I will not abide. so once I stopped using it, the rest (pihole, unbond, etc) came on its own and now I’m not going back.

that’s what syncthing is for. you can set it up to sync the Notes folder to your other devices in a read/write way or just one way, so you got your central repo.

also, qown has nextcloud notes sync built in.

why would you host anything? that’s just an app. QOwnNotes (stupidest name ever) stores .MD files that you can syncthing, rsync, copy, edit externally, whatever, allowing you never to be locked-in again. all the toolboxes can be turned off, netting you a UI that looks like apple’s notes.

not my circus, not my monkeys

but them positions… as mr. cici famously quipped, that’s alot of buffers

you really need a VP of eng and then a director of eng and further liaisons until you reach an actual engineer for a shop that has one product?

again, what do I care, spend it in good health

what is this take based on? there’s a direct line between “we want this shit done” and “judge rubberstamps order”? no process, no interview, no hearing, no nothings? medieval courts maybe worked that way, no system of government I know of nowadays does.

I imagine they got courts and lawyers and motions and hearings and stuff over there, even if the fight is doomed you need to show your teeth once in a while. and what’s with the proton employee reviewing whether there were “explosives” and “guns” involved, naturally based on super-reliable evidence, what the fuck is that?!

and alla that aside, why do they have payment and user info on file, for what fucking purpose? there’s either user privacy or there ain’t. and them folks are in the “ain’t” camp.

article in case you can’t read it: lemmy.ml/post/44086795 edit: better link in a reply.

proton coulda put up a fight, a loud one, for optics sake if nothing else. rolling over on any (and by implication, all) request should be the last straw in their long line of snafus; by way of “death by a thousand cuts”, I would never entrust them with anything of importance.

signal demonstrated that you could decouple payment info from user data and a shop that touts the privacy part of their offerings coulda at least mimic such a thing.

edit 2: fuck any and all pay-with-crypto shills and the horse they rode in on.

I’m saying I’m not gonna use it as an email provider, as in pen a love letter to to sydney sweeney, reminding her of the shit she promised me in my most recent dream and she’s kinda tardy so what’s up with that and so on.

I am gonna use it as a transactional email inbox, as in “you registered to yadda-yadda here’s shit you’re never gonna read”. and if in the process of using them it turns out they’re a buncha good folks, maybe I’ll elevate out reationship.

the trackings and whatnot are a) blocked by a buncha filters, b) gone when I close the tab with their url, c) they don’t get my PII, and d) they don’t get to store anything on my hardware.

way worse shit out there.

what I said in the first sentence - I am assuming we’re in an adversarial position. if I know you’re out to fuck with my shit, guess how much of my shit I’m gonna entrust you? the equivalent of junk mail.

now it’s possible them guys are good people and whatnot, but until that is established beyond a significant threshold, any and all such providers get zero of my trust up front.

I know nothing about these services but intuitively this shit rings true:

• the whole setup is kinda unfalsifiable - who’s to say how many of them “brokers” are out there and if they contacted all of them and what the outcome is/was
• advertising all over the place implies a scammy business model; life’s too short to figure out what the scam exactly is
• related, almost every piece of shit advertising all over the podcast world turned out to be a piece of shit
• the threat vector of you voluntarily supplying them complete and detailed personal info (so they can find you everywhere) cannot be overstated
• they’re motivated to keep you on the hook for a long time; it’s not a pay-once thing, it’s a subscription thing - alarm bells should be going off
• finally, paying for that looks to me like them going to the “broker” and divvying up the cash, if not outright being their affiliate

same way how you don’t send “unsubscribe” proof-of-life to spammers, I’d stay the fuck away.

I automatically assume I’m in an adversarial position vs such a thing and don’t care what kinda shit they try to pull - they’re met with the full arsenal of privacy enhancing tools at my disposal.

as for me, an email provider that asks for no backup email or other verification methods can come useful in everyday life, thanks for mentioning them.

don’t like the email domain, the UX is nothing to write home about, and they’re obnoxious with the upsale pitch, but with a few tweaks here and there this can be useful for signups, transactional emails, and the like.