As a personal philosophy, I like to learn how something works before I allow myself to take it for granted. As a few examples: I can do math by hand, wash my own clothes with homemade detetgant, write a short story or poem, draw/illustrate with pencil pretty well, and I can even build a log cabin with hand tools. Only then do I allow myself to use calculators, washers, generative AI, and modern power tools to perform those skills for me. I can now embrace these new technologies form a standpoint of knowing what they made easier, AI included. Of course many will not think this way ingeneral society, but this is how I tackle the problem from an introspective angle

The end goal of every authoritarian entity is to control currency. Your access to food, entertainment, medical care, quality of life, etc. all go through your exchange of currency. If they control the currency, they control all of the above. NSFW video games are just a small foot in the door, I can see this encroaching onto every aspect of society soon

I love anything written by James A. Owen. His flagship series is The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, which is an excellent fantasy story. Everyone I’ve reccomended it to, including well-seasoned book lovers, has put it in their top 5. He’s also written more thoughtful books like the Meditations trilogy, as well as the Starchild comic series, which are both really good. On top of all that he’s an artist and illustrates for all of his books

I feel the same way. Monero is the best contender for that philosophy, and governments/corporations hate it because they know it’s a threat to their financial chokehold. Whoever controlls the money controlls the power, so if the money is decentralized and private, no entity can ever hold that power over everyone

Looks yummy! I’d call it a taco, because with fajitas, the tortillas are usually served on the side, and quesadillas usually have more cheese than protein/veggies.

Also if you like chicken and bell peppers you should try a dish called pechuga alambre; it’s so good and similar to fajitas but has cheese and bacon on top

Me reading the Epic of Gilgamesh 4000 years later

For me it was NordVPN>Windows Privacy>Signal>Mullvad>Fediverse>CalyxOS>Linux. Surprisingly similar.

Tracing it back I think I learned about Nord VPN from an Internet Historian ad, and went from there.

In general I agree, I love me some appimage, but Flatpak is good when you need sandboxes and repo packages are super easy with apt or dnf

I think I fixed it; I use Jerboa and put the image link in the wrong field. Whoops!

I also now have your comment

Your comment is an example. Without certain measures in place, your comment is now potentially in the hands of:
Your instance
Your app/browser
Your local network
Your ISP
Your OS
Your Government
These are just examples, but you have to trust that each of these privacy policies or your equivalent of them is telling the truth, or have measures in place to mitigate said data collection

Honestly you’re pretty spot on. I use the fingerprinting setup you use except I opt for NoScript and use Librewolf. You can also enable letterboxing in about:config to prevent screen resolution/aspect fingerprints.

I keep Noscript off usually, but if I’m browsing sites I don’t know or frequent I turn it on for the added security. For anyone aware, turning off Javascript does increase your fingerprintability, but also makes you much harder to target via cross site scripting or through trackers from outside sites (e.g. google, facebook, etc.).

Also, very interesting info on I2P. I’ve never looked into it, but it seems like an interesting concept

Me when you’re simply scrolling a shitpost feed and come across an otherworldly nugget of deep wisdom only to question your own perspective on a commonly occuring subject of decpetive simplicity

Essentially what the other person said, but KYC depends on the marketplace. See getmonero.com. XMR allows for merchants to skip KYC, which other cryptos don’t do

I’m not a crypto expert, but from what I know it’s one of the few currencies that have no kyc (know your customer) in order to use. The whole point of it is to have completely anonymous transactions and untracable/unmarked currecy. I used it once to buy a month of Mullvad vpn just to see how it works. I bought a giftcard with cash, traded the gift card for monero on a somewhat sketchy site, put the monero into an XMR wallet, and used the Monero to buy the vpn with wallet keys. It was a fun experiment but it was just too much time and effort to do it the right way to warrant using it 24/7

Idk, I think it depends on their angle

BREAKING: the entire moon has less crime than South Africa! That’s 38 million sq km of no crime!
/s

For real, they picked the most barren places on earth (except Europe). Most of the land mass of Canada, Australia, and Greenland are deserted. Midwest US is all farmland. No one lives in Siberia

I actually do endorse SimpleX. While it does lack a lot of user features you might enjoy in other messengers, it does do the security/privacy part right. While not having as many auditors as signal, there have been enough to form an opinion. The fact that it is foss in the first place gives an advocate for their transparency. It’s also double ratchet E2E enrypted, comletely anonymous, practices perfect forward secrecy, and even offers Tor proxies; which is more to be said than most messengers.

The only good argument I’ve seen against it is that it isn’t federated or P2P, which is a discussion on the centralization of power rather than a security/privacy issue outright

My lithsmus test for a good checklist is how they rate the Brave browser, Telegram, and popular VPNs. All three have marketed themselves as privacy friendly and secure, but all three are absolutely terrible if you do your homework on them. I’ve seen Brave or Telegram in the top tier on so many lists it isn’t even funny