“strange track records”

They’re obvious Russian assets…

“problem on the intelligence front”

…who will pass on the names of all our spies and assignments to Putin…

Intelligence sharing would continue “even if at the top level there might be things we might wish to be circumspect about”.

…so we’re going to bullshit them and not tell them the important stuff.

Techbro led gvmt - move fast, break stuff. Chaos leads to opportunity to profit, by which I mean him and his class to profit.

Lots here too.

‘Better’ is relative :) is it better than using something like SearXNG? No. But for those people who insist on using Google, its better to do a proxied search than a first-hand one. Mullvad are European, are one of the very few orgs I personally think are trustable and have shown no signs of enshittification, Leta has been audited by a 3rd party - for those looking for a private Google experience this is about the best there is.

Leaving notes…committing genocide, yeah they’re interchangeable really.

I don’t think any of them give two shits about pushback. Unless that pushback takes the form of forcible removal from power, they wont care in any way.

The trouble is that the problem is not confined to just Trump. If he dies, Vance becomes president. If they both die, Mike Johnson does. This is not a coup by a single person, this is an entire philosophy - neo-fascism - thats now in charge of the US. Its goose-stepping turtles all the way down.

FairEmail has a good reputation.

Info here

Depends on your threat model - mine is to make it as annoying and difficult for data sellers and advertisers to profile me as possible so in that scenario a reputable VPN service makes perfect sense.

There’s no such thing as total privacy and each service/software is simply a piece of the puzzle. If my government really wanted my data I’m sure they could find a way but making it as difficult as possible for techno-fascists is fine by me.

Thats a good point, I might set that up myself!

At the moment I do a once-a-week encrypted export from BitWarden and Aegis (authenticator) and put those exports onto an encrypted USB pen drive to avoid the issues you mention but I think your way is probably better.

Info here

What assurances do you have they won’t go full proton in the future?

Absolutely none. That applies to all services that exist now or in the future. The only way around that is self-hosting but that path has its own issues including a very steep learning curve if you want to be secure as well as private. Maybe this could be a longer term project to work towards?

For services:

• Mail - Mailbox.org seems the best option right now
• Calendar - don’t know.
• Drive - either Cryptomator used with literally any service or a dedicated service like Filen
• VPN - Mullvad
• Password Manager - Bitwarden
• Documents - I just use LibreOffice offline or CryptPad occasionally if I’m collabing with someone.

In truth none of these are perfect. Privacy has got a lot harder recently as Proton and StartMail/StartPage have politically shit the bed and the UK seems determined to kill encryption which means I have to avoid really good services like IceDrive just because they’re in the UK.

EDIT: Calendars. Mailbox.org’s included one works fine. You can sync using CalDAV. The process for Thunderbird (desktop) is here.

The process for mobile is a little more complicated. First you need Davx5 to actually get the data, but thats all that app does. It’s not a Calendar app. It does work with the native Android Calendar but I used FossifyCalendar.

So install both of those then login to your Mailbox account in a browser and create a Calendar (or use an existing one). Get its unique URL by looking under the heading ‘My Calendars’, clicking the three bars icon, click ‘Properties’ and you can then copy your CalDAV URL.

On your Android device open Davx5, tap the plus icon then specify ‘login with URL and username’ tap ‘continue’ then paste in the URL you copied earlier, your email address and your email account password, tap ‘login’ and that should work.

Now, switch to your Calendar app. I used Fossify Calendar so if you are too, open that up, go to Settings, scroll down to the CALDAV section and turn on CalDAV sync. It might switch to your new Mailbox calendar now, but if it doesn’t, tap ‘Manage synced calendars’ and activate it there.

Privacy focused company move off privacy respecting service and suggest following them on privacy nightmare service. Are they trying to kill any trust in their own company?

Such a weird thing for them to do - why would a Dutch company highlight a connection with a US Trump supporter? Is it a very recent thing? Like Proton’s CEO massaging Trump’s ego?

Not immediately or probably for some years. Facebook’s main problem is the fact its got an aging population and no young people joining. That’s why Meta bought Instagram and is desperate to get their grubby paws on TikTok or force it to close down in the West.

I think internally, over the next decade, FB will start to die off organically as Meta put ever increasing focus on retention and young people.

I’m not a fan of Apple at all but they could’ve done a lot worse. They’ve basically refused to backdoor encryption and instead announced (as opposed to silently doing it) its removal instead.

I think what we should be more concerned about here is the total silence from other companies who offer encrypted cloud services. Might that imply they’ve already (as per the terms of the UK’s edict) silently complied?

Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Act IV, Scene 1

[Enter pirates]

First Pirate: Hold, villain!

1. Do I actually need it? For example, I like the gnome ArcMenu extension but I don’t really need it, so no to that one.
2. Read the reviews and/or ask in the relevant community, or a Privacy community like this one.
3. If the code’s up to date in a repo see where (if anywhere) its phoning home to.
4. If its not but I still really need it, install it, then run Wireshark and see what its up to, if anything.

That’s why I replied directly to you. Are you new to how public, threaded conversations work?