I don’t think you can expect any VPN to work without sign-in for very long. Google’s playing whack-a-mole with VPNs.
I’ve never actually tried signing in with yt-dlp. How easy is it to make a throwaway google account nowadays? Do they require phone verification or something similarly onerous?
This is network-specific. It’s been going on for a few months at least. yt-dlp itself still works without sign-in, if your network is not “suspicious”.
Always worth making sure you’re updated to the latest version of yt-dlp, but this is probably a network thing.
A paper-only journal would defend against the state, but not against people you live with. A digital journal can be encrypted, but an intelligence agency could potentially gain access
A digital journal doesn’t need to be any more government-accessible than a paper journal.
Depending on your threat model, this could require special hardware, special software, or both. In order of ease of setup, I would suggest:
Keep all your data on your own physical media. No cloud services, period.
Keep it encrypted.
Disable network connectivity at every level that you possibly can, such as:
OS level: disable wi-fi, disable blutooth, and disable networking entirely.
Firmware/BIOS level: If you BIOS has options to disable networking components (especially wireless ones), do that.
Hardware level: If your laptop has a switch to disable wi-fi, use it. If ethernet, unplug the cable. Etc.
Physical level: Remove any removable wireless cards or antennas.
Wallet level: buy a computer than never had wi-fi or bluetooth in the first place. This could mean a retro computer, or could mean using a micro-pc like some models of Raspberry Pi.
Neither of those can stream video in real time AFAIK. They will back up the video file on some unpredictable schedule after you’re done recording. So not ideal for a situation where your phone might be seized or destroyed.
But if that works for you, there are lots of open-source options that work similarly. SyncThing can sync to any server, and all you’d need to do is make sure your sync destination is network-accessible somehow (VPN, internet-facing server, whatever). Lots of cloud drive apps can auto-upload photos and videos, and some of those are open-source.
A better off-the-shelf proprietary workflow might be a Zoom call with cloud recording enabled. Then you’d be protected against a sudden (and perhaps permanent) loss of network connectivity.
Is it more for situations that need to be compatible with most *nix systems and you might not necessarily have access to a higher level scripting language?
Yes, and also because integrating Python one-liners into shell pipelines is awkward in general. I’m more likely to write my entire script in Python than to use it just for text processing, and a lot of the time that’s just a pain. Python isn’t really designed for one-liners or for use as a shell. You can twist it into working in those use cases, but then I’d ask the reverse question: why would you do that when you could “just” use awk?
On macOS, Python is not installed by default. So if you are writing scripts that you want to be portable across platforms, or for general Mac administration, using Python is a burden.
This is also true when working with some embedded devices. IIRC I can ssh into my router and use awk (thanks to it being included in Busybox), but I’m definitely not going to install an entire Python environment there. I’m not sure there’d even be enough storage space for that.
Joplin is great. I have its data stored locally with encryption, and I sync across devices with Syncthing. It also has built-in support for some cloud providers like you mentioned, and since it supports local encryption, you don’t need to depend on the cloud provider’s privacy policy.
Setting it up on multiple devices was a bit complex, but the documentation is there. Follow the steps, don’t just waltz through the setup assuming it will work intuitively. I made that mistake and while it was not the end of the world, it would’ve saved me 15 minutes if I’d just RTFM.
Yes, absolutely! I’m in a renter’s mindset so I didn’t even think of that.
In theory, the only difference between an electric heater and your computer, as far as actual heat goes, is the dispersal pattern. They will generate exactly the same heat: 1W of heat per 1W of electricity used. That’s thermodynamics for you!
You said:
The flat was kept not quite as warm as previous years
So I don’t think it makes sense to assign any of the savings to using your PC vs your usual electric heaters. It’s because you kept your place a little cooler, which makes an absolutely huge difference. When heating in winter, every additional degree of air temperature is more costly than the last, since heat loss is relative to the temperature differential between indoors and outdoors (i.e. a warmer room will lose more heat to the outdoors than a cooler room, so you need to generate more heat to maintain it).
This sounds to me a lot like dieting. Most of the time, the success of a diet has less to do with the actual diet and more to do with the fact that dieting has made you more mindful and changed your behavior in other ways.
The two biggest things you can do to save money on heating in winter are:
Defaults matter. Every time you open a private browsing window, that’s what you’re going to get. Every time you use LibreWolf or Firefox Focus or any other browser that disables/clears cookies by default (which is a good practice), that’s what you’re going to get.
I don’t want anything I search for going into OpenAI. Ever. I’d feel fine about this if they hosted their own models.
Generally true. You would want to use DNS-over-TLS (DoT) or DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) to be sure your DNS queries are encrypted in transit.
Apple has three realistic options:
They went with #2, which is probably the least user-hostile option available.
From 1500GMT on Friday, any Apple user in the UK attempting to turn it on has been met with an error message.
Existing users’ access will be disabled at a later date.
I am very interested in seeing what the UX around this will be. Ideally, they should give users direct notice well in advance, so they have time to plan a migration or mitigation. Of course, Apple makes it basically impossible to perform a full backup through any mechanism except iCloud, so…one more example of how vendor lock-in is inherently a security and privacy risk.
I’m not (currently) in a position where others would find it desirable to do so. Potentially in the future?
It’s hard to imagine a scenario where this would happen and your voice would not otherwise be available. For example, if you went into politics, then you’d be a target, but you’d already be speaking in public all the time. It only takes a few seconds of a voice sample to do this nowadays and it’ll only get easier from here.
Maybe just make a point to educate your family and friends on the risk of voice cloning so they don’t fall for phone scams.
I’ve noticed that Google is getting more and more aggressive with VPNs. It won’t let me load anything on VPN without logging in. This applies to third-party tools like yt-dlp too.
This probably depends on your VPN provider. Perhaps I can make a throwaway google account just to get it to stfu? I don’t know how hard it is to make a semi-anonymous Google account nowadays.
Another issue with Google Play is that there’s nothing stopping the developer from pushing out an update that doesn’t match the published source. It isn’t tied to GitHub or anything.
Developers with apps on Google Play are frequently targeted with buyout requests from scammers looking to get malware to an existing user base. Or even if it’s not explicitly malware, it could be closed-source.
For example, the “Simple Mobile Tools” app developer sold their apps a year or two ago. Now they have ads, in-app purchases, and god knows what else. If you had installed them from Google Play, you would have received these updates automatically. Those new versions don’t exist on f-droid, naturally. Anyone who was using them should really uninstall them and install the “Fossify” forks from f-droid.
Every developer ID publishing on Google Play is potentially for sale. There are no real safeguards against this, and you might never know. At least with F-Droid it’s verified as open source and malicious (or just plain crappy) updates can be identified and dealt with, either by f-droid maintainers or by end users.
Typo in your link (but not in the text). https://searx.space
8 is also a lucky number in Chinese culture. I’ve seen a lot of "88"s in Chinese social media just because of that.
It always sucks when shitbags co-opt innocent symbols and language.
Ridiculous.
He specifically started talking about American party politics, unprompted, making sweeping statements about both Democrats and Republicans. NOW he wants to blame us for…being concerned with his views on American party politics? Dude. Get real.
Saying stupid shit now and then is forgivable, but not if you take it in as the new nucleus of your public image. Why do so many public figures have this compulsion to double down combatively?
I’m not worried about getting raided by the KGB or anything like that, but break-ins happen and my computer equipment would be a prime target for theft.
I occasionally cycle my backup drives off-site, so I want those encrypted as well.
The cost of encryption is very close to zero, so I don’t even entertain the question of whether I should encrypt or not. I just encrypt by default.
And it wouldn’t affect your ability to download torrents if you don’t have port forwarding on VPN, just your ability to upload
This isn’t quite true. Two peers who both lack port forwarding will not be able to connect to each other at all. Once a connection is established between two peers, both uploading and downloading should work just fine.
A significant portion of swarms are users like that, who can initiate connections but cannot receive incoming connections. This is especially problematic with smaller torrents. If you’re working with well-supported torrents with dedicated seeders and thousands of users, then it won’t really matter. But if you need something with just a couple seeders, you might find yourself stuck with zero accessible peers.
Weird that they don’t even bother mentioning the backup feature they’ve had on Android for years.
The good news is that this is an addition to the existing backup option to back up everything to a local file, not a replacement. At least in the current beta.
I would like to hear official confirmation that this isn’t going to be a replacement, because if it is, then it’s a huge downgrade. The current system backs up everything, including media, with no time limits, for free.