There are a lot of issues with your post imo.

First, cash is going away, soon. Sweden has done it years ago. Europe is now playing catch up.

Second, a universal digital currency will remove all system heterogeneity. Yes money is already digitalised, but across several proprietary environments. I can and have set up several accounts across several banks so my spending cannot be fully tracked by a single corporate entity. This will be moot once everyone has to use the same harmonized system.

Third, one of the sponsors of the universal European currency has been caught talking about time limited digital currency. As in, spend your money or it just disintegrates after a set amount of time. Which really destroyed a lot of trust in the endeavour

They’ve been around a bit now. Everyone seems to be pretty satisfied. Desktop app could use some improvements, which is already on their roadmap

I think that take is short sighted. Because the next obvious step to “no right to online anonymity” is “online anonymity is illegal”, and it’s pretty obvious we’re headed that way. In that case, courts can make it pretty fucking hard to protect your right to privacy.

Money transfer platforms are even worse than chat apps in terms of how acceptance dictates usefulness. You might convince a couple of friends to use xmpp instead of whatsapp. But its near impossible to get major outlets to integrate new payment methods. Especially if that platform advocates privacy and therefore doesn’t offer a return on invest based on user data. I don’t think we’re gonna see true alternatives without government regulation, and even then…

Exactly this. He’s a corpocrat, which is a big no-no in the french public eye. Also, he has more of an assimilation instead of integration style in regards to immigration politics, so he’s right leaning as well. Doesn’t help that the left doesn’t have any candidates that anyone can take seriously.

Strictly speaking, if being trackable is an issue for you, you shouldn’t run around with bluetooth enabled in the first place. And incidentally, no BT means no find my device either.

I would still recommend turning wifi off when leaving home for privacy reasons (which can easily be automated). The process to identify if a network is trusted or not requires a handshake. So leaving wifi on makes you trackable by the wifi network operators and the apps on your phone with access to your wifi, wether you connect a network or not.

I second disroot. Been happy with their service.

Almost as if only a very small percentage of the population is profiting from those price hikes.

I’ve worked my ass of these past 5 years to advance my career, earning about 30% more, just to have the same buying power I had when I started. It’s ridiculous and utterly demoralizing.

Let’s see what europes e2ee ban will bring. Proton is one of the “high risk” services mentioned in the bills debate. Might not be too long before you have to host your own mail server if you want privacy in europe.

Privacy matters most in the individual case, with people who know you.

That statement is subjective at best. My friends and coworkers knowing where I live certainly isn’t my concern. In today’s day and age privacy enthusiasts are definitely more scared of corpos and governments.

isn’t worth it yet.

You’re thinking too small. Just in the context of the e2ee ban planned in europe, think what you could do. The new law is set to scan all your messages before/after sending for specific keywords. Imagine you get automatically flagged and now an AI is scanning all your pictures for locations and contacts and what not. Just the thought that might be technically possible is scary as hell.

You’re misunderstanding the post. It’s not about whether or not someone could guess your location from a picture. It’s about the automation thereof. As soon as that is possible it becomes another viable vector to compromise your privacy.

Torrenting/seeding works great with Mullvad, which doesn’t have port forwarding

What’s the use case for a history merger?

I never understood how movie-web got so popular when services like FMovies exist.

Be aware that kwallet will require you to enter your password if you auto-login. Kwallet usually saves your passwords for wifi etc. That’s why auto-login with KDE doesn’t make much of a difference in most use cases

It’s probably gone. But maybe you could have some luck looking for it in your BIOS like others suggested.

I haven’t used windows in quite a while, but while I did, on laptops sold with windows there was a recovery partition on them you could reinstall windows from. If you removed that partition you had no legal way of reinstalling, because no key was made available to you at any point.

I think you severely underestimate how our devices are networked nowadays. It’s not about the device directly next to you. It’s about what is beeing agreggated in the back end. Google and Apple have an extensive BT and Wifi map that can locate specific devices very accurately at all times. Which of course is enriched with other device data from installed apps, like where you shop, what you shop, maybe even vitals from your smartwatch etc. to create a scarily accurate persona attached to your name. That’s on a whole other level than what you can do with a license plate.

That being sad I respect your choice as well. Being privacy conscientious is a bit of work.

3 reasons for me:

• XMPP implementations have been around so much longer than signal, to me signal would be “just another messaging app”

• XMPP doesn’t require my phone number. Signal might give you the option to use usernames with your contacts, but still requires a valid number for registration last I checked.

• I can self host an XMPP server instead of trusting/depending on someone else.