If you get Organic Maps you can use GPS navigation. It works entirely offline so you can turn your phones cellular off and just use GPS which is passive and doesn’t send out signals. Best practice would be Graphene OS as the base and not having google services installed at all too.

This is how I listen to music too. What I did is I made a bunch of massive playlists inside the services of 80s, 90s, 70s, etc music seperated by decade. Like you’d have on a radio station. Then I plugged them into Parabolic and ripped mp3s of them from youtube. Shoved them in a folder and just listen to those on shuffle. As for supporting artists, half the people I listen to are dead first of all, and for the ones who aren’t I do also have a physical media collection. A single purchase of a cd or vinyl gives them more money than 1000 streams would.

For anyone considering switching to using mp3s on android I’ve found the Phocid music player best. Plus the app icon is a little weasel which is a plus. You can typically store 150 or so songs per gb depending on the length and quality. I just use syncthing to keep my phone and laptop music library synced up.

I don’t like smart anything. I’ve realized the less connected I am and the less I use ‘smart’ technology the happier I am. Phones are for phone calls. Glasses are for correcting vision or blocking the sun. Let’s keep it that way. If it isn’t my laptop I don’t want it to connect to the internet.

You are right to push back on that guys comment, but I want to offer some more insight on this for you.

Https doesn’t necessarily encrypt your entire connection. While the traffic to that site is encrypted not everything is. I really wish more people were aware of DNScrypt. Which is a method for encrypting your DNS connection.

These things all have their uses.

HTTPS: Encrypts traffic to and from a given websites servers.

DNScrypt: Encrypts DNS queries between your device and the recursive resolver, so your ISP can no longer see those DNS lookups. However, the ISP can still see the IP addresses you connect to.

VPN: Routes your traffic through ANOTHER server adding a layer between your IP and the destination.

The guy you replied to said VPNs encrypt your internet connection. Some VPNs do use end to end encryption, but that’s not like a thing VPNs invented. Not sure why people think it is. VPNs can be unencrypted too. The main use case of a VPN is to act like you’re on another network. This is useful for torrenting to hide your IP, or for pretending to be in a different location. Also VPNs that are encrypted (which most are these days) only encrypt the connection from your computer to the actual VPN server. So if you aren’t using HTTPS then anything after the VPN server is unencrypted.

If the ONLY use case you have is encryption HTTPS + DNScrypt is all you need.

One note though is VPNs can actually protect against man in the middle attacks on public wifi. Where someone tricks you into connecting to their fake wifi pineapple and then shows you common sites as if they’re real, but typically this is not a threat on home wifi or a cellular network. Not a reasonable one anyway. At that point your dealing with state level actors and a VPN aint gonna do shit anyway.

DNScrypt can be subbed for DNS over TLS or DNS over HTTPS. Some browsers even have a DNS over HTTPS option in their settings. This is easier than setting DNScrypt up yourself, but you are also kind of relying on the browser to do a good job in this case. Plus any lookups outside the browser like for other apps or system updates are then not encrypted and would go to whatever the DNS is for your full system.

Even without DNScrypt or one of the alternatives one of the best things you can do is to simply manually choose a different DNS provider. Most ISPs will send you to their DNS provider and can see everything. You can manually select a different one. There are lots of options, Mullvad, Quad9, Cloudflare, Adguard Public DNS, etc. Some will even block ads for you. It’s super easy to do you just go into network settings and put in the IP to your chosen provider. You can look them up online to find a good one.

Easy to talk about dying for a flag when it’s someone else doing the dying.

What is this fantasy you live in where we just have to give Taiwan the right amount of guns so it’ll suddenly be able to defend itself enough? Should we give them nukes? All because a generation ago the US got involved in the tail end of the Chinese civil war and created this schism in the first place. The solution to the problem caused by US guns is not more US guns.

You say you wish there was a diplomatic solution. There is. But that is never going to happen while Taiwan is a battleground for 2 global superpowers. The Taiwanese island is right next to mainland China. China is a global superpower. Taiwan has about as much of a realistic chance at full independence from China as Hawaii does from the US. It will never happen. Thinking that sending more guns is going to make it happen is just fantasy. The ONLY solution is to dial down the temperature and let China feel secure enough to not need to force the issue. China has shown a willingness to wait things out as they prefer stability and diplomacy. But if their hand is forced there is no amount of US aid that can stop them from taking Taiwan. The US can’t even beat Iran for fucks sake. All giving them more weapons is doing is getting more innocent people on both sides killed by prolonging their inevitable defeat in the military conflict those very guns will be the catalyst for.

I very much think the Iranian people have a say. And they said “No.” to US Intervention in case you didn’t notice. Strait of Hormuz looking awfully based lately.

“China bad” essentially. lol. Such a nuanced and factual argument. I can’t compete!

Well if you mean in the 1950s during the civil war sure. The US is the reason that the Taiwan Island was not rejoined with China then. But to suggest that the CPCs preferred method of reunification is by military force TODAY is to show a complete lack of awareness as to how the CPC operates. They will always choose the diplomatic option whne it is available to them. Yet allowing Taiwan to be turned into an unsinkable US aircraft carrier off their coast is untenable. They would have no choice but to attack. Also, this has nothing to do with Donald Trump. You are falling for this trap of assuming US policy is led by the President. Harris would have done the same thing because the reason this is occuring is that the US has realized after its war with Iran that the war it had been planning with China is not winnable. So it is backing down.

Guess I’ll have to be the one who gets downvoted by the liberal imperialists and say this is a GOOD THING!

Taiwan would be better off if the US fucked off and stopped trying to use it as a way to undermine China. China is much less likely to attack a Taiwan that is just being annoying than one that is slowly being armed to the teeth right off its coast. The people of Taiwan do not need more guns. They need competent leaders that can negotiate with Beijing in good faith to rejoin peacefully and on good terms.

Americans who are so concerned about this should be more concerned about the fact the US is probably going to attack it’s 3rd country this year soon (Cuba) instead of whining about a hypothetical Chinese military action that has not happened, and absent the US forcing China’s hand, will not happen.

You do not have the moral high ground. You are making the situation worse by sending weapons not better. Take a good long look in the mirror. Look at what happened to other countries the US did this to (Ukraine). Stop slurping up the Anti-China slop like mindless children. The US is the bad guy. Not China.

Are you serious? Do you think 3rd party voters are “centrist”? What third parties are you looking at? 3rd parties are on the ends of the overton window in the US not the middle. If the Democrats ran a centrist to court 3rd party voters then it makes sense they lost. Because apparently they’re morons.

I would honestly just create a tiny dual boot of another linux distro with LUKS KVM encryption on the entire thing. It has its own sudo, and is locked behind your encryption password. You just boot into a small 30GB or so private session that only you have access to while leaving the main distro untouched.

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