I imagine it’d be a jurisdiction issue for what you propose. If, say, the UK mandates that websites block VPN nodes, that will affect websites served from the UK (creating a Great Firewall of Britain). But what about websites served outside the UK? Those websites can’t possibly tell if a user is from the UK and using a VPN, vs outside the UK and using a VPN, so they can’t only block UK visitors—they’d have to block all VPN traffic, which is probably not worth it from a business point of view. I suppose the UK could then deem that website illegal in the UK and block them, but then that’d only block the website for non-VPN users in the UK… But if the website owner is outside the UK they can’t be punished for violating that law.

More probable (though I still think unlikely) is that a country could sniff for e.g. Wireguard packets and block those. But again that’s unlikely because of businesses using VPNs to let employees access company intranets at home.

In addition to this, they are working with an OEM to produce their own Graphene phones. It sounds like they’ve made significant progress on that front so I’m hopeful.

What are you using that requires a selfie? I can’t think of any services or apps I use that require a selfie. It can’t be that hard to avoid if I’ve never encountered one.

IPA is here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cwtch

With soft forks you still need to merge upstream changes and figure out what to do when they’re incompatible with your changes, do your own testing of your fork once you’ve merged the changes, etc.

Again, stupid chauvinist take. Not everyone speaks English and not everyone uses English pronunciations. Also, cwtch is a relatively popular loanword too, plenty of English speakers have learnt to say it.

You know most of the world finds English spellings hard to pronounce, right? You’re speaking in a language notorious for its inconsistent pronunciations (see “-ough”).

It’s also particularly fucked up to mock Welsh like that given that Welsh is one of the many languages with a long history of children being violently reprimanded for speaking their native language by English people.

unpronounceable

To whom? Should Welsh people not use privacy software too? Stupid ass chauvinist position

It’s a welsh word.

…I can’t think of a “privacy-focused code editor” because code editors are generally not known for having telemetry/tracking/anything privacy-invasive in the first place? A “privacy-respecting” code editor is just a normal one. Use whatever you like. Vim is great. Maybe Kate if you want a GUI.

It looks like a honeypot, and wtf is a “private cell network”? How are they gonna do that? SMS and phone calls aren’t E2EE

I suppose that begs the question of whether or not privacy (as used by this community) inherently means private in the colloquial sense, like the way a diary is private. Because to me, a e.g. public static website with no kind of profiling of its users is privacy-respecting, but obviously not private in the colloquial sense—it’s a public resource.

I do use SMS sometimes and I use it strictly for things that I’m happy to be basically public. Same for using other protocols like unencrypted email.

A stock smartphone is also locked in to mandatory telemetry, like a stock dumbphone. The practical difference is that there’s a much smaller community for installing custom FOSS OSes onto dumbphones compared to smartphones.

I think you’re conflating security with privacy. Not that they are unrelated, but something can be e.g. unencrypted but lack telemetry.

Not that dumbphones are inherently private, but I don’t think they’re less private either. They’re just what you use if you have no need for all the smartphone functions.

This is only because Microsoft’s employees have been relentless in their pressure on their bosses. They’ve been doing occupations of Microsoft buildings, office crashes, etc. They fire the employees who take part but then there are more employees who crop up in their place; there are just too many to fire them all. And Microsoft still provides a lot of support to Israel, so don’t be fooled into thinking that things are over.

No, FreeTube is its own thing, but it can fall back to an invidious instance. Idk why it fails for me with inv.nadeko.net as my default instance though.

Yeah have been using https://inv.nadeko.net/ as FreeTube broke for me. Unfortunately there seems to be some kind of bandwidth throttling as I’m getting 720p videos only (my internet is fine for 1080p and I was getting 1080p on FreeTube).

It wouldn’t be hard to add a clause mandating that websites provide an easy-to-access “reject all” button that actually rejects all cookies.

…No? Communism is the brand new social order I’m talking about that is yet to come about.

Revolution doesn’t have to recreate the currently existing systems in other parts of the world. Every social order was brand new at some point.

A flip phone/dumbphone would sort of be mutually exclusive with my use case. I use my smartphone nearly exclusively as a lightweight mobile computer for web browsing, SSHing into my server, and messaging over internet (not SMS). I rarely use the “phone” features of my phone, i.e. phone calls and SMS. So I’d be losing out over the features I do use, in favour of features I don’t use.

If you’re being distracted by your phone and a dumbphone works for you, good on you. I think most people are like me and use their phones as a small mobile computer rather than a phone though, in which case distractions are best handled with one of the many apps/browser add-ons/etc that block websites or apps.

https://www.getmonero.org/

Getting a wallet and setting it up is the easy part. Buying it can be more difficult depending on where you are—centralised exchanges are easiest but xmr-fiat centralised exchanges often have legal trouble and may not be available where you are. You can try a decentralised exchange like RetoSwap (fiat-xmr directly) or bisq (fiat-btc and btc-xmr). They can be a bit confusing for new users but I figured it out ok when I first bought Monero using bisq.