dmantis

I've been running RPI-based torrent client 24/7 in several countries and never experienced that. Eats a few TBs per month, not the full line, but pretty decent amount. I guess it really depends on the country.

There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves if they don't understand what they are doing. I don't see how brewing is different. A grown-up person has rights and bears the consequences of negligence and that's totally normal, that's what freedom is.

As long as the product is not sold outside but for personal consumption, it must be legal to make without any certifications.

True, but there is yet a one major OS that allows you to run whatever you see fit on your computer.

If you are really disgusted by those moves, you have a time to switch. If enough people switch, then we can just forget about that garbage.

1. web is too slow compared to any decent desktop client. thunderbird navigation/deletion/message opening is basically instant from human perception, web version operations are visible to human eye.

2. doesn't cut trackers

Well, it's all relative and depends on perception.

I tried to briefly explain a typical i-own-my-computer mindset regarding the linux monetization question from the parent comment.

I can pay for cool stuff I can trust, but the "I can trust" part is very tricky.

Many from linux crowd are slightly paranoid and ideological.

I'm as a linux user very reluctant to install anything proprietary that has such sensitive info as my network traffic and would rather use opensnitch or any other foss fork.

The same time I don't mind to pay for open-source, I donate several thousands USD per year to FOSS projects. But I guess I'm in a minority here and if you make the whole stack open-source you're not going to make many sells really.

Just in one particular country. That hurts their labs, but there are ~190 other countries in the world for Chinese to sell their products to, just like they do with their cars.

And businesses from these other countries would happily switch to Chinese. From security perspective both Chinese and US espionage is equally bad, so why care if it all comes down to money and performance.

Do you imply that it's not possible for the US intelligence agencies to request this data from google per person of interest and deliver some information from the metadata?

I heavily doubt that.

And in post-soviet countries you blink and you owe 15+% interest. I know many people who couldn't meet basic needs and pay a never-ending percentage. Or forgot to close the debt and lost more than ever gained from this tool in one payment. So people who can pay from their pocket just pay from it instead of endlessly tracking the grace period and counting the money.

I don't imply that's the same everywhere. Also probably depends on a local regulation and interest rates.

Also people here don't generally like to owe to somebody, that feels insecure.

Probably, but making a non-used CC just for using your own phone sound a bit weird, don't you think?

And I don't criticize US way of living here, but Apple is an international company and could do better adjusting to local cultural habits. But maybe they just punish people for this stupid law in the first place which is totally understandable.

Yes. The point in the post is that it's very American to assume that every adult has a credit card. I'm in my thirties and I never had nor plan to have a credit card. I always have had only debit cards. In countries I've been raised and lived it's a sign of a poverty and total dependency on the bank with additional tax on your living, not an everyday tool like Americans perceive it.

Debit cards can be given to an underage, so I suppose they don't accept it for this reason.

Quick google shows that in 2024 half of the Motorola phone sales were in LATAM, especially Brazil. What makes you say that the key market is the US?

Would be great if true, but that doesn't really correspond in reality truly, especially in intellectual products. Compare even Linus Torvalds fortune with e.g. snapchat founder. Not even talking about thousands of 0 profit open source projects with millions of installations versus some saas hustler - usually the former provide much more value to society than some guy who is just good at selling stuff.

UBI might fuel some useless work, but it also might provide a way to people to be more into creative side of things rather than selling and marketing rat race.

Also in less developed countries money even less corresponds to value. It almost always has some kind of mafia and corruption that extracts huge portions of value from the economy and basically net negative, though profitable.

I'd like to live in the world where money are always allocated fairly, but we see that in IT, for example, predating, stealing data, spying on people bring more money than the honest work due to misaligned incentives, when bad actors pay more money than actual consumer.

On the other hand, it provides the whole world with the information and not just some spy agency. Isn't that more fair system?

And people dying in question is army, professional murderers for hire themselves, not a big loss.

The original post laids out why it's not possible to do well: privacy apps, sanctioned countries, apps made by people for themselves to avoid clouds and third parties, etc.

Simple example: I have a foss VPN app running on my phone to avoid censorship and surveillance in some countries I visit. While using this app is no problem, non-anonymous development might carry consequences to the developer in some dictatorship jurisdictions (which are plenty of). I'm not sure all devs of such system would be willing to give their ids.

Another example is that this way US can cut out countries and people they don't like from mobile usage (which basically equals to modern social life). Look into sanctioned judges of international court because US protects war criminals.

That's not universally true, there is a class of privacy coins whose txs are not (at least in theory) traceable.

I'd argue that's actually a more anarchist original view and transparent ledger is a bug of the first implementation, not a feature, and creates problem of the original money people are trying to solve (i.e. have electronic money without a government overreach, US using modern banking system as a political pressure tool, etc)

Exactly.

While trying to degoogling, removing most proprietary software and use sandboxing for everything that's still needed as proprietary, you would often hear that stupid pro-surveillance thesis: "oh, what's wrong in someone trying to show you relevant things in the internet to buy by your interests?".

Maybe now some people would think about it. That giving someone's leverage over youself is a ticking bomb until the actually scary people will use it as an advantage. That's humanity 101.

Same about non-encrypted emails, cloud AI providers, SMS/real-identity based auth and 2fa, telemetry. The industry is full of trash and has to be revived from VC garbage.

Publicly reproducible attacks are great, because now we know where there the problem is and how to fix it.

You can be pretty sure some three-letter agency trash had been already using it around the world along with shady spyware startups.

Questionable privacy implications are the feature, not the bug.

Surely three-letter agencies, "unknown creators" of chatcontrol proposals in the EU and other state psychopaths care very much about the children!

No, they don't.

Mass surveillance and the leverage coming from that is the goal itself.

And i2p rust router https://github.com/altonen/emissary

Why are saying that Firefox or even Chrome reskin can't compete with Chrome? I haven't been using Chrome for maybe 10 years or more, so I'm genuinely interested. Even if you hate Firefox, something like Brave is felt the same way but without google's garbage. I heard there are new guys in town like Helium and other Chromium based browser which choose to remove telemetry, support manifest v2, adblocks and so on.

The browsing experience without constant upselling some trash and proper adblockers are magnitudes better.

Standard wireguard is blocked by DPI in Russia, China, Iran, etc.

The soluton in the post for VPNs as in "censorship bypass", not as in "virtual lan over the internet for businesses". Like AmneziaWG or VLESS protocols.

And the internet is originally made by the US army (i.e. professional murderers). Doesn't make the internet bad as a technology.

Simplex is quite well designed. Even if it doesn't succeed, I think we'll see its forks and similar implementations.

But it doesn't make Signal bad. If Americans blindly process our messages without knowing what's inside, it's worse than not depending on them, but better than showing your private correspondence to somebody.

At least we don't seem to have things which are close by UX and security at the same time.

Simplex is fine, but still feels a bit raw.

Everything else is either untrustworthy because of the closed code or no e2e encryption or custom encryption schemes (WhatsApp, Telegram, any Asian messenger) or unusable from UX perspective (Tox, Matrix).

They work on that, https://geti2p.net/el/blog/post/2025/10/16/new-i2p-routers

The current focus are new rust and go implementations, but embedding lib for applications is also in the roadmap.

I also agree on hindrance. I don't understand why they don't provide a simple docker-compose at least for daemon deployment for immutable management with controlled scopes. There is an image in the dockerhub, but no proper instructions. People have to spend several hours to ensure that everything works correctly.

I still don't get how to bypass a theoretical block, you need to access at least one of the current major relays or a side channel to find a follower, only аfter that you can re-translate the new set of relays. The autosub is good, but IMO the current major operators have an Elusive Joe situation because nostr is very small. Things will change as soon as people with money and government connections see it as a problem.

I totally agree with the Wikipedia argument though.

Clients are never used as relays in TOR. You never route anyone's traffic until you setup it yourself. And you can't miss that part, and it's not a default, and requires additional configuration.

Also relays (not exit nodes) are pretty safe to operate and running them is a decent thing, supporting free internet instead of a corporate ads machine, let's not frame it as a "crime support".

Where does the nostr pubkey announce it? Let's say you are banned from main default relays. Is there any side channel?

Tor and I2P is a better fit. Nostr is very weird. It sells itself as decentralized, but basically all frontends provide same several relays.

When those relays get subpoenas and remove your resource, you're done. You can use some unknown relays to publish, but who's gonna use them as clients outside of the defaults? It's effectively designed for shadowbans.

We've seen only the world where everything has been adopted to IPv4. p2p technologies strive even under it, but they could really shine with the ability to connect directly between devices. Imagine BitTorrent on steroids, where you don't have peers with assigned IPv4 and seedboxes and everybody else. Torrents are generally faster than usual channels to download things, but with ipv6 it would be far faster than now.

Cloudless cameras streaming to your phone without Chinese vendor clouds, e2e encrypted emails running on your phone without snooping by marketing people and three-leter agencies, content distribution network without vendor lock-ins. The possibilities are impressive if we have a way to do it without TURN servers that cost money and create a technical and legal bottlenecks.

We can't say nobody wants that world because we've never tried it in the first place. I definitely would like to see that.