dmantis

There should be no way the government can 'debank' someone in the first place. Monetary relations with other people have always been untouched by the state until very recently, even for revolutionaries. A private transaction is not anyone's business apart from the counterparties.

Assuming that someone should not be allowed to freely earn, spend, invest and participate in the economy without a proved felony is a dystopian concept.

Either have a proper fair public trial and put criminals in prison for serious violations or don't discriminate against anyone's stuff at all if you don't have any proofs. Otherwise it's massively used to give advantages to citizens of several nations to do business and earn while discriminating against others because of 'high risks' without any public court hearing, based on nationality, citizenship or organizational relations.

It doesn't prove that DRM free is not a viable business.

I also grew up pirating, but I haven't been pirating games for more than 10 years now.

A few bucks costs much less to me these days than a headache with finding a cracked version and installing potential malware on my computer. Not even talking about supporting the artists and developers.

Gabe is right that piracy is a service problem. If you have proper easy installers, easy buying, easy refunds and you are from a middle class and higher - it doesn't make sense to download random executables from the internet. And if you have low-income, you won't buy stuff regardless of DRM and just wait someone to crack it.

Probably because the post is not about the good or bad, but about fighting with censorship technically. Usual tor connections have been blocked for a long time in Russia and Iran. They explain the way they bypass these blocks and advancing the TOR.

Nobody blocks them in the UK and the EU so there is nothing to fight in technical terms for TOR Project.

They are not EU/UK political representative to fight legally or politically.

As it is so easy to start a mass production of vacuum cleaners, yes. Give me a week in my garage. TBH I have zero idea where I should go to start a business of such scale even if I have a 100% zero-risk shot which is never the case. Not everybody has an MBA, some of us just code stuff.

For me it's so weird nobody makes a thing you can trust. I would happily overpay 3-4x for the good vacuum without the cloud and the need to do some hacking with valetudo, with an official service and support for the device. Yet nobody is willing to take the money. They'd rather go bankrupt..

Why not putting NSA officers to the jail first? Can't they "face a fair trial like a men" for illegal spying program?

Until you hold a passport of one of the US enemy states, which are plenty of and have permanent risk of getting your account frozen and money stolen.

Crypto doesn't have this issue.

As far as it's an optional separate window, I don't see any issues with that.

E.g. I had a very good experience in reversing a local bank API with LLMs to download my bank statements in a few seconds by local python scripts instead of several minutes of error-prone clicking in the bank's shitty old interface. The thing that I'd have done in one day, the LLM coded in several minutes by taking recorded request-responses. Yes, the code is a bit gibberish, but why do I care for my local single-user usage?

I can imagine a dozen similar stupid but routine API parsing challenges for LLMs that everyone could use.

If it's not enabled during usual browsing and doesn't snoop in everyday data, but only in a dedicated sandboxed window, I say it's a good design from Mozilla's side.

Two reasons why so at least professionaly:

- Reliability. For anything that needs deterministic result and not even 99.9% of chance that it's generated correctly and not hallucinated. E.g. health, finance, military, etc. There is no room for "you're absolutely right". For the same input an algo must give the same output.

- Privacy. Until we have powerful local models (we might have though in 10 years, I don't know), sending everything to some cloud companies, which are already obliged by court to save data and have spy and ex-military generals in their boardrooms, sounds a bit crazy if it's not about an apple pie recipe. Web chat interface isolates important data from non-important, but we can't integrate it fully in our lifes.

Because obviously people want to enjoy technological usefulness (i.e. navigation, payments, communication) and automation while preserving dignity and not being spied like a bunch of ships.

It's UDP, not TCP (like TLS) and has a distinguishable handshake. Wireguard is not designed as a censorship prevention tool, it's purely a networking solution.

The tunnel itself is encrypted, but the tunnel creation and existence is not obfuscated.

XRay protocol based VPN worked for me in Uzbekistan when I were travelling there.

Wireguard is indeed blocked.

It doesn't matter, he should look into the open source protocols that these services use. He doesn't have to use them.

VLESS / v2ray works in Russia, as far as I know.

So make it an unlockable feature with a big red warning saying something like: 'If you unlock this feature, your money might be stolen, malware could infiltrate your system. You take full responsibility and acknowledge that you are tech-savvy.'

I'm sure if my grandma saw something like that, she wouldn't click it. This way, people who want to stay in a closed garden are protected, while those who want full control have it. The current implementation seems designed for state interests, not the people's.

It shouldn't be impossible. Not every FOSS developer will want to register, or be mature enough, or may be from sanctioned countries, and so forth.

I2P doesn't have exit nodes like Tor, so it's essentially the same thing as running a Tor relay from an outside perspective, with a few positive differences.

I2P is mainly an overlay network that routes traffic only inside the network. The upside is that providers won't ban your IP for participation if you run a node. I know that with Tor, many datacenters/CDNs don't care whether it's a relay or exit node and will blanket ban all known IPs of the network. You also won't attack someone on the clearnet or somehow participate as a scapegoat in clearnet crimes.

I've never heard about any consequences for running non-exit relays in Tor, though if you're in a country that strictly punishes usage of any anonymous technology, that might be risky anyway.

I2P has several commercial "outproxies" that proxy traffic to the usual internet, but that's not the intended usage and it's not enabled on typical users' routers.

UPD: Anyway, if you feel uncomfortable sharing others' traffic and want to only use it as a client, you can disable transit traffic completely in both Java and C++ implementations.

I tried I2P not so long ago and was quite impressed by the design decisions and the quality of the technology. It's truly an amazing piece of software that covers basically everything you need for a distributed network.

The only thing missing is actually the community and usage, because the technology has a network effect, and more users with stable routers provide faster and a more reliable network. So it's indeed slow at the moment. I highly recommend giving it a chance and playing a bit with it. Even for non-anonymity and security cases, it's fun to play with hole punching, global addressing by public keys, and stuff like that, which you can see in things like Iroh and libp2p.

It provides a simple universal SAM interface and libraries to work with it to plug other apps.

> Sanctions

They also affect businesses, not only the government.

Impossible to live in complying with all the Russian laws, not particularly a crypto one. Well, possible, but quite miserable experience.

So are you saying that people get paid in tether after the sentence that it's used 99.9% by the government only?

> For example Russia it is not legal to pay with crypto, and to cash it out allowed crypto exchanges must submit your transactions to the government etc otherwise they get blocked.

Sorry, but it's very naive to think that Russian people use only "allowed" crypto exchanges and comply with the laws. That would be an impossible country to live in.

Direct connections with people and being street-smart are important kinds of skills in such societies. And even without connections, you can easily go to some popular Russian exchange aggregators and find no-KYC options with cash delivery, as far as I know.

EDIT: I've actually just checked for you: starting from 10,000 USDT, you can cash out anonymously with cash delivery for 1% in Moscow right at this moment from a publicly accessible resource with reviews.

First of all, who says that it has to be a global standard?

It's not an 'all-or-nothing' thing.

Those are instruments which already help many people (those you define as questionable for some reason). I'm actually pretty happy to see that the world has a tool to help millions of people with "questionable" religious, cultural, political, ideological views or sexual orientations. That reduces the pressure and advantage of people who want to make their lives harder.

If you don't need it, don't use it. That's totally cool. It doesn't have to be global. To be honest, I don't think anything needs to be global. That gives too much leverage to a single group at the expense of everyone else. The world is better off having many options for everyone.

This is a very American-centric post.

E.g."Stablecoins won’t bank the unbanked, because people get stablecoins by purchasing them on a crypto exchange, and no crypto exchange will open an account for a customer unless they have a bank account."

Well, I understand that US has dystopia level of financial surveillance, but in many places in the world you can change cash in person to crypto without many issues. And you don't need to use any major exchange for that, that defeats the whole point.

And yes, Russians, Iranians, Palestinians are known to use crypto, for example. And the majority of them don't have US bank accounts.

One of the core features of crypto that it's not an American (or anyone else) thing, like paypal, stripe, or any other system and American laws can be easily ignored if both parties are outside of the US. That's already a very liberating feature for at least a billion of people of nations hostile to the US and potentially to 8+ billions of people more.

Exactly, that's what I'm talking about.

So MacOS lives just fine with their own additional button and bindings, I don't see how it's different for Linux.

Every time I need to do something on MacOS, being Linux user, I stuck hitting ctrl-c/ctrl-v instead of cmd, but nobody says that stops them from having a decent marketshare.

1. Ads

2. Built-in cloud AI spyware / Copilot

3. Millions of abandoned laptops that had been made 4-5+ years ago. Basically electronic and ecological waste: machines from 10 years ago work perfectly fine if you change thermal paste and don't hit them too much. Even if you don't care about the planet, you might care about your wallet though.

You can't do ctrl-c and ctrl-v in MacOS too, that's doesn't break their marketshare.

Money and economy is an instrument, not a goal. If a person lives a rat life, being constantly spied, manipulated and sold, what's the point of being richer? To buy what? The most precious thing of freedom and independence is lost already then.

Without dignity it's better to die.

Does that work across profiles? I have to use some apps from such spyware oriented companies and usually put them in isolated profile with shelter.

I wonder whether local ports opened in isolated "work" android profile are accessible by main profile.

I have a personal list with filters by donation method with foss projects: https://hacker.charity

Usually I pick the way I want to spend money at the moment and give them to someone who satisfies the criteria.

Google docs are fine for anything non-private and stuff that can go to the cloud.

I usually use Google docs for stuff like language learning for convenience and libreoffice for financial spreadsheets, work related stuff, and anything I don't want to be snooped by Google systems.

I've never understood why their free bypass extension doesn't release it's sources on public platform.

Their git pages just refer to bundled extensions.

You can get the sources from the extension, but I doubt that anybody audits them and kind of afraid to install it in my browser with access to all tabs.

Could work for a dedicated browser only for paywalls bypass though.

I've been very reluctant for several years to reinstall my stock Android on Pixel with GrapheneOS, as I don't want to backup lots of things, have partially broken banking apps and having another linux moment when I have to figure out bunch of workarounds from scratch, but it seems that Google doesn't give me any choice.

One espionage scandal after another: first Pixels send their location even without location sharing to Google, then several attempts to add some AI crap with completely closed-source implementation and who-knows-what-it-does.

Does anybody use it? Will I have a hard time migrating from Pixel's stock Android?