stupid_asshole69 [none/use name]

Yes, like also some others, but…

https://www.security.org/ said

The literal first words across the top of that website are “we take money from the stuff we review”.

Cyberghost is owned by kape, I don’t know about vpnly.

Even if they’re not processing free users data differently from paid users the point still stands that if you need a vpn you can’t get by with a free one.

You’re not making an argument against VPNs, but against the concept of trust. It’s good argument and I don’t think you’re going far enough, consider the old ass reflections on trusting trust and take a look at your browser of choice’s root ca store too!

There’s a lot farther you could go in making that argument and many conclusion that could be drawn from it.

On the other hand, zero-trust frameworks and packages exist, we can use the past as a predictor of future outcomes and based on actual outcomes we can place more or less trust in various software packages, services and companies.

You’re right about the vpn-as-browser extension (kinda, a lot of those packages act as proxies and override the hosts dns settings, so they do accomplish a lot), but as someone who has used proton and windscribe free and paid you can’t really rely on or trust them. Between drops, rotating endpoints and —I’ll admit that I’m guessing at this last one but my experience and many people I’ve talked to seem to corroborate it— generally being lowest quality of service and first to go when there’s a problem it’s clear that even the “top tier” of free VPNs aren’t to be relied on.

VPN access is literally cheaper than it’s ever been, there’s more transparency and clear information available than ever before and the most basic bar to pass for privacy is being able to figure out a way to conduct business privately (it’s cash).

That’s not to say there shouldn’t be free VPNs, that there isn’t a purpose or use for them, but that people shouldn’t trust or rely on them in any way.

There is no trustworthy free vpn. If you wanna make use of someone’s computer bandwidth and cpu time you need to pay them.

Because this is posted in the privacy com:

It does not meaningfully change any aspect of intelligence apparatus influence on microchip design and production.

It does however make now a great time to buy into intel for two reasons: number one there’s always gonna be a second player in the chip market and there’s no cyrix to step up so intel, from the perspective of the market, can’t actually fail. Number two it represents adoption of the “opponents” winning strategy on the part of the us and that’s ultimately a good thing.

There hasn’t been space for a scrappy underdog in the microchip design industry for at least three decades now and that’s not gonna change even with distributed fabrication and the arm/riscv ecosystem of licensed chunks of silicon. Intel is not too big to fail, it’s too extant to fail and the question now is just how far it needs to fall/how much of our tax dollars have to be pumped into it before the market realizes that.

If the nearby partition isn’t like root or something then yeah you can do that with frisk and parted and whatnot.

What’s your fdisk -l or lsblk output?

Hell yeah

Thanks @Mikelius@lemmy.ml

The people telling you to use apt are pointing you in the wrong direction. Usually it’s better to use apt but sometimes with software that updates very often for a good reason like yt-dlp you can end up with old nonfunctional versions. Apt versions of yt-dlp are often several steps behind the arms race and just fail to work in weird ways.

The person telling you to add .local/bin to your $PATH is the one you should be listening to. The program isn’t launching because when you type it in, the terminal only looks in the places defined in the environment variable $PATH to see if the thing you typed corresponds to a program.

Once you have added the install location to path, be sure to add -U to your invocations of yt-dlp especially if they’re running automatically. The -U flag causes yt-dlp to try to update itself before attempting to do whatever you asked so things will almost never fail because of an old version.

Not in the slightest. Web accessibility using mullvad before and since has tracked the ongoing trend of websites blocking vpn services and almost all their endpoint ips have rolled over since then.

In my own experience, sites that weren’t blocking mullvad before and were blocking during the csam investigation aren’t blocking now. That’s because the blocking was mostly happening at the cdn level.

They didn’t remain on the blocklist but the web is becoming hostile to vpn ips. One way around this is by using a web proxy defined in your browsers settings.

Yes, that was the technique used by interpol to get mullvad to comply with a csam investigation. The terms were ”give us user information or drop port forwarding unless you wanna remain on a global blacklist” and mullvad chose to drop port forwarding.

It’s free.

Social media is not private. It can’t be private.

You can try to isolate it from your end but on its end and other users ends you can’t make it private. Don’t do or say anything on social media if you arent comfortable with it becoming public knowledge.

You are currently posting on a public social media website.

My honest advice if you are concerned about the phone is to switch to ios, turn on automatic updates, turn on adp, turn on lockdown, do the privacy checkup wizard, install a doh/dot device management profile, setup a vpn you trust, either use a device management profile to implement it or that VPNs app if you trust the app and fastidiously go through the settings to improve your privacy further.

From that baseline you can build behaviors like always deleting web data and rotating device identifiers that can help you.

There are two reasons I make this recommendation: first, my goal is not perfect anonymity and privacy, but instead best effort. Im not choosing best effort, but instead recognizing that it’s all that’s within my ability. The best effort within my resources is using the hardware and software made by the company selling security along with careful configuration of settings to refine that.

The second is that my personal threat model is based on the police and recognizes that I am on tax records, voter rolls and many other public records. I am recognizable in my community and cannot “disappear”.

If you wanna make good choices for yourself, I’d recommend doing a foia request or whatever your governments equivalent is on yourself, purchasing yourself on some data brokers websites and going from there.

Rather than going down the rabbit hole of faraday bags, why not gain a better understanding of how you are being tracked every day so you can take steps to alleviate your concern?

Elsewhere you said you don’t want to be tracked going to the doctors office, but if you drive there your cars license plate is being read by dozens of traffic cameras. If you walk or take a bus there are most likely cameras which are accessible to law enforcement that can be used for computer vision if they don’t already do so automatically.

In the event that you drove, it’s likely that your cars wheel mounted sensors are emitting unique rf signals even if it’s infotainment system doesn’t have immediate connectivity (it definitely does and is tracking and reporting unique ids of devices near it).

The places you went before the doctors office are selling your purchase history (that’s why they give you a deal when you enter your phone number at checkout!), your voter registration information is freely available to any group that can register a political organization and if you paid property taxes then those records are publicly accessible and searchable.

WiFi can even be used, experimentally at this point, to pinpoint the physical location of people in a room based only on how their bodies interfere with the high frequency signal.

The point of this post is not to send you into a panic but to help broaden the scope of stuff you’re considering and maybe help you come to a more complete solution.