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Joined 21 days ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2024

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  • A bit more context is important here. They aren’t E2EE, but they are stored encrypted. In the case of the person whose meta information was turned over, ProtonMail wasn’t forced to hand over the information right away, they were forced to collect it the next time that person accessed and used their email. That tells us that they didn’t store the information beforehand and could not access it without preparing to intercept it the next time their service was used.

    Ultimately, though, if something like that’s a dealbreaker, it’s likely you’re doing something that would benefit from a more secure way of communicating than email.



  • They gave meta information like IP to the government in Switzerland, where they are based, after the government forced them to with a court order. Not the encrypted mail, mind you, because they can’t do that, just the additional information they have on a user like email and IP.

    Because of that, a lot of redditers on r/privacy think they spy on their users for the US government. It’s a stretch, yes, but you have to remember they take turns using the one brain they collectively have.


  • It might be being sold even with a VPN, since VPNs aren’t really a privacy product in and of themselves. They need to be combined with other practices to be effective in that regard.

    For example, for social media like YouTube, I sandbox it inside a browser container, then blacklist any scripts from them anywhere else on the web using uBO. So javascript from Google can run inside the YouTube container, but if a page tries to load a Google script on another site, it never connects. Google can’t track me across the web, because the only site they ever see me on is YouTube, and not through my actual IP even then. And it probably goes without saying, but I use a throwaway Google account for YouTube. I make fun of Zios a lot online, so if I ever get banned, I can be back on YouTube in a couple minutes without there being any real consequences.




  • I use a NAS running the Unraid OS, with a Docker setup using the Servarr apps to find and fetch media using SABnzbd and qBitorrent to download from Usenet and private trackers. It pipes movies, TV shows, and music into my Jellyfin library, which has all the features of Plex, but is free. I don’t believe in telling corporations what shows I’m pirating. Bazarr automatically fetches appropriate subtitles for everything. I have the Servarr apps set up to fetch the best quality using the Trash guides.

    For visual media discovery, I use Jellyseerr, which allows me to easily find new shows and movies, and allows my family and friends to request shows to be downloaded. Jellyfin automatically cleans up watched media so that it doesn’t take up space after it’s been watched.

    For audiobooks, everything is fetched from private trackers, specifically the mouse site, and automatically piped into Audiobookshelf, to it can be streamed to friends and family. Ebooks get likewise sent to a Kavita server, so they can be quickly sent via email to physical readers as desired by users.

    And of course, all ebooks and audiobooks are seeded in perpetuity, meaning I get a lot of points on the tracker from seeding hundreds of torrents. I use those points to buy free leech tokens, so I don’t have to worry about ratio. Other types of torrents are usually seeded until they are at 1.5 ratio, then they are deleted.

    Video games I download are automatically synced to all gaming PCs on my network via Syncthing, so they can be installed by everyone. Save games for each person are also backed up to the NAS and to any other PCs or portables used for that game by that person.

    All this is protected behind an obscure domain proxied by Cloudflare and protected by an LDAP server that authenticates and validates access for each user to the services they are allowed to use. Torrents and Usenet media are downloaded to the NAS using a bound VPN located in a country that doesn’t cooperate with Western governments. Everything is streamed to users on a fiber connection.