cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Why not just use proton?

    A few of the many reasons not to use Proton:

    • their e2ee is snakeoil (see my comment here about why - but tldr it requires completely trusting them and if you completely trust them you wouldn’t need e2ee, the point of e2ee is to avoid needing to trust the service provider)
    • their server-side code is closed-source
    • they’re a freemium service which can and does arbitrarily decide to start charging for previously-free features
    • they’ve suspended a number of users who they should not have
    • their CEO is a trump fanboy.

    Its Swiss based.

    You know who else was Swiss based? 🙄

    Not sure about purism but I think its US so avoid it like a plague.

    I don’t know enough about Purism to endorse them but afaict they don’t have any of the above problems.

    Purism’s e2ee is PGP; you can use their service via their client software or whatever other client you want, and can communicate with people who are using different implementations with different mail providers. I don’t see any mention of them even offering webmail but I expect that if they do they would probably offer PGP there using a browser extension instead of having extremely-impractical-to-verify-before-running-it js code being sent anew from the server every time you load the page (which is how Proton’s webmail works, and also what they offer for non-Proton users to receive mail encrypted using their nonstandard encryption).

    I’d rather have US legal jurisdiction and credible e2ee which doesn’t allow the operator to trivially circumvent it for targeted users than to have Swiss jurisdiction and snake oil.









  • good disclaimer. also, they aren’t open source, and from the tech background of the founder who self-funded it i doubt that he plans for it to ever be. in fact, among other cringe things on Issam Hijazi’s linkedin i see that he’s even worked for, enough to become an expert in the proprietary technology of, (checks notes) the very same zionist billionaire (paywall bypass) who just bought TikTok 😢

    Also, one their FAQs is “Where does UpScrolled operate its servers and store data? Does it use Big Tech?”… the answer to which includes:

    We do rely on some large-scale cloud providers at this stage — not because it’s our ideal, but because building fully independent infrastructure takes time. We’d rather be transparent about that than claim otherwise. Over time, we plan to reduce reliance on these providers and move toward greater independence.

    … but We do rely on some is as far as their attempt at transparency took them - they aren’t actually saying which cloud providers they’re using or for what. (given the founder’s expertise i’d guess it’s probably AWS and/or Oracle.)


  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.mlCan you use Linux today without the terminal?
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    11 days ago

    Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch’s amazing AUR

    I am not aware of any software distribution service with a comparable experience (massive userbase with zero vetting for uploaders) as Arch’s amazing AUR - if you are looking for a way to distribute malware to many unsuspecting people (who’s friends think they’re hackerman), it’s really unparalleled. (😢)

    To your primary question, yes, many people do successfully daily drive various Linux distros without ever opening the terminal. 🙄