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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I’ve used wi-fi calling fairly extensively mostly because I’ve lived in areas where there was zero cell service but ready access to internet (via Starlink or other wireless forms of it). One thing I do know is that my phone co. requests that I fill out a form specifying where I am living currently (whilst using it) so that if I ever need to contact emergency services they’ll have a better idea of where to route the call to. For instance my phone number originates from Western BC but I could potentially be using wi-fi calling from anywhere in the province. I mention this to say, it appears my telco doesn’t have a way to triangulate me with this service.

    I can further attest that wi-fi call & text reception still works fine when I have a VPN running on the router that my mobile device is connecting to. Make of that information what you wish.

    Though that I have read that wi-fi calling is atrocious for privacy reasons that I have not followed up on. Given the above I’m not sure how or why that would be the case, but basically if I’m in an area with cell coverage I turn it off. I’ve always meant to look deeper into how or why it might be bad (or worse) in some way.



  • I also use adblocking at multiple levels so it wasn’t a huge thing for me (been blocking Pocket and other bullshit for years at the dns and network levels) but I still feel like Mozilla witnessed Google going for broke with killing mv2 and inline ads on YouTube and decided wellll our existing users probably wouldn’t notice or care if we slipped in an opt-out fuckery… But we did. Immediately.

    For any browser trying to sell itself as “the only privacy browser on the market” this was a dumb fucking move by any metric. Like why not just openly admit we’re going with the Brave browser model?






  • For anyone on this thread who doesn’t know who Ken Klip is, please check out his free Substack (and subscribe if you can). I wasn’t on Twitter very long (maybe 1.5 years before Elmong took over) but one of the people I value that I ran into on that platform is Ken Klippenstein and I’ve been following him since. He’s amazing at filing thousands of FOIA requests and doing the digging into them that no mainstream journalist does anymore. He also recently quit The Intercept because they were enshittifying far more than he was comfortable with, which for a writer is a huge thing to leave the umbrella of a company like that and a paycheck behind. Writers going out on their own in this climate is the only way we’ll stay even remotely unfucked in the post-information (or misinformation) age.

    Klip fuckin rules. Please give him some due.





  • You’ll find that with any major VPN. The IP addresses they use to proxy your traffic eventually get flagged and blocked by lots of major players. Which is why VPN companies cycle through them quite often. As others have said, you’ll either need to switch servers (and thus ips) or figure out another path.

    I don’t use mull but most have a way to exclude a given url or site from the tunnel if you need it. i.e. the site will work for you but it’s coming from your own IP and unencrypted.


  • I set up Bunsenlabs on both of my elderly parents computers and then basically automated login stuff to the sites they use, pinned those tabs. Blocked all ads and trackers. Set Firefox to auto open on boot. Basically made them a Linux version of a chrome book where everything they need is in the browser and already active, no mudding around.

    8 months later zero complaints from either of them.






  • I mean I hope Ladybird devs do a great build and go their own way without being corrupted by their donors and all that, don’t get me wrong. But whenever I see that dumb shopping bag logo I get the no feelings.

    You can also read up on how the vast majority of Mozilla’s funding has been coming from Google for a very long time, and draw your own conclusions from that fact.


  • Shopify (i.e. Shittify) being their top donor already has me looking sideways at this project. They’ll invest in anything they think they can get an edge with and if something starts to happen they’ll fuck it up and wallstreet-ify it as fast as possible if they can.

    Their (Shopify’s) guru founder Tobi made a huge NFT play that went absolutely nowhere while I still worked there. They spent a lot of time and money on it, right before they laid several thousand people off.