Agree, but mad props to the Gentoo people too. Nice community and incredible wiki as well.

Yeah withdraw cash from an ATM and use it. The system sucks, but it’s not trivial to change for a myriad of reasons.

There’s no real way to do it. Unless you know someone who can trade you XMR<->cash and you somehow convince your employer to (break laws and) pay you in those forms, you can’t avoid it. At some point, you’ll have to get money on a real bank account, which requires real information to open.

As far as I know, modern cards don’t just send your CC info to terminals, they do some form of a cryptographic handshake (probably a pubkey signature or similar) which gets confirmed by your bank. I believe Caveman was talking more about online shopping, where you have to enter your card number, expiration date, CVC and often your name too.

That’s why I love virtual card systems like MB NET. You just generate a random virtual card for every purchase (or a recurring one for each subscription vendor, for example) and move on. Your bank still knows what you’re doing, of course, but vendors can’t correlate anything. Preventing your bank from knowing where you’re spending your money is much harder, for very practical reasons: fraud detection. The only real way is to use a secure crypto coin like Monero, but very few places accept it and you still have to deal with volatility.

Ah right, Molly. Have yet to tried it, but looks interesting.

I think I’m too afraid of moving my main stuff to Molly, lest I lose something :P But the UnifiedPush and multiple mobile clients is enticing.

Yeah that’s a bummer. Signal has multi device support but only for desktop and iPad (yeah, not Android tablets), but you always need to have a master phone device.

It’s been an issue for so long, but this is Signal, they do whatever the f they want.

How can I make using Arch Linux my personality

That cracked me up x)

Anyway, I’d say it’s good that the OS is out of your way once set it up. Even though I don’t use Arch directly, I like how comprehensive the AUR is (even though there may be repositories more packages, like nix and whatnot), think the ArchWiki (like the GentooWiki) is a very useful resource, even if you use a completely different system.

encrypted email

Besides being a form of messaging (so the text somewhat contradicts itself), typical email is a deeply insecure protocol.
In my opinion, it’s probably impossible to secure without making a new protocol or making such drastic changes that it might as well be considered one.

Here are some key concerns regarding the usual PGP-powered encrypted email:

• Email, at a simple level, works much akin to physical email — there’s an “envelope” containing important info regarding the communicating parties, which can’t be encrypted, otherwise the mailing servers wouldn’t know where to forward the messages. This essentially leaks a lot of metadata that can be almost as valuable as the message body itself.
• There’s no forward secrecy — one of the best cryptography features that has become pretty much a commodity in modern systems is forward secrecy, which prevents attackers from decrypting older messages after gaining access to one of the keys.
• While not an issue with the protocol itself, it’s the sad reality and we need to consider — most people use GMail, Outlook and the like, which ultimately need to read your emails in plaintext, for better or worse reasons (search is incredibly useful, but some big players don’t stop there of course :p).
• Another thing is the fact that it’s incredibly easy to have an imbalance of encryption, i.e. someone is encrypting their messages, but others aren’t. With the very popular email culture of quoting (be it top or bottom posting), an unencrypted party in the the conversation can leak important information.
• PGP is… peculiar, so to speak. I has a lot of issues, mostly stemming from its age (which could also be a source of robustness and security, due to being very battle-tested, but I don’t think that’s quite the case with PGP/GPG), tries to do too much and typically has a clunky UI, which impedes wider and proper adoption by less technically people.

This isn’t to say people should definitely stop using and promoting encrypted email, since it can be useful.
It’s just it gives, more often than not, a false sense of security and can lead less proficient users to send sensitive data through this medium which isn’t nearly secure enough for such use cases. Preferably, people with such threat models should opt for better alternatives, most suggested in that article (such as, but definitely not limited to, Signal, SimpleX, Matrix+Olm, XMPP+OTR/OMEMO, sharing files via MagicWormhole, encrypting with tools like age).

On a slightly tangential note, I think someone should make a Matrix client with an email client interface. I started working on a new traditional chat client (completely nonfunctional still, very much in-dev), but I’ve been honestly thinking more and more about making one looking like an e-mail client, where there isn’t much focus on instant room-based chats, but rather on longer-lived 1-to-1 and list-like exchange of messages.

Glad to hear! Good luck :)

Just tested* and it doesn’t seem to work, no. I don’t know if it’s doable though, it may be.

• Even though I’m a heavy user of that behaviour in Firefox (which now has to be explicitly turned on :/), I’ve gotten used to just use the left and right arrows (+kitty mod bind) to move around tabs.

Kitty has been my daily driver for quite some time now, I really like it for its rich feature set and extensive configuration.

You can use its goto_tab action with 0 and negative values to get MRU behaviour. See more here: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/actions/#action-goto_tab

Yeah Mullvad’s system is better than Proton’s, since the latter asks you to place your username inside the envelope. Mullvad’s random token is better in that regard.

More info on Proton’s cash payments: https://proton.me/support/payment-options#cash

Disclaimer: I’ve never paid in cash on either of these services.

I believe proton also accepts cash payments. At least I’ve seen that in their mail service.

For hosters, legality has to be considered.

Nice one!

The web font would also be cached, and it wouldn’t be that big of a resource in the first place. I think being able to copy a comment’s content is more important, but whatever.

LibreWolf is little more than a custom config for Firefox, they don’t do actual development on the engine, which is the important and very technically laborious part.

I’m not familiar with any service that works at the international level, but over in Portugal, the biggest ATM network, Multibanco, has had a service called MB NET (now integrated with the newer MB WAY app), which allows you to create temporary cards with 3 different behaviours: one-time, monthly, multiple uses. The first one always has 1 month of validity, while the others only expire after a year, and you can define a maximum capacity.

It works perfectly well in foreign online services, but you have to have a card from one of the associated banks (presumably from their Portuguese branch?).

Can’t use cash online, (nearly*) anywhere.

• Mullvad is the only service I know that accepts payment through mailed cash.