The digital euro, as a digital central-bank currency, is the last thing we want from the perspective of privacy.

ive heard people say

So, literal hearsay.

its not perfect against if the signal servers where malicious (btw said servers are not open source).

The server is centralized so it’s irrelevant whether it’s open source or not, we have no means of checking.

$1 from the cia funding it is $1 too much.

Seems you’re referring to initial funding from the Open Technology Fund. That’s a US government body that promotes technologies that undermine authoritarian regimes. Signal fits the bill perfectly. In any case that was a decade ago. Since then there has been far more money from various do-gooding individuals and foundations. In particular the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which (I just checked) is vouched for by various whistleblowers including Edward Snowden. So, hardly a stooge of US imperialism.

Yes but the difference with every other messenger is that they can’t even see who your message is going to. Due to E2E encryption of contact data.

What remains is the phone number issue. Verifying a phone number is by far the simplest and most effective way to prevent abuse, which is obviously a major issue with any messenger. There’s no reason to disbelieve them when they this is the reason for it.

So: yes, they know who their users are individually. But they cannot know who is talking to who, let alone what is being said.

This is consipiracism-adjacent.

It’s E2E encryption and the source code is public. Uniquely, the E2EE includes the social graph.

They’ve got money from a bunch of people and organizations, That’s also all public. As for any organization, to have a wide variety of stakeholders with different interests is the best possible guarantee of independent.

But I agree that the ideal destination is to fully federate the protocol.

So the answer to the 27-step question is Yes. Alas. Still nowhere near as easy as installing Linux on an Intel laptop. Which of course is already way too hard for most folks.

Still, well done for doing it.

U: downvoting facts does not make them go away. This was not a personal attack. I want this solution to to be more viable than it is, that is all.

Did it come installed or did you need to complete a 27-step process involving cables and obscure commands and fiddly key combinations and the risk of bricking the thing?

The point still stands that no one outside of the US cares about their constitution or political system, and to say it does shows an incredible level of ignorance of world politics outside of US borders.

I’m not sure these sweeping statements are really helping your argument. Despite my “incredible level of ignorance” I am in fact not American myself, I have no particular reason to defend the USA for the sake of it, and I stick to my assertion that the stability of the US Constitution and the American social contract is unusual in world affairs - and even that this is not particularly controversial among historians and pol-sci specialists, notwithstanding your dismissiveness. Don’t agree? That’s fine, but maybe consider letting up on the contemptuous tone, it doesn’t really elevate the debate.

Very few countries in the world have had a political history as stable as the USA’s over the last couple of centuries. Take France, which since 1788 has had: an absolute monarchy, three revolutionary regimes, a constitutional monarchy, two imperial regimes, a bout of full-on fascism, and five separate republican constitutions. At most of the junctures between those things, there was suffering and bloodshed. Maybe people “don’t give a fuck about the US constitution” - it certainly looks like Americans don’t, these days - but the stability of American democratic politics is genuinely very unusual and the constitution obviously has something to do with that.

As for your take on populism in the world, I am not as nonchalant as you. Yes, the rot has been stopped in some places, for now (Brazil, Poland, partly India) but in general it is still very much on the march. India, Turkey, Philippines, Hungary (which is right inside the EU - and now Slovakia too), El Salvador, Mexico, Tunisia, etc. The Arab world is less democratic than ever. And of course China is once again going full dictatorship only a few decades after discovering what a bad idea that is with Mao. Personally I doubt that China is much influenced by US politics, but pretty much everyone else in the world is. And most of this happened quite neatly during the period following Trump’s first election. Whether it is mostly cause or correlation, the link is there.

Yes and that’s the sad paradox. America’s interest is now (at least temporarily) at odds with the interests of freedom and democracy. Trump’s abuses cannot be seen to pay.

The worst impact of this debacle will be outside the USA. This will be taken as a green light for strongman politics everywhere. Including here in Europe where that sort of thing has ended very badly in the past.

You Americans really have behaved like spoiled children. Whatever the leftist fringe here thinks, the American constitution is the envy of the world. You’re on the same electoral calendar since the 1780s, without a single interruption. For literally centuries your leaders would follow the rules, shake hands and leave office when their time was up. Over and over again. It’s an incredible achievement, it was the template for a successful democracy.

And then this ogre came along and broke it all, and you decadently voted him back in.

IMO America’s institutions will contain the damage, probably. But other countries will inevitably now follow the example of America’s voters. And for some of them that’s going to turn out less well.

Interesting. Possibly useful to some. I have also discovered that the simplest, most privacy-friendly way to update location is just to do it manually when you change location.

I have a simple script that does this by querying OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim server with the city name. It feeds the resulting coordinates thru a Python library that deduces the timezone, and sets the system time to this.

Good to know.

And so what? Why are you so bothered by it? I’m a Linux user of 20 years and I couldn’t give a fig that someone is running a forum called LinuxSucks which, unsurprisingly, contains little “positivity or praise” for Linux.

So: you posted a serious contribution in an unserious community, and got treated unseriously. It’s not very newsworthy.

As for that community’s existence, why is that even up for discussion? As a Linux user I’m happy for people to say what they like about Linux. If the jokes are funny, all the better.

I use Ubuntu btw and it doesn’t suck. Well, not that much.

Well sure, if you’re Canadian then none of this is your problem.

The paradox: if, instead, 200,000 newcomers were to subscribe, the WaPo might be economically viable and then it could fire its owner.

The WaPo is currently losing tens of millions of USD a year. That is not so much its fault as our fault. We are the ones who prefer to pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime than for quality journalism.

This is the best answer. Most of the others jump straight in at the deep end. The entirely predictable outcome of asking this question to a bunch of earnest geeks.

Well done for taking a stand. The problem, as ever, is that most people prefer to comply obediently even if it feels wrong. And then next thing we know, it becomes standard practice.

BTW I have been in your situation and responded similarly. Usually it ends in the clerk inputting dummy info, sometimes after I irritably tell them to do so.

Great news.

Time to roll your own with unison over SSHFS. Can confirm it works.