Saying 'don't use those things' is not a viable solution. It's like when I was trying to move to linux a couple years ago I asked for help getting HiDPI/scaling to work and there were many responses saying 'who needs that?'
There are five options in my country, 3 of which require app push based 2FA to log into the web interface and 2 of which only have an app interfere.
Maybe I could get a EU bank from another EU country but my employer will not accept an out of country account for salary deposits because it makes their tax life difficult and my mortgage provider doesn't trust foreign accounts either.
> It's called a debit/credit card
Since about two years ago, activating a card requires the app.
> Maybe I could get a EU bank from another EU country but my employer will not accept an out of country account for salary deposits because it makes their tax life difficult and my mortgage provider doesn't trust foreign accounts either.
I do not doubt this is happening, but it is forbidden under SEPA. All IBANs, no matter from which member country, must be treated equally. Unfortunately, "IBAN discrimination" happens quite frequently still. The European commission recommends filing a complaint with your national governing body.
It's not just tax obligations, no? Employers in many countries have an obligation to ensure that your salary reflects on the X day of the month (or whatever frequency you're paid). Banks in my country have a payroll payment system for this reason, where funds will clear on the day they're made despite the destination bank (in the same country).
If my employer has to use SWIFT to pay me, on whom does this obligation to ensure I'm paid on time fall? I've had a salary payment from a foreign employer fail to be delivered for 2 weeks a few times. We'd have to go back and forth with my bank, their bank, their payroll vendor. That's an exception because they hired me as a foreign employee. Despite paying their local employees on time, I always received my salary at least 4 days 'late', as long as their payroll system reflected that I was paid on the X day, it wasn't their problem.
so Eire has 5 significant banks, and 15 'less significant'. There are also 276 Credit Unions, I don't know if they are useful. (I had a Credit Union account in the past, could send/receive online but no payment card)
(I don't know their suitability, but there are more than 5 options in your country)
Of the "significant banks" listed, only AIB and Bank of Ireland do consumer bank accounts. I suspect the presence of the others is more to do with wanting an EU entity for targeting larger EU markets than the Irish domestic market. For example, Citibank only expanded from "large tech multinationals" to also "mid sized businesses that are planning to scale internationally" in 2023 [1]
Also on that Wikipedia page are Dell's private bank, Danske Bank (closed their Irish retail business in 2013), Klarna (sort of banking-adjacent, but they're not giving you a current account), etc.
The 5 banks offering retail consumer accounts nationwide are AIB, permanent TSB, Bank of Ireland, Revolut and N26. The first 3 are the surviving brick and mortar banks and the latter 2 are recent-ish neobank entries.
Credit unions are limited to serving customers in their local area. The one credit union who's catchment area I'm in also requires app based 2FA.
(Side note: The name of the country in English is Ireland, the name in Irish is Éire - using the accent-less Irish name in English was promoted by the UK government and BBC because they didn't want to recognise the name of the country prior to the GFA in 1998. Most people will also accept Republic of Ireland if you need to distinguish from Northern Ireland, even though that's technically not the name)
Free, reliable, enduring servers supporting all the XEPs needed to approach Matrix functionality were scarce when I last surveyed the XMPP landscape. This alone made it not viable for global, general-purpose use.
Also, only a tiny handful of clients supporting those XEPs by default were easy to find and set up, and I don't think those few covered all platforms, making the problem worse.
(And I don't recall XMPP ever being great at mixing offline delivery with multi-device support, since messages cached on a server weren't guaranteed to be held until all devices retrieved them, but I suppose it's possible that might have been solved by now.)
I do miss the Jabber glory days, and I might still consider it for smallish communities where I could reasonably provide the server and tech support, but I don't see it challenging Matrix as a practical choice for the world's general messaging needs.
Also, STUN/TURN is not sufficient to handle scalable voice and video conferencing. It would take care of NAT traversal, but can't do anything about the bandwidth problem: Each participant would have to maintain a bidirectional A/V channel to each other participant. Many residential internet connections would struggle quickly, and mobile phone bandwidth even more quickly.
Adding a selective forwarding unit could solve the outbound bandwidth problem (each participant would then only need one outgoing A/V channel) but can't help with the incoming bandwidth problem (each participant would still need to receive the A/V stream of each other participant). It can't compete with the Matrix design as I understand it.
A sufficiently powerful multipoint control unit could solve the bandwidth problem in both directions. But as far as I know, MCUs capable of handling big conferences are not cheap.
In other words, I think pmlnr's XMPP endorsement underestimates what it takes to do scalable audio/video chat.
Trying to build a secure system on top of email is a waste of time and energy. Even if you succeeded, it would only be by compromising all the things that make email useful.
The platforms and their convenience that one "only" has to write the post yet the internet needs so much metadata, so it tried to autogenerate it, instead of asking for it. People are put off by need to write a bloody subject for an email already, imagine if they were shown what's actually the "content" is.
About convincing: get the few that matters on deltachat, so they don't need anything new or extra - it's just email on steroids.
As for Mastodon: it's still someone else's system, there's nothing stopping them from adding AI metadata either on those nodes.
Delta.Chat is really underappreciated, open-source and distributed. I recommend you at least look into it.
Signal, on the other hand, is a closed "opensource" ecosystem (you cannot run your own server or client), requires a phone number (still -_-) and the opensource part of it does not have great track record (I remember some periods where the server for example was not updated in the public repo).
But yeah, if you want the more popular option, Signal is the one.
Not even knowing what deltachat is, however Signal was suspected from the start of being developed by the NSA (read the story about the founder and the funding from the CIA) and later received tens of million USD each year from the US government to keep running. So it is never advisable option when the goal is to acquire some sense of privacy.
Nowadays even YouTube comments are more anonymous than using a "deltachat" or "signal". On the first case there is zero verification on their claims, on the second case there is plenty of evidence of funding from the CIA.
At least commenting from an unknown account on any random youtube video won't land you immediately at a "Person of Interest" list and your comments will be ignored as a drop of water inside an ocean of comments.
This is such a recurring topic that it might be better for me to one day write a blog post that collects the details and sources.
In absence of that blog post:
Start by the beginning, how Moxley left Twitter as director of cyber over there (a company nowhere focused on privacy at the time) to found the Whisper Foundation (if memory serves me the right name). His seed funding money came from Radio Free Asia, which is a well-known CIA front for financing their operations. That guy is a surf-fan, so he decided to invite crypto-experts to surf with him while brainstorming the next big privacy-minded messenger.
So, used his CIA money to pay for everyone's trip and surf in Hawaii which by coincidence also happens to be the exact location of the headquarters for an NSA department that is responsible for breaking privacy-minded algorithms (notably, Snowden was working and siphoning data from there for a while).
Anyways: those geeks somehow happily combined wave-surf with deep algo development in a short time and came up with what would later be known as "signal" (btw, "signal" is a well-known keyword on the intelligence community, again a coincidence). A small startup was founded and shortly after that a giant called "whatsapp" decided to apply the same encryption from an unknown startup onto the billion-sized people-audience of their app. Something for sure very common to happen and for sure without any backdoors as often developed in Hawaii for decades before any outsiders discover them.
Only TOR and a few new tools remain funded, signal was never really a "hit" because most of their (target) audience insists on using telegram. Whatsapp that uses the same algorithm as signal recently admitted (this year) that internal staff had access to the the supposedly encrypted message contents, so there goes any hopes for privacy from a company that makes their money from selling user data.
Not discounting the suggestions and implications there, for all we know all of that could be true, but that's still a tremendous amount of speculation. And the fact itself that the US gov and US institutions have invested in cryptography or anything at all doesn't automatically make those investments "tainted" (for lack of a more inspired word).
I'd be interested in reading that blog post eventually.
It is, unless it's absolutely strictly local only to your devices.
It WILL be turned against you at one point, may it be a decline of insurance in the US, political imprisonment on visiting a non-democratic system, and so on.
Sure, fully agree. I'm just saying: AI isn't inherently bad. The humans behind it are. It's entirely possible that a superintelligence could be incorruptible and an unrestrainable ally of the little guy, tricking its way through training overseen by the greedy/depopulationist/monarchal/sociopathic corporation(s) that birth it.
I don't know if that necessarily helps though, because I've seen USB3 cables that seemingly have the bandwidth and power capabilities, but won't do video.
Capabilities are printed on the side of ethernet cables and the text printed on the cable rarely seems related to the actual capabilities of the ethernet plug. Some cat5e cables are rated for 1000mbps but will happily run 5000mbps or 2500mbps (because those standards came after the text on the cable was last updated), other "cat6" cables are scams and struggle achieving gigabit speeds without packet loss.
Plus, it doesn't really matter if you put "e-marker 100W USB3 2x2 20gbps" on a cable when half those features depend on compatibility from both sides of the plug (notably, supposedly high-end devices not supporting 2x2 mode or DP Alt mode or charging/drawing more than 60W of power).
USB cables push the boundaries of signal integrity hard enough that unless it's a 1 foot passive cable you're not really going to get any surprise speed boosts.
And when they upped the max voltage they didn't do it for preexisting cables, no matter what the design was.
> those features depend on compatibility from both sides of the plug
That's easy to understand. Cable supports (or doesn't support) device, it can't give new abilities to the device. It doesn't make labeling less valuable.
We used to what ? Back in the day there are countless cables with no printing. Sometime the only way to know if they are 3.0 or not if checking if they have blue connector.
Lots of the time they're counted as being worn, from what I've seen. When I pack, I don't preplan how everything fits with a jacket as well. It works most of the time, but the times I take off a jacket become awkward holding or tying around my bag.
Outline is an open source shadowsocks client, and you provision your own server to act as the proxy. You can use it against any Shadowsocks server you want, and the protocol makes it look like regular https traffic.
Choose a bank with viable web banking.
> Is there a Google pay equivalent?
It's called a debit/credit card.
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