conduwuit is a fork of the less “energic” conduit.rs software, and both are maintained by the community, not by the Element people, like Dendrite.

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.

Yeah, I am lucky to live in such a country and it’s amazing. The state and municipality each subsidised part of the purchase, so I ended up paying 300 something euros to install 3.5 kW of panels. My electricity bills are almost non existant during summer and also cheaper during winter. To make it even better, anytime I’m not using the produced electricity, it gets sold to the grid, even if pretty cheap, rebating on my next billing cycle.

Yeah, exactly! I was quite amazed at how fast my French degraded after I stopped having classes.

I’m a native Portuguese speaker, fluent in English and can understand Spanish and French. Despite having had 3 years of French in school, I can no longer speak properly, and my writing is really bad, but I can understand pretty well. Spanish just comes to me because of the similarities with Portuguese, I never formally learned it.

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.

True, it’s been much more slow paced. Thought it was because the videos took much more time to make, wasn’t aware he was quite active on Patreon.

Oh really? Was not aware of that at all. Their recent videos about the second Punic Wars were incredible.

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.

Very well put, he makes an effort of bringing you along, which is a nice thing for a younger audience. I never stopped liking his relaxed style, though. His videos are one of those things I always reserve some time to enjoy.

Yeah, I suppose. His channel has less than 500k subs, though, so I always like to recommend it :P

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.

I went through my subscription list on FreeTube and filtered these out (the list was much lengthier initially :p)

• Alt Shift X — well detailed and narrated videos about fantasy series such as Dune, ASOIAF.
• Captain Disillusion — very well made videos about VFX.
• Computerphile — computer science twin of Numberphile; neat videos about the field with a wide range of guests.
• EthosLab — pretty much the only Minecraft creator I still watch; witty, quiet and virtually the same for a long time.
• hbomberguy — well known video essayist, easily one of the best in the platform
• Jacob Geller — another quality essayist, exploring different themes, such as horror
• Lemino — very well known creator focusing on mysteries, with incredible narration and stunning visuals
• LockPickingLawyer — very simple, to the point and informative channel about locks and lockpicking; also virtually unchanged for years
• Oversimplified — great overviews of major history events and periods, with funny narration and visuals
• Tantacrul — fairly unknown essayist on music, with well researched material and nice takes :P
• Then & Now — possibly my favorite atm (alongside hbomberguy); extremely well researched and presented video essays about history, politics and philosophy; very underrated imo

Exactly. There were good comments on that thread already.

Sadly “your local email coop” is very far from being common. Sounds like a fun thing for nerds to do, but I doubt normal folks would be interested in that, over just using one of the big players.