um I don't use a vpn. Please tell me why I should use a VPN. It's just something that costs money that seems unnecessary. I have nothing to hide. Why are you all hiding behind VPNs? What am I missing?
Not really. Unless you’re visiting unencrypted websites. If you’re using HTTPS and DNS over HTTPS, your ISP can only see what IP address you’re connecting to, not the traffic.
Because mainstream porn sites are blocked or require age verification in my state. Other good reasons are to avoid some issues when torrenting things or to "be" in another country to get around Netflix and other streaming service region blocks.
Privacy and avoiding man in the middle is kinda bullshit. Nearly all websites use TLS, so mitm isn't possible. And it's only privacy from your ISP.
A VPN doesn’t protect you the way OP thinks it does. It just hides your IP address from the websites you visit. Of course, now instead of one website seeing that you visited it, one organization can see everything you visit.
Basically it just moves your trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. So yeah, if you don’t need that, and you don’t need to get around geo blocks, you don’t need a VPN.
When you post a real photograph of yourself, wife, kids, and all your social security numbers and bank account numbers, along with a complete history of all video rentals and library books, and your private confessions of folly, vice, and sin-- post all that on your Lemmy profile, then I'll believe you have nothing to hide.
My wife? Gross! I'm heterosexual woman. and everything else you described, except for social security numbers, sounds a lot like Facebook. Which I don't use.
It obscures your IP so that sites don't know who you are by that, but really, they can just fingerprint your browser if you're not addressing that too.
You can present your location to a site as being from any where the VPN has a server. Say you want to watch something that is only available to users in Canada, but you live in Mexico. You can use the VPN to present yourself to the site as being in Canada and watch it. Unfortunately, some sites are blocking content from being accessed by known VPN IP addresses. I think Netflix is one. Frustrating to me, lemmy.world doesn't let anyone post or comment while using a VPN, though I understand that it's for valid security and admin purposes, such as to reduce CASM material.
More importantly, it encrypts your data between you and the VPN. That means that no one between you two knows what the info you're transmitting means. This includes your ISP that likely collects/sells your data or could report it to authorities. Additionally, it protects you from people that can join your wifi and steal your data that way, say at a public wifi like a coffee shop.
Personally, I use a VPN as much as possible, especially when I'm connected to any wifi outside of my home. In fact, I will absolutely not access security-sensitive sites (e.g. bank accounts, credit cards, etc.) on public wifi without using my VPN.
um I don’t use a vpn. Please tell me why I should use a VPN.
It is up to you to use a VPN or not. Some people use a VPN to watch regular TV series which are blocked in their own country. Some people, like myself, despise the ad- and tracking- exploitation industry, other people may want to download e-books from anna's archive or simply do not trust their ISP. Other people live in countries where their government is very oppressive and intends to arrest and torture any critical voices.
I don't know the term for it (I'm sure someone who does will chime in later), but that still makes sense. It's a way of typing things out how they're pronounced. Some other examples includes: 'at'll (as a shortening of "that'll"), ol' (as a shortening of "old", as in "good ol' boy"), or the most common y'all being a popular southern way of shortening and contracting 'you' and 'all'.
Note that I'm not claiming this is perfect proper English, but just saying that from the perspective of myself being a native speaker, it makes perfect sense to me, and just adds some character to how my mental voice reads their text.
While I agree that I think that in most formal situations you should not write that way, I personally see no problem with a more casual writing style like that in a post like this. Seeing as it's written as the writer's personal account of their journey to regain privacy, a slightly more casual writing style is fitting. The benefit of a more expressive writing style, in this context, outweighs the potential reduction in clarity, given that most readers will be able to use context clues just fine.
As a side note, y'all shouldn't be so quick to downvote this guy. While I don't agree with his perspective myself, it's still a fair point of view to have, and it ain't like it's being written in bad faith or such. But that's just my two cents, I s'pose.
The fact that you mark your omission with an apostrophe correctly does wonders for ESL learners so the can see both what is being chopped off while also getting insight into how some native speakers’ accents might produce the sounds. Native speakers should use ’em more of’en.
I've never heard anyone say cause instead of because. Maybe it is a regional thing as it seems like there are a decent amount of people who see this as normal.
I feel hustled, bc I recommended Signal to others :-( However, ANY contact with the US elite is a clear sign of the NSA/CIA/NED propaganda/spying network. I think It is safest for everyone, to voluntarily adopt the Russian, Chinese, Iranian, etc blocklist/firewall of western big-tech propaganda and spy methods, and seek out trustworthy open source. Oc Lemmy/federation as well as any other point of contact with the commoners are valid targets for these guy's, but a minimum of defense like that seems to be the only way to keep the US Capitalist elite out of our lives.
please get some more opinions on this, try to understand the arguments here better, before making up ur mind and believing the founder and CEO of a competing platform that u should switch away from their competitors
And Android runs a shit load of portable devices beyond phones.
Most handheld store scanners are Android based today. Inventory management devices (like warehouses have used since the nineties) used to be Palm-based, are largely Android now, because it's core is Linux. They don't have to run the standard Android shell, they can run their own.
I've used medical monitors that are Android based.
Well, yes, I prefer desktop. But you know, in some countries some people have nothing else than phones. I am glad that Mullvad has posted this and hopefully Google can fix the bugs soon.
Well, I didn't see the other comments till now, and wrote Upvoted as an alternative to Insightful which I was intending it to sound. I appreciated your comment because I think Google likely have their own priorities.
Well yea I understand. I just didn't know what else to say. I didn't want to just upvote and not reply because I don't want to ignore nice (no I'm not saying that upvoting me makes you nice) people in this toxic and hopeless world. In the contrary I want to promote them. Though nobody (probably even myself) will believe in it after everything I've done and said here for various reasons. I guess it's an imagine being sus moment
All fine. Your comment where you mentioned autistic suddenly made me "understand" the let-s-call-them misunderstandings in this thread. And I agree about the toxic world, but we're all in the same boat, so I'd say we may as well be nice to each other at least a few seconds per day. Sometimes small things can make a big difference.
I honesty don't understand the rudeness. What I said is unpopular as 8K monitors and I do think it can be downvoted but why being rude? I just don't want to participate in toxicity because then I become toxic too. Ignorance is the best in this case. And I use LineageOS that's based on Android btw
Realistically speaking, I'm not. Technically speaking, accusing people in what I do too may not be considered bad but that depends on the culture. Anyways I didn't mean to be rude when I made that original comment. I still don't understand how was it rude. I guess it's my English knowledge that sucks again
Well iOS does have its advantages but tbh there are no fully usable alternatives for Android now. Hopefully Linux will get better on phones because I feel like we do need an alternative at this point
Well, we live in right now, and right now, mobile Linux just isn't suitable for many people, and the hardware that actually supports mobile Linux is a whole other story. It's certainly not possible to just not have a phone at all anymore, either. Calyx, Graphene and Lineage are the current best options. To say someone is stupid for using these is, well, stupid.
I didn't say that people who use Android are stupid and neither I intended to. What I meant is that Android is really enshittificated now. "It's certainly not possible to just not have a phone" is another story. I think relying on phones too much hurts people and the world a lot but again that's a whole new story
Okay, but saying "Imagine using Android" paints a certain picture. And, yes, relying on phones is dangerous. It's not that it's impossible to live without a smartphone, it's that arbitrary systems have been put up in society that have created a large dependence on them.
That's nonsense. You can pretty much deal with any unrooted Android phone with Android 9 and above with this smartphone guide. https://lemmy.ml/post/128667
What does stock even mean? No "factory" shipped phone is going to be ideal for privacy and security. Stock to me means the custom Android build firmware that company shipped on the phone. As long as I am merely uninstalling programs, modifying permissions and firewalling the system, without rooting or unlocking it, it still is a stock factory phone. Within minutes I can return it to its "factory" status.
All things I use, besides JavaScript on websites and firmware, is basically open source.
I am lucky to use open protocols for communication only, as when deleting Facebook my friends were willing to use Matrix with me.
I can do many many compromises.
But still, I have OnePlus 6T with mobile Linux and absolutely cannot switch now. I would love to, but working camera and some alternative to Organic Maps is a must I cannot jump around when Android is "just" fine now.
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