It’s a great way to know who to cut off from the conversation as it should be apparent that they aren’t interested in discussing the subject in good faith. (Plus, you can remove GNU part from Linux entirely nowaday.)

Good luck convincing people that it’s End to End Encrypted when it’s not open source.

Well it disrupted my other IDE tools and other stuff, and caused various issues to arise when running start up applications… sooo maybe that environment is specific to me, but… say what you will.

https://alternativeto.net/ would be it.

Yeah, especially when it’s 5, 10 or 20 mb upload limit that Email have and on Matrix/Element we got 100 mb upload limit. (Not sure why Element client side doesn’t support more than 100 MB, hope they get around to addressing it so I can enable 1 gb upload.)

Thank you for letting me know about it, I’m thinking of cutting out Protonmail for business email. In fact, considering cutting out Email as a protocol in general in favor of Matrix/Element. I don’t really need them anymore.

Well, it would depends a lot on how much of an inconvenience to use the public internet if Great Firewall of USA is made and people then look for an alternative in droves. Let’s say hypothetically, the Internet usage become extremely politicized to a point that literally anything you say can make you liable like giving a bad advice, outright ban on political discussion (I’m not seeing this yet since the discussions that are banned are the one that is inciting violence but this is one of the worry people have), de-anonymizing people such as YouTube forcing people to use real name on their website or an outright ban on vices that people enjoy.

It’s probably unrealistic today, but we can observe where the trends are heading and can speculate where we might end up using to work around that negative future. Hence why I said to take my comment with a grain of salt.

Unfortunately, your options are very limited, not exactly a commonplace for something that offer an infrastructure to withstand DDOS attacks which is what Cloudflare is known for.

The real answer? The Public Internet is a broken model conceptually for security/privacy scope, we’re JUST starting to realize that there will be a threshold that pushed our internet infrastructure to the limit on just supporting the Internet as it is, but it is getting wrecked with more and more electronics getting attached to it especially with Internet of Things with increasing demand for more bandwidth. And that isn’t even covering the scenario where censorship will become rampant in coming years. The best approach to go about solving the Internet is to turn it into a friend to friend networking AKA Meshnet.

Pro:

1. DDOS doesn’t scale well on Meshnet, you will likely get depeered if you’re complicit in contributing DDOS attacks. Also the current implementation of CJDNS only works on Linux, so I imagine it helps on security prospect.
2. Segregation of Networks, it can segregate bad services into it’s own network and you can filter out bad network which would affect advertising, bot doing the scanning, and so forth. It’s a place where no bad actors can truly thrive, because they get limited by both bandwidth and access to the other meshnet hubs.
3. You can use the cloud server to set up a “Router” server for meshnet since meshnet like CJDNS is encrypted end to end and it’s even better if you set up multiple “Router” servers under different vendors internationally.
4. Easy to set up and configure on the go, you can spin it up and then add new peer on the fly with CLI.
5. Meshnet can work across both Network Device and Over the Internet, you can use both at the same time.

Con:

1. Barrier of Entry, it doesn’t do well when we’re dealing with your average users who can only open web browser and email.
2. People generally aren’t coordinated or willing to participate such network yet which is why we see very little adoption.
3. Require a little bit of networking knowledge such as how to connect to IPv6 and how to find other peers/nodes for finding websites and other stuff…
4. A search engine for CJDNS meshnet would be necessary.

That the gist of where I’m seeing the Internet is heading toward, so take it as a grain of salt. People are trying to abandon corporate platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth, so naturally at some points, they’ll look into meshnet.

To be honest… if they’re still using Facebook in 2021, they deserve whatever coming to them… There is literal decade of warnings that they have to willfully ignore…

Pretty much, if some level of confidentiality is required, then a hardened Linux computer with 100% open source software running would be necessary, but even that requires audit from the user which is already exceedingly difficult and mentally exhausting.

Privacy/Security topic is some of the most convoluted discussion as far as IT field as a whole is concerned, because there are simply too many areas that have to be defended against and the chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link. (Hell, we have to start worrying about cell phone picking up cryptographic keys from CPU cache/RAM…)

I would consider it compromised at that point.

If you have any close source google module/binary (let alone one that auto-update itself…) without any forms of isolation and sand-boxing, your software is compromised period. The things about privacy is that you can’t take a scout honor when it come to dealing with that, you have to ENFORCE IT and take the time to AUDIT IT. which requires a level of transparency IE you need open source

This is why we don’t trust cryptography algorithms if it’s close source, same concept applies to software that are close sourced.

Nope, because we know what happens with Apple and their ecosystem. If everyone use Fuchsia OS and Google decide to restrict the licensing after you invested so much resources and money into it, you’re shit out of luck. Linux will always have a place and simply because it’s run by saner people rather than insane/psychopathic corporation called Google.

Yeah, that a pretty damn good argument FOR privacy if I ever seen one. I’ll just going to copy and paste the URL every time someone say,

“Well if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.”

“Oh really? IMF thinks so too, they want to judge your web history and assign credit score on you. I can tell you that it’s dropping already just because you hang out here.”

Situation changed quite a lot this year with covid-19, so it is definitely much harder to go out and find friends. Normally, I would recommend joining up some “Meetup” sessions that matches your interests so you can join up with group of people and find friends through there.

Nowadays though? You probably have some lucks with book reading club online, online chat, gaming “guild” and stuff like that, but you have to roll a dice on it and hope you get someone sane from such group. I rolled a dice on it a few times ie flying out and renting hotel to meet them (to play a sort of LAN Party and other stuff) and it worked out few times that I end up being friend with them.

I honestly don’t like to have to see only English speakers on every single community, I wanted us to open up communities to international audience, I think it honestly a lot better overall if we have more diversity of opinions and languages in every community rather than sitting in an echo chamber. Sure, specific community can enact their language policy, but for overall server, I think we ought to open up a bit to the international community. That just my opinion.