• 2 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • idk, I’ve seen all the hype around hexbear users being obnoxious around Lemmy (including our own instance debating blocking the instance, followed by several of their members brigading the thread true to form)… but I’ve explored the communities on the instance itself and even subscribed to some of them like mutual aid, gaming etc, and those that I’m watching are actually just normal people doing normal things if more left than some other similar groups. In my experience it isn’t “all” hexbear users, because that would be a dumb generalization.

    There are some assholes on that instance to be sure. Show me one that this isn’t true of. I’m glad our instance didn’t block them because I now get to decide for myself. I block communities and/or users if they’re a problem for me. I think that’s a good way.


  • I’m a little late in my reply but I believe they stopped SMS support because it’s pretty expensive in the long run. Signal took off over lockdowns like a lot of platforms, and SMS texts cost quite a bit (at scale) to route and process. My anecdotal evidence (take it or leave it) is that I worked at a fairly major ecomm tech company around that same time who discontinued 2FA verification via SMS in regions like India (etc) because collectively it was costing the company millions to use that route for that purpose.

    They actually offloaded the 2FA flows to free (for the user anyhow) services such as Google Authenticator and Authy etc etc (which those companies now have to spend the money on each SMS interaction and/or server costs, not the one I was working for.

    Ultimately I think Signal did it because it was costing them a lot of money with not a lot of benefit as more people adopted the platform.



  • Not a boomer and I don’t hate squirrels but one day I walked out onto the porch to have my morning coffee and a smoke and the fattest fuckin squirrel I’ve ever seen in my life was sitting there at eye level in the bird feeder staring back at me too satiated (or smug, I couldn’t tell) to move after having eaten all the feed for several days straight. I was refilling it daily which is unusual but I never thought I’d meet the culprit in this way.

    It’s a thing.




  • Not many great memories from that era (I was a late teen when payphones largely started disappearing because cell phones) but when as a pre-teen I learned that you could take a standard issue tack from any bulletin board and hold it in contact with the mouthpiece and any other metal object to make free calls, it opened doors in my world forever.

    Fact that any major series of companies released tech this easily circumvented gave younger me an intuitive understanding that capitalism is and always will be completely fucked up. Long before I could express how.

    Thanks Telus!!!






  • You might like Commento which is FOSS. You can self-host it (or fire it onto a free or low cost cloud host), and fun. It’s more like a Lemmy/reddit format (comment up/down votes can be enabled) than masto but maybe you’ll enjoy it.

    Users can comment anonymously or you can enable basic verification steps. Decent moderation for if spam bots find you. Etc.

    ETA I used to host my instance on Heroku’s free tier and it was more than enough for what little traffic was coming to my site.



  • I use syncthing for personal and work, and it’s great. Having said that I’ve found it struggles with versioning i.e. editing a document from multiple devices.

    Look into something like Standard Notes for cross platform markdown editing. It’s e2e encrypted, works great, the dev is very responsive. Ymmv but I really like it, have it on every device I own and use it daily.

    I’ve also just used a private git repo for editing docs from multiple devices. Once you get it set up it’s effortless, and most ide’s are extremely fun to use as text editors.


  • The other comments almost got it right. If you had your torrent client bound to Mullvad and then opened your Tor Browser… your torrent client would be running over the VPN tunnel (Mullvad) while your Tor Browser would be sending all its traffic over your vanilla ISP and through… the Tor network (unless you also bind it to Mullvad). You’d effectively be “split tunnelling” your traffic, which is actually a good use-case for Tor anyhow.

    There’s a lot of debate about whether it’s fine to run a VPN tunnel (OS-wide) before you fire up your Tor Browser… effectively you’d be pushing your Tor traffic through the tunnel to the VPN’s entry/exit nodes before it got to/left the Tor network. Some say it’s a security risk (if you don’t trust the VPN provider, for instance. Which is valid if you’re using some of the scummier providers). You need to do some research and understand the implications of doing that, before just mashing buttons.

    You can also fire up the Tor network system-wide if you’re crafty and then create an encrypted VPN tunnel to go over that, so all of your VPN traffic would be travelling over and through Tor nodes before it reached the entry/exit nodes of your VPN. It can work both ways. There are cases for both options, if you know what you’re doing… which is a huge caveat.

    Overall though, no. Please don’t torrent over Tor. As you say, it’s not necessary and eats bandwidth from an already slow network protocol. A VPN is more than sufficient for that purpose. If you wanna get more secure than that, make sure you’re running an encrypted DNS solution (or resolve your DNS locally if you know how to do that) and profit. Then your ISP can’t see shit. They’ll still probably traffic-shape and throttle you, simply because they can tell it’s going out over an encrypted tunnel of some kind… but they’ll never be able to see what specifically you’re up to.