She is a successful author. She’s never been a great author. Great authors know how to write with originality and imagination. JKR merely took a handful of fantasy and British empire tropes, put them in a blender with ideas ‘inspired’ by vastly better writers and with the help of a PR team, created a marketable franchise.
Along the way, she became consumed by an utterly irrational hatred which is now creating a horrific world for the people she targeted with her marketing money.
Let me guess - you think Elon was saying ‘from my heart to yours’, right?
Thunderbird Pro will apparently be:
This email thing plus Thunderbird Send (which is basically https://send.vis.ee/), Thunderbird Appointment - a scheduling tool and Thunderbird Assist, which is:
“…at least for now, being cautiously labeled as “an experiment” that will allow users to take advantage of AI features within their email. However, the goal is to be lightweight enough that the language models can be run locally on a user’s PC in the interest of privacy. This service is being developed in partnership with Flower AI, which leverages Nvidia’s confidential compute to provide private remote processing in the event a user’s PC isn’t powerful enough. Sipes emphasizes that any remote processing features attached to Thunderbird Assist will always be optional, in the interest of ensuring complete user privacy.”
So AI shit that nobody asked for or wants.
Archive link for anyone else for whom that article crashed their tab.
Makes sense, thanks.
I promise this is genuine curiosity, not snark, but what’s the benefit/point to tracking ones pet?
I’ll miss the ability to buy using cash-bought gift vouchers as that seems the only straightforward way to preserve privacy.
No, no, I’m saying it should have been reported there and I don’t get why they didn’t share it.
On the face of it, that is a massive own goal. TOR project surely has a fediverse account or a blog or something to announce these things. This should be common knowledge.
Its a mystery - why would a hypercapitalist society increasingly dependent on manual labour destroy education, destroy workers rights, remove the ability to abort unwanted pregnancies and make prisoners legal slaves?
‘Better’ is relative :) is it better than using something like SearXNG? No. But for those people who insist on using Google, its better to do a proxied search than a first-hand one. Mullvad are European, are one of the very few orgs I personally think are trustable and have shown no signs of enshittification, Leta has been audited by a 3rd party - for those looking for a private Google experience this is about the best there is.
Leaving notes…committing genocide, yeah they’re interchangeable really.
FairEmail has a good reputation.
Depends on your threat model - mine is to make it as annoying and difficult for data sellers and advertisers to profile me as possible so in that scenario a reputable VPN service makes perfect sense.
There’s no such thing as total privacy and each service/software is simply a piece of the puzzle. If my government really wanted my data I’m sure they could find a way but making it as difficult as possible for techno-fascists is fine by me.
Thats a good point, I might set that up myself!
At the moment I do a once-a-week encrypted export from BitWarden and Aegis (authenticator) and put those exports onto an encrypted USB pen drive to avoid the issues you mention but I think your way is probably better.
What assurances do you have they won’t go full proton in the future?
Absolutely none. That applies to all services that exist now or in the future. The only way around that is self-hosting but that path has its own issues including a very steep learning curve if you want to be secure as well as private. Maybe this could be a longer term project to work towards?
For services:
In truth none of these are perfect. Privacy has got a lot harder recently as Proton and StartMail/StartPage have politically shit the bed and the UK seems determined to kill encryption which means I have to avoid really good services like IceDrive just because they’re in the UK.
EDIT: Calendars. Mailbox.org’s included one works fine. You can sync using CalDAV. The process for Thunderbird (desktop) is here.
The process for mobile is a little more complicated. First you need Davx5 to actually get the data, but thats all that app does. It’s not a Calendar app. It does work with the native Android Calendar but I used FossifyCalendar.
So install both of those then login to your Mailbox account in a browser and create a Calendar (or use an existing one). Get its unique URL by looking under the heading ‘My Calendars’, clicking the three bars icon, click ‘Properties’ and you can then copy your CalDAV URL.
On your Android device open Davx5, tap the plus icon then specify ‘login with URL and username’ tap ‘continue’ then paste in the URL you copied earlier, your email address and your email account password, tap ‘login’ and that should work.
Now, switch to your Calendar app. I used Fossify Calendar so if you are too, open that up, go to Settings, scroll down to the CALDAV section and turn on CalDAV sync. It might switch to your new Mailbox calendar now, but if it doesn’t, tap ‘Manage synced calendars’ and activate it there.
I think, as well as the issues you mention, another issue might possibly be duplication. Historically, search engines penalise duplicated content, even across different domains and federation kind of bakes that in.