It's been "common knowledge" that your right to privacy is long gone, but here's the smoking gun that everyone needs to be aggressively protective over their online privacy, block ads, use de-googled ROMs, and switch to Pinephone technologies as soon as they are mature enough to adopt.
Occasionally Vice does good journalism. I was starting to forget what that looked like, but here we are.
Think of it as a FOSS alternative to Dropbox and Google Drive. You can either rent a server or install one on your own machine (provided you have Linux or at least run Linux in a virtual machine).
It’s gotten fairly robust. Beyond being a convenient central repository for all my files to sync between disparate PCs and mobile devices, they have their own cloud office suite (once again self hosted if you like, but I don’t use it and can’t attest to it). It also has a zillion optional apps, say, if you were interested in hosting your own cookbook or RSS server.
In my case, I had documents I wanted to ensure were backed up across multiple harddrives in case of a failure, and I wanted it automatic. That was the appeal of Dropbox but they can fuck right off.
They've been doing this for over a year now.
Been running my own Nextcloud server for a few months to replace Dropbox and Drive, and I’m never ever going back. You've gotta be completely mental to host your private documents on any tech platform (read: someone else's computer) at this point.
I'm not confident this is an effect that manifests more squarely on either side of the right/left spectrum, and I've witnessed it within highly meritocratic, large companies. I think it maps more onto organizational size than ideology. But maybe you're right. My personal experience is hardly a statistical sample.
My tiny hope is this really demonstrates the fuck-up-move-up/Peter Principle whereby organizations tend to be run by incompetent morons while the people below them have a better grasp on reality. That tends to hold true in most large organizations I've been part of, with a similar observed tendency for large orgs to be run by sociopaths.
It's open source. The code has been evaluated by third party privacy advocates, and you can do the same. It's not perfect, but it's a huge push in the right direction.
Ultimately, you need to decide what your threat model looks like. If the omniscient cabal of women are after you and you specifically, your choice of chat app won't keep you out of jail. If you just like to text the N word to your buddies because you think it's funny, running Signal is leagues better than blasting embarrassing texts over SMS for some asshole at the phone company to store forever and the NSA to retrieve and leak whenever you become politically inconvenient.
I set rules that messages auto-delete after a duration of my choosing. The effect is carried onto both ends of the messenger.
It's not perfect. If you use Android's default keyboard, your typing could still be logged. Assume if you're on factory Android or Windows 10 you're running a compromised system no matter what messenger you're using. If you can get by with it, run a de-Googled LineageOS or other ROM with a similar effect.
I use Signal for its end-to-end encryption, FOSS nature, availability on F-Droid, ability to permanently delete messages, and its widespread market adoption. Ultimately if no one else uses the messenger then it's useless.
There's been a lot written about all the messenger options, but Michael Bazzell with IntelTechniques uses Signal, and I tend to align with his recommendations since his job is literally to help people disappear.
It's a logistical and maintenance issue but not a world-ending threat. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) damaged transformers and other grid infrastructure in Sweden, South Africa, Quebec, and New York, as recently as 2003. There's concern that damaged transformers take a long time to repair or replace, but utilities do maintain small stockpiles.
An early warning system would help mitigate damage, giving us the ability to shut down threatened grid systems before space weather can inflict any damage. As far as I know, no one has ever demonstrated that consumer electronics would be threated by such an event, but I suppose it's possible.
It really hasn't affected me. I don't watch TV and read a lot. Plus, horror as a genre has been relatively untouched by this woke crap. Even the horror movies that are trying to make statements about race (Get Out) I still found pretty enjoyable.
It's also the only genre that seems still interested in Christianity since demonic possession is a subgenre of horror. I'm not religious but it does bother me how much of mainstream media seems to ignore that much of the country still is.
Joke's on you I'm 12