Mullvad is trusted. They are pretty open with their policies, exist for a long time already, not involved in any privacy scandals (to my best knowledge), charge flat and fair fee without 60% sales and other dubious marketing practices. It is one of the better VPN providers, not in 5/9 eyes (they are in 14 eyes though), you can buy a subscription with crypto, which (assuming crypto was acquired anonymously too) is a good start for some privacy guarantees.

Pretty much every cyber security professional I know uses Mullvad in one way or another, usually as part of a more complex solution.

But all in all, please bear in mind that VPN is not some magic silver bullet to preserve your privacy and anonymity. With VPNs you basically shift your trust from your ISP to the VPN provider. That trust you put into the provider, it is still a requirement. Not to mention that a good chunk of tracking is happening on a lower level nowadays, so if you use Mullvad on Windows / any Apple device etc. do not expect to become untraceable :)

Use Firefox or Safari, the more people use Chromium-based browsers the faster we get to the situation where Google completely owns the Internet (and they almost do now).

Texts are securely stored

Right, must be military grade encryption

Indeed

Books, online courses. Education in depth, ideally.

Books, online courses. Education in depth, ideally.

Yeah but… Brilliant has… a trial period. Seven days is plenty to realise that there’s next to zero educational value in that platform no matter how hard it is shilled online.

They are pretty poor courses anyway, why would you want them?

I’ve never heard of that project, looks pretty cool! To be clear, I do not say that “one guy” cannot possibly make great software. Passion projects are a thing. What differentiates them from the Abode situation, in my opinion, is that passion projects rarely have strict deadlines and paying backers who expect software that is Adobe-level in terms of quality and polish in a roughly 1 year.

I’m highly sceptical of this shipping in a state that can compete with Adobe at the end of it all. The branding itself is asking for trouble, which is just plain stupid if you are serious about long-term and sustainable development of the whole suite, and 180k is not enough to even put together a competent alternative to Illustrator, not to mention Photoshop and InDesign.

And before people start claiming that you can fund this by outsourcing to Eastern Europe / India etc, please bear in mind that you usually get what you pay for. A competent developer with enough experience to actually make this happen won’t come cheap, and opportunistic juniors with big ambitions won’t deliver.

I wish this project all the luck it can get, but I’m personally banking on Graphite and Inkscape from the FOSS world and Affinity suite from (as of yet) less corpo commercial offerings.

Done

Welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of left wing propaganda

In all seriousness though, this is one of the podcasts I tune in to religiously. It’s just too fun and serves as a great high level of “what’s up in big tech” even when my brain is mush.

Depends on what you want to self-host. In general, I would advise against self-hosting anything before you familiarise yourself with the basics of *nix, networking and cyber security.

You at least need to know enough to make sure that whatever you host is only available within your local network and is inaccessible from the outside.

Once that’s ensured, go nuts, experiment, learn, evolve.

In terms of how to start, really depends on your budget, what hardware you can spare, how much space you have at your place etc.

For the most basic playground it’s enough to have a raspberry pi or similar, or a very old laptop / desktop computer.

For something more swanky you can get old Dell servers (e.g. R420) online for around 100$ or so. They are quite power hungry though. Or you can get yourself a NUC and use that.

If all of this sounds like too much work, just get yourself QNAP / Synology NAS and see what it can do for you (it is way more limited in terms of options, but easier to setup and you can still have your Plex / file sharing / docker containers).

Sadly, what we seem to have over and over is https://xkcd.com/927/

It’s getting better though

Depends on what kind of data, if it’s mostly internal documents / dumps of whatever communication systems they use etc, it would not be too large (mostly because of retention policies on that software).

If it is actually the data straight from Reddit’s production databases, then 80GB does sound questionable. But then what kind of data are we talking about? Is it actually valuable?

Anyways, this is big (if true).