Fun fact about KeepassXC: it also supports 2FA (via manually inserting totp tokens), so you could argue it’s also an alternative to Proton Authenticator assuming you don’t mind having your TOTP tokens and passwords are in the same place. Though I will say having them in the same place is at least better than not having 2FA at all, so it’s an option to consider

I missed the news - what’s wrong with the proton?

@inlandempire@jlai.lu , I said I’d write about bitwarden and here I am. Trollaccount69: promises made, promises kept.

Bitwarden is good. People saying it’s bad are either mistaken from not reading news reports closely enough, completely unwilling to accept a company as opposed to a small open source project or don’t consider cloud services worthwhile when they could be self hosted.

I’ll start with the last one first.

I self host a lot of stuff. Many people have a little computer in the closet, some have mini racks, a few have full size frac racks. I have two full size racks in different physical locations separated by miles. The point of saying that is not to brag or flaunt undiagnosed mental illness but to make it 100% clear that I am not opposed to self hosting by any measure.

A few years ago I was in a natural disaster. It wasn’t predictable or common and while some of the conditions that precipitated it had a generous parry window the effects were outsized and still linger to this day.

My local server was rendered inoperable and my offsite was damaged beyond recovery. Conditions in the area prevented consistent access to the internet so my cloud backup was not an option. Afterwards I did not have power or Internet at either my home or offsite location for two weeks. Even in the case that I did, my focus was on keeping my family warm, fed and housed.

The experience immediately afterwards had a lot of what might get called second factors or one time tokens or just shit you gotta write down and every group involved wanted to mediate the process through their website or some other computer system not least of which is the us federal governments now monolothic login.gov (what a fucking name).

Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

If it weren’t for bitwardens ability to access secrets securely through a web browser on an untrusted computer I would have had a much different experience toting handwritten copies of important logins, passwords, tokens, codes and even just notes to remember in sweat soaked waterlogged pockets.

Bitwarden isn’t the only cloud password thingy that has that functionality but it’s the one with the longest history of dudes popping up to “well actually” out the way their website access works when someone says “browser? That’s not secure!”. So I’m not gonna waste your time with that. It is secure and you can do your own research and come to that conclusion yourself.

The point of writing all that is you probably would be what a disgusting race of people with bad teeth from an overcast island in the North Atlantic would describe as “proper fucked” in their nasty, brutish imitation of the English language if you couldn’t get to your selfhosted passwords. Imagine if that coincided with a bonafide cortisol experience.

Cloud services can be described as a lot of things. A safety net against local disruptions is part of that.

Alright working backwards from that mess, it’s fine to be skeptical of companies but they do represent stores of expertise and often act as the benevolent supporters of open source projects either through a direct relationship like Bitwarden, keeping the maintainers of an open source project employed so they can continue working on the project (often as part of their job responsibilities) like Bitwarden or even just using the profits to prop up the free side uh, like Bitwarden.

Off the dome, and I will not be looking this shit up, the first thing comes from people seeing some small indicator and freaking the fuck out. Recently it’s a change to an acronym that describes the companies values. Literally come on. Red hat is basically the IG Farben of open source but no one is fleeing the Linux kernel because of their involvement. Another recent freak out came from a new ceo who took on venture capital. The company intends to broaden its user base and provide its service as a trusted third party in an increasingly fractured world, that takes capital and the part no one seems to be willing to hand to ceos, leadership. There have not been tangible changes to bitwardens free service as a result of these events.

My favorite Bitwarden freak out is the tos data collection one. Someone posted the terms of service and highlighted that user data could be collected and used. Now that’s something! Wait, it was the terms of service of the website, not the service (an important legal shield in some jurisdictions) and was just boilerplate. There was no evidence ever provided that Bitwarden collected user data in any way other than that which is part of rendering a web page (how big is the viewport, what protocols do you support etc.).

If you take anything away from this, hell, if you even read down to the bottom and see this sentence: don’t discount cloud password vaults, you may end up relying on them during a trying time.

You did not include the “office”/“collaboration” section, if you plan to, i suggest CryptPad

replace KeePassXC with ChiPass, which is a fork without AI

Migadu supports custom domains is one of the few email providers that does not limit the number of domains, aliases or mailboxes. Instead their pricing is based on storage and the number of emails received and sent.

I can’t switch again, for the love of god(s) I’m old and tired.

Why are you using the GOP logo? This isn’t an American-centric issue.

Just put a Swastika. That’s what he apparently stands for now.

Would you consider NymVPN? I’ve been using it for a few months now and it’s pretty good. It’s backed by PhD level Cryptography and it’s open source but the parent company is still for-profit. I think it’s an actual good use of blockchain too. Also it’s decentralised! Fedi should love it but I never see it mentioned.

What’s the thing with ChiPass vs KeepassXC?

I’m going to give Mozilla’s new mail service a try next weekend. I think it’s called thundermail or thinderbirdmail.

I would recommend doing a little more research into Mullvad and not rule it completely. I had the same stance until recently when someone pointed out a few facts.

The Örebro party is actually pretty interesting. Most of thier policies are pretty reasonable and forward thinking. Other countries would love to have some of the things they are advocating for (shorter work weeks, free public transport, and lower politician salaries, to name a few).

Just because one of the founders donated his own money to the organization doesn’t mean the company as a whole supports it.

Many of the VPNs being suggested may not have founders with crazy political views, but in my experience and other research, they are either extremely slow or have very few servers.

I will be switching to Mullvad in the very near future.

So, guys, I’ve had a pretty great experience with GMail, from a small company… they index the Internet, whatever that means. Anyway, the sign up is free and and I don’t have to bring a domain… again, not sure what that means, but it sounds nice.

@inlandempire@jlai.lu , I think you may be inadvertently making a mistake excluding mullvad and bitwarden.

Mullvad is an excellent vpn service that provides unparalleled security, privacy and anonymity. If security, anonymity or privacy could have an effect on your safety then consider weighing that safety against your concerns about its founders political donations.

I currently have active subscriptions to mullvad, windscribe, proton, ivpn and airvpn. If I had to go down to one it would be mullvad, if I had to go down to two I’d add air for piracy.

Windscribe is the one I won’t be renewing. It’s complex, confusing, frankly expensive for what you get, has an awful app and config file generator, constantly seems to radiate incompetence and I think their style in general is cringey.

Proton is what you’re leaving and to be honest I’m probably gonna replace it with Nord. It’s “fine” but I can’t effectively automate its use on headless systems so it’s gotta go.

Ivpn is pretty good with a couple of caveats: it’s still possible to screw up and make an account with pii that the company can be forced to divulge, there are many examples of this vector causing people problems with other services. The company has not faced the same scrutiny as mullvad, however that’s a very high bar. What truly is a dealbreaker is how few servers & locations ivpn has and how not great the speeds are.

Airvpn is a piracy service. Theres no two ways about it and it’s great for that. I wouldnt bet my life on it but it sure does allow port forwarding at a decent price!

Mullvad in comparison is simple, reasonably priced, has plenty of servers and locations with good speed, has the best vpn apps I’ve seen, you literally can’t make an account that’s not anonymous and has passed the most intense possible scrutiny I know of for a vpn.

If your life or freedom depends on it, you should pick mullvad.

Many companies with some tie to politics I disagree with produce extremely high quality products and services that I rely on. It is particularly hard to avoid in the gun market but is certainly present in security as well.

Of course if the vpn is for getting past the company firewall so you can look at pornography on company WiFi or something, feel free to disregard this.

I brought up bitwarden but I’m tired of tippa tapping out a post so just imagine an equally long description of how it’s good and the problems always seem to turn out to be overblown.

i had enough struggle to convince my friends to switch away from google, im sure as hell not getting them to switch again. especially not when i am the one paying for the family subscription