UnfortunateShort

Honestly favor this over mandatory backdoors

Company phone. I don’t do work stuff on my private phone, period.

You cannot selfhost Signal, because the regular app won’t connect to your server. You could probably bridge it to Matrix I guess? I’m pretty sure it’s a thing, but I see little benefit here, besides your phone not connecting to Signal and your messages being collected in one app, if you so desire.

Have you tried setting up rclone for cloud access and then using restic with -r “rclone:my_aws:path/to/backup”?

For any kind of storage, cloud or not, I think rclone should provide whatever you need for free (not entirely shure about metadata). You will likely want at least one script tho, since the commands can get quite long, depending on configuration.

I don’t know whether this fits your needs better, but “Ente” and “Proton” offer E2E encrypted cloud storage with the option to share parts of it via link or accounts, as well as clients that automatically sync stuff for you (Android only for Ente I think)

That’s pretty much it afaik. Owner sold it, new owner didn’t know what to do with it, owner bought it back.

Afaik most people who seriously want to have a local LLM start of off a pre-trained one from the internet…?

To correct some oversimplifications in this thread, let me just summarise some facts:

Crypto is exactly as worthless as money.

Not all crypto is bad for the climate, see for example Etherium and Solana.

Crypto has legitimate uses, especially as a replacement for traditional bank transactions, which to remind everyone, are basically made up numbers and ‘trust me bro’-s. And I will explicitly include smart contracts and NFTs here, just to annoy people who don’t get them.

Not all crypto is private. In fact, it was designed to be the opposite, hence most crypto isn’t private at all.

While not all crypto is private, even less ways to spend or exchange crypto are private. A simple and also very private thing is cash.

Connecting to any trustworthy VPN at the very least:

1. Encrypts your connection entirely and ensures you are connected to a party you trust
2. Limits snooping in your traffic to one party you trust

Which is objectively not a scam and a desirable thing to do. Not as desirable as hosting your own VPN, but 100% better than not having one, no matter what some guy on the internet says.

Yeah, Element is super easy to use.

You just need to chose a Matrix instance, create an account with username and password that have nothing to do with what follows, log in (not that), generate keys, ideally back up those keys (which you could ignore, but you are prompted to), then it bothers you with cross-signing (which you can also ignore, except you kinda can’t, depending on you contacts, so log in again and confirm the devices), then chose another, unrelated instance to be discoverable via mail/phone (which again is optional, except if you want to be or don’t want to explain how adding via domain + name works), than add mail or phone number and activate it and boom, you are golden. Except you are not, because if you want Element X, well, you still have no push notifications, which just require you to… Oh, create another account, neat!

Meanwhile on Signal you do what? Punch in your number, confirm, optionally set a PIN, optionally enable backups, done. Yeah, that’s not as private, and missing online massage backups, I know, but it’s also a 1-3 step setup without any alarming prompts, telling you to do non-straightforward stuff that could very well compromise your privacy. Or having to dig through options and make choices and handle keys you don’t understand.

Do you need a reminder that 123456789 is a popular password and 2FA commonly considered a nuisance? Matrix is complicated enough to confuse even (non-ITSec) IT people.

As a professional software developer, I consider Matrix/Element to be quite user-unfriendly (and anecdotally also quite buggy)

Edit: Some clarifications. Describing this easy process was kinda confusing for silly ol’ me

Does borg support rclone? Might be an interesting addition to adapt that chain for cloud storage solutions

Conversations is very simple

There are some fairly good solutions tho. Matrix is still kinda half-baked (specifically thinking about 2.0 and Element X) and Conversations has limited capabilities, but they are fairly easy to use

Edit: Although I would really wish Matrix had a ‘normie-mode’, with secure and reasonably easy to handle defaults

If you are talking about online services, Proton is a Swiss option and for what it’s worth, Bitwarden offers an EU instance. Both are freemium OSS. You could also self-host Bitwarden. If you are looking for offline options, there are plenty. KeePass2 comes to mind.

Cool

In much of Europe speaking out can get you arrested. Many of us don’t believe in universally free speech, starting at insults and hate speech.

I just reconnect and hope for an unflagged IP lol

Monitor monitors the web for leaked credentials you have in Firefox’s password manager. That’s what it’s for. I think it’s quite clear why it would access your sync data

In the US maybe, in the EU? Only if you want to get sued and then forced to re-hire them.