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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • I would be interested to know why you are pushing this product across multiple places on Lemmy. Your post, despite disparaging “viral marketers”, has a viral marketing tone with statements such as “I feel like I’ve been wasting money on my VPN ever since I found Riseup”.

    Additionally, while I do believe a free VPN using an autonomous collective, resource pooling approach is a great idea, in practice this VPN has had… not a great history from my point of view. A quick search shows that in 2017 they were forced to comply with US Law Enforcement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riseup, see the Warrant Canary section. VPNs based in the US are known to be at risk, and this is another good example.

    When choosing a VPN provider, server location is important, as well as company location. You are repeatedly encouraging people to Torrent from a VPN based in one of the most zealous countries opposing file sharing worldwide, and one that has already worked with Law Enforcement.


  • FYI, for folks currently using a normal PIN and looking to use this, it’s intended that the 2nd factor PIN at least be different than the main unlock PIN. Otherwise you can just swipe up to dismiss the fingerprint prompt and get to the main PIN prompt; if its the same as your 2nd factor, that’s pointless.

    I was told on the Graphene matrix channel that the most secure configuration for this is:

    Main unlock method: 6 word diceware password

    Secondary unlock method: biometric + 6 character 2nd factor PIN

    Be aware that if you use this config that you will be prompted for the main unlock method (long password) at reboot, and also every 48 hours.




  • The ultimate in privacy for YouTube is Invidious https://invidious.io/, which fully proxies your videos from YouTube through an Invidious server. Every once in a while YouTube will get the upper hand and figure out how to fingerprint and block the servers, but so far the community has always figured out how to circumvent it. One advantage is that you can feasibly use a VPN with Invidious; without it, you have to keep hopping from VPN server to VPN server until you find one YouTube hasn’t already blocked, especially on a large public VPN like ProtonVPN. This applies to NewPipe as well, since NewPipe still tries to talk to YouTube directly as far as I understand. On Android I use Clipious as the app to access the Invidious servers.


  • So many people say to isolate google play services in another profile, but I have not seen anything quantifying the amount of attack surface reduction or what benefit this gives in terms of anonymity or security. Google play services includes Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) which is what enables most apps to give timely notifications. There are alternatives like ntfy, but they require some understanding of how to set them up, and tinkering.

    Finally, multiple profiles is useful for the most security conscious but for the typical user I do not believe its very useful. One thing I noticed is notifications are not consisently reliable, so setting up a “Facebook” profile does isolate you from the app but then you may miss notifications. You also have to type your password for every profile switch.