From the UK it looks like the internet has changed. You now need to dox yourself to interact with a significant proportion of the internet. The rules are different all over the world, from California to Utah, the UK to China.
I think this site is almost unique in how safe it is from this problem. Its longstanding and effective child safe policy seems to protect it from the UK law at least. I how this means we can talk freely about this issue.
There are multiple sites tracking this, here is one.
The easiest step is a VPN. Here is a review, but they seem to be missing prices. Proton has a free tier, and that is important in that anyone can access the information they need safety. Almost uniquely among free VPNs I would expect my data to be reasonably safe, rather than the many scammy ones. The browser Opera also offer a free tier, and while I do not trust them like I do Proton it could be not a scam. If you know anything about trustworthy free VPNs that would be great to share.
These are the prices for the cheapest per month offering for the three in that article and the one I am with, PIA:
- Proton $4.99/month for a 2 year contract
- Mullvad $5.74/month flat rate
- IVPN $3.89/month for a 3 year contract
- PIA $2.03/month for a 3 1/4 year contract
As I say I am with PIA, they seem OK but google really do not like them and I think cloudflare may have their risk turned up to 11.
A question is how to pay. I use crypto, and Mullvad and IVPN accept monero which is perfect, fairly good anonymity and trivial transfer fees. PIA only accepts bitcoin as cryto payments, which is less private and the fees are higher, but at about $1 on a $65 purchase it is not awful and still by far the cheapest. Some may not like this option, and they offer cash and giftcard payments, but I do not know how they work.
Another question is what do you do with IP6? I have never quite figured it out, and I do not think PIA supports IP6 so I just turn it off in my VPN startup script. I do not actually see the harm in just turning off IP6, but I do always accept a certain proportion of sites to fail so perhaps I am just not noticing the problem. If anyone actually understands this and knows how best to handle it I would love to know.
Another solution is to go decentralised. The fediverse, of which mastadon is probably the easiest entrypoint, you need to choose a server, it does not matter much which you choose, and you are on with no verification. There are verification scams to be aware of, but the only way to validate yourself is prove ownership of a web site or something. I think it is great, but it is pretty far left from my point of view so perhaps not everyone will find it so like home, but perhaps it looks different from different servers, there may be a home for anyone there.
I suppose there is the option of uploading your personal data to the internet. This is preaking what has always been one of the most important rules that started with usenet. In this day and age of financial fraud and deep fake videos the idea of uploading government ID and / or facial scans seems madness. Horrible as it is for those involved, the tea hack could not have come at a more appropriate time to make sure everyone knows the risks of doing that.
The EU have suggested a solution that has a requirement that you use google or apples walled garden. I guess it is marginally less likely to end up with your data on the dark web, though very far from zero, it allows an unprecedented level of surveillance that I hope trump is apply demonstrating the danger of.
I would love to here the point of view of someone who thinks differently in this matter.
A big thing it not to be held hostage by any one site. We have recently had stories about people being locked out for example google docs or instagram for unknown unappealable reasons and being left hanging.
Backing up these things is very important. There are ways to do google docs through their interface, and there are tools to automate it.
How to deal with it in other places where the primary contact is the in site usernames. I do not use big social media, so I have not looked at it but it does makeme wonder how we wouldkeepincontact if this place went down. I do not have an anser, but one way would be generate an onion address and make that know
An answer that quite attracts me is to generate an onion address and post it on my profile here where it would get caught by the wayback machine. That would mean that whatever happened here I would be able to spin up a way for people to be able to contact me, but I would only need to backup buck up the key until I needed it. It takes 8.5 hours for one starting with the six characters of my username here, I may well give that a try just to see how it works.
What are your thoughts on any of this stuff?
I think this site is almost unique in how safe it is from this problem. Its longstanding and effective child safe policy seems to protect it from the UK law at least. I how this means we can talk freely about this issue.
There are multiple sites tracking this, here is one.
The easiest step is a VPN. Here is a review, but they seem to be missing prices. Proton has a free tier, and that is important in that anyone can access the information they need safety. Almost uniquely among free VPNs I would expect my data to be reasonably safe, rather than the many scammy ones. The browser Opera also offer a free tier, and while I do not trust them like I do Proton it could be not a scam. If you know anything about trustworthy free VPNs that would be great to share.
These are the prices for the cheapest per month offering for the three in that article and the one I am with, PIA:
- Proton $4.99/month for a 2 year contract
- Mullvad $5.74/month flat rate
- IVPN $3.89/month for a 3 year contract
- PIA $2.03/month for a 3 1/4 year contract
As I say I am with PIA, they seem OK but google really do not like them and I think cloudflare may have their risk turned up to 11.
A question is how to pay. I use crypto, and Mullvad and IVPN accept monero which is perfect, fairly good anonymity and trivial transfer fees. PIA only accepts bitcoin as cryto payments, which is less private and the fees are higher, but at about $1 on a $65 purchase it is not awful and still by far the cheapest. Some may not like this option, and they offer cash and giftcard payments, but I do not know how they work.
Another question is what do you do with IP6? I have never quite figured it out, and I do not think PIA supports IP6 so I just turn it off in my VPN startup script. I do not actually see the harm in just turning off IP6, but I do always accept a certain proportion of sites to fail so perhaps I am just not noticing the problem. If anyone actually understands this and knows how best to handle it I would love to know.
Another solution is to go decentralised. The fediverse, of which mastadon is probably the easiest entrypoint, you need to choose a server, it does not matter much which you choose, and you are on with no verification. There are verification scams to be aware of, but the only way to validate yourself is prove ownership of a web site or something. I think it is great, but it is pretty far left from my point of view so perhaps not everyone will find it so like home, but perhaps it looks different from different servers, there may be a home for anyone there.
I suppose there is the option of uploading your personal data to the internet. This is preaking what has always been one of the most important rules that started with usenet. In this day and age of financial fraud and deep fake videos the idea of uploading government ID and / or facial scans seems madness. Horrible as it is for those involved, the tea hack could not have come at a more appropriate time to make sure everyone knows the risks of doing that.
The EU have suggested a solution that has a requirement that you use google or apples walled garden. I guess it is marginally less likely to end up with your data on the dark web, though very far from zero, it allows an unprecedented level of surveillance that I hope trump is apply demonstrating the danger of.
I would love to here the point of view of someone who thinks differently in this matter.
A big thing it not to be held hostage by any one site. We have recently had stories about people being locked out for example google docs or instagram for unknown unappealable reasons and being left hanging.
Backing up these things is very important. There are ways to do google docs through their interface, and there are tools to automate it.
How to deal with it in other places where the primary contact is the in site usernames. I do not use big social media, so I have not looked at it but it does makeme wonder how we wouldkeepincontact if this place went down. I do not have an anser, but one way would be generate an onion address and make that know
An answer that quite attracts me is to generate an onion address and post it on my profile here where it would get caught by the wayback machine. That would mean that whatever happened here I would be able to spin up a way for people to be able to contact me, but I would only need to backup buck up the key until I needed it. It takes 8.5 hours for one starting with the six characters of my username here, I may well give that a try just to see how it works.
What are your thoughts on any of this stuff?
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...we (collectively) have been voting for this, now we reap what we sowed
