Those that do not vote don’t seem to vote meaningfully different from voters.
This is to be expected, as non-voters either don’t care to vote as they have their own problems, or have a general mistrust of the voting system. These traits are not specific to progressives or conservatives, so they don’t skew the outcome meaningfully.
As much as i would like it, there is no 1/3 of the population that is made from antinatalist communists just waiting for the signal.
Sadly election results prove every few years, that you are the only one seeking radical change.
~30-50% want extreme conservativism/capitalism.
~20-40% want everything as-is.
~30% want mild improvements like a really low UBI.
<5% want to get rid of oligarchs.
<.1% want to eliminate suffering.
…until the owners of that company realize how much more money they could make by introducing stuff like planned obsolescence.
Humans that have no price are really really rare.
There are 2 kinds of companies:
What this means in this case is that only your own E-Mail server running on a Raspi in your own home can be considered private or secure in the long run. Unfortunately this is really really hard to do, which is the only reason i have not done it yet.
Personally i do not consider any E-Mail private, because E-Mail is not E2E-encrypted, and 99.9% of times one side of the conversation is going to be hosted on some shady companies servers.
Of course Proton delivers a great service, because they make an insecure protocol a little less insecure, and i personally use Proton mail. Unfortunately their closed-source nature makes it impossible to switch providers without abandoning their great software.
As for services like Drive, they can actually be hosted privately and securely on your own Raspi with stuff like NextCloud/OwnCloud.
For those that can’t/don’t want to self-host, i would recommend paying for a hoster that hosts FOSS software and contributes to it either with money or code. In that case you would probably loose E2E-encryption, but gain the ability to switch providers once your provider turns on you. In that case at least some of your money would continue to offer value to you by having improved the software you are still using.
Personally, i have never experienced problems while reading from USB sticks, but i have while writing. I have a 15+ years old USB2 stick and a new USB3.x stick. The USB2 stick writes with constant ~20MB/s, while USB3 is all over the place between 200MB/s and ~0.1MB/s. Unusable for me. For a while i used external HDDs and SSDs over USB3, as they somehow run without problems, but they are cumbersome and expensive.
Therefore i have switched to transfer files over the network (for large files i plug in Ethernet) using KDE connect. Unfortunately it can not send folders (yet), so i would .tar them before sending, and untar them after.
LocalSend would also be an option. Maybe that can do folders natively.
I am running BTRFS on multiple PCs and Laptops since about 8-10 years ago, and i had 2 incidents:
I am using BTRFS RAID0 since about 6 years. Even there, i had 0 issues. In all those years BTRFS snapshoting has saved me countless hours when i accidentially misconfigured a program or did a accidential rm -r ~/xyz.
For me the real risk in BTRFS comes from snapper, which takes snapshots even when the disk is almost full. This has resulted in multiple systems not booting because there was no space left. That’s why i prefer Timeshift for anything but my main PC.
Here some info about how much and what kind of user data is being sold (GPS position,…), and the legality of it all.
Tipps to prevent future accidents:
Mistakes are unpreventable due to our error-prone brains, but it is a choice to repeat them.
Extracting the keys locked to an TPM is supposed to be impossible, so you do not need to worry about somebody stealing your keys.
If you are having sensitive information stored using closed-source software/OS, you can stop reading right here. This is your biggest vulnerability and the best thing you can do is to switch to FOSS.
For those that have already switched:
It made me think about how to improve the resistance of large FOSS projects against state-sponsored attackers injecting backdoors.
The best thing i came up with would be to have each contribution checked by a contributor of a rival state. So a Russian (or Chinese) contributor verifies a contribution by an American.
The verifying contributors would have to be chosen at random in a way that is not predeterminable by an attacker, otherwise a Chinese-state contributor will contribute harmless code until the next verifier will be a US-based Chinese spy. Then they will submit a backdoor and have it checked by an American citizen paid by China.
Also the random number generator has to be verifiable by outsiders, otherwise a spy in the Linux-Foundation can manipulate the outcome of choosing a favorable verifier for a backdoor.
This can obviously only be done as long as there are lots of contributors from rivaling states. If the US decided that Linux can only allow contributors from USA/EU, then this model can not work and Linux would have to relocate into a more favorable state like Switzerland.
What one should keep in mind that even if the US would ban all foreign contributions and the foundation would not relocate, Linux would still be more secure than any closed source OS, as those foreigners can still look at the code and blow the whistle on bugs/backdoors. It would however be much more insecure than it is now, as the overhead for finding bugs/backdoors would be much larger.
Suffering is bad, and the intentional or neglient creation of suffering is evil.
Those that have created suffering have done evil, and those that are currently creating suffering, or plan to create suffering are evil. The larger the suffering, the greater the evil.
Those that have done evil, but are no longer willing to do evil are not evil.
In the end, evil is a simplification that allows us to take power from those that want to create suffering without needing to know what exactly they are doing or planning.