ExtremeDullard

So I'm on the market for a 4G or 5G mobile hotspot with a build-in VPN client I can carry around in my backpack and connect my cellphone to. I've looked far and wide, and really the only manufacturer that seems to make what I want is GL.iNet.

The two battery-powered models they offer that interest me are the Mudi v2 and the Puli: they only do 4G and I wish they did 5G too, but I can live with that. Other than that, they really tick all the boxes for me.

From what I could read, the GL.iNet company also seems very open and very responsive. That's a plus too.

But I have one giant problem that prevents me from whipping out the credit card: GL.iNet is a Chinese company, and those products are sensitive applications. I know I can flash OpenWRT separately on those devices to ensure they're not doing stuff behind my back, but I don't really want to do that because I'd lose the GL.iNet plugins and custom UI. Not to mention, I have no free time for that. I'm looking for a ready-made solution if possible with this one.

Anybody knows if GL.iNet can be trusted?

Also, has anybody ordered from Europe using their EU store? They say they ship direct from Europe but they give no details.

And finally, what do you think of those two mobile VPN routers if you own one. Do they work well? I read somewhere that they can be buggy with certain VPN providers. Do they work in Europe? I assume they do since they sell EU plugs but maybe there are caveats.

I'm investigating getting off the cell network permanently to avoid at least the constant triangulation of my position. I figured I'd look into getting a VoIP number and getting calls and texts over WiFi. I don't mind being unreachable when I'm not connected to a hotspot, so it's not a problem for me.

But before looking for a good VoIP provider, I decided to check if WiFi still worked in airplane mode. And indeed it works. But to my surprise, when I connected the WiFi, my cellphone provider's name also came right back up at the top right of the screen. In airplane mode? What the hell?

Long story short, after investigating a bit, I realized I had WiFi calling enabled. So I can in fact already get calls and texts without being on the cell network.

And I'm thinking, maybe that's good enough for privacy?

I mean I know SIMs leak information like ICCID / IMSI / IMEI so obviously they have no reason not to do that over WiFi also and that's not so hot.

But on the plus side, none of that information is linked to cell towers and location anymore - at least not precise location if I'm not on a VPN - the baseband processor is off and can't do whatever shady chit-chat it does with the SIM and the cell towers, and I can still use my normal phone numbers without having to change and tell a million people that I have new numbers if I go with VoIP.

Also, I don't store my contacts on my SIMs and I use a deGoogled Android. So I figure that limits how much adversarial software can exploit the SIMs to leak data.

So it seems to me that WiFi calling may be a good solution for me for better privacy without too many compromises.

Can you think of something I missed that I should know before using this feature?

After their shameless Synology shilling a couple of weeks ago, today Techlore is trying to sell me Proton Pass.

Is Proton Pass a bad password manager? I don't know. It seems okay, but I have no opinion.

What I do know is that Techlore is affiliated with Proton, which makes their newest 10-minute video - in which they reveal the affiliation only at the last minute - 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Unfortunately, In the business they're in, the merest hint of a bias kind of invalidates any advice they give. As the saying goes, when you point out other people's body odor, you'd better make sure you took a shower yourself.

Unsubscribe...

I like Techlore (https://www.techlore.tech if you don't know) and I usually regard them as one of the most impartial and most trustworthy Youtubers out there. But for the past few months, I couldn't help noticing their somewhat heavy bias towards some of their video sponsors. Still, everybody has to eat right?

This time though, it looks like Synology flew them over to Taiwan, and if you watch their video at the event, it's wall-to-wall Synology shilling. I'm really disappointed.

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment but... God I hate those caps.

None of what follows is new. I know this stuff happens all the time. And yet somehow this insignificant thing shocked me and it's been gnawing at me for the past few days. And today was the icing on the shit cake.

So my wife ordered a a foot massage machine. $50, typical el-cheapo thing made in China. The thing was shipped to our home out in the boonies in less than 48 hours. Wow!

My wife opened the box, got the device out onto the floor and... she couldn't fit her feet inside. She's not big, but apparently the device was designed for customers in the Shire. Unusable.

So she emailed the distributor who told her to cut the cord, send them a photo proving the destruction and throw it away herself. Not return the device. Not pretend to return the device and the device is thrown away behind her back. No no: this time, the distributor told her in no uncertain terms that it's cheaper for them to let her destroy the thing herself.

And then it hit me: here is a device that was born in China, put together by some underpaid workers in a nondescript factory, designed by someone who didn't give a shit, made out of materials that probably came out of the ground somewhere in Africa and in Saudi Arabia - probably involving child labor at some point or other - put on a boat, shipped halfway around the world, then put into a truck, only to be landfilled here.

It didn't even see a single second of use. This is utterly absurd and completely depressing.

I'm not compatible with that. When I buy something, the thing has value and I want it to have a decently useful life. It's not about ecology or money: it's just basic respect for the resources and the human labor that went into this thing. The value of the object is what it cost the Earth and the people who toiled to make it and ship it to me. When I use my things, I show respect for those who made them and it justifies the use ot the materials they're made of.

But here I was looking at that poor thing across the room, unloved and unlovable, whose sole purpose as an object was to be landfilled without ever seeing any use. It consumed resources and someone worked to make it, yet somehow it never had any value for anybody.

And the most depressing thing about it is, its very existence from Chinese factory to my local landfill is totally absurd and makes no sense at all, yet all the invididual steps that contributed to it being fabricated and ultimately landing on our doorstep were a series of perfectly rational economical decisions: someone found added value in designing and building a shit foot massage machine, my wife found it worth buying sight unseen, someone figured there was money to be made shipping it here, and the distributor decided to outsource its destruction to the customers because it's cheaper than destroying it themselves - let alone shipping it back to Shenzen or wherever. And yet when you string everything together, the net result is senseless waste and production of things that have no inherent worth. How crazy is that eh?

I couldn't throw it away. So I replaced the cord and I gave it to the local Red Cross store yesterday to give to someone in need or sell it for pennies. Today, I passed by the shop on my way to work and saw the damn thing in their garbage container behind the store. In the box. Unopened. I guess it will be going to the landfill after all...

That really put the final damper on my day today...

Sorry if this is the wrong venue, but I really needed to vent.

I've never been super-impressed by Rob Braxman. I mean he's never truly wrong in what he was saying in his Youtube videos, but his explanations are over-simplistic, a bit of a shortcut (but fair enough to reach a wide audience I guess), and mostly designed to sell his meh deGoogled cellphones and equally meh privacy services. But all in all, he's somewhat watchable and sometimes informative after I'm done watching all the new videos from the other, more interesting channels I follow.

But lately, his videos seem to have shifted markedly toward unhinged rants and sensationalist conspiracy theory. His latest video for instance is utter nonsense:

Skynet 2024: The Infrastructure is Complete!

I mean yeah, okay, technically he's talking about a real thing. But Skynet? And doomsday Terminator imagery from 1984? Really?

I'm pretty sure the man doesn't have all his fries in the cone anymore. This can't possibly be a conscious strategy to win more Youtube subscribers: this sort of video is going to lose him the part of his audience that has a genuine and technically-informed interest in privacy, and I doubt he's ever going to become a favorite of the sort of crowd who likes conspiracy theories.

Either that or Youtube is a lot stupider than I thought and he noticed an uptick in subscribers when he makes videos like that. At any rate, I really hesitate to click on any of his new videos now.

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment. But... Holy smokes they drive me up the wall. They really do!

I had no trouble adapting when aluminum can pull-tabs got replaced by push-tabs, because it was pretty much the same movement, and I could see the immediate advantage of not getting cut by a pull-tab.

But the tethered cap is fighting decades of muscle memory in me: I'm used to taking the cap off with one hand and keeping it there while taking a swig with the other. Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it's out of the way. It feels like drinking in handcuffs each and every time...

So unlike the pull-tab, the tethered plastic bottle cap is one of those compulsory eco solutions that constantly make you feel ever-so-slightly more miserable all the time, and I hate that because ecology only works when it brings something of value both to people and to the environment.

I use Firefox and Firefox Mobile on the desktop and Android respectively, Chromium with Bromite patches on Android, and infrequently Brave on the desktop to get to sites that only work properly with Chromium (more and more often - another whole separate can of worms too, this...) And I always pay attention to disable google.com and gstatic.com in NoScript and uBlock Origin whenever possible.

I noticed something quite striking: when I hit sites that use those hateful captchas from Google - aka "reCAPTCHA" that I know are from Google because they force me to temporarily reenable google.com and gstatic.com - statistically, Google quite consistently marks the captcha as passed with the green checkmark without even asking me to identify fire hydrants or bicycles once, or perhaps once but the test passes even if I purposedly don't select certain images, and almost never serves me those especially heinous "rolling captchas" that keep coming up with more and more images to identify or not as you click on them until it apparently has annoyed you enough and lets you through.

When I use Firefox however, the captchas never pass without at least one test, sometimes several in a row, and very often rolling captchas. And if I purposedly don't select certain images for the sake of experimentation, the captchas keep on coming and coming and coming forever - and if I keep doing it long enough, they plain never stop and the site become impossible to access.

Only with Firefox. Never with Chromium-based browsers.

I've been experimenting with this informally for months now and it's quite clear to me that Google has a dark pattern in place with its reCAPTCHA system to make Chrome and Chromium-based browsers the path of least resistance.

It's really disgusting...

Hey everybody,

I installed LineageOS 20 (Android 13) on an old cellphone I had lying around. It works fine, apart from an odd problem: when I connect the phone to my computer by USB, the "Charging this device via USB" notification appears but all the USB preference options are greyed out.

Data transfer works however: if I go into System > Developer options > Default USB configuration, set it to Data Transfer, unplug the USB cable and plug it back in, the options are still greyed out, but File Transfer is selected and the drive appears on the PC. So it's not the cable, and my ports or plugs don't need cleaning.

It's very inconvenient to have to enable and disable this in the Developer options each time I want to transfer a file, and I most certainly don't want to leave Data tranfer enabled all the time.

I've been looking for a solution everywhere, and it seems plenty of people have the same problem with a lot of different phones, but nobody has a solution.

Anybody knows what might be going on here? Any adb shell command I could issue to reenable what might be disabled?

So I'm in the bus, happily browsing Lemmy in Jerboa. I clicked on a Reddit link in a Lemmy post that silently opened the Reddit app without my noticing (cuz I was paying attention to my bus stop). The subreddit had this grey theme going on, so overall the Reddit client kinda looked like Jerboa.

I kept on browsing, but then I thought "That's odd, my Reddit comments show up in Jerboa... Does it aggregate? That's slick. But how does it know my Reddit creds?"

Kept on browsing some more... Wow! They even thought of making the karma points look red. Jerboa is really slick!

And then I went to my home, the UI turned bright red again and I had a "Oh..." moment... Tap twice on the square button, back to Jerboa.

That was an oddly mind-bending 20 seconds.

I'm aware that you can "edit" binary files with :%!xxd but seriously, am I the only one to think it's totally pathetic? Vim should be better than that.

I use Hexer myself. It's binary editing done right and it should be merged into vim - as in, type :hex or something and the edition mode switches to that editor's layout.