kbal

Pick one that has a wireguard config generator, so you don't need to use any client software besides the normal linux wg client.

I'd also look for one that accepts anonymous payment methods. Even if you don't intend to go to the trouble to use that yourself, it's probably a good sign if it's available. Mullvad is pretty safe and served me well until they stopped doing port forwarding. Proton, windscribe, azire, and airvpn were the ones that seemed most recommended when I went to look for a new one a few months ago.

I think that's just some scrabble players angry at all the non-words

Only 1 in 100 Americans knows that HTML was named for "hot metal" after a type of ancient torture device.

Well, she's not wrong that we need more influential people fighting back against this latest push in the global coordinated effort to put an end to communications privacy. It's really quite alarming how little attention it seems to get most of the time. Civil society seemed much more robust when it fought off similar attacks in the 1990s. I do hope that the "VC community" isn't our only hope.

But of course Signal can’t interoperate with another messaging platform, without them raising their privacy bar significantly

Signal is supposed to be free software. You could probably manage to interoperate at least with other operators of actual Signal-Server instances, if you wanted to.

More importantly, you don't need to be on an airplane to use airplane mode.

Kids should focus on the one thing AI can't do: Stand-up comedy.

"Piracy shield" sounds pretty stupid. It needs more of a catchy name. "The Great Melonian Firewalls" maybe?

Whittaker says that, for better or worse, a phone number remains a necessary requisite

Worse. It is for the worse. We sure did wait a long time for this half measure, Signal.

Every once in a while I wonder what things are like back in the land of Microsoft. That this message doesn't give the user even the slightest hint about what it wants to do more specifically than "improve your experience" tells me all I need to know.

I'm just glad I checked the comments here before wasting even one second watching the video.

This isn't really the right decade for that.

Price discrimination just means charging different prices to different customers based on what you think you know about them. Its benign form would be a market vendor asking higher prices of individual people who look like they can afford it, and then really fleecing the tourists who look like they'll fall for it. In that form it looks perfectly wholesome compared to what the big corporations get up to today: Supermarkets selling smaller package sizes in poor areas at lower sticker price but higher unit price, airlines asking different ticket prices depending what they know about your web browsing history, et cetera. I do not rate it a good thing overall. Even if we take it for granted that international borders are a thing, and services can't be intermediated or subjected to arbitrage, the rich man in a luxury condo in Brazil paying less for some thing than the minimum-wage worker in New York does not strike me as reflecting any kind of justice.

But this is the Internet. International borders are not supposed to be a thing here, and still aren't for the most part despite the best efforts of the most repressive governments to change that. The cost of shipping data from one side of the world to the other is effectively zero. The system where it's broadly true that different parts of the world have vastly different purchasing power is an injustice, it's not something we should be attempting to replicate in cyberspace. I can route my network packets so that they appear to be coming from any region I choose, and so can anyone who can afford Netflix in any country. It's not a freedom I want to give up so that big streaming services can extract maximum revenue from each national market separately.