Mullvad, they have a feature called DAITA

Thanks, for reference https://mullvad.net/en/vpn/daita but as it’s an arm race I wouldn’t assume it’s the perfect solution.

why cell phones don’t authenticate the towers they connect to.

I believe it’s because they assume it’s not necessary because it was until now

• prohibitively expensive, but now a “tower” is less than 2k EUR e.g. https://www.crowdsupply.com/ukama/ukama
• prohibitively complex, see above, namely you don’t need to be a TelCo engineer to get it going
• probably illegal, namely you needed (and I bet still need in most places) wireless band allocation before you could deploy anything

… so I imagine there was no authentication because there was no practical threat beside few “fun” examples in CCC or DEF Con.

No idea what your analogy about non conventional medicine is about. Feel free to explain.

just be visible to your home network’s ISP instead of your phone’s ISP.

Indeed, which is already what I mentioned, namely another group. It’s about the threat model namely if you trust one ISP more than another. I believe your understood that but chose not to acknowledge it and I’m not sure why but maybe it related to your analogy that I didn’t get.

Edit: if you and others are interested in the topic I recommend https://splintercon.net/ plenty of resources on the topic.

PS: FWIW I didn’t suggest VPN is the solution to all problems but they do alleviate some. The point is one must understand both how they work and their threat model.

I’'d argue changing who can see your data from either a large group to a smaller one or one you do trust vs one you do not trust precisely is protecting your privacy.

Also FWIW you can host your VPN, you do not have to rely on a commercial VPN provider.

a VPN doesn’t protect your privacy

Does from your ISP unless they do deep packet inspection and related techniques.

I’m lazy, bought my phone from Murena, they deGoogled it for me.

Who in the EU wants a US car

Bunch of people according to most EU capitals where one can see, sadly, plenty of Swatzicars.

move somewhere I can get around with just a bicycle.

So… FWIW that’d be Brussels and I bet most European cities. By bike you can get your food in, get to the nearby Brico to fix pretty much anything in your house, get deliveries with national post service, but you can cycle all the way to the airport (if somehow you don’t want to use the train), park there and get… well pretty much anywhere else in the World.

There were and still are into quantum computing.

They are absolute champions of tech-washing and green-washing.

It’s literally anything to say, do and spending money on to make people forget that their core business is actually advertising.

True but wouldn’t also literacy be about knowing what defaults are and how to change them?

Helping others is nice but if it’s babysitting rather than raising them up, then they can’t in turn help others.

A good example to “play” with could be https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ which does highlight the idea of “bits of identifying information” namely :

“A “bit” is a basic unit of information for computers. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values, often represented as “1” or “0”, for example. In your results from Cover Your Tracks, some metrics may be listed as “1” or “0”, or “true” or “false”, indicating whether a setting is enabled or disabled. While each individual metric’s details may seem like a small amount of information, when combined with your browser’s other metrics, they can uniquely identify your browser. Your results are measured in “bits of identifying information,” which is a combined summary of all these metrics.”

Point being, not all behaviors, conscious or not, explicit or not, lead to the same amount of bits. Some are VERY valuable, others are basically pointless. Knowing the difference means not spending a lot of energy fighting without making a difference.

If you are into that could be interesting to learn about metadata, e.g EXIF data, and how anything can be used for fingerprinting. What’s interesting IMHO is to pragmatically know how valuable a specific piece of data or metadata is useful for fingerprinting, namely how identifying it truly is. For example knowing if a file comes from Android or iOS is too generic to be useful whereas timestamp with geolocation data segments the potential space a lot more.

Indeed, IMHO what’s important here is precisely WHY the question is asked, namely is it to evaluate agency, passion as a proxy for skills potentially, or the opportunity to exploit.

I mean again my initial reaction would be that indeed … BUT it depends. If they genuinely offer say 3x rate, it’s on demand from MY side (not the client), double vacations, etc then maybe. Again it has to be something that’s actually interesting.

Sadly this is not even .001% the case, usually companies consider the weekend an extension of the week and such cases, they can absolutely go get fucked.

quick test as to if they’re your people or not

Absolutely… it’s like when during job interview the recruiter ask if you code on the weekend. Some people treat that like the absolute worst question ever. Yes, in most cases I would argue it’s to probe if you can be abused by working over time for free… but maybe you are into that or rather you do have found a way to make it work, e.g. NOT work during some weekdays. The point is that the question itself is a way to discover BOTH ways, for them AND for you. It is perfectly fine to stop right there and then if any of you is now aware that it’s a show stopper because of whatever difference. The entire purpose of dating or interviews is to engage in a more involving relationship ONLY if it’s worth it for both. It’s a discovery phase, not a “let’s close the sale” phase.

Precisely https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/jun/27/tony-cox-epidemiology-risk-assessment-chatgpt-ai

Starting to look like the biggest f*cking corner humanity ever faced.

conjure up an email summary within seconds that can shave off up to 5 whole minutes

… but can it? Like actually, can one do that?

Sure an LLM can generate something akin to a summary. It will look like it’s getting some of the points in a different form… but did it get the actual gist of it? Did it skip anything meaningful that once ignore will have far reaching consequences?

So yes sure an LLM can generate shorter text related to what was said during the meeting but if there is limited confidence in the accuracy and no responsibility, unlike somebody who would take notes and summarize potentially facing negative consequences, then wouldn’t the reliance on such a tool create more risk?

No I did not and I’m not sure what you imagine “regular users” might be. I feel that if someone goes the extra length to get their browser outside of a store, they can do the same with extensions, is it extravagant?

Right, is https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium then? Take like 4 clicks to get a working AppImage.