The metadata in the headers can be avoided using Memoryhole and similar protocols which embed the headers inside the encrypted payload. The problem is again barrier to entry. Low-tech users generally can’t even handle app installs on desktops.

When you say “worry”, that’s not the right word for it. My boycott against Google is not fear-driven. I will not feed Google anything it can profit from as an ethical stance. Even if an expert linux tor user were on Google, I’m not sure we could exchange email in a way that ensures Google gets no profitable data. If we use PGP coupled with Memoryhole to strip out the headers, I’m not sure Google would accept a msg with a missing or bogus From: header. But if so, Google still possibly learns the user’s timezone. Though that may be useless if Google learns nothing else about that user. But we’re talking obscure corner cases at this point. Such an expert user would have no Google dependency anyway.

MS/google-dependent friends are generally extremely low-tech. They don’t know the difference between Firefox and the Internet. They don’t know the difference between Wi-Fi and Internet. Linux – what’s linux? They would say. At best, they just think of it as a mysterious nerd tool to be avoided. So what can I do wholly on my end to reach them via gmail without Google getting a shred of profitable data? Nothing really. So I just don’t connect directly with a large segment of friends and family. Some of them are probably no longer reachable. Some are in touch with people who connect to me via XMPP, so sometimes info/msgs get proxied through the few XMPP users. It’s still a shitshow because Google still gets fed through that proxied inner circle of friends and family. In the past when someone needed to reach me directly, they would create a Hushmail or Protonmail mail account for that temporary purpose (like coordinating a trip somewhere). But that option is mostly dead.

I just had to reach out to plumbers for quotes. All of them are gmail-served. All I could do is refuse to share my email address and push them to use analog mechanisms. They are not hungry enough for business to alter their online workflow or create protonmail accounts.

That’s exactly what I did with hushmail. I would tell low-tech folks to get a hushmail account then I would use hushtools.com to do all the key management, putting my key on the keyring and grabbing their key. So the other person did not need to know anything or take any special steps. That was best option of my time. But last time I checked hushmail was still entirely non-gratis.

Protonmail emerged when HM became non-gratis and messed with hushtools. But PM requires every one of their own users to do key management which creates a barrier to entry. I would have to walk a PM user through adding my key to my record in their address book and walk them through sending me their key. That effort is a show stopper for many. I might as well walk them through setting up a PGP-capable MUA. But then if they keep their gmail or MS acct the metadata still feeds those corps.

This simple answer is no doubt the most overlooked; probably as a consequence of the tyranny of convenience… people too lazy to go to the library.

I give out my XMPP address and offer Snikket accounts. Some go along with it and some do not. I lost touch with some friends. Some people are in contact via phone but that’s not ideal some connections are lost as phone numbers change.

I used to push some people toward Hushmail until they dropped the gratis plans. Then for a while I pressured people onto Protonmail but then distanced myself from PM when the brought in Google reCAPTCHAs and killed off Hydroxide. Tuta is a non-starter because Tuta’s variety of e2ee is incompatible with open standards, thus forcing me to periodically login to a web UI (also due to them sabotaging their Android app by way of forced obsolescence pushed in the most incompetent way).

So it’s a shitty state of affairs. 2024 and simply sending a msg to someone has become a total shitshow.

I refuse to fund my oppressors

Bingo. I live by this philosophy.

Although more precisely: I refuse to fund feed my oppressors. The reason for s/fund/feed/ swap is that our oppressors profit from our data too. So e.g. I won’t even email a gmail user because my data would then feed Google (an oppressor because of how they dictate e-mail terms among other oppressions).

The others are right. Trying to stream from a torrent seems wasteful and complex.

But if you must for some strange reason, perhaps it would work to use webtor.io to produce an http-reachable audio file which could be curl/wget-fetched and piped to an audio decoder/player. I doubt you could make webtor fetch pieces linearly from the beginning. You would likely have to wait until the last piece is fetched to start streaming.

I’ve not fetched subtitles in a while but back when I did, I recall all the websites hosting them were extremely protectionist… more so than any other category of content on the web.

Of course the fix is to have torrents for the subtitle collections, perhaps by language.

It basically is saying that if you have more money then you have more “votes”.

That’s simply true. It doesn’t do anyone any good to disregard the facts.

Or to put it in another way: If you have more money you matter more.

That abstraction doesn’t help much. And first of all, it’s more accurate to derive the statement “If you have more money then you have more influence”.

It’s still a shitty status quo, but it is what it is. The worse thing you can do is tell people not to boycott shit products on the basis of rejecting reality. It’d be like telling people not to vote in elections because their vote is a drop in the ocean.

Some people vote for democrats, then they cancel their own vote by getting their internet service from Spectrum, buying fuel from Chevron for their car, shipping their packages using FedEx, getting their phone service from AT&T, banking at PNC Bank, flying on Boeing planes, shopping on Amazon, doing their web searches on a Microsoft syndicate’s site (e.g. DDG), buying Sony devices… etc. They either have no clue that most of their voting is actually for the republicans, or they think that drop-in-the-ocean vote that comes once in 4 years somehow carries more weight than the daily votes they cast with reckless disregard.

Greg Abbott’s war chest is mostly fed by oil companies. If you buy fuel for a car, you help Greg Abbott and other republicans. And if you buy from Chevron, you give the greatest support to republicans (Chevron is an ALEC member).

You might let her know that she can borrow DVDs from the public library at no cost. Another little-known gratis option is freesat and terrestrial broadcast. I recently started using MythTV as a PVR to record broadcast TV and was pleasantly surprised to find no commercial interruptions (but if there are commercials in her region, MythTV can cut them out).

I didn’t see the OP’s pic but these groups generally work against enshitification of the world:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Notice that none of those communities are on Cloudflared instances (thus also avoid propagating the enshitified portion of the fedi).

Ending capitalism is not the /only/ way. Within a capitalistic system, you can boycott shit. Most consumers are pushovers but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m boycotting hundreds of shitty companies. Off the top of my head:

• Amazon
• Cloudflare
• Microsoft
• Facebook
• Google
• Apple
• (surveillance advertisers in general)
• (all closed-source s/w)
• HP
• Proctor & Gamble
• Unilever
• all ALEC members (American Express, Anheuser Busch, Boeing, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, Chevron, FedEx, Motorola, PNC bank, Sony, TimeWarner)
• many shitty banks
• Paypal
• AT&T
• GMA members (Coke, Pepsi, Kraft - Heinz, Kellogg’s, General Mills, McCormick, Hormel, Smucker)
• BetterThanCashAlliance.org members (visa, mastercard, unilever) – war on cash
• Bayar-Monsanto
• Dupont
• Hershey
• Nestlé
• Exxon/Mobil
• Comcast
• Koch
• Home Depot
• Lowes
• …etc

Those are all shitty companies that significantly worsen the world. Giving money or data to any of them contributes to enshitification of the world.

Of course it’s an option to stop supporting assholes. Become ethical. Be the change you want to see.

That’s good to know. I would hope a metal anchor to reshape when temp causes expansion. It’s a shame to hear it’s the brick that’s forced to expand. In my case it’s a solid metal rod, so it sounds like the metal is guaranteed to split the brick in a temp change.

It sounds like I have to pull out the shank, bore the hole to 10mm, and either use chemical anchor or fasten it using a sheet metal w/2 nuts.

I could not pull it out with my hands after tapping it in. But to be clear, there’s only a sheer force to deal with, and it’s light.

I cut a bicycle axle bolt in half, and embedded it in the brick so there is a bicycle sprocket on the wall. Then a chain wraps another sprocket, which turns a shaft that goes all the way though the wall to the other side, where it connects to a right-angle gearbox, which attaches to a water valve. It’s lightweight overall… just the weight of a sprocket, chain, and a small decorative wood thing out of wood to serve as a handle.

This might come a bit too late but why didn’t you just get threaded rod and use one of these instead?

I did not know anchors like that existed for machine bolts. That’s good to know! However, it would not have helped in this situation. The bicycle axle has non-standard threading (~9mm bolt with a thread pitch that’s 2 steps away from the norm). Since it had a special nut that interfaced to ball bearings, I could not bring in a standard bolt or threaded rod. And the threaded portion of the axle was short enough that no threads could have gone into the wall. I could have added threads to the bare portion, but my die set skips the ø=9mm size.

I was asking more for future reference – whether or not I should ever repeat this. And I think you answered that. Even if I get lucky in the future on getting a perfect fit at that moment, temp changes could blow it. I guess I’ll assume anchors (chemical and mechanical) are designed to handle the temp changes.

I don’t have anything specialized like simple green, but wouldn’t acetone or denatured alcohol make a decent primer? I think priming the smooth rubber surface should be the easy part but it’s the bitumen band that’s tricky. It has a sandy texture and sand crumbles off when I rub it. Perhaps I should steel brush it where it needs adhesive.

Thanks for the suggestion but in my case there is nothing to nail to. A shingle must be attached to thick (~2mm) rubber that’s just formed to be vertical. Perhaps I need to rivet the two rubber pieces together. Or I might try construction glue again but also get a couple metal plates and screws to clamp them together as a permanent clamp.

Which git repo is used to host the article doesn’t matter. That project is mirrored on ½ dozen other repos. Did you follow the links of the citations? The article is well cited but sometimes the links go stale (or become cloudflared). If you had trouble reaching the cited sources plz let me know & I’ll get the author to fix it. Or you can file a bug report in the issues tab.

The bug is most likely in the scenario of a default Cloudflare config. Cloudflare pushes a captcha to all apps other than the Tor Browser that come over Tor (in the default config). This would of course cause the #Lemmy javascript to go apeshit.

Better or worse depends on who you ask.

I boycott Cloudflare and I avoid it. Some CF hosts are configured to whitelist Tor so we don’t encounter a block screen or captcha. For me that is actually worse because I could inadvertently interact with a CF website without knowing about the CF MitM. I want to be blocked by Cloudflare because it helps me avoid those sites.

The CF onion (IIUC) cuts out the exit node which is good. But CF is still a MitM so for me that’s useless.

Some users might not care that CF has a view on all their packets - they just don’t want to be blocked. So for them the onion is a bonus.

The drain is working well now after the sulfuric acid cleanse. But I suspect it’s double trapping or something because after draining water some gurgling goes on for a while. I suspect the pipes are embedded in a concrete slab on the ground floor, so rework would require lots of demolition.

W.r.t CSAM, CF is pro-CSAM. When a CF customer was hosting CSAM, a whistleblower informed Cloudflare. Instead of taking action against the CSAM host, CF doxxed the ID of the whistleblower to the CSAM host admin, who then published the ID details so the users would retaliate against the whistleblower. (more details)

There is no way to “disable” cloudflare if an instance has chosen to use it. It will sit between you and the server for all traffic.

Some people use CF DNS and keep the CF proxy disabled by default. They set it to only switch on the CF proxy if the load reaches an unmanageable level. This keeps the mitm off most of the time. But users who are wise to CF will still avoid the site because it still carries the risk of a spontaneous & unpredictable mitm.