machiavellian

It isn’t as hard as people imagine it to be. For starters you could watch a few entertaining videos by MentalOutlaw or listen to Opt Out and Watchman Privacy podcast.

When you feel more at home with the terminology and understand the basic process behind cryptocurrencies in general and Monero, you could get a wallet, look some at some of their recommended guides, buy some Bitcoin at a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange, trade it for Monero and badabim badaboom - you now have Monero.

I recommend either Haveno Reto or Bisq. Nevertheless, always do your own research and make your own choice. This is a good place to start.

You can use centralized exchanges as well as they make the process a bit easier but then you have to KYC yourself. Which isn’t a big problem because when you trade Bitcoin to Monero, all following transactions are anonymous.

If you want to go hardcore from the start, you could use decentralized P2P exchange to get Monero for cash but this is a bit more advanced and comes with a premium.

It appears that I was mistaken. After looking through Mullvad’s documentation, it truly appears that it has really good fingerprinting protection.

The downsides I see with Mullvad Browser:

1. it makes a lot of automatic connections on startup (which Pale Moon does not (with some caveats));
2. the choice of uBlock Origin and NoScript over the superior uMatrix is also a bit of a disappointment;
3. it forces pointless DoH when the same privacy effect could be achieved for cheaper (resource wise) with just configuring your local resolver.

Sure, you could argue that these automatic connections are necessary and they are to trusted sites but you are still dealing with telemetry which should be disabled by default.

Nevertheless thank you for enlightening me. I will definetly now try out Mullvad Browser to replace Arkened Firefox.

Many people say that SimpleX is not ready to replace the likes of Whatsapp, Telegram and Signal yet but noone specifies exactly what features are missing.

I get that public key cryptography is confusing for the average people but there is no UI fix that is getting around that obstacle if we want people to make informed choices on what platform/protocol to use for communications.

The same thing applies to decentralization - people just need to understand that the trade-off they’re making for communications’ resilience is the comfort of an online addressbook.

Although I admit that there are certain UI elements that could be made better (for example the nickname setting could be stylized a bit better so people can more easily change the names of their contacts to something more familiar), most criticism towards SimpleX comes from people being a bit lazy and not reading the manual before using the app.

TL;DR: I don’t understand what features are missing from SimpleX.

As far as I know, no it isn’t.
My recommendation is that if you want better browser privacy than Librewolf, look into Pale Moon or GNU IceCat which are independently maintained older forks of Firefox (and thus untouched by the plague that is Mozilla). Use uMatrix and JShelter. You can also read these articles on browser privacy. Although many of these articles haven’t been updated in a while, most are still relevant.

Snufkin hopeposting is something I don’t see very often but it is a welcome surprise nevertheless.

Edit: Fixed spelling.

Did you mean GNU Icecat? Or Waterfox?

Just to clarify, this was not meant as an insult. Just a critique of the general consensus that people that sin cannot advocate for morality. And it was a funny meme I thought was relevant. :))

Your argument is, correct me if I’m wrong, that the demand for product X always necessetates its production/supply and that supply will cease when there is no more demand.

A valid argument based on basic market economic principles.

I argue that there are times, when the demand for something does not outweigh the cost incurred (by the society) from the production and supply of a product. Meaning there are cases, such as this one, when it is almost impossible to decrease demand and thus influence the production which in turn would decrease the cost incurred by the society. In my view, the State has to protect foremost its citizenry, not ginormous enterprises. If this protection means going against “market forces”, then so be it.

Both “products” cause harm to society while only a few benefit, so no, it was not a false equivalence.

But then again, I could be mistaken and feel free to correct me on anything. :))

There was/is a demand for slavery. Should we wait for these people to realize that maybe owning slaves is not okay and morally wrong? Or should we just outright ban slavery and not give two fucks how “the market forces” view such action? You tell me.

Inundate me with info!

As you wish!

Look through this index. Maybe something catches your eye. Also some of these links are part of webrings so I think you’ll be occupied with this information for awhile.

If this isn’t a trollpost and your not getting paid for it, then I’m just baffled on how wrong someone can be regarding generic historical facts. Aside from the idea itself, that it is somehow normal and even commendable to assist foreign states against enemies without them requesting it, all the while criticizing the US for similar actions, your opinion ignores the whole Molotov-Ribbentrop secret pact.

And for argument’s sake, let’s just pretend, that Soviets were of kind heart and mind and truly wanted to help and protect the Polish people from the horrifing Nazis they so clearly detested. Then why did they host a joint parade in Brest-Litovsk after having conquered Poland?? Or better yet, why did they mercilessly execute 20 000 officers in the woods of Katyn? Not to mention the fact that the Warsaw Uprising failed because the Soviets deliberatly waited for all future dissidents to be killed off, before “liberating” it.

As a general guideline, I recommend you watch a video or two about how Monero works. Don’t know how strict your threat model is but it’s always good to know what a tool can and cannot do.

I also recommend you run your own Monero node. MentalOutlaw explains pretty nicely why it’s necessary and how to do it.

As for where to spend Monero, there used to be general indexes hosted on HackLiberty and Nowhere. But of the top of my head I can recommend XMRbazaar and ProxyStore.

In case your bored, an index of some intresting material to read.

tomb: Tomb is a minimalistic CLI based hidden file encryption tool based on Linux dm-crypt and LUKS.
In addition to its cool ass name, it also has a GUI that’s called Mausoleum.