I’m all for sanctioning them too. Economic sanctions are the bare minimum we should be doing to genocidal authoritarians.

Political agenda is a funny euphemism for imperialist invasion and genocide.

Where are you getting free VM hosting?

The comment was in reference to VPN services. Sadly, given theres no right to privacy, you must pay to not be tracked.

i feel like most of your argument is rendered moot with encrypted dns solutions like DoH.

You misunderstand. Large ISPs run their own DNS servers which are preconfigured into the devices they sell. They are the intended recipient and you’d just be encrypting it in transit to their servers.

Another reason to use a VPN is that ISPs have every motive to sell your browsing data and they do. Unlike many other groups tracking you, your ISP inherently has your meatspace name, address, and payment information making their data easily collatable and very valuable.

If you use the default DNS on their provided router they can even tell if someone purchased an XBox, Playstation, or any other smart device just from update and telemetry lookups.

As the article says, by using a VPN youre using someone else’s ISP making that info worthless.

If your threat model includes preventing ad networks from gathering data, a VPN absolutely is a tool to prevent that. Do you have to pay for a service? Probably not if you’re technical enough; a VM in a data center is probably sufficient.

You don’t seem to understand terminal velocity.

They’re campists; they can’t understand any level of moral complexity.

Anyone who opposes the US is inherently good, because surely the west is the only one that can be imperialistic.

Mozilla is a non profit. The most “capitalist” they get is the Mozilla Corp a company owned by the foundation which is basically just for tax purposes. Having a big player in the fediverse helps.

My day is made immeasurably better by Jim Jordan’s failure. This entertainment is surely the best thing he’s ever done for the country.

At least one member said they were switching from McCarthy to Jordan on the second vote, so sadly we’re probably not going to get a revolt.

I think a lot of these points have been made better elsewhere.

The extended discussion of hypothetical US interference just because of a tenuous chain of connection to the CIA is just typical US-badism. The US frequently funds tools which they think further geopolitical goals and this doesn’t inherently mean its untrustworthy, just that their methodology of control is more resilient to uncensored speech; the best example of this is TOR, decentralized, anonymous, and created by Naval Research and DARPA. The author can’t concede this point as it’d bring up they’re unsubtly simping for a different colonial power, one who does require such censorship.

Signal’s centralized nature has always been a major criticism (and it’s reasonable), however as a trade off it’s easy to on-board the tech illiterate. It’s nontrivial to set up a Matrix server and I’ve seen the difficulty of migrating activist groups there. It’s good as a long term goal, but one also has to recognize that a person struggling with housing has different concerns and will prefer to use whatever their friends and family do.