Yes, surely TOR will protect us from government surveillance…
I don't get the sarcasm. Everything that you've posted suggests that it will.
Simply pointing out public funding doesn't make it less secure. It's implying (or allowing others to imply) some hidden conspiracy that breaks TOR in some way that we don't know about. If this is a source of vulnerability, it has not been demonstrated.
Based on what we do know:
“We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time”, but “with manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users”.
when used in conjunction with other privacy tools such as OTR, Cspace, ZRTP, RedPhone, Tails, and TrueCrypt was ranked as “catastrophic,” leading to a “near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications, presence…”
TOR is open source and the protocol is well understood. The software has been audited multiple times by multiple different sources.
The TOR network itself is secure.
The people who get 'caught using TOR' are caught based on other failures of their personal security. Like forgetting to enable TOR once and logging into an IRC channel, connecting to a malicious site with a javascript enabled browser, running TOR on an exploitable phone or running a business who's payments travel through financial networks viewable by the adversary.
There's more to cybersecurity than simply installing the TOR browser bundle. If you are not familiar with this field, do not risk your freedom or safety trying to do things on TOR which would cause you to come to the attention of intelligence services or other bad people.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
I've heard that the best billionaires really love Greenland, just let them roam free in northern Greenland (wouldn't want to annoy any actual Greenlanders). Don't worry about them, these Masters of Industry will pull themselves up by their bootstraps and have a fire and shelter in no time.
They're giving good advice but, in my opinion, they are using the reputation of Mullvad to 'privacy-wash' their public image by associating with a trusted brand.
WhatsApp is not a secure messaging service, your messages are not private. Being end to end encrypted doesn't mean anything if both ends are compromised by having the app installed on them (or being vendor rooted).
Various companies go out of their way to make plugin-ins for the platform that everyone uses and everyone uses the platform because of the additional support that it receives on account of being the most popular.
Microsoft is the one that ultimately benefits by being able to make anti-consumer decisions because each individual decision by Microsoft isn't as bad as the friction required to switch and learn to a new IDE. Microsoft can move the product in any direction that they want as long as they do it in steps tiny enough to not scare people away from their platform.
In the end we're the frogs that they're boiling, eventually you gotta jump out of the pot.
Nobody is deploying these at scale to harvest water to sell, it's way too expensive. Probably even more so than desalination.
These kinds of devices would be useful in areas where they didn't have access to preexisting infrastructure. There the comparison would be between operating one of these devices or air lifting water in by helicopter. The fact that it's expensive isn't as much a concern when the alternative is to pay for airlift delivery.
It's probably being A/B tested and you're not in the test group yet.
Or, alternatively, OP is from an area that's been designated as having an increased risk of fake accounts and these extra measures are being deployed selectively.
I would recommend not installing beta drivers in that case.