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Joined
2 yr. ago

I'm currently testing https://piefed.social/u/Libb all my new participation will be posted there, at least for the time being.

A 50-something French dude that's old enough to think blogs are still cool, if not cooler than ever. Also, I like to write and to sketch.https://thefoolwithapen.com/

  • Either someone randomly downvoted (ok, bye). Or someone thinks downvoting me is punishing me in some way for daring say something they don't agree with (no idea how that could be punishing me, but hey). Or someone is too lazy to explain their reasoning. In any case, I don't think it's worth much consideration.

    And, yep, as far as I'm concerned I consider this an OK approach. Not faultless, but usable ;)

  • Not much

    • Full disk encryption on my computers.
    • Password manager, for strong & unique passwords everywhere
    • Linux as my OS
    • Firewall.
    • Backups: local (encrypted) and remote (encrypted).
    • Computers are all wired to the network, no WiFi.
    • Also, I use my phone as a... phone and for little else.I mean, there is a 2FA app and the few mandatory apps I must have access to (finance, and banking) and that is it. No social, no games, no nothing. Not even email is configured on that trash piece of corporate spyware. I sincerely consider it a threat to our privacy so I don't trust it beside what I have no option to trust it with. I also suppose that this device, even though I deactivated the setting, is constantly listening to what we say nearby. So, when I don't need it, I store it in a thick box to reduce whatever it may be recording.
    • I use as little digital tools as I can. I went back to analog (ie, for my agenda and I hardly see any reason to go back to digital). I take all my notes longhand too, and it's been more than a year I have not read an ebook as I went back to analog there too. Why? No spying, no tracking of what I read and what I write. And no sudden 'termination' of services or 'removal' of a book from my device for any reason.

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  • You're not mistaken, as far as I can tell.

    It's just that I'm so incompetent I would not dream of self-hosting anything critical like my spouse's and my passwords. Way too afraid to find ourselves completely locked out of them, or finding that someone else would have gained access to them. Just thinking about these give me goose bumps.

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  • Just in case: 1Password is Canadian, maybe an option?

  • gg à elle, comme disent les jeunes je crois.

    Ca fait plaisir de voir des jeunes qui se lancent comme elle... reste à espérer que nos diverses administrations et leur légendaire souci de ne pas compliquer la vie des indépendants ne viennent pas, heu, refroidir ses ambitions.

  • USA has obviously lost its way. It was hard to watch the orange one say to Ukraine they could go fuck themselves (despite the promises to protect them) and to say the same to us too, in his typical illiterate racist asshole manner.

    But he only said out loudly what a lot of is friends are thinking. I don't know about you but I prefer to know what someone thinks about me, it makes things much simpler. But the USA not respecting us and not respecting its word doesn't make the USA our enemies.

    The USA are sick of... the exact same disease that is spreading in the EU too, just not as quickly as it has ravaged them. The proud idiocy. A quickly rising illiteracy and non-education, coupled with a frenetic turning back to some kind of 'fundamental' or 'traditional' values that can be anything but rationality and/or sciences.

    Meanwhile, our real enemies which, I insist, are not the USA but all those other countries and regions of the world that want our Western societies (and all of us, with all our 'immoral' lifestyles) to be gone, meanwhile those are exploiting our very own hysterical stupidity to try to further divide us.

    Maybe we should question if that's really a good idea to help them achieve that goal?

    For now, what we should thrive for is to try to keep in touch with whatever remain of a working democracy in the USA. Judging by what I can see and read coming from there, there isn't much left of if that is working.

    That, much more than Trump and his many tantrum, is what should worry us because a democracy is all about safeguards and control (no one controls it, no one is supposed to own it, thx to the many safeguards). The vanishing of any safeguard able to stop an aberration like the orange one to get (and to get back!) to power is the telltale sign of a failing democracy. Trump is just the symptom of the disease and he will go away, if not in four years at the very least the day he dies (peacefully, of old age). But the structural failure of the US democratic system that were supposed to prevent anything remotely like Trump to ever grab the power? That is the real issue. And that issue won't fix itself that easily.

    We should also send all our support to whatever non 'MAGA' working brain power remains in the USA. They badly need all the love they can get.

    We also need to watch and to listen carefully to what's happening there, and analyze how it's happening. To prevent it from happening here. We are democracies too. With too many failing safeguards too. They've started failing a few decades ago in my country (France), and they're still failing to day in front of our very eyes. And we rejoice, because... here too, that proud idiocy is on the quick rise with its vocal 'demands' and its short-sighted certainties.

    Maybe ours won't wear a silly buffalo costume when they will attempt their own coup, but I doubt they will look much smarter.

    To resist that, we need to listen to what's happening here in the EU, not just in the USA, the sharp decline in education (the illiteracy of kids is real) and the rise of of a so-called 'fundamentalism' (often religious) ore the longing for 'traditional values' is not happening only the USA. And we also need to not mistake a sick friend, no matter how poorly he behaves, with our enemies.

    If we want the current failing of the USA to remain an exception, and a short lived one as I have little doubt they can get back to their senses, maybe we should start by looking at what is happening around us here too and resist it.

    I don't want to boycott the USA because they're acting like assholes, I want to promote EU-made solutions and tools because I want us to be able to not depend as much on the USA anymore—we now know how quickly they can change mood and forget their own word. I don't want to punish the USA because they're sick right now, I want them to get better. As quickly as possible.

    Meanwhile, I want us to prepare for the same illness that has already started spreading in the EU too. We're not better and we're not smarter than the Americans, but watching them stumble we could prepare better.

    And I want us to stop mistaken who our actual enemies are. There are plenty. USA is not one of them. Not yet.

  • Oh, it was about an app to watch stocks valuation, of course... Thx, now I understand the question 8)

  • Not sure to understand the question: what do you mean by stocks? The stuff that various markets trade? Those are not 'open source', they aren't code at all: they' property title on some corporation you buy/sell on say WallStreet. be it Apple or any other one.

    edit: typos.

  • Mullvad first, but then I would put Proton. And yep I pay for mullvad despite already paying for the Proton suite of apps.

    That said, more people able to easily start using a vpn is great news... Until the day our leaders, always so focused on our well-being, decide to make it illegal for us to use a VPN for our own security quite obviously as there would be no comparison with what may happen in some dictatorship.

  • I use a small French company called monarobase. I don't use it but they offer wordpress hosting (and they have easy to use assistant for all their other offers). I've been their customer for well over 10 years now and I wouldn't want a larger more widely known host because 1) I never had any major issue with them, contrary to larger ones 2) their customer support is is the closest to perfection I have ever dealt with—which I find invaluable since I have myself very, very limited technical knowledge: every time I've made an oopsie, they fixed it in a matter of hours (and they never laughed at me :p)

    If you want a bigger host and not some small French one (we have great cheese, too), like already suggested I would say the German at Hetzner are great but depending the offer, you will have a lot of maintenance to do yourself. So is the Swiss Infomaniak, I can say I really like what they're trying to make with their Site Creator, even though it still needs some work.

    Infomaniak cloud/office suite is also very nice, if anyone is interested: myksuite.

    WorPress (though I am open to alternative suggestions).

    I started to use WP when it first appeared but in the last decade or so I became incredibly tired with both the direction it was going and the constant flow of feature updates and countless security updates. Not mentioning extensions). I wanted something a lot less demanding, simple and less bloated. I learned to use Hugo, a static website generator. That's what I'm now using. May not fit all use case but it's perfect for me. And I have zero maintenance (security or whatever) server side, since Hugo is only installed on my computer on the website is 100% static.

  • Can't read the paper but Vivaldi is a great browser. Always have been my go to Chromium browser... when I don't use something FF-based ;)

  • Nope.

  • I did not know that. Thx!

  • My spouse phone was bought on their store and it worked really well for years. The hardware wasn't that impressive but it was fine with her (don't ask me the exact model, I could not tell) which btw, show how much work e-os put in making their version of android run smoothly: it was really not a powerful phone and there never was any major issue for basic usage ;)

    She was able to use the few apps she needed from their store, including banking apps and some 2FA/security one for work project.

    Maybe my next phone will be from them too but they will have to wait for my p^resent iPhone to stop working as I refuse to buy a new one unless I have no choice anymore ;)

    • Full EU search (not just a front-end): no idea.
    • EU front-end to US search engines, I would suggest Startpage as well as Qwant, I mean.
    • Independant and ad-free tracking-free innovative search engine but made in USA and also not free: Kagi. It's the one I've been using for almost two years, next to Qwant and to Startpage ;)
  • Thoughts?

    Short term? Won't happen.

    Long-term? Three things are required for any change to happen:

    • Teach people, aka the users, to redefine their expectations and demands. We won't get sovereign and on-par services any time soon. Heck, we don't even have a eu-made computer/smartphone to access it. We won't get a non-US Google-like panel of services either.
    • Teach people to get their fingers out of their ass and start to make do with what they (we will) have available. What's sure is that if the EU-USA relationships keep going where they're headed people won't have much choice anyway.
    • Tell the all-mighty EU institutions (as well as the various national ones) to shut the fuck up with their endless pooping of regulations, rules and laws that kills any attempt at innovating.

    I was reading a French newspaper a couple days ago, the dude was explaining one of the EU objective, now faced with the fact that the USA are not our best friends anymore and faced with a lack of essential natural resources (100% of our lithium and rare earth as well as other key elements are imported), was to shorten the legal delay for opening a new mine from 10 years to 27 months. 10-fucking-years to just start digging a hole in the ground because of regulations and procedures?! BTW, there are rare earths and a few other valuable items in Ukraine's soil...

  • It still uses Bing (Microsoft) as its backend, as far as I can tell. I know they want to partner with Ecosia to build something less... USA-dependent but I doubt that will happen overnight.

  • J'aurais aimé une solution qui gaspille moins. Pour te donner le contexte: ma compagne et moi utilisons à peine nos téléphoines respectifs, alors en un avoir un supplémentaire dédié à filtrer le spam... tu peux imaginer comme ça ne nous enchante pas des masses. Mais j'ai pas trouvé de meilleure solution. On limlte la casse en achetant le téléphone d'occasion (un de moins à la poubelle) et en le faisant durer jusqu'au bout du bout (comme les nôtres, d'ailleurs) mais ça reste un sacré gaspillage de matière première pour avoir accès quelque chose qui devrait aller de soi: un filtre anti-emmerdeurs... C'est aussi un peu d'argent gaspillé, mais ça ça ne coûte qu'à nous, pas à la planète ;)

  • That sells what?

    Many local shops have their own website, or they may have a shared portal between them. For example, the two nearby bookshops are part of such a portal (that is much larger than those two shops) where I can order any book at the exact same price I would pay it on Amazon (thx to our French law) and then go pick it up at the shop I selected (I suppose I could have delivered too, but I like to go there ;). For computer stuff, here in France we have LDLC.com and a few others (I use LDLC since they also have a few shops nearby). We have stuff like Darty.com or boulanger.com for appliances and small electronics. For art supply, the one I use the most frequently is https://www.geant-beaux-arts.fr/ but we also have quite a few much smaller stores around here, that also have an online store (and they're great too). The shop where I buy my clothes also has an online presence. And so on ;)

    Also the platform being privacy oriented would be a big plus.

    How would that be? I mean they would still need to collect a lot of personal informations to do business with a customer (bank, address, phone, personal mensurations, preferences,...). So, I wouldn't count much on that beside GDRP (which is European law, so any shop in the EU is expected to be respecting it).