It's been a few steps in a concerning direction by them recently. As of right now, it's still OK to use IMO but I'm sincerely hoping this is the extent of it, or even that they row back some of the recent changes.
However, I still want it to exist because its the only viable alternative at the moment to Google's dominance. Yes there are plenty of forks (two of which I use) but they still rely on Firefox as the core product. I don't think any are hard forks (or am I wrong?). I'm very uncomfortable at the thought of using a browser thats based on Chromium and/or unable to run the full version of UBO or have Containerised tabs.
I'm not convinced Trump ever really wanted those minerals. He floated the idea knowing Zelensky would never say 'yes' to the deal as originally presented. But then, when Zelensky seemed prepared to make compromises, Trump had to find another excuse to get the US out of being involved and went with the pathetic, shameful, cowardly performance we just witnessed.
Depends on your threat model - mine is to make it as annoying and difficult for data sellers and advertisers to profile me as possible so in that scenario a reputable VPN service makes perfect sense.
There's no such thing as total privacy and each service/software is simply a piece of the puzzle. If my government really wanted my data I'm sure they could find a way but making it as difficult as possible for techno-fascists is fine by me.
At the moment I do a once-a-week encrypted export from BitWarden and Aegis (authenticator) and put those exports onto an encrypted USB pen drive to avoid the issues you mention but I think your way is probably better.
What assurances do you have they won’t go full proton in the future?
Absolutely none. That applies to all services that exist now or in the future. The only way around that is self-hosting but that path has its own issues including a very steep learning curve if you want to be secure as well as private. Maybe this could be a longer term project to work towards?
For services:
Mail - Mailbox.org seems the best option right now
Calendar - don't know.
Drive - either Cryptomator used with literally any service or a dedicated service like Filen
Documents - I just use LibreOffice offline or CryptPad occasionally if I'm collabing with someone.
In truth none of these are perfect. Privacy has got a lot harder recently as Proton and StartMail/StartPage have politically shit the bed and the UK seems determined to kill encryption which means I have to avoid really good services like IceDrive just because they're in the UK.
EDIT: Calendars. Mailbox.org's included one works fine. You can sync using CalDAV. The process for Thunderbird (desktop) is here.
The process for mobile is a little more complicated. First you need Davx5 to actually get the data, but thats all that app does. It's not a Calendar app. It does work with the native Android Calendar but I used FossifyCalendar.
So install both of those then login to your Mailbox account in a browser and create a Calendar (or use an existing one). Get its unique URL by looking under the heading 'My Calendars', clicking the three bars icon, click 'Properties' and you can then copy your CalDAV URL.
On your Android device open Davx5, tap the plus icon then specify 'login with URL and username' tap 'continue' then paste in the URL you copied earlier, your email address and your email account password, tap 'login' and that should work.
Now, switch to your Calendar app. I used Fossify Calendar so if you are too, open that up, go to Settings, scroll down to the CALDAV section and turn on CalDAV sync. It might switch to your new Mailbox calendar now, but if it doesn't, tap 'Manage synced calendars' and activate it there.
Privacy focused company move off privacy respecting service and suggest following them on privacy nightmare service. Are they trying to kill any trust in their own company?
Such a weird thing for them to do - why would a Dutch company highlight a connection with a US Trump supporter? Is it a very recent thing? Like Proton's CEO massaging Trump's ego?
No, more like if (somehow) George Bush and Trump ran against each other and Bush won.
Its far from a great result but its not as bad as it could've been and, from a European standpoint, it means there's strong opposition to Trump and strong support for Ukraine.
Lemmings have a huge obsession with shit being both free and adfree
Not sure thats very accurate. There's a healthy percentage who donate to instances and developers, because on open source platforms/services/software you don't have just trust no ones selling your data for their profit and its good to support that.
If Google open sourced their clients, got rid of adverts and all tracking and stopped selling or giving away user data but charged a reasonable fee I'd happily use YouTube.
Not immediately or probably for some years. Facebook's main problem is the fact its got an aging population and no young people joining. That's why Meta bought Instagram and is desperate to get their grubby paws on TikTok or force it to close down in the West.
I think internally, over the next decade, FB will start to die off organically as Meta put ever increasing focus on retention and young people.
Yep, it's not a perfect result (that would've been AfD polling 0%) but its one that will definitely exclude the far-right and I suspect lead to a Europe united in their defence of Ukraine.
Not an American but to be honest, both Google and Apple are appalling. Google openly steal all your data and sell it. Apple do similar but on a smaller scale but also claim they're all about privacy. Both make it difficult to use alternative app stores but with Apple its actually impossible. Phone vendors can and do install their own awful bloat on Android phones. Apple force you to use webkit for any browsing you might want to do, Android's native GUI is a mess. Nothing Apple put on their devices is open source so all their claims of privacy can never be verified. Both companies constantly try and impose proprietary standards or charge you a bajillion pounds for a fucking pen or some such bullshit.
The key difference for me is I can put something like Calyx or Graphene on an Android device and use a whole open source ecosystem of alternative apps which vastly improves the privacy of my device.
I get that federation of content is one of the main selling points of the fediverse but doesn't there also come a point when the format of the content plays a part? Isn't there an argument to be made that content posted to one type of service (link aggregation) doesn't need to be shoehorned into the format of an entirely different type of service (microblogging)?
FairEmail has a good reputation.