<5min Germany

Pretty unusual, especially state-owned. There was a similar program on EU level that was just cancelled, apart from that I don’t know any other countries investing in open source.

This may be, but the probability is unarguably higher than with Trump. Voting exclusively for candidates you morally agree on only works if enough people have the same morale (in this case i.e. are educated on Israel and so on) and are also not willing to make compromises.

Even if unfortunate, this is currently not the case; and you voting independent has smaller chances of changing that than voting democratic. So you will probably have to accept this situation for the moment and choose the “best actually feasible” strategy— and feasible means having the highest probability to win in real life, not merely trying.

Personally, I’d even argue that it’s unethical to not vote for a candidate like Harris, just because the chances of getting stuff like ranked choice voting or educating voters done (which will then lead to you being able to realistically vote for others) is significantly higher when voting Democrats than… letting Trump win?

Notice that I don’t say you have to agree with anything else she stands for, you’re trying to achieve certain goals/get out of the very unfortunate current situation, and even a low chance of reaching that is infinitely better than none.

Text of an average book is 100,000 letters; with a very smart and optimized compression/prediction algorithm (which hopefully is far smaller than 1GB), it is reasonable to expect a single char to be less than half a byte in size, so 50kB per book (saving without covers of course), this would mean around 20,000 books in a GB (not really, the compression algorithm probably also takes quite some MBs)— which should be enough for quite some time.

Then it looks like a really terrible concert and then you notice it’s cotton.

I’m absolutely with you on the typing, the problem is (as far as I’m concerned) that learning typing takes a ton of time that I don’t want to spend just on that, so I’ll instead provide them with resources on how to improve typing skills if they want to.

I planned on letting them build cheap, old desktops in groups so they are not as afraid of opening their devices (I find this to teach a different relationship to your devices in general) and so they don’t inherently see computers as a black box.

Thank you for your recommendations!

Especially the “don’t be afraid to break and how to troubleshoot” part seem very important to me, I will definitely do that. Thank you!

Yeah, I will generally do a lot of “how to use the web correctly”, from basic privacy stuff (no, you don’t have to have something to hide; why care; no, it’s not too late…), ad blocking, using search engines correctly, evaluating sources etc.

I will have to teach some explicit security consciousness as well, basic and maybe not so basic stuff, maybe even spice it up a notch and do an intro to opsec to interest people (probably not gonna fit for time reasons, but will do basic security in any case)?

Yeah, I will definitely start with scripting first, although I think Python scripting or similar is better for getting used to actual programming/loops and variables are just better and more intuitive than in scripting languages.

I actually only have programming on the list because I felt like I somehow needed to teach it, which is definitely true, but not at the very beginning.

You’re absolutely correct about the PATH thing, I think I should teach about how filesystems work in general (like, most people use devices that only have “apps” and have never used a file system/directory structure)

Seems to have become one of the fundamental rules of the Internet now, I approve 👍

This is crazy. I’m in exactly the same situation and have been thinking about getting a mobile plan with a Pixel 8 (where I would install GrapheneOS on) as those are getting cheaper with the Pixel 9 out not.

Wikipedia will keep running, even if you don’t donate. The Wikimedia foundation (which runs Wikipedia) gets a lot of donations and fund a ton of other stuff apart from Wikipedia, so you’re donation will rather have a chance to decide if these keep running.

Billy should really not support them, Ad Block Plus let’s advertisers pay for having their ads checked as “acceptable advertisements”, i.e. is selling out the core functionality of their product. Billy should use uBlock origin, which afaik does not accept donations, he could however support something like PiHole .

(In reply to the post) Actually, I’ve found my immutable distro of choice (Silverblue) to be a lot of fun to tinker in (not with), but you just have to accept that tinkering does work a bit different here, with toolbox/containers instead of your actual host system to install most stuff you want to try etc. on

From how they’re presenting themselves on their website, I would also guess their payment methods aren’t private /anonymous at all. It seems like you could even be forced to use the Apple/Google integration to pay for your subscription (which just means you can’t really pay privately).

Also, VPNs that have own apps and don’t allow access via OpenVPN are a red flag. You don’t know what their apps are doing and they don’t give you any reason to trust them either.

No, but as far as I can tell, it’s a private company in the US (which is pretty bad for a VPN). Also, all of its features are closed-source. The encryption seems to be closed source. That should make you question their motives and integrity. And trust them not much more than Google or Facebook. For everything not privacy related, as their virtual cards and in a sense also phone numbers and email addresses (those could be private, but not using this service), this service seems fine.