Texts are securely stored

Right, must be military grade encryption

Indeed

Books, online courses. Education in depth, ideally.

Books, online courses. Education in depth, ideally.

Yeah but… Brilliant has… a trial period. Seven days is plenty to realise that there’s next to zero educational value in that platform no matter how hard it is shilled online.

They are pretty poor courses anyway, why would you want them?

The last paragraph doesn’t have to be a problem though

It is not yet, but the trajectory implies it may become a problem down the road. We’re, sadly, living this decade, where you can no longer ignore where a certain service is heading and how it monetises itself.

Mandatory “don’t put Signal and Telegram in the same sentence” notice. Not to be a snob, but Telegram is not “secure and private”, all chats are not end-to-end encrypted by default, everything is stored on Telegram’s servers with “forever-ever” retention. The end-to-end encryption is opt in, uses a dodgy encryption algorithm and has some limitations in terms of who you can contact and from what device etc.

Telegram is owned by Pavel Durov who also created the largest Russian social media platform VK, which later was overtaken by Russian state as a tool for crowd control and propaganda. Even if we assume that Pavel no longer has any ties with Russia and its “government”, his biography should still raise at least some questions around whether one should trust Telegram.

And finally, Telegram seems to be going the “everything app” route lately, which makes it a one stop shop of personal communication, public channels, news, bots, stories etc. (you name it). While it is not a bad thing in objective terms, these features are not built with privacy in mind, as that would pose quite a technical challenge. This means that Telegram’s privacy and security will only be sacrificed more and more to get more of the social features out of the door.

/rant over/

The enshittification of the internet shall continue.

We will fight and we will lose, as depressing as it sounds. The vast majority of people just don’t and won’t care.

All good, the downvotes are not my doing :)

I tolerate it, though barely. But that’s not the reference I was trying to make :)

Literally uninterjectable

Feeling old yet? 😗

Welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of left wing propaganda

In all seriousness though, this is one of the podcasts I tune in to religiously. It’s just too fun and serves as a great high level of “what’s up in big tech” even when my brain is mush.

I think there were 0 instances of Quora being useful when I search for things. At this point I just ignore Quora results completely, just because chances are whatever is on there are just shills and word salad people.

Depends on what you want to self-host. In general, I would advise against self-hosting anything before you familiarise yourself with the basics of *nix, networking and cyber security.

You at least need to know enough to make sure that whatever you host is only available within your local network and is inaccessible from the outside.

Once that’s ensured, go nuts, experiment, learn, evolve.

In terms of how to start, really depends on your budget, what hardware you can spare, how much space you have at your place etc.

For the most basic playground it’s enough to have a raspberry pi or similar, or a very old laptop / desktop computer.

For something more swanky you can get old Dell servers (e.g. R420) online for around 100$ or so. They are quite power hungry though. Or you can get yourself a NUC and use that.

If all of this sounds like too much work, just get yourself QNAP / Synology NAS and see what it can do for you (it is way more limited in terms of options, but easier to setup and you can still have your Plex / file sharing / docker containers).