machiavellian

Just as normal sunglasse don’t fool facial recognition systems, modern gait recognition systems can’t be defeated by “just altering how you walk”. You can read more about it on The Hitchhikers Guide to Online Anonymity. There is this research paper.

They link a specific device which can fool some systems, but a bit easier (although more inefficient) is just wearing very loose clothes that cover the movement of your muscles.

A bit weird that they labelled SimpleX’s businessmodel freemium. AFAIK every functionality is free, just like other messengers they list.

It isn’t as hard as people imagine it to be. For starters you could watch a few entertaining videos by MentalOutlaw or listen to Opt Out and Watchman Privacy podcast.

When you feel more at home with the terminology and understand the basic process behind cryptocurrencies in general and Monero, you could get a wallet, look some at some of their recommended guides, buy some Bitcoin at a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange, trade it for Monero and badabim badaboom - you now have Monero.

I recommend either Haveno Reto or Bisq. Nevertheless, always do your own research and make your own choice. This is a good place to start.

You can use centralized exchanges as well as they make the process a bit easier but then you have to KYC yourself. Which isn’t a big problem because when you trade Bitcoin to Monero, all following transactions are anonymous.

If you want to go hardcore from the start, you could use decentralized P2P exchange to get Monero for cash but this is a bit more advanced and comes with a premium.

Many people say that SimpleX is not ready to replace the likes of Whatsapp, Telegram and Signal yet but noone specifies exactly what features are missing.

I get that public key cryptography is confusing for the average people but there is no UI fix that is getting around that obstacle if we want people to make informed choices on what platform/protocol to use for communications.

The same thing applies to decentralization - people just need to understand that the trade-off they’re making for communications’ resilience is the comfort of an online addressbook.

Although I admit that there are certain UI elements that could be made better (for example the nickname setting could be stylized a bit better so people can more easily change the names of their contacts to something more familiar), most criticism towards SimpleX comes from people being a bit lazy and not reading the manual before using the app.

TL;DR: I don’t understand what features are missing from SimpleX.

Inundate me with info!

As you wish!

Look through this index. Maybe something catches your eye. Also some of these links are part of webrings so I think you’ll be occupied with this information for awhile.

As a general guideline, I recommend you watch a video or two about how Monero works. Don’t know how strict your threat model is but it’s always good to know what a tool can and cannot do.

I also recommend you run your own Monero node. MentalOutlaw explains pretty nicely why it’s necessary and how to do it.

As for where to spend Monero, there used to be general indexes hosted on HackLiberty and Nowhere. But of the top of my head I can recommend XMRbazaar and ProxyStore.

In case your bored, an index of some intresting material to read.

tomb: Tomb is a minimalistic CLI based hidden file encryption tool based on Linux dm-crypt and LUKS.
In addition to its cool ass name, it also has a GUI that’s called Mausoleum.

The same argument of “lawful acces to data while ensuring the rights to privacy and security” keeps popping up. I just can’t fit into my head how one can ensure my right to privacy while actively enabeling the undermining of said right. Have none of the “experts” taken Cybersecurity 101 or read just [one article detailing why it is impossible to “just let the good guys decrypt the bad guys’ encrypted data”] (https://mullvad.net/en/chatcontrol/stop-chatcontrol). Maybe I’m just missing something.