Lucy :3

I always found it weird for people to recommend BitWarden … it just FELT like a company that’ll go completely off track sooner or later. And it did. Oh wonder. KeePass ftw!

LMAO. KeePass ftw.

Even Wayland works well on Nvidia now

Damn lies. Nvidia works like shit on Wayland and newer kernels.

I use rsync to incrementally back up / to a separate drive, as well as a drive on another device (my server), which then packs, compresses and encrypts the latest backup of all devices daily, and uploads them to Hetzner as well as GDrive.

Does any Linux distro have autorun? Because Windows isn’t really an OS anyway.

In the end they won’t notice it. It’s just files named backup. No way for them to prove this isn’t only files for the club.

We could argue it’s legit backups from everything involving it, and that’s kinda true as it also contains stuff for the club. Just all other files of my server too, which includes the backups of all my other devices.

My dad has 100 TB free drive storage due to being a non-profit club. I’m happy to fill that nearly to the brim with my encrypted backups. I doubt they’d ever think someone can really use that space, especially as a small non-profit, but considering daily full-disk backups of several hundres gigabytes … it’s gonna be easy. On the contrary, I’m happy to pay for my 1 TB Hetzner Storagebox. Because I know exactly where my data resides, I can ssh into the box and even use rsync (to some degree).

If you want to actually replicate one to one - any distro, and use dd or netcat to transfer the root partition. Reinstall the bootloader, update BLKIDs and you’re done. Worked for me multiple times.

Doesn’t Graphene not support Gapps at all?

And then just setting a private DNS and checking “the little lock at your address bar” fully prevents any digital sniffing of your credentials. No VPN needed.

If it works for you, and you found a VPN provider you can trust, or at least have the feeling of that, great! That is one of the very rare use cases where VPNs are not only useful, but actually have a purpose.

On a broader scale, most people won’t find a trustworthy VPN, and would use it for way more than they need to, essentially giving all data to the VPN company now, instead of just to the local Café or google.

And for the bank app, there is no replacement. Google’s camera can be replaced by OpenCamera, or just disallowed to access the internet, and google maps can almost perfectly be replaced by organic maps

If you’re not relatively tech savy, a typical VPN IS the man in the middle. That’s the problem. A VPN, in itself, is very good. But as you said, non-tech savy users won’t be able to set up a VPN themselves, so they need to trust a company to route all their traffic, be their DNS server, not log anything, not be hacked and not give any data to current or future totalitarian governments. Not even I could recommend any VPN company that fulfills enough points there, especially the security related ones.

No. That’s a whole different use case. We’re discussing what most people in a public network should do. Some people, such as whistleblowers, journalists etc. maybe should use a VPN. For you grandparents, it would be pure snake oil. And even as such an endangered person, choosing the wrong, so almost all, VPNs would be even more dangerous.

For your problems, a VPN could be useful, even though for the former I would use the usenet or soap2day-like sites, which do not have you seed that content. If you still want to share it, then use a VPN. ONLY for the torrent process, not for anything else, as that would still be bad for privacy and security, as the VPN company could, and most WILL, surveil and log you. And for the latter problem, don’t use such apps except in closed environments or without internet access.

Then they won’t know what a VPN is either.

And most users don’t know what a VPN is. In both cases, they’re not gonna learn anything about it. Except you need to pay for a VPN, after figuring out which one is kinda trustworthy instead of snakeoil, while encrypted DNS is a simple setting on any OS. Nothing more. You don’t need whole articles to explain what your product does and why you respect privacy and blah, while not saying a single word that’s true. It’s a simple setting. VPNs are not only user friendly, they’re a full ripoff for most people and snakeoil. They don’t explain what they do in “laymans terms”, most of them just blatantly lie. Anything for the cash. If you want an explanation of encrypted DNS:

A DNS is kind of like your GPS. It translates an address into something more usable, e.g… like your GPS translates ‘123 Baker Street, Washington’ into coordinates, so you can use it on a map, for example. A DNS does the same, but for the internet: It translates “google.de” into a format that is actually readable and usable to the computer. However, to translate “google.de” you need to reach out to someone else, that knows the address. The thing is, if someone just pretends to give the right answer, but in fact gives you their own address, you may end up at the wrong website, or in the GPS example, at the wrong house. So instead of visiting your actual bank’s website, you’re going to visit someone else’s website, which looks basically the same, except once you log into your bank account the attacker can read that and steal all your money. In the GPS example, you would now be at the slaughterhouse instead of Disneyland. An encrypted DNS just means that you specify exactly whom you will trust, for example google, and that you want your communication with google to be encrypted, so no one can even read which website you want to visit.

If someone doesn’t understand this, they wouldn’t understand what a VPN is, even broken down to bare concepts. So for those people: It makes you safe just trust me just set this setting, no app, no account, no money required. Because that’s the level a typical VPN company argues on.

most people don’t know or use encrypted DNS

But a cybersecurity expert does. That’s the point. If you know those things, VPNs become obsolete, for most people. So why not teach people about it, instead of promoting VPNs?

And can you really trust an extremely profit focused company, that is built on user data, more than your local Café? If you’re in China, sure, use a VPN, they’re the lesser evil. But most spots don’t have the resources or expertise to analyze and sell or otherwise misuse your logs. VPN companies not only do, most rely on it.

If you’re a highly targeted person, it’s another story, but in that case your only hope is Tor or a new identity.

Also, install the generic or AMD specific packages now. Eg. vulkan-radeon or amdvlk instead of nvidia-utils (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Vulkan)

But they’re going on the AI fad now. Not like they are geniuses after all.

If it’s normal files, yeah. If the partition is complicated to replicate, or encrypted etc., then just dd’ing the partition would be easier