Re: De - Googling yourself ?!

yt-dlp is a program that has high tendency to break and stop working properly because there's an active effort from Google to constantly cripple and break it by tweaking and changing the backend behavior from YT. The stable releases from this program are usually not very reliable and I don't recommend them.

Instead, just clone the repo directly and compile it, or download the binary directly and put it on /bin, with a symlink in /sbin, then you can upgrade it individually through yt-dlp -U, mpv will work just fine. Better than waiting for the stable release on repos to get patched which can take years, it's just about time that it'll eventually breaks.

Threads seem to get split when replying to the OP through the mailing list.

EDIT: in addition, the original thread has now disappeared.

I could take a guess as to why they removed those two, but I can give you my reasons to avoid them.

1. The Proton service is provided by proprietary servers.

2. Their own obscure PGP implementation breaks compatibility with any standard Email client and makes user-controlled GPG encryption as aggressively inconvenient as possible, on top of paywalling IMAP and SMTP.

3. The aforementioned encryption is completely pointless if you send emails to people that has addresses on other email agents (like Gmail, Outlook or standard Email servers), as the email must be decrypted for them to read the contents, this proprietary encryption scheme only works on addresses inside Proton servers and there's no evidence that they're not saving unencrypted copies anyways.

4. Considering all of that, Proton totally stinks of a honeypot and makes privacy more inconvenient than it should. Use Email proper, standard-compliant providers that give clear access to IMAP and SMTP, setup your own GPG keypair and communicate that way, if you have your own GPG keypair Proton has nothing to offer and it's yet another compromise.

Signal is just a worse and more stupid XMPP, XMPP has cross platform clients, proper decentralization and has no arbitrary requirements such as phone numbers, Signal is phone only, requires a SIM card, requires a phone number and the service snitches to everyone that has your phone number saved in their phone that you installed and have a Signal account.

>I'm curious to know why you deleted Signal and Proton?

TL;DR Signal, Proton, are guardians, keeping users in a position of minority.

Signal.

The main reason is that Signal's founder Marlinspike is *for* centralization, i.e. against people running their own instances. His argument for his: "the ecosystem is moving" - but he omits to ask *why* things are moving fast - instead joins the race lead by the controllers of proprietary software, chose centralization, and herds more people into a walled-garden.[1]

I am uncomfortable at the idea of someone being okay herding x00 millions users into a walled-garden.

If Marlinspike's reason is security, he misses something. For this we have look at the security question from an epistemological perspective (I shall write more about this - sorry for the undeveloped statement.)

Proton, like Signal, are telling users "it is dangerous", "encryption is complicated"[2], positioning themselves as guardians, thus keeping users in a position of minority. What do I mean by "guardians" and "minority"? These concepts are taken from a text written by Kant - an excerpt:

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on--then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. **Those guardians who have kindly taken supervision upon themselves see to it that the overwhelming majority of mankind [...] should consider the step to maturity, not only as hard, but as extremely dangerous. First, these guardians make their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them. Then they show them the danger that would threaten them if they should try to walk by themselves.** Now this danger is really not very great; after stumbling a few times they would, at last, learn to walk. However, examples of such failures intimidate and generally discourage all further attempts.[3] emphasize mine

[1] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/; also: https://lwn.net/Articles/687294/ ; also see repository of LibreSignal on GitHub, issue #37
[2] cryptography is the art of a few (including Marlinspike) but generating a GPG key pair can be as simple as $ gpg --full-generate-key and answering 4 questions. You have a key pair. Then follow the EFF guide to set up your client with your newly generated GPG key pair.
[3] "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?" translation: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html

I have not. Thanks for mentioning RiseupVPN and CalyxVPN. I had trouble finding VPNs ran by non-profits when I was looking for it.