I’ll have to test it. Better to have one less extension.

Okay great, so you’re in denial about what’s going on around you. There’s a bigger picture than what you’re painting, I’m not saying Russia acted correctly nor that we shouldn’t blame it but Ukraine and the US aren’t saints either and profits are being made.

Of course I place blame, and a lot, on Russia. After all they were the ones to react. But frankly Ukraine has a ton of as well.

Interesting… I wasn’t aware of ClearURLs for uBo. How good is that? Does it really filer all tracking elements like clear URLs does?

Okay that’s fair, even if remove that and assume they hold zero influence / there are no cleaver backdoors Signal is still not good when it comes to performance and reliability.

Clearly you don’t live in Europe, you aren’t paying the electrical, gas and whatnot bill that this war caused. Get over yourself, your American lifestyle is only possible because a large chunk of your economy is only possible due to wars somewhere else.

Yes, yet telegram isn’t a piece of shit of an app that runs slowly on every device, can’t sync messages because “something went wrong” and doesn’t depend on electron to run. Also, not funded by the CIA.

How delusion one must be to think that the US isn’t profiting from this war? C’mon, the US just loves to sell all kinds of militar equipment. Russia has been a problem since ever but a bigger problem is the US that poke around the entire globe for wars and don’t really care about the impact because for them it’s all profits. Unfortunately for me, this time, they decided to poke around Ukraine and Russia.

Innovation and privacy go hand in hand here at Mozilla

As well as profits and corporate interests.

People speak very good thing about Firefox but they like to hide and avoid the shady stuff. Let me give you the un-cesored version of what Firefox really is. Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances and they also do stuff like adding unique IDs to each installation.

Firefox does is a LOT of calling home. Just fire Wireshark alongside it and see how much calling home and even calling 3rd parties it does. From basic ocsp requests to calling Firefox servers and a 3rd party company that does analytics they do it all, even after disabling most stuff in Settings and config like the OP did.

I know other browsers do it as well, except for Ungoogled and because of that I’m sticking with it. I would like to avoid programs that need no snitch whenever I open them. ungoogled-chromium + ublock origin + decentraleyes + clearurls and a few others.

Now you’re free to go ahead and downvote this post as much as you would like. I’m sorry for the trouble and mental break down I may have caused by the sudden realization that Firefox isn’t as good and private after all.

Let me correct you: this is another sign that Europe was dragged into a war because the US needed to jack up their economy with a manufactured war that, besides Ukraine, hurts Europe the most.

Window XP, is that you?

Yes, that’s true but I’m no longer doing that. Everything sync to the NAS using Syncthing that in turn is set with file versioning and weekly snapshots.

And rEFInd, GParted Live… SystemRescueCd.

SMB (NAS), Syncthing, FileBrowser, snapdrop.net, email and sometimes public cloud services…

And here I was under the impression that using USB storage for anything else than installing operating systems was a thing of the past.

Yes, but those things need to have procedures and employee authentication. If someone employee is found to be accepting bribes for SIM swaps then it should be fired on the spot and hold legally liable for all the damages - you can easily add this into a work contract. If a carrier doesn’t do this and doesn’t log those kinds operations then it’s just poor management and people shouldn’t buy services from it.

If you require KYC for buying and changing cards then SIM swapping becomes impossible as nobody can get a new SIM card with your phone number by social engineering the carrier.

Yes, a “non shitty verification system” like what EU countries do. Want to validate your identity? Sure show your ID card with a photo and smart card, insert into a smart card reader and the person can attest your identity against the info there. Same goes for using those cards to make signature forging a thing of the past.

In the case of US gov., they’ve been caught repeatedly selling taxpayer info for money. THAT is the problem.

Yes, this is a problem but I don’t think that you can fix it by making it harder to identify people… Because that also increases identity theft, general criminal behavior, make you unable exert other rights etc.

Hospitals used to track you by name and address, with no problem. They did for me for decades. Using a government ID number isn’t necessary, organizations just like exerting control.

Yes… and then you’ve those same hospital selling your data to insurance companies (or being owned by them) because that’s mostly the way they’ve to keep track of people and have updated medical records across the country.

Meanwhile in Europe what you get is the govt manages your healthcare data and hospital simply access and update the data in a controlled and organized fashion by typing your social security number into a govt provided system. You, as patient, also get an SMS message asking for permission whenever they want to access information / do certain actions or just notifications of data access. Prescriptions use the same system, you walk out of a clinic / hospital without any papers, just go into a pharmacy and they can pull what’s prescribed to you.

And no, in the US you don’t need to have ID to go anywhere. You can drive from California to Maine never having to show an ID - why should you?

Well I can drive across multiple countries in Europe using highways without ever stopping or showing IDs… however if some police officer appears and asks for it I’m required to show it by law.

Also, your social security number is not to be used as an ID - states so right on the card. Let’s think about the implications of that statement, vs what is occurring today.

Yes, because the US doesn’t have the concept of a citizen ID / identity card and people are identified by stuff like a social security number or a driving license (lol)… there’s almost no standardization when it comes to identifying people in the US (especially across states) and social security shouldn’t be used to identify people mostly because in the US there’s no useful central database thus those numbers might not be correct, unique etc.

In Europe countries have way more autonomy and sovereignty than any US state yet there’s a cross-border framework for identifying people. Every country has it’s own citizen card that follows certain rules, usually includes a single (or multiple) numbers that are used as citizen ID, social security ID for taxes. Those cards are also required to contain a chip (smartcard), allowing for the secure digital identification and authentication as well as the digital signatures - you can login into any govt service with your card a PIN and/or sign contracts with it for instance. Some people such as lawyers, doctors and accountants are even required by law to sign documents with those cards instead of handwriting because forging signatures is doable while forging a X.509 digital signature isn’t possible.