I have Emacs on every computer I use. That said, I mainly use it for Magit and org-mode, so I’m not sure it counts as an IDE at that point.

I use Aegis Authenticator on Android. It can do encrypted backups (or unencrypted, but it sufficiently warns you to be careful). I periodically make an offsite backup just in case my phone gets destroyed.

Thanks for linking to this extension!

Thunderbird has a home on every computer that I use, mainly because it still supports plain-text mail - without resistance (unlike Outlook and web clients) - and because it natively supports GPG encryption and signing.

Let’s hope the UI redesign doesn’t interfere with these advantages, and helps draw in new users!

As worded, this would apply to every Turing-complete system that exists, right? Or is it meant to target specific pieces of software - like GPG and Signal and Protonmail and TOR - where the governments don’t have a backdoor?

Sometimes I need Chromium. I always want an ad-blocker, though. So the two best choices are Vivaldi and Brave.

Vivaldi is closed-source, which is bad. But it has a lot of good customization options, and is transparent about its monetization.

Brave is open-source, but tries to get you into crypto junk. You can turn that off, but you have to do it for every different machine.

I currently use a combination of Librewolf and Vivaldi. But my setup shifts around a lot.

Can you go into more detail about Librewolf having weak security? This is news to me.

I never acknowledged that you asked for clarification. In fact, when you asked “which pandemic”, you cannot have been asking for clarification, since the OP’s meaning was already clear. This distinction is actually the root of our disagreement, BTW.

So in this case, both @mariubrlu@mastodonapp.uk and myself have made the error of associating the word “pandemic” with COVID in particular, no doubt due to viewing the world through a western media lens. In reality there are other pandemics going on as well.

Truly, I’d never thought of AIDS as a pandemic before now. Thanks for the persuasive information, @lemmyreader@lemmy.ml!

1. Thread OP makes a post clearly about COVID
2. You say, “which pandemic”, not because it is unclear that the OP is talking about COVID, but because you have motivation to prevent a discussion about privacy and COVID. (Basically, if you don’t already see the link, it must not exist, and you want to reinforce this.)
3. I say “he’s clearly talking about COVID”
4. Thread OP says he is talking about COVID

In your own words: “I can’t think of a reason COVID was partly caused by privacy issues, so there must be another pandemic”. Instead of considering that the thread OP might be speaking plainly, you forced an inobvious interpretation onto a clearly-worded post, and based your reply on that.

Talking in good faith means that you assume people mean what they say, instead of trying to parse out hidden actual meanings that suit your views better.

Asking the right questions is fine.

If you posted, “I was tremendously affected by the events of 9/11” and someone replied “By which event on 9/11? Lots of things happened that day!” or “9/11, which year?” They are not advancing the discussion, they’re just wasting your time. Asking someone in the early 2020s to specify which pandemic they mean is just as pedantic.

Socrates would have loved to interrogate the possible relationship between internet culture and the pandemic. He would have asked questions to draw out the thread OP’s beliefs and assumptions. Asking “which pandemic” doesn’t accomplish that goal.

I feel that bad faith arguments need to be called out on sight.

The purpose of a bad-faith argument, for the person making it, is to derail a discussion - with the end-goal of protecting something that the discussion would otherwise cause damage to.

A good-faith discussion would reveal a lot of correlation between social media corporations, misinformation, and vaccine denial - with a good bit of political and religious context as well - but if the posters in the discussion have to waste their time being badgered about “which” pandemic, or whatever else can be nitpicked, then the discussion becomes tiresome and people stop having it. That’s the goal, for some.

You have made an interesting example of a bad faith argument. There is exactly one possible pandemic he is referring to, yet you are acting like he is not specific enough about which pandemic. He is not referring to the black plague, the Spanish flu, or smallpox, as those are not correlated with internet privacy.

If you were genuinely curious about a link between internet privacy and the pandemic, you would not ask the poster to waste everyone’s time specifying “which pandemic” we all know he was referring to.

Personally, I would like to see @mariubrlu@mastodonapp.uk talk more about the link between internet privacy and the pandemic. I have my own theories about it as well, but hearing more from others may help to clarify my own position or even change my mind on some points.

Edit from the future: I was wrong to say “There is exactly one possible pandemic he is referring to”. See https://lemmy.ml/post/713841/comment/372567

The TLDR is that I realized the big internet companies are trying to make our lives worse to their benefit.

It started with the Kindle - I was comparing e-readers, saw that most of them use the ePub format, and learned that Kindle was not supporting that format. They had a custom format instead. Anyone with a computer can make an ePub, but you need special software to make Amazon’s format.

The effect would be that everyone who bought or received a Kindle was tacitly agreeing to make all of their ebook purchases from a single store. If B&N has a sale, or Kobo offers better image quality, the Kindle user will still only purchase their ebooks through Amazon. It’s a per-user monopoly.

(I know that technically savvy users, with a cavalier attitude towards Terms of Service agreements, can work around this. I do not believe this describes a majority of book customers.)

Anyway, when I saw what Amazon was doing, I cut ties with them entirely. I then started examining the other tech giants critically, and saw their bad behaviors as well. How FaceBook manipulates its users’ mental health, and how Google and Amazon slurp up your data and sell it. How Microsoft badgers its users and tricks them into installing anti-features. (I used to be so pro-Windows before this, it’s embarrassing.)

My goal with internet privacy is to ensure that these corporations do not profit from my data or attention. And I try to bring my friends and family with me, when it’s possible.