conduwuit is a fork of the less “energic” conduit.rs software, and both are maintained by the community, not by the Element people, like Dendrite.

Yeah withdraw cash from an ATM and use it. The system sucks, but it’s not trivial to change for a myriad of reasons.

There’s no real way to do it. Unless you know someone who can trade you XMR<->cash and you somehow convince your employer to (break laws and) pay you in those forms, you can’t avoid it. At some point, you’ll have to get money on a real bank account, which requires real information to open.

As far as I know, modern cards don’t just send your CC info to terminals, they do some form of a cryptographic handshake (probably a pubkey signature or similar) which gets confirmed by your bank. I believe Caveman was talking more about online shopping, where you have to enter your card number, expiration date, CVC and often your name too.

That’s why I love virtual card systems like MB NET. You just generate a random virtual card for every purchase (or a recurring one for each subscription vendor, for example) and move on. Your bank still knows what you’re doing, of course, but vendors can’t correlate anything. Preventing your bank from knowing where you’re spending your money is much harder, for very practical reasons: fraud detection. The only real way is to use a secure crypto coin like Monero, but very few places accept it and you still have to deal with volatility.

Yeah, I am lucky to live in such a country and it’s amazing. The state and municipality each subsidised part of the purchase, so I ended up paying 300 something euros to install 3.5 kW of panels. My electricity bills are almost non existant during summer and also cheaper during winter. To make it even better, anytime I’m not using the produced electricity, it gets sold to the grid, even if pretty cheap, rebating on my next billing cycle.

Ah right, Molly. Have yet to tried it, but looks interesting.

I think I’m too afraid of moving my main stuff to Molly, lest I lose something :P But the UnifiedPush and multiple mobile clients is enticing.

Yeah that’s a bummer. Signal has multi device support but only for desktop and iPad (yeah, not Android tablets), but you always need to have a master phone device.

It’s been an issue for so long, but this is Signal, they do whatever the f they want.

encrypted email

Besides being a form of messaging (so the text somewhat contradicts itself), typical email is a deeply insecure protocol.
In my opinion, it’s probably impossible to secure without making a new protocol or making such drastic changes that it might as well be considered one.

Here are some key concerns regarding the usual PGP-powered encrypted email:

• Email, at a simple level, works much akin to physical email — there’s an “envelope” containing important info regarding the communicating parties, which can’t be encrypted, otherwise the mailing servers wouldn’t know where to forward the messages. This essentially leaks a lot of metadata that can be almost as valuable as the message body itself.
• There’s no forward secrecy — one of the best cryptography features that has become pretty much a commodity in modern systems is forward secrecy, which prevents attackers from decrypting older messages after gaining access to one of the keys.
• While not an issue with the protocol itself, it’s the sad reality and we need to consider — most people use GMail, Outlook and the like, which ultimately need to read your emails in plaintext, for better or worse reasons (search is incredibly useful, but some big players don’t stop there of course :p).
• Another thing is the fact that it’s incredibly easy to have an imbalance of encryption, i.e. someone is encrypting their messages, but others aren’t. With the very popular email culture of quoting (be it top or bottom posting), an unencrypted party in the the conversation can leak important information.
• PGP is… peculiar, so to speak. I has a lot of issues, mostly stemming from its age (which could also be a source of robustness and security, due to being very battle-tested, but I don’t think that’s quite the case with PGP/GPG), tries to do too much and typically has a clunky UI, which impedes wider and proper adoption by less technically people.

This isn’t to say people should definitely stop using and promoting encrypted email, since it can be useful.
It’s just it gives, more often than not, a false sense of security and can lead less proficient users to send sensitive data through this medium which isn’t nearly secure enough for such use cases. Preferably, people with such threat models should opt for better alternatives, most suggested in that article (such as, but definitely not limited to, Signal, SimpleX, Matrix+Olm, XMPP+OTR/OMEMO, sharing files via MagicWormhole, encrypting with tools like age).

On a slightly tangential note, I think someone should make a Matrix client with an email client interface. I started working on a new traditional chat client (completely nonfunctional still, very much in-dev), but I’ve been honestly thinking more and more about making one looking like an e-mail client, where there isn’t much focus on instant room-based chats, but rather on longer-lived 1-to-1 and list-like exchange of messages.

Yeah Mullvad’s system is better than Proton’s, since the latter asks you to place your username inside the envelope. Mullvad’s random token is better in that regard.

More info on Proton’s cash payments: https://proton.me/support/payment-options#cash

Disclaimer: I’ve never paid in cash on either of these services.

I believe proton also accepts cash payments. At least I’ve seen that in their mail service.

For hosters, legality has to be considered.

Oh what, 5€ per withdrawal? That’s crazy!

Interesting. Sounds like it can be convenient.

Over here, there’s pretty much a terminal at every not-even-necessarily-super market and often people will check their balance or withdraw cash from them before/after shopping.

That’s very alien to me wow, never heard of such thing. So you essentially pay more with card and get the change in cash.
Is that usually “imposed” by the shop or is something you ask for?

Right, but what is “cash back”?

I don’t know what it is either :/
I’m also not exactly understanding how it can save people from sparse ATMs.

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Have you looked at all the different layers? A while back they added more of those, with different types of quests that don’t appear normally.

StreetComplete is godsend. Editing OSM in JOSM, iD, etc, is not trivial and involves reading a lot of documentation and forum posts (if you care to do things right), which of course isn’t anywhere near practical for small devices when you’re on the go, surveying.

This app changed my whole routine. The interface is really solid and helps the community target important tasks, rewarding it with little prizes. Althewhile, the gamification is kept at a very healthy level, to avoid attracting leaderboard seekers and whatnot, which would certainly lower the quality of contributions.

I think the contribution day grid (akin to GitHub’s thing) as well as the dynamic category explorer, the badges and the OSM-related projects it reveals to you bit by bit really bring everything together. It’s an incredible tool!

For the experienced (and this is not said lightly), there is the expert version, which adds more advanced editing features for those looking for a bit more control in regular SC.