evujumenuk

I think installing spyware on someone’s device is two or three steps more drastic a measure than a simple search, which is about the extent of what a court order can authorize police to do right now. It feels conceptually close to tampering with evidence present at a (possible) crime scene. To add to this, spyware is not the same thing as installing a physical listening device in someone’s home. It requires far-reaching permissions on a system, and can influence lots of other software on the same system. You’d have to have an extreme level of confidence that this won’t lead to accidental or intentional planting of incriminating material. And, in my opinion that sort of load-bearing trust is not really something law enforcement has earned in the general case.

Where in Settings would this be? Cellular?

If you only ever use this mail domain to send messages to or receive messages from people who don’t know your name and address, why not. Any old infoleak would otherwise indelibly associate that domain with that personal info.

Tello gives you a real (US though) number, E911 and all, for 5 USD a month. You get an eSIM you can activate from anywhere in the world via Wi-Fi Calling. Send and receive unlimited texts and get 100 minutes a month for the odd service that insists on verification calls rather than texts. I’ve had zero issues.

Like basically all cloud providers, Oracle publish their public-facing IP address ranges.

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/General/Concepts/addressranges.htm

Many services block these because, as you are pointing out, standing up VPN tunnel routing on a cloud instance is sort of trivial. Cloud providers publish these ranges specifically so anyone can block them easily. If lemmy.world is not blocking Oracle Cloud already, it’s only because they just haven’t come around to it.

Mullvad has a 30-day money back guarantee.

Apart from that, some payment methods (like crypto) allow transmitting arbitrary amounts. At least, paying for years in advance works without issue. You could pay a few cents and try it out, but be mindful of fees.

In the specific case of Mastodon, an instance pretty much only receives a post via federation if one of its users either follows the creator of that post, or is mentioned in it.

Discoverability suffers, because this also applies to replies to a post even if you follow its poster. You might see them, or you might not. You look at the post history of one of the users in a thread and it comes up empty.

This is not much of a problem if you’re in one of the, say, top five instances, but beyond that, many functions become increasingly unreliable. Instead of one big microblogging ocean, it feels more like an assortment of a few lakes and myriad puddles with only tenuous interconnection.

Personally, I’ve kinda given up on finding (or creating) my One True Instance and am resorting to having profiles on all of the biggest instances. This also has the advantage that arbitrary defederation decisions affect me to a much lesser extent.

Almost all extensions will weaken your security posture. In fact off the top of my head there are basically only two kinds of extensions that could improve it:

• ad blockers
• (maybe!) password manager integrations

Anything else is questionable at best. Maybe you could create browser profiles where you install extensions somewhat more liberally, with decreased expectation of safety.

“I’m allowed to do this… This place is literally named Chinatown”