but if they do it’s a scandal waiting to happen

That was my line of thought. If you pay for failed captchas, there are a few websites using it that’d deserve a bot failing them constantly.

I use Pixel with GrapheneOS as my phone, and I just have a separate profile that only has WhatsApp installed and nothing else. Since the profiles are completely separated, it doesn’t have access to anything else I do on the phone and it’s not running in the background (the profiles are basically sandboxed fresh slates, and switching it can be set-up to behave in a same way as basically turning off the phone as far as the profile is concerned).

When the bridge asks me to log in again or refresh a session, I simply switch to the second profile for a minute and re-log in. I’ve heard iIt might be possible to set up an emulator and leave it running on the server, but that felt like too much effort.

Do you pay for successful verification only, or even for failed ones?

Ooh, that’s actually a good idea, just installing it on a separate removable drive, copying it over and seeing what works. Thanks!

I mostly wonder whether I would be able to just copy and paste /home from Nobara to Bazzite, and apps like steam or lutris/wine games would keep working, or if it’s more complex than that.

I’m planning to do that, I’ve been running Nobara for the past year, but I don’t have /home on separate partition and Idon’t want to bother with moving data, so I’m postponing it. What are the advantages, are is there something I should watch out for before switching?

I bought a Legion Go last week, and so far I’m really happy with it. The first thing I did was delete Windows and install Bazzite, and from that moment everything was smooth. The larger size is nice, and so far I had no issues running games pretty comfortably.

That sound like a fun idea.

Is it illegal to use a fake name for such interviews, or rather - can it get you prosecuted, i.e if the company would get really salty and sued you for their incurred manpower? As long as you don’t submit any fake legal documents, just sending a fake CV with fake name and creds, maybe going to an interview or two, only to bail out before providing anything legally binding, is it a persecutable crime?

Yeah, that’s my experience as well. In addition to being lazy with updating, so if some kind of supply chain attack happens, I usually sorts itself out before I get to updating :D

But I did limit my browser extensions, after I a cause with Nano Defender taught me a lesson - it was a mildly popular anit-anti-adblock killer that worked where other adblocks were detected, but the developer sold the extension to a company that turned it into a info-stealer malware and pushed an update through chrome store, which got accepted and propagated, and some of my social network sessions got compromised. So, I just stick to more popular projects where something like this shouldn’t happen, and don’t use random extensions.

Yeah, that part about WhatsApp is annoying. I just have a spearate profile on Graphene that has only WhatsApp installed, and whenever it wants me to refresh a session I just switch to the profile and log in.

There is, but it requires you to log into the app every two weeks to maintain a session. You can setup a emulator to do it for you. I just have a separate profile on my Graphene with Only WhatsApp that I switch to and login whenever I get a warning.

I’ve been using it for almost a year by now, and so far I didn’t have any problems. I’ve not considered that problem though, so it might be happening and I was just lucky.

WhenI was setting it up, it took me only like two hours tops. The ansible project is well documented, has a clear setup guide, and the process is really just getting server with ssh access, changing DNS, changing around 5 values in the ansible config and running it.

As far as I know the Discord bridge has some limitations, the major one being that IIRC it doesn’t atually support calls. But just for chatting across servers it has worked well for me.

There’s also the fact that you have to either trust the project with your password (as in, the the bridfe adds a matrix bot that runs on your server, but needs your pssword), since I think it uses the web version in the background (but then you can also use it for DMs and any server), or set up a bot on the discord server you want to bridge, which obviously cant be done if you’re not an admin. It’s a foss project, but there’s always a small risk of it gping rogue.

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Its pretty well documented and easy to follow, it took me only like an hour to setup.

I’m hodsting my own Matrix server with WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord (you don’t need a bot for that, you can just share your login with the bridge) and Messenger bridge. I have all my IMs in one app, don’t have to install spyware on my phone, and I can make bots that troll annoying people that message me on any platform.

Hosting it was super simple, thanks to the Ansible project that’s extremely robust and well done, I literally just got a hosting, domain amd changed like 5 config values to enable the bridges I wanted, gave it an IP and ssh key, and ran it. And if I need to update, I literally “just update” (it’s all wrapped up into “just” tool), and it eve handles cases where I didn’t update for a while, failing graciously and telling me what I need to do maually, usually just rename some config values.

I wholly recommend it. You probably wont convince your friends to switch from <insert app here>, and this is the best compromise.

I’m using a small instance on Hetzner, for 6$ a month. You could in theory get a free oracle cloud instance for it, but I didn’t manage to get one.

And you can easily share it with anyone interrested, make them an account, so they can also consolidate their DMs. I’m sharing it with a few friends and colleagues.

It works simillarly to an IRC. You have a server, that server can have channels, I think it can even do voice. But, unlike IRC, you can also use your server to talk to people on other servers, similar to how Fediverse works - if I have a server hosted on myserver.com, and someone else has a public room on server otherserver.com, I can either join the room@otherserver.com or message person@otherserver.com, all from my account on myserver.com.

And bridges are basically just bots that run on your own server, and by scraping websites/using API of the service your bridging they create a private room i.e Messenger@myserver.com, with subrooms per chat, and the bot then sends every message it recieves signed into your messenger account to the room, and vice versa - anything you send there will it forward to the real messenger, basically allowing you to chat with people on messenger through your matrix server. Which solves the problem of “Each of my friend is using different messaging service, can I have them all in one app? (The app being Matrix client)”.

I’m a fan of self-hosted Matrix server. You can get a dozen of bridges for those stubborn people that refuse to leave messenger/whatsapp/telegram (at a loss of encryption, and they still get your convos, but at least you don’t have their spyware on your mobile and you can have everything in one app), while also being decentralized.

Self-hosting a server is actually really, really easy. It took me like half an hour, because there is an amazing Matrix Ansible Deploy script, that has a pretty easy to follow documentation, and is also one of those super-rare projects that just works. Even if I forgot to update my server for several months, I could literally “just update”, and the script is clever enough to figure out what changed, tell me what I need to update in the config files (which are still only like four rows of stuff I needed to setup), and it is a really smooth experience. Even when you want to set up some bridges, for most it’s literally just adding “<service>_bridge_enabled: true” to the ansible yml config file. I’ve already set up Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord and Messenger this way, and it was effortless.

I just ignore everything, avoid news, especially local or politics. I just don’t care, don’t plan to ever have children and just hope I’ll get to live the rest of my life with my circle of friends playing games without having to deal with any kind of large crisis that would affect me.

Since I have slightly above avarage salary as someone working in IT, I’m counting on not being rich enough to be of interrest, while also not being poor enough (taking my lack of any expenses on family/car/etc into account) that if the living conditions worsen significatly, it will have already been a problem for more than half of a population way earlier and something will have to be done about it. And even if not, I can still comfortably get by even if prices of everything got 3-4 times as much as they are now, so IDGAF. It’s a privilege, but I’m at a point where I don’t really care what happens to others. For my part, I’m not bringing children into this hopeless mess, and while it’s sad that a lot of innocent will take the fall, I also take solace in that a lot of the people who brought it on themselves will suffer for it.

If I ever wanted to fight against my local regime, it would definitely not be through US and CIA, lol.