should be live. A lot fewer shenanigans, I hope, than last week.
YouTube says the stream has started. It says it's excellent. Hello, everybody. Hello. Welcome in.
Welcome in. Happy Friday. Happy Crunchy Day, as Adam Bean would definitely say.
I see some familiar faces already. Let me go ahead and bring that up.
Whenby's Note, Adam Bean, Shadow Ben. Shadow Ben, yeah, I was going to say that's a new one.
Hi, Henry. First time in live. Welcome in. Welcome in. JMS 547, welcome.
Terracotta Pie. The title of the stream sounds interesting. Yeah, I think it's a common issue,
right? It's a common thing, at least I get back here, so I have to assume it impacts
a lot of people who listen. But the concept of burnout and just always trying to stay on top of
things and just feeling like it's maybe more work than you're able to put in. And then kind of wondering,
hey, so is this doable? Is it possible? Should I keep going? There's an actual direct question
that I'll address shortly. But I feel like those are the questions I see a lot back here.
I've received emails from you guys that see the comments, so I wanted to address it,
share my thoughts on it. It's something I've shared my thoughts on before,
but I think it's always a really good reminder to share. If you're in the live chat, say hi. Hello.
I'm going to give everyone a few minutes to log in. If you're in a signal group,
definitely say hi as well. I'll be kind of cycling there, too. So say hi if you're in a
signal group and you're tuning in live. Say hi in the live chat there. And I also want to
thank the five people who left questions. If you guys want to already get ahead of that,
there is a link that's the same consistent link every week in a description so that you
can leave a question, a formal question like the one here that I answer in the next week's stream.
So that's how we kind of keep the show going. And if it can be about me, it can be about you,
it can be about life, it can be about tech, it can be about anything. Hello, green cactus.
Hello, 303. Poochievert. Hello, hello. Welcome, everybody. Let me see how the stream is looking
here. All right. I'll give it a few more minutes. Wait a few more minutes for everyone
to come in. Do you guys have any updates or anything you're looking forward to this weekend?
On my end, it is a boring weekend, which I'm really happy about because on the topic of burnout,
I don't feel like I'm burning out, but I'm just exhausted this week. So I'm excited for
kind of a down weekend to relax over here. It's been a crazy week with recording.
I think yesterday I recorded for like five. No, it was like three to four hours of just
talking because I had a Techlor Talks interview to record yesterday and then I recorded the
second part of the proton hardening video, which was an hour and then surveillance support was
over an hour. So my voice yesterday was pretty wiped. All right. Let me check the stream.
Okay. Let's go ahead and get started. So the main question this week, okay. And then
Steve says hi from the signal group. Hi, Steve. Definitely feel free to leave questions and
tag along as we go. And I'll go ahead and bounce between people. So go ahead and keep
leaving questions in the live chat. Again, I bounced between them and I'll make sure to
catch up. So please be a part of the stream. You guys are part of the stream if you're in
the live chat. And yeah, let's get into it. So this is from an anonymous person. They asked,
I'm getting tired of trying to maintain my privacy. At what point do you accept that
all services collect data on you? Your voice and image will likely be fed to AI.
And you just have to live with that in order to live in the world. It sucks,
but especially in some industries, you just have to use the invasive tools. There isn't
another option and trying to fight it puts you behind your colleagues who are using
the big data tools and not worrying about being private. Yeah. So I think there's two,
maybe three parts of this question. The first is that I always see this feeling,
I'm just going to call this privacy burnout, right? I think that's maybe just a term that
we can all coin and use. I think everybody can understand quite easily. It's probably
relatable to many people as well. I see it as a signal, not really a verdict, right?
In the running world, I'm a runner. And if I, you know, if I've been training for months
and months and months, and then I have a week where I'm just mentally and physically exhausted,
it means I'm over-training. It doesn't mean that I hate running, even though it might feel
like I hate running that week. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with the running.
It doesn't mean that it's something wrong. I'm doing too many hills. It's just that
I'm doing too much relative to what I can handle and what I probably need in that time. And so
actually the way to address this isn't to do more. It isn't to quit. It's to just step back
for a second and re-reflect on the situation and see why you feel that way. Again, the burnout
is a signal that something isn't working. It's usually just a mismatch. Technically,
if you want to get technical, it's a mismatch between your threat model and what you're
doing to try to address kind of the risks that you have established. So I think that's
always where I like to start. It's always good for any of you if you feel this way to ask what
specifically is giving me the most amount of overwhelm and is that aligned with what my
concerns actually are? Because when you actually, you know, dig into this, it feels like every
service collects data on you and your voice and image will be fed to AI. But really,
that's not always true. A lot of the privacy respecting services actively try not to collect
data about you. And I'm sure you already used many of them. So it's easy to only look at the
negatives when you're in that kind of very negative state. So that's always what I like
to say if you have burnout. Now, in terms of solutions, again, step back, re-reflect
either what you're doing doesn't align with your threat model and your threat model is
actually good. Like you've put together a good threat model, you understand what your risks are,
you understand what you really care about. And then you might realize, oh,
eight of these things I'm doing actually are too much. Like they actually go beyond
what I need to do. And sometimes it's actually not that at all. Sometimes you are actually
just, you don't have a good threat model. And sometimes you need to update the threat model.
And it's like, okay, beforehand I had this concern and I realized maybe this isn't as much
of my concern anymore. So I'm going to change that expectation. And then when I actually
execute with the tools, they will better align with that. So I just think it signals something
isn't matching up. In terms of your follow-up questions, I think that, you know, anything
that has to do with work, I think that is less of a burnout thing and more of a compartmentalization
thing. This is the kind of situation where it's like, hey, if something's for work,
it's probably for a business, it's probably for school, it's probably something that doesn't
even need to inherently be about you. And so it's very possible to actually have a situation
where you're using tools that maybe you wouldn't use in your personal life that you feel comfortable
using because they align with the risk and the kind of what you've designated into that
section of your life. So if you work for a company and you're helping this company develop
a piece of software and they're like, hey, you should use cloud code. You should use chat
GBT to help build the tool. And then it's like, okay, I'll use these tools to build the site
for the company. But that doesn't mean you have to upload your personal information to it.
You don't have to upload your bank statements. You don't have to upload even your first and
last name sometimes. So that's typically how I look at it. But you guys should also let me know
if you're in the, in the live chat, like what's been your experience. I know it's very common.
So I just want to make sure that no one feels like it's only them going through this. I go
through this too. I actually just had this happen to me a few weeks ago where I just felt
overall overwhelmed by my tech stack, not specifically the privacy and security, but
just overall in tech, everything just felt like it just wasn't working. And so I had to kind of go
through very particularly, like just the little things, the big things, it was, it was a whole
thing. It took my whole weekend up. But when I came back from the weekend, it was like a whole
weight came off my chest and it felt really nice. So that's what I have to say about that question.
Let's see here. The title of the stream sounds interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a common thing.
My processor is also burning out apparently very frequent system fails today. I'm sorry about
that. I hope that it can get over it by stepping back and reassessing where it's at. I also just
wanted to shout out on this, the privacy dad, I really liked their blog. It's very practical.
It's coming from the perspective of someone with a family. And so I just think it's really
well done. But they actually just published this a few days ago. It's okay to take a break from
thinking about digital privacy. It's not like inherently about burnout. Like that's not exactly
what it's about. But I think there's a lot of overlaps with kind of what he discusses and why
he kind of took a little break and how it allows him to come back stronger and still
passionate about this. You guys have to take a break. Like I can tell you I've been doing
this for over 10 years. And if I was like on it every single day all the time,
I wouldn't still be doing this. Like I would have quit a long time ago and I would have
maybe just given in fully. So I really think it's important to have those boundaries for yourself.
Steve shared a recent win on signal here, installing smart tube on the fire stick for
ad for YouTube. That's pretty cool. I haven't heard a smart tube before, but whatever you
can do to get ad for YouTube is going to be a big win. So good work. I mean, not a win for
maybe creators fully, but it's a win for you guys personally. I also wanted to share our quiz.
Actually, I think is a really good tool for this too. So our quiz is going to ask you
questions about your situation all across the board. This browser doesn't support emojis.
That's why you see that thing. But on our tools, it's going to ask you like, hey,
tell me a little bit about yourself. And then it's going to ask, what do you do?
And when you skip to results, it's going to tell you, hey, you're doing enough for who
you are. You're doing too much for who you are. It actually tells you, you're probably doing more
than you need to do. And I think it's not a perfect tool by any stretch of the imagination.
That's not the point. It's not meant to be exact. It's meant to give you an idea of where
you're at and track patterns over time. So the quiz, it actually tracks your score over time.
And again, it's it's your own link. So we don't keep that data. It's just a link that you
keep for yourself. If you keep taking that quiz of every couple months, it'll actually
start to spot patterns over time on how you're doing. And this question is a big reason for
why I developed that quiz. So all right, let's see Gothic for life. Personal data is very much
connected with your work, though. It's very difficult to avoid that SSO integrations. Most
companies use. Yeah, but most companies, they set up an email account for you, right? Like a
lot of companies, let's say they use Google, they're going to give you a Google account
tied to your company, Google account. If they're not doing that, they're not
doing things properly, I would say. A lot of organizations again, really should be giving
you company based credentials that aren't personal whatsoever. And ideally, a company
is giving you dedicated devices for work as well. That's how they should be doing
things. If they're not, then you should still try to recreate that create a new
account just for work that isn't tied to you that you can use for work. Try to
set up a virtual machine if they don't want to give you a dedicated device,
like try your best to recreate that if they're not going to do it.
Let's see. The link is quiz.techlor.tech. It's on our site. It's easy to find.
Just go to our site. Felix's next question, and I'll jump again between the chats,
but Felix's next question, I am living in a heavily censored country where 99%
of major VPN providers are inaccessible. So most of your recs on those are
useless for me. What is your stance and advice on proxy protocols that are
primarily used to bypass censorship in countries like mine where normal VPNs
like WireGuard and OpenVPN and proxies are blocked? I'm mostly talking about
Shadowsocks, V2ray, Trojan, Hysteria 2, et cetera that have appeared in China
for circumventing the Great Firewall and are now widely used in countries like
Russia and Iran to access the rest of the internet. So I always preface this
question. Like I want to be as realistic with where I think my advice
is, and this is a place where I just don't have much first-hand experience.
Like I have lived in the US most of my life, and here I've never had to deal
with censorship issues other than the occasional Wi-Fi network that doesn't
want VPN usage on it, which is a very easy thing to get around,
and it's nothing anywhere near as complex as what you might be dealing
with in your region. So again, and I think this is why when we talk
about having public teams for projects, it's really important because when a
project is public about who runs it, then you get to know who runs the project,
whether it's a service, an email client, et cetera, and whoever runs it,
their personal experiences end up in the product. So
Techlor probably right now isn't the best resource for censorship circumvention
because look at me, like I've lived in the US my whole life, like how much am I
going to know about it, and how much first-hand experience am I going to have?
That doesn't mean I can't understand, it doesn't mean that I can't learn and give
you guys better advice, but there's probably people who actively are in your exact situation
who have that info. So I just always want to preface that, guys, and it's a good
reminder to like when you're using a service, just know who runs it because it reflects on
the service and what they're going to prioritize. Based on what I've seen,
seems like it's the best right now, but guys, this is based on what I read online and what
people report works today. And this stuff is a cat and mouse game, what works today might not
work next week. And so all I can share is try to find communities online that discuss these
things that have people like yourself that are going through this exact situation.
And don't just rely on one method because this change is so frequently, so you need to have
more than one method ready to go so that you can access content because this is, again,
it's a cat and mouse game. So I don't think one method is ever going to be the only method that
will permanently work for you. And that's pretty much the best I can kind of share right now,
unfortunately. It's just not something I know very much about.
Anonymous asks, could you explain lockdown mode, please? I hear it helps against UFED and
other digital forensics tools designed to extract phone data and is very useful to journalists,
but I don't understand the pros and cons and if I should use it. I suppose if I can use the service
on a computer, then I shouldn't use my phone for it to limit the data on my phone, or is it more
secure to use the phone since iOS sandbox is everything. Yeah, so the first thing, it's weird
because this video actually got quite a lot of views, but it seems like it got organic search
views and it feels like a lot of our like dedicated audience missed it for some reason.
So we made a whole lockdown video and I've been using lockdown mode for years now and that video
was made a while back, but it's overall still relevant and that video discusses exactly what
you actually notice when you start using lockdown mode on the phone, on the laptop, and it literally
shows you like side by side how the features impact your day to day workflow. So I'd highly
recommend checking out that video if you want to learn more about what it looks like. Now,
for me personally, I think that lockdown mode is a lot more restrictive on mobile,
mainly because third-party browsers you can't add site exceptions for, so you're kind of incentivized
to use Safari. iMessage features largely break to be honest, like I'm pretty sure search just
isn't a thing in iMessage. Photo sharing is always a little bit iffy and I just stumble on random
things that don't seem to work on mobile because of lockdown mode. On desktop, honestly,
I can't even tell you it's on 90% of the time. Like on desktop, because third-party
browsers can use their own browser engines, they're not really impacted when you enable lockdown mode,
so I just don't notice much on desktop. In terms of, you know, you say should I enable it on one
device or another device, I would say that if you are using lockdown mode for a good reason,
which I don't think is necessarily everyone should use lockdown, but I think it's designed for
specific people or just people who want more security. But if you have to enable it on one device,
you probably have to enable it on all of your devices. I mean, this is what Apple specifically
recommends. It's supposed to be enabled on all of your devices. In fact, if you remove a device
and you're signed into the same Apple account, if you remove a device and you turn off lockdown
mode on one of them, you get notified on your other devices, hey, lockdown mode was disabled on one
of your devices. And also, if you have lockdown mode enabled on like an iPhone and you buy a brand
new Mac, while you go through the setup menu on the Mac, it'll prompt you and ask you if you want to
enable lockdown mode. So again, it's meant to be used on all devices. If you have an Apple Watch
and you have an iPhone, the Apple Watch will automatically inherit lockdown mode from the
iPhone. So again, I really don't think there's many situations where you should be enabling
lockdown mode on one, but not the other. It's meant to be used across all Apple devices.
The one exception maybe is if you have like very compartmentalized Apple devices that are
like tied to different accounts or you don't use any Apple services on them, then maybe
there's a use case where like maybe a home desktop doesn't need lockdown mode, but the
phone you take with you does. But overall, that's what I would say to that question.
Did I miss something here? In terms of the digital forensic tools, I think, you know,
the main thing I associate lockdown mode with is actually like mercenary spyware.
Like that's kind of what I'm associating lockdown mode with. Not so much. And actually,
let me check. I want to make sure. Okay, I want to make sure I wasn't like the big view here.
And the main thing of lockdown mode that I think might impact this, the digital forensic tools,
is the fact that it actually has forces on the feature where you can't plug things in unless
your device is unlocked. So that might have something to do with the digital forensics
tools. But again, I associate personally lockdown mode as being more of a spyware thing.
Um, yeah, I guess I didn't really answer your first question. Lockdown mode, it's it's,
I would call it reductionist. It's not adding anything. It's not like you're installing
an antivirus. You're not installing a VPN. You're not installing something to do
something extra for you. Lockdown mode does the opposite. It actually removes things.
It removes features. It removes or changes the way that features work to pretty much
prevent almost all of the avenues that someone well equipped can try to exploit
to attack your device. And to this day, Apple still recently said that they have not found
any sign of lockdown mode being bypassed for any kind of mercenary spyware, which is really impressive.
So yeah, let's see. All right, let me go ahead and bump over to the live chat.
Let's see. On topic of staying on top, I actively stopped looking at privacy stuff for
a few months when the whole chat control and age verification started to hit.
It was starting to stress me out too much. Yeah.
It's a really tough line to draw because, you know, we want to make sure we're staying up
to date on these things so that we can stay active in them.
But at the same time, I also think that the long-term sustainability
of keeping up with things should be sustainable.
That was worded horribly, but I hope you guys know what I'm saying.
I just feel like there is some kind of balance that we have to find where
if you have to take a few months off, then when you come back, how can I
still keep up with these things but not have to take three months off again?
It's kind of the question I would pose. So maybe it's, hey, I just checked the news
each weekend. Once a week, that's actually pretty good, right?
Like it means that you're going to catch almost all the stuff.
It means that you don't have to like keep up with it during the week
when you're probably the most overwhelmed.
And it means that you can even set aside an hour.
Like it doesn't have to be a weekend, just like an hour over the weekend
where I go ahead and actively look at this stuff.
That's actually like the whole inspiration behind surveillance support, right?
The reason my surveillance support started is for this job,
I literally have to keep up with news all the time.
And I hate keeping up with news. And so for me, it just wasn't fun.
And so I still do it because it's my job and it's something I love doing for you guys
and people clearly like the podcast.
And the podcast has just been extremely successful over the years.
But the whole point of the podcast is so that people don't have to do that.
Like that really is, I think the main selling point of surveillance support is like,
hey, you don't have to follow news from like 100 different sources each week.
Just watch this 45 minute podcast and you will get everything you need to know for the week.
So I hope that like, you know, that's what it's doing.
Other than that, I hope you can find some kind of balance for yourself
because I think it's important.
Gothic Life Your Personal Day is very much connected with your work.
I think I addressed that one earlier.
This is a good one.
Ophelia says, for me, the privacy burnout is not from what I'm doing myself,
but seeing the people around me absolutely not care about privacy at all.
Yeah, I think it's always hard because privacy is a social thing.
And I think there's almost maybe a loneliness to it, right?
Like if there's something that you care about that you're putting a lot of time into,
but the people around you aren't.
I think that is inherently, you know, kind of isolating.
So I can definitely see that.
And I mean, I feel it too.
For me, I like going to events like I go to,
and I try to do coverage for the events when I go on the channel.
But it's also really fun to be around other people who care about these things
where you don't have to explain yourself.
There is no, oh, here's why I do this.
People just ask, oh, like what are you doing for this?
Which is a different conversation, right?
Like what a conversation about why you do something versus what you're doing is very different.
So yeah, I think that's the first thing.
The second thing is if you can just try to find some way to feel optimistic
when you're engaging with it yourself,
whether that's for some people, it's joining a community
of other people going through the journey.
For some people, it's disconnecting from that, right?
Like for some people, they don't want to be a part of it.
And for them, it's a lot more intrinsic,
the reason why they're doing these things.
So I hope something there resonated with you,
but it's a tough place to be.
Lizzie Taj says, I've been under the impression that DNS control
blocking is hugely important when it comes to privacy.
Would you agree?
Actually, I think DNS is kind of the thing that I have evolved my views on
maybe the most the last few years or one of the most.
I can't measure that, but I feel like it's something that...
I didn't completely ignore DNS back in the day,
but I didn't realize just how powerful it really was,
especially the blocking aspect of things until maybe a couple of years ago,
especially on mobile devices,
because mobile devices don't let you do anything, right?
Like if an app bundles itself with a third-party SDK
to the invasive company, you can't really block the SDK.
There's not much you can do.
It's not like a browser where a browser can actually block elements
from the website, and it can give you fingerprinting resistance,
and it can do really fun, cool things.
So the closest thing we can do is DNS blocking.
And that's why I think DNS blocking is really powerful,
is it can actually deal with apps that otherwise there's nothing
you can really do to make them a little bit more privacy-respecting.
So, I'm a fan.
I need a tablet for school as an iPad, the best privacy tablet,
especially with Graphene StopPixel tablet support soon.
Also, what are your thoughts on Open Slate by Brax,
their upcoming tablet?
I don't have many thoughts on their devices.
Yeah, I always want to tread carefully
because I know that building products is really challenging,
and it's not to discount that they could be good devices,
but I do think that I'm always going to trust...
And this goes for us as well.
Like, you know, we're content first, and then services second.
That doesn't mean we can't build good services,
but I also think building a website with some tools
is a lot easier than building a full phone
with hardware and software.
So, yeah, I would just say, like, if you trust the tool,
then definitely use it.
I personally would probably be looking more at,
like, Calyx or Graphene, and then just getting my own phone.
That's personally how I would go about it.
In terms of a tablet for school, though,
I actually don't think it matters too much, right?
Like, we talked about this earlier.
I think it's more about compartmentalization,
like work, school, all of these things.
Like, yes, it might have your name in the settings,
but overall, you can have that device
be used for that one use case.
You can literally power off the device physically,
and only power it on at school
or when you're, like, at a cafe or at the library to study.
And that's it.
That's where it exists, and it's logged into
even, like, your school's EDU email.
You set up a new Apple account with the EDU email.
Like, you can really set up, like, different lives
for yourself, and you can have these devices
follow those lives.
And that way, there isn't really that much personal exposure.
And it's really, I think, the easiest way
to make privacy easy, actually.
If you're trying to go for absolute privacy
in all areas of your life,
it's gonna be extremely difficult, if not impossible,
unless you wanna just, you know, live at home all day
and never leave the house.
And complete recluse-style lifestyle.
So I really think compartmentalization
is how you can pull this off.
Let's see.
Any personal information is enough to make dots between.
Yeah, I got, like, right, I'm not saying
that's not the case, but it's about risk reduction.
Again, you're not gonna be perfect.
Like, if that, if your point
is any personal information is enough
to make dots between your personal and your work life,
well, what are you suggesting in that situation, right?
Like, what is your real suggestion there?
Is it to, like, I don't know.
Like, how is that actionable?
So I really do think that compartmentalization,
as much as you can, can actually get you very far.
And it's a very nice middle ground for a lot of people.
What crypto prepaid Visa Mastercard disposable cards
do you recommend?
I use CakePay personally in CakeWallet.
It's just, I already use CakeWallet.
CakePay's already built in, and so it's really easy to use that.
I also know there's CoinCards, and that's another really good tool.
I don't, I have never done a prepaid Visa through CoinCards,
but I've definitely done them with CakePay,
and it works really nicely.
I'm still deciding on my future non-Gmail email account.
Does anyone have experience of Infomaniac
and how private their email is?
Yeah, Infomaniac looks interesting.
A lot of people have asked for a review of it.
I haven't personally used it yet, so I don't have any feedback there.
It's their way to alias credit cards for free while keeping privacy.
I don't think credit cards, unless your credit card company does that.
Like, I believe Capital One has a feature like that
that I think does work on credit cards, actually.
So there are some tools, but no, even Privacy.com,
which I'm a big fan of, they don't support credit.
It's just debit cards, which is a bit sad.
Yeah, yeah, you're welcome.
All right, let's switch back to the questions.
It's a light week this week, so it's nice because I'm exhausted.
Let's see.
Hi, Henry.
I have a question about VPNs and proxies.
I really like this question,
because a lot of people don't know how this works,
so it's a chance for me to showcase a feature
that people don't know much about.
In the MOLVAD browser, when using their extension,
when you enable random mode on all sites,
it routes through a proxy.
Is this on top of a VPN?
I'm using a system-wide VPN with lockdown mode enabled,
plus all sites on random in the extension on the MacBook.
So, yeah, or MOLVAD browser, I guess.
MOLVAD browser and B could be either,
but it sounds like both apply to you.
So lockdown mode is irrelevant here, so ignore that.
That doesn't, it shouldn't change anything
as part of your question.
Now, what people don't know
is that the proxy inside of MOLVAD
only works if you are connected to MOLVAD VPN.
So it's actually not at all like other extensions.
So when you see the Wendscribe extension,
the ProtonVPN extension,
really any VPN that has an extension,
that's just like in the Chrome store
or in the Firefox store,
what those do is they are essentially
just creating a SOX5 proxy in your browser,
and it's still overall going to give you
the IP protection of a VPN,
but it's keeping it within your browser.
MOLVAD is a bit different.
It's still a SOX5 proxy,
but again, it requires you to be connected
to their VPN first.
So it's actually a multi-hop kind of.
It's, you're connecting to MOLVAD VPN servers,
and then from the VPN server,
it connects to the SOX5 proxy in the extension.
So then the site sees the proxy,
not even the MOLVAD exit node.
So you see it's almost a multi-hop
with a VPN and a proxy.
It's a very interesting workflow,
and why it's actually really powerful
is that because you set it to random,
it means every site per tab
is going to get a different IP address.
It's different than when you connect
to just a system-wide VPN.
When you're connecting to a system-wide VPN
and you access 10 websites in a regular browser,
those 10 websites will still get
the same IP address of your VPN connection,
which typically is fine, right?
Like the, there's a huge, like,
anonymity layer to this
because if you have 10,000 people
connected to the same VPN connection,
they're all going to have the same IP address.
And so you're normally blending
in quite nicely with other people.
But the nice thing about the proxy
is that you still get that anonymity
because there's other people connecting to the proxy.
But now you get a different IP address
on every website.
And in fact, you're using MOLVAD browser,
which is already designed to make users look the same
because it's pretty much like a lightweight Tor browser,
right?
You're getting a lot of privacy from that.
So it's kind of a hidden thing I would recommend
if you want the maximum amount of privacy
out of the MOLVAD browser
to enable the extension and use the proxy,
kind of like you're doing in random mode.
The other nice usability benefit I've found
using the proxy
is that the proxies are typically
a little bit less blocked
than the VPN itself.
Like Reddit is a really good example of this.
Like MOLVAD VPN IPs are to meet,
for me, at least universally blocked by Reddit.
But the proxies, I'd say, are 50-50.
So when I try to access Reddit,
I have a specific proxy I'm connected to just for Reddit
because I know that proxy works.
And then maybe in two months, they block that one too.
But I just have an easier time bypassing those site blocks.
So yeah, that's a pro tip.
I don't know how commonly known that is,
but it was something I definitely wanted to talk about.
It looks like we got some troubleshooting there
in the Signal Group.
Okay, last question.
Again, it was a really light week here.
And then we can just open it up for the live chat.
But it's YodaLuca23.
They said that seems that Google Messages
is finally starting to roll out the full RCS 3.1 spec
in the stable release branch.
That includes RCS end-to-end encryption.
This is a hugely forward for global society.
And I don't think they say it here,
but a couple iOS version updates ago.
Apple also released this so that you can enable it.
I believe it was in beta.
It might still be in beta,
where you can enable RCS with end-to-end encryption
inside of the settings on your Apple device.
So then theoretically, you would get that
between Android and iOS.
Now, the real question a lot of people I communicate with
refuse to get Signal Session, SimpleX,
or any other privacy-focused messenger,
and only WhatsApp or RCS.
So what is my better choice?
And then they kind of go through their thought process
as to like, is WhatsApp better or worse than RCS?
So RCS is using MLS, which is at least like an open standard.
It's something open.
Now, technically, WhatsApp is using Signal's protocol,
which is also open.
But I really think this, I don't know,
first off, it's a wash to me.
Like if I'm comparing them,
I'm not like this one is just across the board,
the better option.
So you should definitely always use this one.
So I'm not gonna like take a,
I'm on the fence as well here.
I don't think you need to decide fully, right?
Like I don't see any harm in having an RCS client
and a WhatsApp client,
and then seeing over time how that develops,
especially because the RCS thing is new.
So I would love to see maybe a little bit more coverage
for the full kind of metadata leakage
if there are any like more independent audits
that are done to try to see how secure it really is.
We might see over time like how good it really is.
And I think over time we'll get the answer of like,
hey, is RCS becoming more popular?
And is it starting to take some of the traffic away from WhatsApp?
If that's the case, then maybe RCS makes more sense.
So the only other thing I'd say
is that at the end of the day, RCS is a standard.
And you're just using a standard,
whereas if you're using WhatsApp,
you're using a private company
that's gonna be associating that traffic
with everything else you do in the Facebook ecosystem.
So again, it's kind of a wash.
These are just kind of the things I'd be thinking about.
And really the biggest hole
is probably gonna be backups,
regardless of what you choose to use.
So if you're using WhatsApp,
but your contacts and yourself
aren't using the encrypted backups feature,
then all of your chats are gonna end up unencrypted
as a cloud backup that they can access.
And same thing with RCS.
I don't know what Google Messages does,
but if Google Messages does do any backups
that aren't fully encrypted,
then your messages would end up there as well.
So I'd be looking at that,
try to meet people where they're at
with the best tool you can give them.
So, yeah.
And actually, JMR just had a really good point.
You have to watch for old text protocol
fallback from RCS.
It's a really good point.
When you're using WhatsApp,
fairly certain there is no way to somehow fall back
to something that's not end-to-end encrypted.
But when you are using something that is RCS
with end-to-end encryption,
you're in a client that probably can fall back
to something a lot worse.
It's a really good point.
So thanks for saying that.
But that's actually it for the week, guys.
So let me go ahead
and we can just stay here in the live chat
and have some fun.
If you're in a signal group,
definitely say that you're in the signal group.
Otherwise, let me switch these around.
Swap tab positions.
Do I even need this?
Honestly, I kind of don't.
Why don't we just leave it like that?
And then I have the signal room open.
If you guys want to join a signal group,
it is open to all our techlorians,
even the smallest techlorian tier.
You get access to our signal group.
It's something that's a lot of fun.
I get active there.
It's our only community left at this point.
It's the only one that we're able to maintain.
We're a two-person team.
So the forum was just way too much for us.
Even with moderators, it was just a lot of work.
So I'm really happy to still have at least one community.
And yeah, you also get to access my RSS feed.
Like on the topic of burnout,
like I maintain my own RSS feed
to track all the surveillance report stories.
And so if you want to be able to just track one feed
and not have to track hundreds of things,
that's something that's also part of the techlorians.
And you can join that down in the description.
It's a big help for us.
Let's see.
What was the name of the other card provider,
the one you said after CakePay?
It's called CoinCards.
Again, I didn't have as good of an experience with it
as I do with CakePay,
but I still like CoinCards.
It's still a really good service.
Can anyone remember the name of the iOS app he showed us
that shows all the secrets your iPhone leaks?
Yeah, it's called Loop.
L-O-U-P-E, I believe.
I believe it's called Loop.
Yeah, it's a good point.
Hi.
Hello, Amethyst...
Uh, Emi.
Amethystangel216.
Hello, hello.
I do not have any info on CHOMP SMS.
I have never heard of a CHOMP.
Thanks again, Henry.
Yeah, of course, of course.
Yeah.
So guys, this is the open time.
Maybe we'll go to just an hour this week.
We don't need to push this further than it needs to go.
So say hi if you have a question for me,
if you have a question about privacy,
security, digital rights, the world, whatever.
I'm here.
It's meant to be the office hours,
so we can just kind of chill and have a good time here.
If you're in a signal group,
same thing goes to you guys.
Steve, Henry's still here.
One of the rare times I've been free for this slot.
Yay, yeah.
I feel like I haven't seen you on the live chat often,
if ever.
I don't want to say ever,
because maybe there was a time where you were on
and I'm forgetting.
But it's good to have you on.
Let's see.
Grant Sherman, have you heard of File-In,
the cloud storage provider?
You should do a privacy cloud storage tier list.
Actually, we did do some coverage for File-In.
Way back.
I think this was four or five years ago.
We did a video on top five Google Drive alternatives
or just end-end encrypted cloud providers.
And File-In was on there.
I forgot if File-In's on our website,
actually, on our tools page.
Let's find out here.
Tools.
Yeah, File-In's on there.
We just can't do coverage for everything.
We don't have a Firefox-focused video.
We don't have a Duck-to-Go browser video.
We don't have a Waterfox video.
Like, there's just so many tools that we don't have videos on.
So I do think that the nice thing about having the site tools
is that we can still kind of keep up with things
a bit better on a website.
Because content is really hard.
It's hard to put together a content version of sites.
It just takes a lot more time.
How's the compatibility with using crypto wallets
for regular commercial use?
Are these usable in place of credit cards?
Yeah, I don't think so.
Some businesses, you can look at maps online
of businesses that support cryptocurrency.
I think that's what you're asking.
But ultimately, I think for a regular person,
if you're trying to use cryptocurrency day-to-day,
you're probably going to have to use one of these bridges,
like using a prepaid Visa gift card.
I've done the experiment before.
It's actually really fun where it's like,
okay, can I spend a week and only use cryptocurrency?
And specifically, CakePay, back in the day,
I did a showcase partnered video with CakePay.
This was a long time ago, back when they first released the feature.
And it was like, I did a road trip just using CakePay.
So I bought the hotel with it.
I got our food with it.
And it was a really fun video to record.
We drove into the Humboldt Mountains
and the Redwoods and the Giants.
So it was really cool.
So I think that is really the main way to do it.
Most people don't support cryptocurrency.
And so if you want to actually use it more often,
you need to probably find people who natively support it
and use that when you can.
But otherwise, you have to use something like a gift card
that you purchase.
And it's kind of like a workaround.
Do you have a referral link for CakePay?
No, I don't think there's referral links.
So yeah, just use it.
Create an app that uses Google Drive for storage,
but it encrypts the file before uploading it.
Nice. How does it compare to like CryptoMator?
Like what's the difference between CryptoMator?
Anyone here have info on CHOP?
What is CHOP SMS?
I have to know now.
I'm going to pull it in my other browser.
I don't trust you guys always.
I know.
There's like pranks and stuff that you guys could play.
CHOP SMS.
Okay, no, it's a real thing.
It's a real thing.
I'm seeing it on the Google Play Store.
It looks like an SMS client.
It looks like just an SMS client.
I don't see what about it would be better or worse
for your privacy unless they're uploading any of that data elsewhere.
But I'm on their site.
I would guess it's like more of a generic SMS client from what I can tell.
How can I still use YouTube while keeping the recommended feed?
The issue with the YouTube offshoots
are that you lose the convenience of a curated feed.
Personally, I think that's like the whole benefit
to using something without a feed.
Like I think that's a good thing.
But if you really want that feed,
I mean, I don't know how else you're going to recreate that.
You're going to have to use YouTube probably to do that.
In that case, then like use YouTube in a dedicated browser
that's only used for YouTube, maybe use an ad blocker
because you can still have an ad blocker
and still get the recommendations.
That's probably the direction I would go
if those are the specific things that you want.
Speaking of Firefox focus,
I used to have it as my main browser.
So links from other apps open in it
instead of normal Firefox issue is it doesn't have extensions.
Do you think focus is worth it?
I think focus is nice for just a disposable browser.
So if you want your default browser to just open things
and then they don't permanently stay,
I think focus is really nice for that use case.
DuckDuckGo is going to offer something quite similar there too.
So it's kind of your call,
what you want your default browser to do.
I've been in both phases myself.
Like I've been in a phase where it's like,
I actually want my default browser
to be the browser I'm using to log into accounts, etc.
And I've also been in a situation where it's like,
I want my default browser to just wipe everything
when I'm done on mobile specifically, right?
On desktop, I'm always like,
my default browser is always like my account browser,
but on mobile, I've kind of gone back and forth there.
So try them out.
I mean, they're, see what you like better too.
There's no, like none of these are bad options.
Yeah, good luck over there.
I hope that it's not too bad troubleshooting what's going on.
I remember when I got my,
like my first PC build was the Skylake build
with like the 6700K, I believe.
And pretty much like, it was a good computer.
It just worked really nicely.
And then I kind of like started getting into this mode.
It's an issue that I think a lot of people go through
where it's like, oh, I want to be more professional
and I want to be more like a business,
even though we're like a two person team,
just kind of like figuring this stuff out as we go, right?
But I went through this phase and so I was like,
okay, I'm going to build like a really nice PC
using more like business-esque style hardware.
So I got the Skylake X processor, big mistake.
That thing was a pain in the ass.
I, you know, because it's like
a little bit more of a niche processor,
I had to get a much more expensive motherboard.
And then the thing ran so flipping hot.
Like I got the nicest Noctua Air fan
and that thing ran idling at like 50, 60 Celsius sometimes.
And when I actually hit it hard with a video edit,
it would crack 100 Celsius.
So I actually had to set up my first liquid cooled PC
just for that thing.
So literally, like this is why, I don't know, like in life,
I've learned to try to always take the simplest path
where I can because like the amount of downstream impacts
from one choice is like crazy.
It blows my mind.
Like me choosing to go with that processor,
it changed the CPU cooler I had to buy.
It changed the motherboard I had to buy.
It changed literally the GPU I had to buy.
Like everything downstream had to change
as a result of the CPU I picked.
So never underestimate like a decision you're making
that might seem a little complicated on day one
and like what it really means long-term.
And we see this everywhere.
Like the operating system you choose to use
literally impacts everything downstream.
This is like one of the main selling points, I think,
actually for the Apple ecosystem.
It's like, and again, this is all personal preference,
but when you choose to use the Apple ecosystem,
you get 80% of everything over the cloud
with end-to-end encryption.
It's not the best end-to-end encryption.
There's still metadata collection from Apple.
I get that, right?
But it takes care of everything for you.
If you go with something like Graphene,
still a great project, you can still recreate
that experience, but it's gonna take a lot more work.
So again, there's no right answer.
You're gonna get a lot of benefits
by doing that latter thing as well in other areas.
But it's those kind of decisions
that people don't put as much emphasis on.
People are a lot more likely to go,
how does iOS and their sandboxing
compare to Android and their sandboxing?
But realistically, the real secret
is that that's probably not going
to make or break anything for you.
What's gonna make or break either option for you
is downstream what it enables you to do
on top of the operating system.
From that perspective, it really comes down to the individual.
I just caught myself rambling about,
I don't even know what.
Like, why did I start rambling?
Oh, you're reseeding your CPU.
I'm wishing you very much luck
in that your system is not a Skylake X system.
Mayonnaise, I'm thinking about making
the full switch over to Proton today.
I haven't watched your video yet,
but do you have any suggestions
of an order to work in when starting?
You don't have to,
so you say full switch over to Proton today.
The first thing I would say
is that these things can be a transition.
I know, like, I'm this way too.
I want, when I'm done with something,
I want to just delete it and have it out of my life
and it's out of my bandwidth
and it's not taking up that mental space.
And I just want to be done, right?
But I think big transitions, right?
Like Proton's a suite,
which means you might be coming from another suite
and suites aren't just one tool.
It's email.
It's drive storage.
It's photos.
It's calendars.
There are so many things
that could go wrong in the transition.
So I don't know where you're at.
You didn't tell me where you're at
or what full switch means to you.
But Proton just released a new feature
even where you can link a Google account
into Proton.
So you can literally use Proton
as your centralized email client.
And you can have a Proton email there
as well as a Gmail email there.
And that's not going to cost you
any more privacy, right?
If you trust Proton,
they're not going to do anything nefarious
with your emails there.
If anything, there might be some privacy benefits
because you're not using the Gmail client,
which might have some of its own tracking
built into it.
So do your best to do the transition
and slowly phase things out.
You know, move one service over,
then start using that service.
You might find a week later
that this one thing didn't transfer properly.
And then when you actually have full confidence,
then delete the data from the old service
and then you're done with that service.
And then over time,
you can finally click that delete button.
Again, I don't know where you're at.
So I'm just making a lot of assumptions here.
But it's something that I know I fall into
in terms of traps.
Let's see.
Steve, tip, have a separate profile
on your phone for finance apps.
Don't use it outdoors.
If your phone is snatched from your hand
because of your carelessness,
at least the thief cannot see or access
your finance apps.
Yeah, it's true.
Yeah, it's a very good tip.
So thanks for sharing, Steve.
Let's see.
Cloud storage provider.
Again, infomaniac suite claims to be 150 Euro for 50 gigabytes
along with the rest of the suite.
Like I said above, seems too good to be true.
Yeah, it might be.
Again, I don't have experience with it.
Question for Henry.
Going cognitive course is five years old.
If you have the time,
is there anything you would update?
Yeah, well, it's already recorded, the update.
It was like a nine hour,
it's like nine hours total of footage.
And we're in the middle of cutting it up.
We already have beta testers
and we have a completed lesson for the most part
as kind of like our template lesson.
So if you're one of those beta testers,
you know who you are.
And the site is done.
We're going to do the transition
from the old teachable users to the new site
for the first version.
So that way they're on the new site.
So we're literally in the middle
of just editing the new one.
And there are a lot of updates.
Like there's a lot of things that have changed
in five years.
I'd say the fundamentals are still there, right?
But especially the tool recommendations
have changed a lot.
Like there wasn't even aliasing five years ago, right?
Like simple login.
I mean, all those tools weren't a thing.
It's kind of crazy to think about that.
So yeah, it's going to be really good guys.
Like I'm really hyped for it.
And it's going to be a lot more thorough
than the first one too,
while still being accessible and easy to take.
And there's still going to be the free version.
But we're probably going to open up pre-orders
for it pretty soon here
because we're already kind of coming up
on maybe finishing our first section.
So yeah, it's an exciting time.
That's what we've been putting a lot of our time
into the last few weeks.
So it's pretty good.
Let's see.
Hello.
Thanks for all the content.
Of course.
Thanks for tuning in.
Massive Holes Plat, 8539.
Have you ever used EOS?
I have.
I actually have a review of EOS.
It's very outdated, right?
It's changed a lot.
And I think I'd be maybe
a little bit less critical of it now in 2026.
I'm still not a fan of it.
Not like I'd say don't use it.
It's just for me, when I'm using Android,
I don't want it to be like EOS.
And I just don't really like the EOS-esque-ness of EOS.
So yeah, that's just my feelings towards it.
Again, very personal preference.
I know a lot of you guys use EOS
and you guys really like it.
So it seems like a great project.
It's just as well.
You didn't have self-oxidizing raptor.
Funny.
Fortunately, I can watch the stream on a tablet,
not missing it for the CPU BS.
Thanks for the luck.
Of course.
Why don't you recommend YouTube Revansit?
It is the most convenient YouTube alternative.
It blocks ads, OLED dark mode sponsor block,
and it just feels like the original YouTube
without the bloat.
Use it.
I don't like not recommend YouTube Revansit.
I know a lot of you guys use it.
So yeah, please do.
I will say sponsor block does piss me off a little bit.
Like I get why people use it,
but I do feel like it pushes the boundaries, man.
Because I'm already pro ad blocking.
Right?
I think there is no way that I can,
in good faith, run a channel that talks
about the topics we discuss and say,
yeah, but guys, you should keep your ads on.
The whole industry that's behind
over half of the real privacy invasion happening
and also security issues that are behind it.
So I can't, in good faith, say you don't use an ad blocker,
even though like 75% of our views are non monetized,
which means that a huge majority of our audience
is using an ad blocker and we're not getting money for it.
But sponsor block really pisses me off actually,
especially because we time stamp things like,
you know, we time stamp like every sponsor segment.
So it's really easy to skip.
And I feel like at that point it's like, hey,
like you just don't value the creator.
It's how it feels to me.
I'm not saying that's necessarily how you feel about it.
But as a creator, it feels like, okay,
if you're blocking my ads,
if you're blocking the sponsor segment,
then it just, it feels like it just sucks, man.
Because like it takes a lot of time.
These videos can take like 10, 20, 30 hours
to put together.
And obviously it's not free.
And the only way we can do this for a living
and not dedicate ourselves to other things
is because of revenue models.
So yeah, all I'll say, if you do use these tools,
try to support the creators however they're doing it.
So if you are using sponsor block on like all things secured
or the hated one or whoever,
find a way to support them individually separate from that.
So that way you can still get the best of all worlds.
Yeah.
And I mean, don't disrespect again to the project.
I know that the person who runs the project
knows of our content because they tweeted at us once
because I forgot to time stamp a sponsor segment once.
Like literally it was like on a surveillance report.
I think I forgot to time stamp a segment.
And then the sponsor block Twitter account
added the Techlor Twitter account and said,
why did you not timestamp this?
It's like, oh my God, I literally just forgot.
So I think they might be familiar with our stuff.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Why reasoning?
Why receding a CPU?
Yeah.
Good call to keep paying for a domain.
Yeah.
It's a good point.
Another place, just a tip when you're transitioning,
I think they're referring to the transition
to like a new email provider.
When you change phone numbers,
I do always like say, if you're not 100% ready,
you can port your phone number to something like Google Voice.
I know it's Google.
You can port it to something else.
But that way the number still exists somewhere
and you still have it parked somewhere
if you really need access to it
and it'll still receive messages.
So don't forget, you can like port things to other places
to kind of just buy yourself some time
to make sure that the transition was actually successful
when you're moving between providers.
If you need any more beta testers,
I'd love to sign up.
Yes, send me an email.
If you guys want to be a beta tester for going Cognito,
I'm trying to keep it very low key.
You know, I'm giving free access to the course,
which is like the least I could do
for you guys taking a look at it.
But like the first three people who email us meet,
email me, Henry, Henry at techlar.tech.
First three people,
I'll get you added to that signal group,
but that's it.
I won't do more than three.
I already only let, I think,
like five or six people in from our techlorians.
So I gave kind of like a techlorian beta access to those.
Thanks for the answer.
I appreciate it, of course, of course.
Did you mention in the video
that what Google's up to doing with app installations,
Google's not allowing any apps to be installed
without being signed by them
or a hard way for a usual user to get around?
Yeah, we've been doing a lot of coverage for that.
Like we have been really promoting the hell
out of keep Android open.
And we even signed the open letter.
Like we're listed on their site
as like some of their sources.
So I'm keeping track of it.
In fact, the people who run keep Android open
like literally send me emails when they get updates.
So I'm very much kept in the loop
on what's happening there.
And if there's something that I miss
and you're like, Henry,
why didn't you talk about this?
Then maybe I missed it.
So let me know and then I can try to cover it.
Multiple YouTube creators I follow here
have been experiencing horrible decreases
in user revenue.
Is that affecting you?
Yeah.
I mean, revenue definitely has gone down
on the YouTube end of things.
Like our ad revenue has been a lot lower
the last few months, I would say.
And like the first few months of this year
we saw a huge spike.
So it feels especially aggressive
because we went like,
we had kind of our average
and then our ad revenue went like this.
And now it like came down
like really hard the last few months.
So again, that's why we have other revenue models.
That's why we have techlorians.
That's why we have affiliate links
that are always opt-in.
That's why we have sponsors.
Like that's how we can still keep doing this.
And I don't feel like I can say no to a sponsor.
I can say no to like paywalling content,
which I know is a common thing.
So like it's cool.
I like the diversification that we've accomplished.
But yeah, it is always hard
when the YouTube ad revenue drops
because when it does well,
it's actually a huge help for us
when it doesn't do well.
Then it's like, man, that would be,
I think it's like the easiest thing
to like influence if you get like a really
good video out.
But if you're just dependent on ad revenue,
then you're only incentivized
to make like crazy viral videos
that like are going to get the most attention.
I think that's like why it's hard to,
it's hard to only have one revenue source
because then you're incentivized
by that revenue source.
That's always what I try to come back to
back here.
And it's how I try to run the channel
in a way that I think is fair
to what I want it to look like.
Does YouTube premium light actually result
in creators getting a good cut?
I've heard that it does,
but I'm not YouTube.
And I don't know much about YouTube
premium light.
That's a new thing.
So I don't know.
Oh, I see.
I could go voice is not available
in Germany.
That's a bummer.
Yeah, I feel like in the US too,
most people take the number with them.
That's a very normal thing to do.
Like normally you port to the new provider.
But because we have VoIP services
that are a lot more common here,
I think it's a little more common
to use something like Google Voice as well.
If I were to email you about beta testing,
going cognitive, I mean, I was ready to
choose a new email provider.
That's funny.
Yeah.
Hey, you could set up.
And this is another pro tip.
If you don't have a custom domain or
something set up simple login,
use simple login,
and then you can change behind the
scenes, the email that it gets
forwarded to.
That's like another huge benefit
when you're using simple login,
when you're using ad EIO.
Let's say you generate 10 emails on
10 different accounts.
It doesn't matter if you change
your email provider behind the
scenes, the 10 emails on those
accounts always stay the same.
If you get a new email provider,
you just point simple login or
ad EIO at the new email provider.
So if you're not using aliasing
services, just reach out with an
alias to me.
And then it doesn't matter if you
do a transition in a week.
Like I won't know.
I'm still going to email the same
email.
It's just going to go to a
different inbox.
What's your favorite secondary
phone number provider to sign
up for sites?
VoIP are sometimes blocked.
Lately it's Cape.
I migrated to Cape Cellular
like a few weeks ago.
And they have a secondary numbers
feature.
And I think
someone I know tried signing up
for a Facebook account with the
secondary numbers feature and
that wasn't approved.
But I have been able to access
like so many services that were
blocked with my other VoIP
provider with Cape's secondary
numbers.
And I did the full switch.
So now I'm using only Cape.
So I have like my regular Cape
SIM number and I have the two
secondary numbers.
The first secondary number I'm
using for accounts and like
OTPs and stuff like that.
And then the second Cape number
I'm using is just my spam.
Like I can give this out to
anybody number and that way it's
like part of the same cell plan
and it's all I'm paying for.
So I think I'm going to make a
full Cape review soon because I've
been pretty impressed with the
user experience and it's
really enabled a lot of cool
workflows that are pretty
nice.
I do have an idea about a
peer recommendation model using
social recommendations.
Still trying to figure that out.
It's an interesting concept.
Yeah.
PeerTube I think kind of does this
if I'm not mistaken.
Like you should look at how
PeerTube does recommendations
because we're on PeerTube.
You guys I should have
mentioned that.
Everyone who's like watching
your content using YouTube
revancid and whatnot.
Don't do that for us.
Not because there's
nothing wrong with it,
but because we literally host
a PeerTube server which is
just ad free out of the box.
And it's a lot more privacy
respecting than going
through Google in any capacity.
So check us out on PeerTube
techlor.tv.
That's always the better way
to go.
If you can push some of your
creators simply onto better
platforms then you don't have
to use tools like YouTube
revanced or
Grey J and stuff like that.
So again nothing wrong with
the tools but I think the
best case scenario is to just
get people in better platforms.
So yeah.
Brilliant tip.
Simple login.
I'll do that this evening.
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a nice
like side effect of using
aliasing services.
All right guys.
I'm gonna give this a five
minutes cutoff.
Five more minutes.
I just hit an hour.
So let's do five more minutes.
So why don't you guys
leave your final questions.
Any wins that you had in the
last week you want to share
or anything else.
Signal group, same thing.
Go for your last calls.
Five minutes, last calls.
And while you guys kind of get
those in if you can support
us definitely do.
Otherwise just you being here
is amazing and having people
to do this live stream with
is a lot of fun.
And it's again just meant to
be a place where I can just
be more candid just be myself
and just kind of share more
like thoughts as I go along
with you all.
And this is normally done
Fridays at 10 a.m.
I think next week I might
have to move it a little
earlier.
I think there's something
on my calendar next week
but I normally schedule them
a day or two in advance.
So you guys will get notified
about that.
And if you become a TechLorean
in the description you can
join our private signal group.
We'll get you in there
pretty quickly.
You can also do it via Monero.
You can literally become
a TechLorean with Monero
and we'll comp you for the
year.
And then you can just
renew manually each year.
Kind of like I think what
Mulvad does with their
subscription.
And then let's see.
Beyond that.
Is there anything else I want
to promote?
No.
It's nice to have you all in here.
Let's see.
What kinds of use cases
should someone choose
cubes versus tails versus
who next?
I understand how they're
different but not super
clear on when one is
preferable to another.
Yeah.
It's a good question.
So cubes for me is
supposed to be.
It doesn't have to be
but it's to me aimed
at being more of like
a daily driver operating
system.
Cubes when you use it
just makes compartmentalization
stupid easy kind of
because I think cubes
is actually horrible
from usability perspective.
I can't stand using cubes
but it makes compartmentalization
itself as a concept
easy to do.
It lets you have
as many Firefox browsers
as you want
and each of them can tunnel
through a different VPN
connection.
Some of the things you can
have go through who next
like cubes is just
extremely powerful
and it's a wonderful tool
at what it does.
And again though
it's meant to be
a permanent home.
It's where you do
your stuff.
It's where you save your data.
So it's more of a traditional
Linux.
It's not technically it's
like what a zen
situation
but yeah
that's how I would define it.
Tails is pretty much
exclusively designed to be used
on a USB flash drive.
It's meant to be
completely ephemeral
and it's meant to
just be spun up
and then you unplug it
and it's gone.
Who next does have
a live OS version as well
but it's definitely
more historically used
like as a virtual machine
on your device.
And I think where it's
actually most powerful
is when you combine
who next on cubes.
So those can be combined
as tools.
So yeah
they're just different tools
for different people.
I think
Tails is just something
you can always have
in your backpack
if you ever need it.
It's a nice like
safe place
that you could boot up
even on a public computer
sometimes.
And otherwise I think
who next is good
on any operating system
if you just want
like a more safe place.
And if you want like
the best scenario
for who next you can use
who next on top of cubes.
Oh no you missed
the whole stream
Kredas Kredas.
Sorry about that.
You can always rewind.
These are published
after the fact.
And oh my gosh
that is an announcement
I think one or two weeks
ago.
People were asking
about getting these streams
cross posted to peer tube.
I'm going to have
an announcement.
This is more for me
but it does impact
you guys because
we finally enabled
channel auto sync
on peer tube.
Yes I know
a lot of people
are going to go Henry
hasn't that been a feature
for a long time
where you can just
automatically sync videos
from YouTube to peer tube.
Yes the feature exists
but practically speaking
it is a lot more annoying
than that right
because first off
you can't for the most part
I mean I guess
some people are lucky
and their servers
haven't been blacklisted
but day one
of spinning up this server
I was never able to do
a YouTube import natively
from peer tube
because YouTube blocks
you know imports
and so our server IP
was blacklisted from day one
so I was never able to go
that route.
So then I set up
a residential proxy
but back in the day
this was like
even as early as a few months
ago
there was no way
to only set a residential
proxy for imports
on YouTube
so if you set a residential
proxy in peer tube
it applied to the whole
damn peer tube site
which means that
all federated traffic
goes through the residential
proxy
which is a huge problem
because federation
depends
on a static IP address
so I didn't know this
beforehand
so I just was like
okay cool
imports are working
so I just set
the residential proxy
to the whole instance
and of course
you know it used a lot of bandwidth
because then
you know
a lot of bandwidth
goes through the proxy
but especially
the fact that
federation just broke
so we lost all our subscribers
I think I've lost
my peer tube subscribers
like 10 different times now
like I think we've actually
lost like
1,000 to 2,000 subscribers
on our peer tube server
as a result of me just
screwing something up
with federation
it's like
really easy to break federation
apparently
and then
you know
so what I had to do
is I had to build
like a proxy server
so what was happening is
I would send
all the traffic
from our peer tube
to this proxy server
and the entire
point of the server
is to just
filter traffic
so if something is
YouTube traffic
it goes through
its residential proxy
and if it's not
YouTube traffic
it pretty much just sends it
back to the server
the peer tube server
and then sends it out
through the static IP
so that way
it's like a dedicated IP
that people can always use
and it doesn't break federation
but then the YouTube traffic
does get tunnels
so I had to recreate that
thank goodness
peer tube actually
released this feature
natively
so now you can just
proxy
import traffic
through the residential proxy
and so I finally migrated
to their native system
which has been working
fabulously for us
and then you might be
wondering
oh Henry
like
why didn't you just enable
channel sync then
it's because the channel sync function
actually uses a lot of bandwidth
for us
and our channel
it runs every hour
by default
and each hour
it uses 20 megabytes
of bandwidth
just to check
if there's new videos
if you do the math
20 times 24
like 20 times 24
that's 480
times 30
that's 14.4 gigabytes
of bandwidth a month
and the residential proxy services
aren't cheap
so
I finally learned
recently that you can actually
set it to auto sync
every eight hours
so now it auto sinks
every eight hours
so it will only use that
20 megabytes of bandwidth
every eight hours
and it should only import
the videos
when needed
and yes
I did announce this last week
but I wanted to just
announce it again
because I'm really excited
about it
and it's been working
and you can see
last week's stream
did import correctly
which
when I announced it
I didn't know if it would happen
but now I'm a lot more
confident enough
to really expand
on like the behind the scenes
and yeah
running peer trip is a pain in the butt
and it costs us money
it costs us time
it's like one of the things
that we continually go back here
and say
man
we really want to cut this out
like it's just a lot of overhead
it's a lot of cost
for what it is
and like look at the views guys
like we literally get 70 views
on this interview
I guess we got over 100 on this one
the most views I see on a video on this
is like 300-400 views
so it's one of those like
business decisions
where it doesn't make any sense
but it's the right thing to do
like the reason I can tell you guys
not to use an ad blocker
and to like
and the reason I feel comfortable
posting to YouTube
and all these things
is because we have peer tube
is that safe space
if you don't have the safe space
then it's a lot harder
to like in good faith say
oh I'm just posting to YouTube
to reach people
it's like yeah
for reaching people
who are already on YouTube
but also we can get them on peer tube
which is a much safer place
anyway I just wanted to share
a little bit about peer tube
because it's a pain in the ass to host
but it should be working
and you guys should get these streams
after the fact
sorry I just went on a huge tangent there
but I hope someone found that interesting
let's see
earlier stream would be nice for Europe
next week will be about half an hour earlier
but yeah it's not going to be that early
at the time zone
like pacific time to European
time zones is just not fantastic
I have to do a lot of meetings
in central European time
I think CET
and it's always a little bit hard to coordinate
you ever used Hoonix
yeah I've used Hoonix in cubes
and it was
I don't have a use case for it
day-to-day
but it works well
and I really enjoyed it
why do you smell that
instead of obscura
it's still using more that
but more anonymous
I use Moldad instead of obscura
because I actually use tail skill
that's really why I use Moldad
I actually wish that I could change the VPN provider
as the exit node
but there is no way to do that
so for those who don't know
tail scale is how you can connect to things
it's more of like a traditional VPN use case
so like I have my NAS
I connect to my NAS using tail scale
and I have some servers
like the peer tube server
that I can connect to
through tail scale
and tail scale pretty much is a VPN
and normally it's
you have to run tail scale
and then Moldad separately
so you have to have like two VPN connections running
but tail scale partnered with Moldad
so that you can just have Moldad
built into the same VPN connection
and use Moldad as an exit node
so that's what I do
it's very convenient
it lets me have just one VPN connection
across my devices
and if I could use obscura
within tail scale
I would do it
but it's just
I don't want to have to run
two VPN connections
just to answer
I got privacy burnout last week
I was just too tired to be paranoid
I just like to play my stuff
without worrying about life too much
like paying cash everywhere
yeah again like
I covered a lot more of my thoughts
at the beginning
so I would go there
if you want to see it
I'm in burnout
trying to off-scape baseband signals
watch a mobile didn't you announce
yeah I did
why burnout
everyone's saying name
privacy burnout
why burnout lol
yeah
all right
yeah I don't see much else
let's see
yeah nothing on signal
all right guys
I'm gonna go ahead
and start rounding this out
I want to thank you all
for being here as always
it's always a pleasure to be here
and I
you know these are just meant to be fun
they're meant to be casual
and so
the fact that there's so many
familiar faces that come each week
just makes it a little bit more enjoyable
it's already enjoyable
but it's even more enjoyable
with you guys
and having familiar faces
I hope that you are able to
reset your cpu
Adam Bean
and yeah
again
Techlorians down in the description
PeerTube server
we have our tools
tools.techlor.tech
quiz.techlor.tech
and also VPN.techlor.tech
which did not come up this week
anywhere near as much as last week
but I will see you all
next Friday
check to see the exact time
because I think next Friday
might have to be a little bit earlier
which you Europeans might enjoy
other than that
thank you all for being here
and I'll see you guys
next time on Techlor