I just want to have control of my data!

Google:

And small businesses.

Yeah, just keep telling yourself that. You’re definitely proving it by making personal attacks with no arguments of substance.

In order to provide a globally accessible, reliable, and high-performance communications service for the many millions of people around the world who depend on Signal, it’s necessary for Signal’s servers to be globally distributed. Having a geographically distributed network of servers is particularly important for end-to-end encrypted voice and video calls, because latency can result in audio delays or degraded video connections that quickly make the app unusable for real-time communication.

Because everything in Signal is end-to-end encrypted, we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, and others while ensuring that your messages and calls remain private and secure. We can’t access them, and neither can the companies that provide any of the infrastructure we rent. As a small nonprofit organization, we cannot afford to purchase all of the physical computers that are necessary to support everyone who relies on Signal while also placing them in independent data centers around the world. Only a select few of the very largest companies globally are still capable of doing this, which is a hallmark of a troublingly concentrated industry.

https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/

Signal’s servers are distributed globally, but yes rented primarily from American companies. I think they would diversify this if they could, but there aren’t really other options with global presence. The only other host providers with comparable scale are Chinese ( like Tencent), but Signal is banned in China as of 2021 ( https://www.vice.com/en/article/signal-blocked-in-china/ ) because the PRC does not allow its citizens to have privacy from government surveillance at all.

There is no evidence that having Signal infrastructure hosted on US company servers provides any capacity for the US government to bypass Signal’s encryption.

To each their own. I prefer having the ability to adjust things from 1 central source. I’m prone to losing remotes.

My preference is for devices to be as simple and reliable and end-user repairable as possible. I have an aversion to any kind of appliance that might be dependent on someone else to update software or maintain a network service to keep operational. No software dependence at all if possible, just a basic microcontroller and firmware. Again, there’s nothing to this that needs to be any more advanced or complicated than the functions of a basic alarm clock like this:

Instead of setting off an alarm, we’re activating the feeding mechanism. Dead simple. Hell, you could probably make this yourself by wiring the alarm from a clock like this to a motor that moves the feeding mechanism.

Also, how would you do such a remote. You would also need a screen for feedback etc, which puts you back at square 1.

Nah, there’s no reason feeding times need to be any more granular than per-hour. You can show that with a 2x6 grid of 12 indicator LEDs, with a 13th AM/PM indicator. On lights indicate hours when feeding will activate. You could have that on both the remote and the feeder, cheap and easy. Maybe you have a 14th indicator that lights up if the food in the storage bin is low and needs refilling.

Also, a remote would be considerably more expensive than the extra cost of a ZigBee/Wifi enabled microcontroller.

Definitely not, because it’s not fair to count the cost of only the link hardware on the feeder, you have to account for the cost of the rest of the smart home system to operate it. A remote like this is dirt cheap:

You’re over thinking what this really needs to do. It’s a timer that activates a switch, that’s all.

OK, add a simple remote control with buttons for adjusting the schedule and triggering a manual feed. No need for that to be any more complicated than a TV remote from the 90s. Keep it offline, no problem.

God forbid the user have to push a button on the device itself.

Why in fuck would a device that activates a motor once or twice a day on a schedule need any kind of network connectivity? This is an ultra-dumb programmatic function, it shouldn’t need any more compute power than an alarm clock. Why would you hook it up to a smart home anything?

It should be exactly this complicated:

Anything beyond that is like killing a housefly with a bazooka.

Or push ads, or gather data on users.

Rarely, to be sure. I tried Arch for a bit, but I need a computer that I can actually use to get shit done, that isn’t a constant project itself. Even Qubes doesn’t require as much effort to keep operational.

Wrap with aluminum foil tape:

Well you can always bake your own. I actually do this occasionally for some LTS versions - DVDs are more shelf-stable than USB drives. In particular I like to keep a live gparted build around, it’s a great tool for its intended purpose and also a decent recovery environment.

Yeah, I trust Whittaker’s conviction on this because she’s been tested multiple times by the governments of multiple countries at this point. When pushed, her response is “OK, we just won’t support your country, bye”… and then the government ends up using Signal internally anyway. She is more than just talk, and so far she’s been unwilling to sell out or compromise Signal for anyone. At the moment, there’s no other secure communication project that I know of that is similarly effective, well audited by third parties, and has trustworthy leadership.

Proton is more complicated. There are more tradeoffs and compromises, but it is also more complex and offers more functionality than just a messaging platform. I recommend this video by Reject Convenience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFKSKjyBVDU He used Proton services for awhile and has made some different choices since, so he has some useful criticism from experience (not knee-jerk reactionary stuff).

At some point you have to make decisions about what your risk tolerance is, how much manual effort you can reasonably put in to sustain your tools, and how much money you’re willing to spend on it. Proton is the right choice for many people not because it’s a perfect company, but because providing equivalent functionality for yourself is a full-time job.

Hard disagree on Signal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYVeyhxLF7s

Ryanair

Everything you need to know right there. Cut-rate businesses cut corners on maintenance and quality control.

If the smugglers are even marginally competent they won’t use their real personal information for the orders, nor the same fake information from one order to the next.

But it’s called an “agent”! Of course it has agency!

Oh absolutely, I think that is already happening, but it hasn’t reached broad public awareness yet. Reddit has 20 years of momentum, it won’t stop all at once.

I suspect the company is aware that user engagement is dropping, along with the quality of new content. Typical of most corporations, their response is to play defensive, to try to maximize the value of what they already have, to scratch and claw and squeeze every drop from the existing data and userbase. This will accelerate the decline, obviously, but when a company is in this state they consider any strategy besides protectionism to be too high a risk.

They will ruin themselves with cowardice, to be sure, but they’re still coasting on momentum for the moment. They will continue making the same types of decisions, at an accelerating pace, as the desperation sets in.

“Vhen rockets go up, who cares vhere zey come down? Zat’s not my department!”

Sarcasm aside, you can buy these in dev kits on MicroCenter:

https://www.microcenter.com/product/691058/nvidia-jetson-orin-nano-super-developer-kit

Which means the components are pretty widely available. I’m not sure how you’d prevent someone from ordering a bunch to an in-between country and then shipping them on to Russia after.