Ah, okay. I just wanted Vanadium because it came with the OS, but if I were to install another anyway - I am content with a FF fork, where Ublock Origin is indeed available. I was just very surprised that Vanadium did not block the giant element that has "Ad" in its html name...

It says the content blocker there is "Basic + Adblock Plus", and Adblock Plus is known for its not-so-great reputation (like whitelisted "acceptable ads") compared to UBO.

I really wish I could use Vanadium as my main browser, but two downsides are really noticeable: a) adblocking is not as good as with Ublock Origin (for example, on TVTropes the ads themselves were removed but not the HTML elements they used to be in) and b) the multiple-choice search engine turned out to be quite important for me. So a Firefox fork it is.

While I do use crypto for digital purchases, for physical ones I would much rather pay cash. I either shop in-person or order delivery to the online store's physical office where cash can be paid, which is usually the only delivery method without extra cost anyway. Our big Amazon-like marketplaces only accept prepayment, but pretty much all others with a physical office accept payment on delivery.

Now if only you could hide the pornographic stuff to not accidentally see disgusting nudity.

I would rather not use KYC even for low-sensitivity transactions. Because I am afraid of such sensitive info leaking. Sure, I do KYC for things like phone service already - but would avoid it at any cost where it can be done.

There are indeed shades of grey. Not only the presence of encryption itself matters, but the metadata, as well as details of the implementation. For example, Signal has all the messages encrypted - but it has the capability to know the identities of everyone and to build their social graph due to centralization.

My 7a cost $300 this summer. Very expensive for me but I don't regret. 8 is around $400 in that store now that 9 is out, maybe it would drop in price with time (or as 9a comes out?).

Your supermarket accepts payments in cash, which is better anyway.

(I say as someone who pays for certain services in Monero)

That's why here, giving a student a laptop without supervision is unthinkable... Good if the school has computers at all anyway.

My issue is effective impossibility to selfhost. XMPP, Simplex, even Matrix are very possible to run on your own, while a Session node would be insanely, arbitrarily expensive (requires around $1000 now, IIRC used to be more). A hobbyist like me and you would not want to pour this much into something they provide out of the goodness of their heart.

Seriously, if you have this much disposable money, you'd be better off running a few Tor nodes in various places).

Huh, and for me Searx hasn't been great for searching in Russian in particular.

I just have a profile on each that are always both in the same groups. IDK about private messaging though.

There is a full-featured desktop client now! What I am waiting for are third-party lighter clients, because the official one is obscenely heavy.

I personally don't need sophistication, I just want to not sound like a woman in a game voice chat. I wonder if this is what I need.

I hear a lot about gait detection, but I wonder how widely it is implemented.

And - gasp! - you can do it from your computer directly! No Android emulators, no inconvenient command-line client!

If I cared about the contents of email staying safe, would rather not depend on a provider and just use provider-independent PGP. If safety is more important than universality - then I'd use something outside of email in general, like XMPP+OMEMO or maybe Simplex.

Yea, my main issue is that because of the price, you're locked to phones that are either out or almost out of support, or secondhand. Even the last generation's cheapest model is $300! Though very tempted to try to save that anyway.

Plus they are not officially sold here, so always a bit of a gamble.

I mean, running outdated software is bad practice. Do you think backdoors would have to be cleverly hidden every time, like what we almost got with XZ? If it is in plain sight, I highly doubt a person outside of the oppressed jurisdictions (or just someone anonymous) wouldn't make a malware-removing fork.