Yeah I wish there was a good answer to that. Floccus at least works ok for bookmarks.

A timing attack is extremely realistic when you control one of the end devices which is a common scenario if a person gets arrested or their device compromised. This way you can then identify who the contacts are and with the phone number you can easily get the real name and movement patterns.

This is like the ideal setup for law inforcement, and it is well documented that honeypot “encrypted” messengers have been set up for similar purposes before. Signal was probably not explicitly set up for that, but the FBI for sure has an internal informant that could run those timing attacts.

There are some mitigations in place, yes, but Sealed Sender on a centralized platform is snake-oil as someone with server access can easily do a timing attack and discover who communicated with whom.

If you are even remotely involved in any activist type of things, you certainly don’t want this US government honeypot have your phone-number and device id.

AFAIK the “wear” does not mainly come from the spinning, but from temperature changes that make parts slightly expand and contract in size. An always on HDD has pretty constant temperature.

Be careful with powering HDDs on and off. That is actually the operation that puts the most strain on them AFAIK. Sadly there is no good rule of thumb when it does more harm than good, but I would guess if you turn it on more than once a week, you are probably doing more harm than good compared to just letting in run. Many people even intentionally turn off sleep-mode in “green” drives so that they don’t shut down automatically.

This isn’t about a laptop, but a full desktop case with 5.25" slots. 3.5" fit fine into these with a different kind of adapter.

Taler ensures asymmetric privacy. The buyer does not expose their identity to the seller (or the government), nor what they bought to their bank/payment-provider. But the seller needs to expose their income for tax purposes. This is a good compromise as it follows existing law and prevents tax-evasion and (to some extend) money laundering.

Yes, like cash.

An IRC server would work, but I think having to deal with 32bit ARM will be too annoying.

Except for some very niche crypto-currency users no one stores “money” like that. You have a bank account where you store money.

The same audience as Paypal, which seems to be reasonably popular. Except this is privacy preserving and an open standard that many providers can use.

It can be many different ones. Usually your home bank would allow you to exchange some Euro into Taler tokens and then use those to pay in compatible stores. But instead of a centralized system there can be many different exchanges that follow the same standard (protocol) and can be used with the same software and wallet apps.

Taler is not a store of value. Exchanging some Taler is like going to the ATM and withdrawing some cash to put in your wallet.

If there’s one thing that we learnt from the cryptocurrecy industry, it’s that users don’t care to understand how the technology works, and will do stupid things.

Yes, like turning a digital payment system into a speculative asset and making it basically impossible to actually buy anything with it.

But it seems you are totally missing the point of Taler, as it doesn’t even aim to be anything like so called crypto-“currencies”. It’s a digital payment system like Paypal, but decentralized.

Apparently this is using face recognition technology from Russia 🤷

Probably not, but you can likely improvise by binding the audio mute to a button in your OS.

You cam try https://jami.net/

But I also think Mumble is the better solution, but of course not p2p.

Seems like an obvious suggestion, but Nextcloud can do that quite well.

Many things are very similar on Linux compared to Windows (e.g. Browsing, Steam). One big difference is that people prefer using package managers to install software (instead of downloading and installing it manually).

This. Especially for drivers, always use the package manager of your distro and do not attempt to manually install Nvidia drivers you downloaded from their website.