Oh I didn’t think of that. It’s native French speakers who use “mail” for “email” (when speaking english).

Interesting to see his take on “e-mail” vs “email”. I bet he changes his tune on “email” vs “mail” – where gen-z has decided that it’s okay to save keystrokes by dropping the “e” because no one uses snail mail anymore. Indeed I am always disguested when someone says “send a mail”. I have to ask for clarification and they always confirm that mean email.

AT&T is the worst of the worst. And I boycott them for countless reasons like snooping on their own customers voluntarily without a warrant. It’s really a hard-right corp. In any case, never tried them so I didn’t know they blocked egress 25.

One trick that works if truth-in-advertising laws are in force: ask the sales people before subscribing if the block port 25. They always say “no, we block nothing” (in my experience). So you subscribe and sign the contract. Then when you see they actually block 25, you have a false advertising situation and also a contract violation (if either verbal contracts are enforcable or if you can get it in writing that nothing is blocked). So you complain. In my experience, they give a gratis upgrade to an enterprise level of service that generally has a static IP and no blocks – for the price of the residential plan you signed up for.

I can’t speak for @ShutUpWesley@piefed.zip, but I boycott both Google and Microsoft. This means 95+% of prospective people, corps, and gov agencies I would exchange email with are not getting email from me. They are also not getting an email address out of me.

I have been done with email for nearly a decade now, mostly. So, to answer your question, I use fax and snail mail. Not joking. I feel liberated and don’t give a shit about postage or inconvenience. There is still that exceptional 5% or so who I will exchange email with, which does not have GAFAM in the loop.

(edit) should add that I give friends and family an XMPP address (of my own, but often I also give them an XMPP acct for themselves). Google bounced from XMPP a decade or so ago and AFAIK Microsoft has no XMPP service. So it’s mostly snail mail and fax for govs and corps. XMPP for people.

Any friends or family who resist XMPP are mostly stuffed. They can either proxy through a mutual friend or call me if they are local.

Maybe the way to fight GMail’s outsized power is to stop using GMail.

Stopping your own gmail use is trivially easy. It just scratches the surface. In order to not lick Google’s boots, you also need to stop sending email to gmail users. That means doing an MX lookup before emailing to see if their vanity email address is on a Gmail host. And of course this also means not sharing an email address with gmail users.

I do that, in fact. I also boycott Microsoft. In the end, this means I am not using email much at all.

They claim its for spam prevention which is why most ISPs actually also block outgoing SMTP port 25.

European ISPs block egress port 25, not American ones, generally. Not sure about the rest of the world.

In Europe, one refuge is to send using the GSM networks, which tend not to block egress 25 for some reason.

Very happy to have learned about tildeverse.org. It gives a great refuge from a lot of the garbage. But I have to ask, if you are part of the tildeverse project why are you on lemmy.world, a centralised exclusive Cloudflare instance? I realise tildeverse does not have a lemmy node but there are many decent ones and LW is probably the most contrary to the tildeverse philosophies.

Doesn’t stop it broadcasting, but stops it being useful to anything nearby.

Any SSID broadcast is useful to Google and Apple spies (read: simple phone patrons) who feed the SSID to the mothership which is then used for mapping. There are security risks by that alone even if it’s blocked from my LAN, which I detail in these threads:

• https://infosec.pub/post/50218987
• https://infosec.pub/post/50218988

Apart from tracking my residency, I boycott both Google and Apple, so I object to feeding them in the slightest even when it’s innocuous to me. The map data enhances their location products and feeds their advertising surviellance machines.

Anyway, I appreciate your insight. I assumed it was a proactive act by Karcher and would not have thought that they were naive or lazy w.r.t. something baked-in upstream from them.

What browser is that? Did you change a setting that would block redirections that would be triggered by the header Kairos mentioned in this thread?

So IIUC, you’re saying it’s for a phone to configure the appliance? The reason being that the appliance’s UI is not convenient enough, I presume?

In the case at hand, the Karcher DAB radio has no iOS or AOS app. So AFAICT it would only be feasible if the radio also had a built-in web server and a captive portal. But I get no captive portal when connecting.

I suppose another theory is that if the radio has a cloud uplink, perhaps it would then push a captive portal to redirect to a centralised server which then remotely configures the device. I would not trust it enough to give it an uplink so I can’t test this theory.

Sorry for the late reply. But for the record I must say Tails does not do what I want because Tails gives clearnet access. The UI discourages it, but the possibility is there to open a browser on clearnet.

You may be right about Whonix… I have yet to tinker with it.

I like where your head is at but this feels like an impossible stretch. If you have the technical knowledge to run Tails, you aren’t being blocked.

It’s perhaps more complex than you realise. There are several facets to this with a broad range of effects, which is not necessarily just a Tor-acceptance problem.

Tor-blocking sites do not have the decency to so much as state /why/ they have blocked you. They either send a generic “403 forbidden”, or they drop packets and it times out, or you get a broken CAPTCHA. In the latter two cases you can’t even be sure Tor is the issue. They do not treat visitors with dignity. So playing dumb when facing them is a good policy. E.g. “I could not pay my taxes on time because I get this screen:…” then go boomer on them and send a camera pic of a timed out connection. If they take some time to investigate and chase their tails a bit, that’s already a win to some extent, in some situations. We want to penalise them for not even having the decency of transparency.

It’d be like shutting off your water, locking the mechanical room, and suing your landlord

Hence why Qubes is not ideal. But if there is an OS that simply excludes clearnet, I might say (when pressed): “my friend gave me this laptop… said it was safer than Windows”¹. But the conversation never goes that far.

The baby step micro-goal is just to get a bit of due transparency and dignity. Not “403 Forbidden” but rather “We’re sorry, we detect you are using Tor and we do not have the competency to secure against Tor users”, or “we need to track you, thus cannot accept traffic from Tor or VPNs”.

¹ Note that this scenario is becoming increasingly realistic. A local group of volunteers offers gratis advice and support for digital self-defense. Some people walk away with Tails and only a superficial idea of what they have.