With this level of spying it becomes important to learn to use technologies that are outside of this system that people on HN usually laugh at. Tor, VPNs, Bitcoin, Bitchat, Nostr based socials, Signal and get some extra clean hardware (phone, laptop...) to work with when you need to...
It's stupid when one of the CEOs of a private VPN company decides to fund political actors. That's just PR issue bound to happen. Funding bad actors bites you every single time - so maybe have a chat about if you have seen this coming - and if not why were you blind to this?
On top of this don't change your service based on this outrage. If you change it, then you will prove that Mullvad is malleable by political pressure. You can guess what happens next...
That's not true. Most money laundering is in USD and then stablecoins (USDT, etc). NFTs are a thing of the past and the big majority was not on bitcoin anyway. So no, bitcoin is not a major player.
If you would completely eradicate bitcoin (which is not possible), you would solve (I'm guesstimating) 0.3% of money laundering.
I like DOSBox pure, because that allows you to put the full games into a single zip file and so you then essentially have the equivalent of per-game file on consoles.
I want to do that. Last week there was an article from a person that vibed their whole system in assembly and it was super fast and it did exactly what the person wanted and nothing else. That was eye opening.
This will probably finally push me to migrate away from Bitwarden. Somehow over the years the UI was getting worse and worse too. It's more steps to add custom hidden fields than it used to, etc.
In case of error you talk to the seller, if they are reasonable and care about their reputation, they pay you back (e.g. the Square seller devices have options for this). If they don't, you can try suing them.
There's a wide group of people that are stealing from sellers (especially on Amazon and similar) by using the product and then returning it with made up issues. Bitcoin would help these businesses, since the settlement is final.
It's also couple percent cheaper to send money internationally using bitcoin as the "rails" when compared to e.g. Wise. Even for sending money from classical bank in one country to a classical bank in another country. On bigger amounts you can save quite a lot of money.
I think it depends if you pay them money. If you do, then you should indeed have strong expectations towards them and hold them accountable. If they provide a free service to you, then it's still reasonable to feel upset, but at the same time you get what you pay for.
I think Midnight Commander is still the most advanced TUI there is. It has so many hidden capabilities that you may not even know about. You can be connected over ssh to another computer, while browsing the inside of a compressed zip file and previewing the content of the file inside of it . If you enable lynx motion and case insensitive - you are navigating across folders so much faster than just trying to "cd" and "ls"... It's impressive that this category of file managers has worked the same way for more than 40 years - the same shortcuts, etc.
I think the effects of how the services operate in the background are observable by the real users at some point. Unfortunately it's often too late do something about it. You get hit by censorship when the overton window moves past you, you get deplatformed when your mastodon instance shuts down - that has happened to me and so that's why I have bad aftertaste from mastodon.
On nostr there are some very cool sub-communities - there are surprisingly a lot of surfers, there are multiple book authors with bestselling books, there are local non-english communities, etc. And on top of that there's a variety of applications on top of it, like divine.video.
I'll get the usual hate for this, but in this instance using bitcoin is safer, since it forces you to verify the transaction on your phone (i.e. you use your phone to pay - either scanning QR code or now NFC).
In the US the Square payment terminals can now accept bitcoin from any lightning enabled wallet app, CashApp does it natively, etc.
So there are people sitting in cubicles in various companies/orgs that flock sells the access to and they are watching your children on a screen.
Usually the government is trying to wrap the spying/privacy breaches by "save the children", but this time if you want to save your children from some older dude watching them on a screen, you actually have to be against this privacy nightmare.