Granted, you’re using a home setup. But you could still consider setting up the VPN on a central AP and repeating your hotspot through it to make everything going in and out of your network encrypted and more secure. None of your actual traffic (besides what your phone is emitting) will be in the clear, which is better than nothing.

Almost any router with VPN and repeater options will accomplish this if you don’t wanna root your phone. I’ve flashed OpenWRT on the equivalent of router potatoes over the years. It’s pretty straightforward.

Yeah sorry I don’t have experience with Graphene but a quick search seems to say root is very difficult with it. Maybe look into flashing a different custom ROM if you really need this.

One thing I’ve done quite a bit is use my travel router (I have a GL-Inet Slate but there are lots of options) to repeat my hotspot, then connect all my devices via the router. And set the VPN up on the router. This way everything going out over the hotspot is encrypted anyhow.

For my needs, I can power the Slate by plugging it into my laptop or even my phone via usb-c. It’s very portable and versatile. Ymmv.

You can (basically) only do this with a rooted phone. There are some permissions issues that prevent the hotspot network adapter from being shared over the VPN client otherwise. This article from Proton is just an ELI5 splainer, you can go deeper with some searches.

If you have root and/or a custom ROM already (which usually assumes root) it’s not that complicated.

Ed’s got a podcast called Better Offline as well.

/nightsoil has entered the chat

You should probably look up how most of your rice and beans are grown overseas.

Right. We all know Steam Deck is running on Arch. And also that Steam previously did publicly release SteamOS for awhile (Debian based). So hopefully one day soon they get ballsy enough to push a new/modern official linux build and profit. They haven’t even taken the old links to the SteamOS builds down. I mean c’mon!

For anyone on this thread who doesn’t know who Ken Klip is, please check out his free Substack (and subscribe if you can). I wasn’t on Twitter very long (maybe 1.5 years before Elmong took over) but one of the people I value that I ran into on that platform is Ken Klippenstein and I’ve been following him since. He’s amazing at filing thousands of FOIA requests and doing the digging into them that no mainstream journalist does anymore. He also recently quit The Intercept because they were enshittifying far more than he was comfortable with, which for a writer is a huge thing to leave the umbrella of a company like that and a paycheck behind. Writers going out on their own in this climate is the only way we’ll stay even remotely unfucked in the post-information (or misinformation) age.

Klip fuckin rules. Please give him some due.

Admit to not reading the whole article but does this mean they’re finally going to officially release SteamOS 3 for desktops? Or am I stuck with hacky ports from the Steam Deck?

Can confirm. Noticed that stupid fucking opt-out setting after the last update and shook my fist at the sky. Do better Firefox, ffs.

Well you’re kinda right. I’ve lived in BC and the Yukon where it’s fully legal for women to go topless and I know quite a few who have, for shorter events like naked bike ride etc. But most of them intelligently choose not to at public beaches and whatnot because of the ick factor.

I know one lady who did choose to go topless on a hot summer day in a fairly major downtown center and was accosted by cops whom she had to argue with (gladly, and loudly) for over an hour to explain to them that she was breaking no laws. They were trying to pressure her to re-robe because they were getting complaints, but again it’s true that she was breaking no laws at all. They couldn’t in the end do anything about it, and rightly so.

Adderall is basically chemically identical to meth. The Sacklers are fuckin billionaires for pushing Oxy onto tens of millions of people (who later had to go to the streets for fent and smack to avoid becoming dope sick if they couldn’t ween off successfully). It’s time to stop leaning into this bullshit drug-war rhetoric that was already de-humanizing long before benzo-dope and fentanyl etc hit the market.

Anyone who opposes medically supervised safer-supply is de facto pro leaving things the way they are, which are illicit drugs being distributed by cartels and gangs at extremely elevated costs to the user, which creates an economic situation that the addicts need to come up with the money to stay unsick by any means necessary.

In most cases the legitimate cost to produce a dose of a given drug is pennies. Street prices reflect all of the greed and logistics of smuggling them across several borders to get them into the hands of users. And those costs don’t take into account all of the violence and corruption and murder which come into play when cartels and gangs are responsible for those supply routes.

At the very least safer-supply would bring the cost down for end-users and those drugs would be taxed which could be put back into the system, instead of those profits being taken by assholes with zero concern for who lives or dies. I’m saying this with no love for the government but I would way rather go to a doctor than a street dealer (even while I’ve met lots of dealers who have more empathy than the medical system as a whole). I think that’s pretty fucking easy to parse.

Yeah caught that. Appropriately apologetic for even trying to use a calculator. I’m a HS dropout, what can I say 😂

Thanks for fact-checking.

Yeah caught that. Appropriately apologetic for even trying to use a calculator. I’m a HS dropout, what can I say 😂

Thanks for fact-checking.

Yeah I got the memo. Disclaimer above that I am not a math guy and shouldn’t have ever attempted it. 🤷

Well yeah… you wouldn’t have to use foreign services if a domestic alternative existed. One doesn’t for northern residents, yet. So here we are like many times in the past (like for getting northern people online, or getting them clean water to drink) talking about future, possible, great idea measures that will take place at some point instead of just doing the fucking thing.

I don’t love Starlink or Musk. However, I do own a Starlink dish and I have used it for the past couple of years for work. I know lots of other people who live in very remote areas who have been using it since it became available to them. Starlink took off in central and northern areas of Canada very quickly because it was the only (good) option for highspeed internet, and still is. And while it would be dope if a canadian competitor came along and made good on their potential, we’re still falling back into the fact that at best a canadian LEO internet company would have to launch their sats in the north for a total of 120k customers. Starlink has the Alaskan market which is upwards of 750k people, already. The canadian customers are just a bonus for them in that region, at that scale.

Why can’t we get northern people online now as well as develop a domestic solution? I don’t think it’s a stretch to say Telesat looks like another XPlore-net type solution (i.e. half-assed, at best, and maybe will never happen at this point). I’ve worked in tech for 4 years now. Currently for a fully private company, zero public or private/VC funding. But the first company I worked for took an obscene amount of public funding (lockdown subsidies which in fact is how I got hired) and a fuckton of tax breaks before and since. Sadly, they’ve also done a lot of screaming about the suggestion that they should pay their fair share of corporate tax. Not super relevant to this convo, but I do understand in some ways what’s at stake when a company takes public money (and still treats locals like shit). There are lots of examples of this going wrong, so I wouldn’t wanna see it be the only option on the table for any reason.

At any rate I think we agree that folks should probably have clean drinking water first anyhow.

I’m with you on that. I really am. However I’m also for people in the north getting online effectively before another decades passes. The government (and that’s not just the libs) have been promising this shit since the early oughts, and throwing money at it that seldom seems to do any good.

NP! It’s a great app, the dev updates it really frequently and I’ve never had any functional issue with it. I keep meaning to drop onto their git issues board and make a couple of small quality of life suggestions for the UI/UX as I use it dozens of times per day for work (there are some processes that currently take 5 clicks/per that could be reduced to 1 or 2 max) but that is a very small and nice problem to have.

This is an interesting scenario with the entire military might of the US sitting in Alaska at this moment literally there to prevent this exact thing from happening. I mean, fun to think about, but not happening any time soon. Especially by the year 2030.

You can buy used dishes online for as little as 100 bucks and get the account transferred over to your name. Source; bought a dish for less than 100 bucks and got it transferred to my account. You don’t have to pay full price for the equipment. And I don’t know where you live but even in a major city you’re paying roughly 120/mo for decent broadband internet. If you’re doing a budget plan you can get it for half that, if you want fuckin 1.5mbps upload speeds lmfao.