this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/58733010

Tech Guidlines For Europeans

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

These posts are already beginning to be tiring. It's always the same software, and always the same arguments against some of the choices.

Ditching open source projects for corporate European stuff doesn't solve anything, it just moves the problem. How can you be sure that every country in the EU won't break some trade deals and leave the EU at some point? And closed source software is not better at protecting your privacy if that's what you want.

And the "European based forks/open source projects"(whatever that means) is a stupid argument. For example, cryptography experts pointed out issues in threema, so why recommend it instead of signal which is open source projects, and by definition, not tied to a country?

And finally, I think we should stop recommending LLMs altogether. They're an ecological and sociological disaster.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

In any case this (the pic) is the dumb ape "A is bad, so I replace it with something by B, B is my friend, B won't poison it" thought. For whatever reason stupid people always think it's better to look at social context of something and not the actual thing.

That's the reason a lot of dumb bastards use Telegram for things that would have already gotten them in jail if law enforcement in their countries cared enough. They "trust" Telegram because of different roots than American\European corporate. By the way, due to these different roots probably some of more high-ranking dumb bastards who've been using Telegram are under control of some intelligence services via blackmail, or whatever.

There are layers of defense and sane expectations of anything's security. If you are afraid of US corporations and state, then using any downstream of a big FOSS project is not normal unless it's done by some Chinese project with a lot of very qualified hands. Scratch anything based on Chromium and Firefox.

If someone still remembers Cryptonomicon the book, and the rest of smart things Neal Stephenson wrote, people in these never trust tech they use. Neither do people doing secure things in real life. In the beginning of Cryptonomicon they are trying to create some electronic currency mapped to a real-life currency backed by a lot of gold yet to be found, in the end they blow up that gold with no conclusion, which may or may not symbolize exactly what I'm saying.

That's because it's nonsense, someone else made magic paper to protect your letters and you just trust it? It's really sad Rowling didn't develop the idea enough in HP, not with Riddle's diary, but with Snape's spells (or any spells). I mean, she did in the fifth book, but that was a special connection, should have been something like recipes.

By the way, it's strange people rarely bring up HP as a book about computers. It really is. That's the reason electronics don't work in Hogwarts, world-building wise. There's the usual outrage about terfs, bad emotional patterns, relationship between fate and logic, negative stereotypes of minorities manifested in characters, - but that's not all those books are.

And LOTR is usually brought up by wrong people, so is The Napoleon of Notting Hill (I often call my dad a stupid man, but without him I would never have read it), while they are relevant for any new mechanism, and when new tools arise, people sometimes make new mechanisms where they could do with old ones, for the lack of understanding of applying the old mechanisms with the new tools.

That was a rant.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago

Honestly, due to how it's a paid app, I don't see any viable mass adoption. Possibly great for a professional/corporate setting, but considering that Signal is free and some people already have a hard time leaving WhatsApp, it'd be hard to convince anyone to pay for a messaging app.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Is using a fork of something really an actual solution? It's still enabling the dominance of the original corporation.

I dunno, maybe it is, but it sure doesn't seem like it to me

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

In specific for this, yes. But also in general

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Yup.

Don't get me wrong, I really only use forks at this point, but that's all they are, nor distinct browsers of their own

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Mistral --> pseudo-open-source

Linux --> not relates to Europe (but amazing choice)

Vivaldi --> only source available

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

It is not only about being european but also about being digitally sovereign

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

From Wikipedia of Qwant:

Restructuring

In May 2019, Qwant announced that it would migrate its servers to an infrastructure based on Microsoft Azure, and also keep some of its indexing capacity on its infrastructure.[22]

Not only that, but they base their results almost entirely off of MS Bing.

So idk, but not that european other than data privacy.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Now it is working together with Ecosia on an Europan Search engine

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I've been using Vivaldi more and more. Been aware of it for years, even used it back in beta. It's almost too kustomizable. It boarders on being an OS with how much is built in.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I wish that Vivaldi was open source and not proprietary.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

I agree, but knowing it’s from Norway makes me feel more comfortable with the idea of using it than if it was made in the US…. (And I’m American…)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Vivaldi is based on Chromium. When Google kills manifest v2 in a few months, Vivaldi will be forced to follow. They can't maintain a full fork. So, no more uBlock in Vivaldi.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've been meaning to do more testing with it's built in blocking. Guess we'll have to see when the time comes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

if you want to test it by seeing how many ads do pages have after, I just want to point out that ublock is much more than an ad filter. you won't notice by looking at the website if vivaldi does not block data mining content anymore

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Fair enough. I also run a local pihole too with a fairly extensive lists. (~2.2mil). It's mostly a concern for work. We have freedom of browser choices, but extensions are monitored. Though I can't make use of pihole on my work laptop.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

i too have a pihole but DNS based filtering is not much. ublock does not only limit the domains that can be reached. it limits which scripts and other resources can load, which outgoing data requests can proceed, what can a js script access and how will it see that, and all of that per-site so that it doesn't need to use broad whitelists

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

both Qwant and Ecosia are working with Microsoft. Not so European.

Monocles is SearX, which basically is boogle, bing &c behind a shroud. Like Leta also is.

Mojeek is the only "European" alternative, it seems

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

if I recall right Ecosia and Qwant joining together to build a new Search Engine without the use of Bing and Google

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

+1 for Mojeek. I use it on a daily basis.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Europe was trying to add censorship to all these software stacks. Maybe they should use Chinese software so that its already in place?

https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/upload-moderation.pdf