I’m all for sanctioning them too. Economic sanctions are the bare minimum we should be doing to genocidal authoritarians.

Political agenda is a funny euphemism for imperialist invasion and genocide.

Ngl I kinda want zeplin public transit.

Deadliest catch story lines are drying up. Gotta have Harris call in an airstrike on an illegal Chinese trawler.

Now when I’m lazy and don’t support some standards in my open source projects, I’m just going to say its for security.

They’re part of multiple mutual defense treaties, including just being part of the EU. If Russia continues to be agressive, this could well be required.

Another reason to use a VPN is that ISPs have every motive to sell your browsing data and they do. Unlike many other groups tracking you, your ISP inherently has your meatspace name, address, and payment information making their data easily collatable and very valuable.

If you use the default DNS on their provided router they can even tell if someone purchased an XBox, Playstation, or any other smart device just from update and telemetry lookups.

As the article says, by using a VPN youre using someone else’s ISP making that info worthless.

If your threat model includes preventing ad networks from gathering data, a VPN absolutely is a tool to prevent that. Do you have to pay for a service? Probably not if you’re technical enough; a VM in a data center is probably sufficient.

You don’t seem to understand terminal velocity.

Mozilla is a non profit. The most “capitalist” they get is the Mozilla Corp a company owned by the foundation which is basically just for tax purposes. Having a big player in the fediverse helps.

I think a lot of these points have been made better elsewhere.

The extended discussion of hypothetical US interference just because of a tenuous chain of connection to the CIA is just typical US-badism. The US frequently funds tools which they think further geopolitical goals and this doesn’t inherently mean its untrustworthy, just that their methodology of control is more resilient to uncensored speech; the best example of this is TOR, decentralized, anonymous, and created by Naval Research and DARPA. The author can’t concede this point as it’d bring up they’re unsubtly simping for a different colonial power, one who does require such censorship.

Signal’s centralized nature has always been a major criticism (and it’s reasonable), however as a trade off it’s easy to on-board the tech illiterate. It’s nontrivial to set up a Matrix server and I’ve seen the difficulty of migrating activist groups there. It’s good as a long term goal, but one also has to recognize that a person struggling with housing has different concerns and will prefer to use whatever their friends and family do.