At least link the full article and not just the headline… smh. Here is also the follow-up article with comments from Firefox’s CTO. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Firefox-defends-itself-Everything-done-right-just-poorly-communicated-9802546.html

Honestly mentioning Enchrochat together with other mainstream message clients is kind of misleading. The Enchrochat message client was also E2EE. However Enchrochat was also a company that sold their own mobile phones with a prorietary OS on it together with own sim cards and only those phones were able to connect to each other. And law enforcment had enough evidence that they sold those hardware in shady untracable ways similar to drugs. At that point there was no western government that didn’t want to help seizing their infrastructure and taking over their update services for example.

The bigger problem however for the general public is that certain politicians want to break encryption all together by forcing companies to implement backdoors on client side. This has been an ongoing discussion for 2 years in EU parliament and it has to stop: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/now-eu-council-should-finally-understand-no-one-wants-chat-control

Well just recently researchers discovered a campaign installing backdoors on iPhones using a chain of several 0-day expoits or in this case using also 0-click exploits, where no interaction from a user is needed. However those attack chain are so advanced that practically normal law enforcement would never be able to do it. But theoretically yes some well equiped state actors are able to infect you without noticing. If you are really intrested to see how advanced these attack are search for “project triangulation” or watch the recording from last years chaos computer conference: https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11859-operation_triangulation_what_you_get_when_attack_iphones_of_researchers#t=373

165166320 here

That is not entirely true. It’s a bit more complicated. Yes it is protected since the 1970s but it’s more of an academic title. You needed to study something that is “mainly” of technological or scientific nature. Basically befire the Bologna reform every student in Tec. Unis/FHs did get the title Diplom-Ingenieur. So the engineer part was literally part of your degree. This of course also true in case you studied IT. So yes there are many who call themselves IT engineers also in Germany. However it’s more of a philosophical question how much software development is actually engineering or rather craftsmanship.

Oh nice, I actually didn’t know that. Pretty nice feature.

I don’t think there is split tunneling in the browser add-on, not exactly sure what you mean.

See my update in the main post, please check if you also had split tunneling enabled. Still a weird behavior but now it is narrowed down to this feature.

See my update in the post, now everything makes a little more sense and it is for sure related to the split tunneling feature.

good to hear that I am not the only one and it is reproducible

again, this doesn’t make sense as the NordVPN Firefox extension is using the same IP address ranges. Also I tried different VPN server in different regions, even the “IP obfuscating” ones

No I am not sure, I don’t really see any error message, just a timeout. Not sure how an error of the DNS resolver looks like compared to any error caused by a timeout. However the DNS resolution should indeed be returning a different error, at least when entering a random non existing URL Firefox returns “server not found” instead of “problem loading page”(and NS_ERROR_NET_TIMEOUT in network debugging consoel). But what else could it be? It is so strange that the combination of Firefox and NordVPN extension does work, so it seems that the routing through the vpn network generally works, so it actually has to be something with the windows client interaction I guess.

That doesn’t make sense, why would it only cause google.com to break? Also I tried turning it off completely, didn’t work.

or instead of throwing more data/money at Big Tech try one of the self hosted instances of https://nextcloud.com/office/ or https://cryptpad.org/

it’s hard to believe…

well I guess he means that Nazis are like cultist or rather any zealots of any religion in a sense that they are blindly following some ideology made up by some guy and that he therefore neither likes religions nor nazism. To saying Lemmy would “sympathize” with Nazism is just plain wrong. Of course he did have a rather weird hobby…

I don’t think thats true, Vivaldi is more like Chromium is you want to do that comparison. Well anyway they are way different thant the google user profile tracking you get with all the google servies. They mostly makeoney with partner deals in pre-set bookmarks and search engines. They explicitly say they don’t collecr user data: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/

But yeah I get your point. They are still not a “non-profit” like the signal foundation or wiki etc. Still the whole company and the team behind them relies om a lot of work by voluntaries im they forums an big collection and I totally would pay for Vivaldi or donate for them if they ever want to change their business model to become donation driven.

yeah you can see all donation transparently on the donations section (unless u opted for anonymous) and fortunately it’s looking like it’s going quite well. I assume the creator actually has some more employees now or at least professional help for all the translations of the app as it seems to be available in a lot of languages.

Weawow is a completly (also ad-)free weather forecast app run basically solo by a Japanese guy. I was surprised when I found this app that it was so good in every aspect that I had to donate the guy. It has has more than half a Mio. reviews on google play with an average of 4.9 . Idk of any free app with that many reviews having this kind of rating, well deserved.

Further honorable mentions:

• Vivaldi browser
• Joplin notes app
• nextcloud
• wikipedia (obviously)
• Öffi
• Signal
• keepass
• rif for reddit (R.I.P)