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Islamic Audiobooks Central
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Audiobook publisher and distributor. Find our books on Google Play (DRM-free), Apple Books, Spotify and Audible as well as in public libraries, our website and our YouTube and Odysee channels. We love and use #Linux and #OpenSource / #FreeSoftware for professional audio production! Looking in from the Fediverse? You're seeing a #Nostr profile via a bridge. Full profile at: https://primal.net/p/npub12yqn2f5z3wkx5x8q0w22pd8nc0fn0jtqf76u677fk06yftaujmsscfkjum XMR: 87T3MhEThNNDmGxRrPPUvW76upi4RzeAq2nVYErCgeJKdssoWiQWttegvCkzFvxCZBCXFzAjfrCBXF88rebjfFqP2F1pYty

Interesting idea. I'm a wired headphones person and don't even use Wi-F unless I have to.

I love and use XMPP along with other protocols and apps.

However, there are some other factors to consider when promoting adoption to normies... because it is really difficult to make them switch to any other communication apps other than the ones they've gotten used to so we may only get one chance to succeed:

- Is one-to-one communication e2ee by default without any complicated setup?

- Are text messages and audio+video calls available?

- Is there at least one feature-complete app available on all 5 major platforms?

I have not found any #XMPP client available that meets just these 3 criterea even though XMPP has been around for much longer than #Matrix.

On the other hand, I can very easily get any normie, even kids, to switch to Matrix by just installing one app regardless of their OS and they can start texting and calling right away!

PrivacyGuides Loves Spyware

One of our readers asked how we differ from PrivacyGuides. So I wanted to outline the technology choices for your benefit.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, PrivacyGuides.org is a website run by Jonah Aragon. And although this post will heavily criticize PrivacyGuides, I must stress that I do respect Jonah and the rest of his team. They are doing a huge service by running their guides as a non-profit. And I encourage anyone who reads their stuff to continue to donate.

That being said, I have huge philosophical disagreements, and the main one is that we view Big Tech as corrupt and oppressive, because of their enormous involuntary surveillance and political censorship. On the other hand, PrivacyGuides appears to just be concerned with low level evasion, where they place large amounts of trust in the very groups we criticize. For example, their forum PrivacyGuides.net is on Cloudflare, their other forum Lemmy.one is on Cloudflare, and even his personal site JonahAragon.com is Cloudflared along with its email. And even just for text and avatar icons with their staff bios, they use Microsoft Github. You can’t afford to host 5 tiny jpegs?

While I genuinely admire Jonah for separating himself from the previous PrivacyGuides site because they sold out to commission links. I do not think his current recommendations have enough adversarial thinking in mind. For example, it’s only when Skiff email was recently bought by Notion, did PrivacyGuides remove it. They never mentioned that Cloudflare can break SSL and see the private encryption keys served to you when you first sign-up.

Over and over, I have criticized Cloudflare seeing the bulk of our traffic and breaking SSL to see data. And so it’s unfair to his readers to not even warn them that on his website, they’re being browser fingerprinted and logged for DDoS purposes when he tells them no data is collected. Especially when his readers are first consulting his website to buy a VPN in the first place. Further, users of their forums and Lemmy, don’t own their identities because CF sees the login passwords. How can you say this doesn’t matter? To quote Jonah’s own website: ā€œPrivacy is about power, and it is so important that this power ends up in the right handsā€

But not owning your identity, how are readers of PrivacyGuides even supposed to know if Jonah is the one writing on the forums, or if it's really the government? Even worse, it is painful for me to see Jonah Aragon criticize Nostr. When Nostr is the very solution to his identity problem. He said: ā€œI am trying out Nostr and so far am unimpressed. If anyone else is testing it out find me here and we’ll see if this even makes sense as a social network much less one we’d want to recommend on the site lol" [1]

Nostr is truly an amazing place and I urge him to try it again. His website says ā€œdecentralizationā€ but I was shocked to see he does not even mention XMPP on his list of encrypted messengers. And when asked on forums, users are told to go to Matrix. [2] I could not disagree more. XMPP is the gold standard of decentralized open source communications and the primary choice for the darkweb. How can he guide us on Tor without even mentioning it?

Now we can debate XMPP’s reliance on government domains vs SimpleX & Session. Those are fair criticisms. But all of these, including Matrix, have centralized development. SimpleX got money from Microsoft. Signal is on Amazon. And while Session is on a blockchain, it’s like a corporation when it comes to changes. While as XMPP is the only one that’s pure & truly decentralized, with nobody in charge. And because hosting a Matrix server is so annoying, most people DON’T self-host, and use the official Matrix server w/ Google captchas fingerprinting your device and Gmail doing the verification. That’s right, Matrix.org is linked to Gmail, which ties your Matrix account to your real name if you were dumb enough to trust them with your real email.

And can you guess what company actually hosts Matrix.org? Can you guess what US-government compliant company sees who you talk to and when? Drum roll... Cloudflare.

Jonah, I’m not attacking you. I’m trying to make you realize that they are attacking us. And instead of being at each other’s throats, we can empower our readers to take control of their digital lives. That’s why I applied to write for you when I first started. And my offer still stands.

Currently, your website looks more like a blog. If you set it up as a privacy journey guide in stages, hopefully it can be more useful to newcomers.

I love it too but that plugin is available for Joplin and VScode too, I think.

If you're degoogling your phone or using a #degoogled OS, you might consider migrating away from Google. Self-hosted #Nextcloud can be an option or a hosted one like murena.io which is pretty affordable and hosted in Europe. If you want hosting in Germany, #Filen have their servers there and their apps are #opensource and have #e2ee...

For the people wishing to see on Nostr the features #GrapheneOS Vanadium browser has:

- Type-based Control Flow Integrity enabled

- Hardware memory tagging (MTE) enabled for the main allocator

- Strict site isolation and sandboxed iframes

- JavaScript JIT disabled by default with per-site override option

- Native Android autofill implementation to avoid needing sandboxed Google Play for autofill support

- WebGPU disabled for attack surface reduction

- WebRTC IP handling policy toggle to control peer-to-peer WebRTC mode

- Compiler hardening: automatic variable initialization, strong stack protector, well defined signed overflow

- High performance content filtering engine using EasyList + EasyPrivacy with a per-site override option

- More complete state partitioning without origin trial opt-out

- High entropy client hints replaced with the frozen user agent values to avoid leaking device/OS info

- Battery API always shows the battery as charging and at 100% capacity

- Trivial subdomain hiding disabled

- Consistent browser behavior across users without usage of feature flags and seed-based trials

- Nearly all remote services disabled by default or removed. Only connects to GrapheneOS servers by default. There are only 2 default services: component updates such as certificate authority and certificate revocation updates and DNS-over-HTTPS connectivity checks when enabled

- Web search and global search intents to replace the need for an OS search app

- Option to always open links from other apps, custom tabs and search intents in Incognito mode

Better default settings, including non-user-facing flags:

- Reduce Accept-Language header by default (only available via chrome://flags)

- Third party cookies disabled by default

- Payment support disabled by default

- Website background sync disabled by default

- Sensors access disabled by default

- Protected media (DRM) disabled by default

- Hyperlink auditing disabled by default

- Do Not Track enabled by default mainly to avoid users differentiating themselves from others by enabling it since it has no real value

- WebRTC IP handling policy set to the most private value by default instead of the least private value (turned into a user-facing option by Vanadium)

nostr:nevent1qqstu7eafcpguaqfplrvh88vu5ked4ke6kcxh7svrllastrdh9vgnnspz3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wcpzps26tfjesmn6ksf5mm36hpf9fkjut49sfeutfutvs2phrykn25v9qvzqqqqqqyyjcwrn

Did you mean Do Not Track *disabled* by default?

Enjoy. Let us know what range you get out of it

Replying to Avatar ck

Beware.

Recently, there was a fake one beiefly on #Flathub too before it was taken down. #Linux users beware. And of course the #Snap store one...