Did you know? Your phone is:
a. Tracking your location 24/7.
b. Sending your push notifications to the government.
c. Recording your conversations and reading your messages.
d. Recording audio OFF the phone, in the same room as the phone's mic.
e. Relationship mapping everyone you know, to label unknown numbers or accounts as you.
So, who cares?
Well, Without privacy:
a. You don't own your Nostr private key.
b. You don't own your Bitcoin wallets.
c. You're using the infrastructure of your enemy, who is actively looking to suppress your speech and take away your rights.
What's the answer?
A DeGoogled phone is just Android without telemetry. You can do it on your own, or Simplified Privacy sells cheap ones.
Why would I get a DeGoogled Android through Simplified Privacy?
a. Pay in Bitcoin, keep your name off the hardware identifiers.
b. Get a 1-hour consult included to ask your questions on the best apps and ways to use it.
c. Pay zero taxes.
d. Get low pricing, we do the Pixel 6a for just $300.
e. Avoid the stress of ending up with the wrong thing or a bricked phone.
f. Participate in the Nostr economy. We don’t need government registration, our signature is our word.
g. Support us to develop our open source Nostr client.
Learn more:
Libertarian Institute on Nostr?!
Simplified Privacy is proud to announce our partnership with the Libertarian Institute to promote, manage, and setup services for their Nostr & Session!
The Libertarian Institute features many amazing authors, podcasters, and influencers:
Scott Horton, Sheldon Richman, Laurie Calhoun, James Bovard, Ted G. Carpenter, Kyle Anzalone, Keith Knight
And Tom Woods
The combined audiences of these guys is over 100k! This is a big opportunity for Nostr to grow!
They are giving this a brief shot. But it’s meaningless without your adoption. I’ve been grinding to find influencers to adopt it. But we need to show them there’s an audience. We got this, I believe in you. Let’s bring it home guys.
It starts with just the Institute, but they all will follow. All these podcasts promoting it. Repost the shit out of the posts from this Nostr public key:
npub1jjn8f2qr0cc576c0qme737hgh0d8j3uyrugrehhyv4rh9dwy3kyqc39576
& Session ID: “Libertarian” (without quotes)
Oh. That'd be hella expensive for just email only. But if you have a bunch of other stuff running too, then yeah
WhatsApp is down, worldwide.
Instagram and Facebook are down for some.
This shows the danger of using centralized services! Switch to “encryption as identity” with Nostr & Session, and the nodes are commodity. You would be indifferent to any particular server going down.
Use this opportunity to convince your friends to switch to privacy!
Learn more on the outage:
What if you could convert anyone onto Nostr and help it grow?
Do you struggle to convince friends to see Nostr’s value?
The problem is you framed it as political censorship, when the real issue is about control.
Our new guide shifts the focus away from fringe tinfoil hat politics, and instead convinces small business owners how they are going to make more money and get more traffic by owning their identity,
https://simplifiedprivacy.com/why-you-need-nostr/
These rock solid arguments can shift the tide in your favor. If you want to see our values and way of life grow, share this link with your skeptical friends.
Don’t share it for me. Spread freedom for you.
I agree email sucks. And I agree it depends on the person.
But many businesses require email for sales. So for small businesses, who want the freedom and privacy, then this goes excellent with the other VPS services such as cloud docs and chat.
You can in theory host email on a (24/7 on) home computer or rasberry Pi, the problem is that outgoing email would be labeled spam. And anyone who sees your domain would know where you live. So we do not recommend this.
However, you don’t need a full dedicated server, as that’s expensive. Best option is a small VPS cloud.
Q: What are the advantages of self-hosted VPS email over blindly trusting Proton?
1.More control and privacy. Proton is running the software, compared to you running the software. This means there is no passive surveillance. There is no AI scanning. The only time your emails would be read is with an active court order. Even if there’s a court order, whatever you deleted in the past would remain deleted.
Think of this with the analogy of renting your own private condo, compared to using someone’s bunk bed, for free, in a tiny room jammed packed with other roommates masturbating. Yes in both cases the landlord can get to what’s stored in the room, but with your own condo, it’s kept hidden until he takes serious action.
2. Proton is the target for thousands of court orders a year. Just by using them and wanting to be “private”, you’re a heavily scrutinized target. It’s no effort to automate the court order process for them. In comparison, to when you run the services yourself, it’s a bigger time commitment and costs more money to get data from that VPS.
Yes, if it was truly critical to law enforcement they can get it. But they have to first win over this unique and different VPS company in a different country. Then the VPS company has to find an IT guy who knows how to snapshot memory and retrieve emails from your particular unique email software. Remember, that each self-host is using different software, which is all adding more cost to get to. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying it costs money and time. Which completely kills passive surveillance, and is likely not worth it unless its real serious. Compared to Proton, where it’s all automated.
3. Proton hands over many thousands of emails a year, and the number is exponentially growing. If it’s all encrypted, why does law enforcement want it so bad?
4. Proton is slow as shit on Tor and restricts Tor signups. They want you to have an email already to sign-up. They don’t understand Tor Onions don’t need httpS encryption, so the Onion is so slow its unuseable.
5. If you’re going to use Proton, do a free burner. Why would you pay money to Proton, when you can have a VPS for nearly the same cost, and then get all this extra functionality on it? Such as chat or docs?
The real benefit to your own VPS is beyond just email. You can have your own website. Your chat completely under your control, as opposed to just blindly trusting some random XMPP server or the SimpleX developer servers. Replace Google docs with CryptPad with solid encryption and convenient file sharing and collaboration.
6. Branding and security for your small business. If you have your own domain, people take you more seriously. But if you point your domain to Proton, you give up your autonomy. If you have your cloud collaboration docs on secure end-to-end encrypted Cryptpad, your clients collaborating on documents will love the secure and professional treatment of their data. Compared to using public free infrastructure that makes your brand look homeless.
If you want save yourself time and hassle, consider Simplified Privacy’s VPS combo pack of Email, Chat (XMPP/SimpleX), and collaboration docs (Cryptpad) all on 1 single low cost VPS. This perfect for your small business to get cheap and reliable tech support, and look professional and secure to your clients. See screenshots and learn more here:
Guys I’ve decided to join the NSA and sell all your data.
Further, I changed my mind on Google, and I will be having a Gcaptcha anal probe inserted into my rectum to monitor my daily activity.
And finally, I’ve decided to switch to NordVPN & Telegram, because they are secure & private.
Ok, maybe that last one is going too far. April fools.
Ah I see you are celebrating april fools by being insane
We do offer it on a root w/ encryption. But as you just said, they can still snapshot memory as ALL email has this issue.
But there is still privacy above what proton has, and you get other services such as XMPP and Cryptpad with it, so its good for small businesses that need email to function
Q: Is email encrypted or private?
A: Let’s take a step back and learn how the web works. Domains point to IP addresses or physical locations. The physical location registers encryption keys with a certificate authority. Then when an email is sent, it looks up what IP address to send it to and the public encryption key. When it gets to that physical location, it’s then unencrypted. So it’s only encrypted in transport.
Q: That’s absurd to only encrypt it server-to-server in transport. Why don’t you register the public encryption key with the domain registrar instead of having the physical location register it?
A: That’s how Session messenger works! Except their “domain registrar” is the blockchain. You assign on the blockchain which public key goes to your name, so the relays (physical locations) are powerless, and you have self-sovereign control. But that’s NOT email! So until you and me can convince these bone head clowns to let us register all our accounts and do all our businesses on Session & Nostr, we’re stuck with email.
Considering you need email to function in society, you have 2 choices. Either blindly trusting Protonmail/Tutanota, or self-host.
Q: What does “self-hosting email” even mean?
A: It means renting a 1 core VPS in a datacenter for under $10 a month, and running open source email software on it. Also once you have the VPS, you can get other use out of it, such as chat (XMPP or SimpleX) and replacing Google docs with Cryptpad. So a VPS doesn’t have to be just email, you can connect VoIP phone lines to XMPP, you can collaborate with all kinds of docs/spreadsheets, and have much more control over all your data. Also your friends and family can use the VPS too. Not only is this economical, but if the communication stays on the same server, it’s even more private.
Q: Why don’t I self-host email in my residential home?
A: Unfortunately, most email providers block messages from homes as spam. So if you host in your house, you can receive email, but you can’t send outgoing. Also people will know where you live just by seeing your domain.
Q: So Protonmail is NOT encrypted?
A: As we just discussed above, ALL email uses TLS (transport only). TLS gets unencrypted when it arrives at its physical location. Protonmail then claims to encrypt this after they scan it for spam. But this is a conflict of interest as they are encrypting it to protect from themselves.
Q: What are the advantages of self-hosted VPS email over blindly trusting Proton?
A: We’re going to break this up into 2 Nostr posts to prevent it from being an entire Bible.
So stay tuned, show some love so that others can learn, and we’ll see you next time!
I believe we have a miscommunication, that’s alright let me clarify.
Simplified Privacy is technical support. We don’t run the VPS.
We setup for you/customers services you like on a third party VPS that you pick, with your domain choice.
So we aren’t hosting the email, we’re providing the software and technical support.
The challenge is getting 3 services, with different web panels, to all work without issue.
So once we set it up, you lock US, meaning Simplified Privacy out.
That’s true, this is why I am a huge fan of Session and Unstoppable domains. We have domains for sale on Session
First of all, we’re talking about a combination of email, XMPP, and Cryptpad docs. So the XMPP/SimpleX and Cryptpad are genuinely encrypted, and the email prevents against passive surveillance. You can not honestly tell me that trusting random strangers for XMPP chat is better than self-hosting. We deliver value by configuring all of these services to run a single 1 core VPS.
Your criticisms of ALL email are valid, but that doesn’t mean that controlling the software doesn’t offer stronger self-sovereignty and control over your communications, data, and accounts doesn’t have a leg up over just purely trusting proton. Proton is a bigger risk for passive surveillance with it all being scanned, while as a VPS they have to go out of their way for it.
Urgent: serious backdoor impacts major linux distros Fedora, Kali, openSUSE, Debian
DegenRocket has summarized the info & given you a simple command to check if your Linux machine is vulnerable:
This is not only email, but also cryptpad cloud (replace google docs) and XMPP.
Self-hosting XMPP or SimpleX is far more private and secure than relying on a random third party server.
While I agree email isn't that private to begin with, this protects you against passive AI surveillance to a far greater degree. And email has a big risk of aggregating all information about you.
The real benefit of our product is getting all of these services on a single tiny VPS, so you get the most bang for your buck
Why should you have a self-hosted email?
Because without it, you don’t own anything.
Most websites force you to link an email, and the email can reset the password. And because email forces you to trust the provider, the provider really owns your accounts.
Don’t use Protonmail. The emails come in as plain text, and then they supposedly encrypt it. But this is a conflict of interest, as they are protecting you from themselves.
Instead, here at Simplified Privacy, each customer gets the login credentials and SSH keys to their own tiny cloud (VPS). So you fully control your own data, and lock us out. With Protonmail, you can’t verify their cloud. But with your own VPS, you are the cloud.
Our combo package is designed to keep your VPS lightweight and save you money, while being jammed packed with functionality!
We’ll setup 3 services, (using open source software, all on the same VPS):
1) Email
2) Chat (Your choice of XMPP or SimpleX)
3) Team cloud docs w/ CryptPad (like Google docs but encrypted)
4) With a full YEAR of tech support after.
5) Includes domain name registration AND the first month of VPS costs.
All for just a one-time $99 setup fee, and then after the first month you take over paying the VPS directly (like $8 a month).
See screenshots and learn more:
US State Department worker publicly resigns (ending her career) over Israel & Joe Biden's genocide:
Can this huge influencer be changed?
LewRockwell is an extremely popular Libertarian website. They recently published a well shared article from Dr. Mercola on why to ditch Google:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/03/joseph-mercola/goodbye-google/
While it’s great that people see the messages of privacy and anti-censorship, it’s bad that the suggested solutions not only won’t help, but in fact likely turn people off. Here’s a key example:
“Your suggestion of reading the privacy policy for every website people visit to avoid Google analytics is not practical. A far better solution is to use the browser extension uBlock Origin, which lists all third party JavaScript calls by domain, and allows you to block it. In fact, your own website MercolaMarket has Google’s APIs on it, which allows them to see the IP address of anyone buying your products. The most ridiculous part is the very article on LewRockwell.com telling me to read privacy policies to avoid Google Analytics, uses Google Analytics and Gmail.”
And this is just one of the many examples in an open letter we wrote. The primary problem is not technological, but apathy. It doesn’t have to be like this. We just need the real solutions to make it to the readers screens.
I stand here today to ask you to share our open letter, so that the thousands of readers of LewRockwell can learn:
https://simplifiedprivacy.com/letter-to-lewrockwell/
I stand here today to ask you to be part of the genuine change. Because at the end of the day, LewRockwell is only a reflection of what his readers want. And so the challenge is not convincing him, but you.