I used Proton Mail since college student, it was great and upgraded to Unlimited tier after getting a job. Thier VPN was okay for occasional usage. However, coming from a personal perspective, over the time I became not a fan of them branching out to other services such as Proton Pass, when they still have work to do for their existing ones (eg. split tunneling on Linux VPN client, calendar sync on Bridge, to name a few), so I downgraded to only Mail Plus. I also switched to Mullvad VPN and I like the experience better than Proton VPN. As of now, I think Proton is still a great service for email and calendar, but I’m not sure about other ones
I’m also interested in hearing Proton users’ experience. On paper it looks like an okay deal, but you could get a similar suite of services from Posteo + iDrive + Mullvad + BitWarden for cheaper and not end up locked into an “ecosystem”.
However, there is legitimate value in combining email and drive space. Posteo only gives you 2GB for email, and their upgrades are rather expensive.
Also, Mullvad might not be equivalent since they axed the port forwarding feature a while back, making BitTorrent only kind-of usable (incoming connections will not work).
If you’re familiar with Electrum and migrating to the privacy coin, Feather may be a convenient choice.
The fundamental problem for you might not be the wallet; but KYC vs. non-KYC. Is it allowed to post a link or mention specific platforms here? You may want to check a website about no-kyc and try a trusted, no-kyc platform—not a CEX but a DEX (pure P2P), so no company can monitor your private life (related to shopping). You can browse monero.town, which is a friendly Lemmy instance of !privacyguides in the sense that Monero is recomended on the official site of Privacy Gudies: www.privacyguides.org/en/cryptocurrency/ (I’m a mod from !privacy)
The tricky part is, if you have been once KYCed, your privacy invaded, then you couldn’t undo it (un-KYC it). You may need to start over, creating totally new addresses, doing everything anonymously over Tor. If you’re not that privacy-oriented, you can just swap the KYC coin you have to Monero, and you’ll be invisible from that point.
But Moneo is not magic to solve everything. DYOR and stay safe!
Are there any recommendations for cold storage? Or are paper wallets enough? I’ve pretty much only ever used Electrum and rarely so and I’m trying to expand my horizons
It depends on how much you have, etc. If it’s just like 10 or 100 €, maybe you don’t need to be super careful.
The following is just one possible way—get a safe and libre “poor man’s hardware wallet” quickly and easily without paying:
1. Main wallet
Get a USB stick, install Tails. This takes about an hour (most time is for downloading the .img file)
Create a persistent storage, with a strong password (maybe 7 or 8 random words).
Install Feather. This takes 10–15 minutes; 30 minutes if generating a new wallet. Use it as your main wallet, and send your Monero to it.
When ready, shut down Tails. Pull out the USB and save it in a safe place. Now your wallet is physically disconnected from the Internet, air gapped. Very hard for any attacker to hack it.
2. Hot wallet
Set up whatever wallet(s) you like on your daily device(s) for daily use. It too can be Feather, or it can be something different. Just don’t have too much money in a daily wallet.
3. When you send Monero from 1 to 2
Insert the said USB, boot into Tails, send a necessary (small) amount from 1 to 2. Unlike BTC, the tx fees are like 1 cent or less. You can make a lot of small TXs without worrying about fees.
Once you signed and sent, immediately close your main Feather, shut down Tails, and physically disconnect the USB again. You don’t need to wait for confirmations. It’ll be fully confirmed in 15 or 30 minutes, and for which your wallet doesn’t need to be online.
So your daily wallet will be moderately funded, ready to use. You can enjoy private transactions, e.g. buying VPS or making anonymous donations to support your favorite software. Even if your daily wallet is hacked, your main wallet will be safe, physically disconnected from the Internet.
In theory this should work pretty well, if not the strongest possible. It’s not a recommendation, though. Do your own research. You may want to ask the same question in !monero; hearing various opinions, not just trusting one person (me), is a good idea.
Rather then committing a year to a service, do a monthly subscription until you find something you’re happy with. Then switch to annual billing if you want. I wouldn’t continue paying for a VPN that doesn’t work well. I’m personally pretty happy with PIA.
As others have mentioned, Bitwarden is a very good password manager that has a very full-featured free tier. And its paid tiers are very cheap if you decide to upgrade.
I accidentally nuked my internet the other day while testing Pass. Because it’s not local hosted, I could not access a single password. That’s not cool. Still not sure if I’m sold on using Pass. I’ve also had it not always offer to save new login details and some forms it misses 2fa. Hopefully all that gets fixed soon. But I’m an unlimited user for all the other features. Luckily they prorate the upgrade if you have current service. Might as well take the jump.
Sit tight, I reckon. All the projects have been forked by one of the more involved contributors to SMT, so I doubt it’ll be long before we have rebranded versions, that’ll take an import of the settings from the original apps.
The only reason I got Signal to catch on with friends & family was that it made group chats between Android and iPhone just work for everybody. Although if they had already been using Whatsapp it may have been a harder sell. But Signal was easy to use to figure out.
These companies dig up everything from a prospective employee’s past, starting from childhood. Things that you said come back to bite you, even if you got wiser and changed your stance. But companies get to pull shit like this without consequences.
There should be a public blacklist database with every company and their dirty infractions like these. That way, at least very competent and desirable candidates can avoid them and look for better jobs.
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