I don’t think you can expect any VPN to work without sign-in for very long. Google’s playing whack-a-mole with VPNs.
I’ve never actually tried signing in with yt-dlp. How easy is it to make a throwaway google account nowadays? Do they require phone verification or something similarly onerous?
This is network-specific. It’s been going on for a few months at least. yt-dlp itself still works without sign-in, if your network is not “suspicious”.
Always worth making sure you’re updated to the latest version of yt-dlp, but this is probably a network thing.
A paper-only journal would defend against the state, but not against people you live with. A digital journal can be encrypted, but an intelligence agency could potentially gain access
A digital journal doesn’t need to be any more government-accessible than a paper journal.
Depending on your threat model, this could require special hardware, special software, or both. In order of ease of setup, I would suggest:
Keep all your data on your own physical media. No cloud services, period.
Keep it encrypted.
Disable network connectivity at every level that you possibly can, such as:
OS level: disable wi-fi, disable blutooth, and disable networking entirely.
Firmware/BIOS level: If you BIOS has options to disable networking components (especially wireless ones), do that.
Hardware level: If your laptop has a switch to disable wi-fi, use it. If ethernet, unplug the cable. Etc.
Physical level: Remove any removable wireless cards or antennas.
Wallet level: buy a computer than never had wi-fi or bluetooth in the first place. This could mean a retro computer, or could mean using a micro-pc like some models of Raspberry Pi.
Neither of those can stream video in real time AFAIK. They will back up the video file on some unpredictable schedule after you’re done recording. So not ideal for a situation where your phone might be seized or destroyed.
But if that works for you, there are lots of open-source options that work similarly. SyncThing can sync to any server, and all you’d need to do is make sure your sync destination is network-accessible somehow (VPN, internet-facing server, whatever). Lots of cloud drive apps can auto-upload photos and videos, and some of those are open-source.
A better off-the-shelf proprietary workflow might be a Zoom call with cloud recording enabled. Then you’d be protected against a sudden (and perhaps permanent) loss of network connectivity.
Link to Mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503
Tuta.com is similar to Proton Mail + Calendar.
Location: Germany
Governance: Private GmbH (German corporation, similar to an American LLC)
Integrity/trustworthiness/transparency: Better than Proton IMHO. All their apps are open source and available on F-Droid. They encrypt email headers (unlike Proton, who are weaselly about this in their marketing materials).
User Experience: Ehhhh…6? I’m not in the best position to compare because I do not have a premium plan, so I am not able to examine features like inbox rules/filters. Much like Proton, it doesn’t support full-text email search unless you have it cache your entire mailbox locally (either via the web site or app). They do not support POP or IMAP, but do offer their own desktop and mobile apps.
Pricing: €3/month for 20GB, €8/month for 500GB. https://tuta.com/pricing
Kind of the opposite. It takes more effort to make a filesystem case-insensitive. Binary comparison is the laziest approach. (Note that laziness is a virtue.)
I’m on the fence as to which is better. Putting backwards compatibility aside, there’s a perfectly good case to be made for case-insensitivity being more intuitive to the human user.
Apple got into a strange position when marrying Mac OS (case-insensitive) and NeXTSTEP (case-sensitive). It used to be possible to install OS X on case-sensitive HFS+ but it was never very well supported and I think they axed it somewhere down the road.