They are microprocessors embedded within the microprocessor. Intel’s IME enables remote access (by intel’s own admission). If you are not a corporation who manages a fleet of machines, the backdoor can only be used against you. AMD’s variant called the PSP is similar but closed-source. We don’t really have a complete picture of the extent of the compromise with AMD because of the opacity of it (as AMD proactively denied a request for source code). What we don’t know /can/ hurt us, as we already got stung by a defective driver for the AMD’s PSP.

Even if the spychips were to be hypothetically designed to be aligned with the interests of non-corporate individual consumers, there is no such thing as bug-free software. They have added complexity that works against us and brings vulnerabilities. And we also cannot dispense of the deliberate design whereby some remote actor decides for the user what software is or is not “authorised” to execute. I alone should decide what is authorised on my PC.

So the fix is to use an AMD processor made before ~2014 (roughly speaking), or a pre-2009 intel. AMD chips were behind intel in terms of performance, but probably not 5 years behind. So I figure 2013 AMDs are the most interesting. But we only have a fuzzy idea of which AMD chips are spychip-free.

Arm has trustzone, so you can’t simply nix x86 chips and be done with it. We would need to do the same research for arm chips.

This means we could create a demand for old phones by separating those without spychips from the rest. Although it’s a bit sketchy when considering all phones have a dodgy gsm stack designed for remote compromise, IIUC. Maybe Osmocom neutralizes it - not sure.

Oh I didn’t think of that. It’s native French speakers who use “mail” for “email” (when speaking english).

Interesting to see his take on “e-mail” vs “email”. I bet he changes his tune on “email” vs “mail” – where gen-z has decided that it’s okay to save keystrokes by dropping the “e” because no one uses snail mail anymore. Indeed I am always disguested when someone says “send a mail”. I have to ask for clarification and they always confirm that mean email.

AT&T is the worst of the worst. And I boycott them for countless reasons like snooping on their own customers voluntarily without a warrant. It’s really a hard-right corp. In any case, never tried them so I didn’t know they blocked egress 25.

One trick that works if truth-in-advertising laws are in force: ask the sales people before subscribing if the block port 25. They always say “no, we block nothing” (in my experience). So you subscribe and sign the contract. Then when you see they actually block 25, you have a false advertising situation and also a contract violation (if either verbal contracts are enforcable or if you can get it in writing that nothing is blocked). So you complain. In my experience, they give a gratis upgrade to an enterprise level of service that generally has a static IP and no blocks – for the price of the residential plan you signed up for.

I can’t speak for @ShutUpWesley@piefed.zip, but I boycott both Google and Microsoft. This means 95+% of prospective people, corps, and gov agencies I would exchange email with are not getting email from me. They are also not getting an email address out of me.

I have been done with email for nearly a decade now, mostly. So, to answer your question, I use fax and snail mail. Not joking. I feel liberated and don’t give a shit about postage or inconvenience. There is still that exceptional 5% or so who I will exchange email with, which does not have GAFAM in the loop.

(edit) should add that I give friends and family an XMPP address (of my own, but often I also give them an XMPP acct for themselves). Google bounced from XMPP a decade or so ago and AFAIK Microsoft has no XMPP service. So it’s mostly snail mail and fax for govs and corps. XMPP for people.

Any friends or family who resist XMPP are mostly stuffed. They can either proxy through a mutual friend or call me if they are local.

Maybe the way to fight GMail’s outsized power is to stop using GMail.

Stopping your own gmail use is trivially easy. It just scratches the surface. In order to not lick Google’s boots, you also need to stop sending email to gmail users. That means doing an MX lookup before emailing to see if their vanity email address is on a Gmail host. And of course this also means not sharing an email address with gmail users.

I do that, in fact. I also boycott Microsoft. In the end, this means I am not using email much at all.

They claim its for spam prevention which is why most ISPs actually also block outgoing SMTP port 25.

European ISPs block egress port 25, not American ones, generally. Not sure about the rest of the world.

In Europe, one refuge is to send using the GSM networks, which tend not to block egress 25 for some reason.

Very happy to have learned about tildeverse.org. It gives a great refuge from a lot of the garbage. But I have to ask, if you are part of the tildeverse project why are you on lemmy.world, a centralised exclusive Cloudflare instance? I realise tildeverse does not have a lemmy node but there are many decent ones and LW is probably the most contrary to the tildeverse philosophies.

What browser is that? Did you change a setting that would block redirections that would be triggered by the header Kairos mentioned in this thread?