TerkErJerbs

I’ve used wi-fi calling fairly extensively mostly because I’ve lived in areas where there was zero cell service but ready access to internet (via Starlink or other wireless forms of it). One thing I do know is that my phone co. requests that I fill out a form specifying where I am living currently (whilst using it) so that if I ever need to contact emergency services they’ll have a better idea of where to route the call to. For instance my phone number originates from Western BC but I could potentially be using wi-fi calling from anywhere in the province. I mention this to say, it appears my telco doesn’t have a way to triangulate me with this service.

I can further attest that wi-fi call & text reception still works fine when I have a VPN running on the router that my mobile device is connecting to. Make of that information what you wish.

Though that I have read that wi-fi calling is atrocious for privacy reasons that I have not followed up on. Given the above I’m not sure how or why that would be the case, but basically if I’m in an area with cell coverage I turn it off. I’ve always meant to look deeper into how or why it might be bad (or worse) in some way.

Are you talking about America lol

I also use adblocking at multiple levels so it wasn’t a huge thing for me (been blocking Pocket and other bullshit for years at the dns and network levels) but I still feel like Mozilla witnessed Google going for broke with killing mv2 and inline ads on YouTube and decided wellll our existing users probably wouldn’t notice or care if we slipped in an opt-out fuckery… But we did. Immediately.

For any browser trying to sell itself as “the only privacy browser on the market” this was a dumb fucking move by any metric. Like why not just openly admit we’re going with the Brave browser model?

No it’s not. But if we’re hoping Firefox will be better in some way we’d expect more from them. Wouldn’t we?

Should probably add this info about Mozilla funding almost exclusively from Google but at least they haven’t disabled mv2 extensions yet. Even though they put in a fucking opt-out ad telemetry setting in recent releases.

Granted, you’re using a home setup. But you could still consider setting up the VPN on a central AP and repeating your hotspot through it to make everything going in and out of your network encrypted and more secure. None of your actual traffic (besides what your phone is emitting) will be in the clear, which is better than nothing.

Almost any router with VPN and repeater options will accomplish this if you don’t wanna root your phone. I’ve flashed OpenWRT on the equivalent of router potatoes over the years. It’s pretty straightforward.

Yeah sorry I don’t have experience with Graphene but a quick search seems to say root is very difficult with it. Maybe look into flashing a different custom ROM if you really need this.

One thing I’ve done quite a bit is use my travel router (I have a GL-Inet Slate but there are lots of options) to repeat my hotspot, then connect all my devices via the router. And set the VPN up on the router. This way everything going out over the hotspot is encrypted anyhow.

For my needs, I can power the Slate by plugging it into my laptop or even my phone via usb-c. It’s very portable and versatile. Ymmv.

You can (basically) only do this with a rooted phone. There are some permissions issues that prevent the hotspot network adapter from being shared over the VPN client otherwise. This article from Proton is just an ELI5 splainer, you can go deeper with some searches.

If you have root and/or a custom ROM already (which usually assumes root) it’s not that complicated.

For anyone on this thread who doesn’t know who Ken Klip is, please check out his free Substack (and subscribe if you can). I wasn’t on Twitter very long (maybe 1.5 years before Elmong took over) but one of the people I value that I ran into on that platform is Ken Klippenstein and I’ve been following him since. He’s amazing at filing thousands of FOIA requests and doing the digging into them that no mainstream journalist does anymore. He also recently quit The Intercept because they were enshittifying far more than he was comfortable with, which for a writer is a huge thing to leave the umbrella of a company like that and a paycheck behind. Writers going out on their own in this climate is the only way we’ll stay even remotely unfucked in the post-information (or misinformation) age.

Klip fuckin rules. Please give him some due.

NP! It’s a great app, the dev updates it really frequently and I’ve never had any functional issue with it. I keep meaning to drop onto their git issues board and make a couple of small quality of life suggestions for the UI/UX as I use it dozens of times per day for work (there are some processes that currently take 5 clicks/per that could be reduced to 1 or 2 max) but that is a very small and nice problem to have.

That was the same issue I had with SyncThing, it just seemed to conk out at weird times and I gave up on it (for that purpose). It’s great for centralizing a directory of files from one machine to another but I didn’t love it for keeping a single file up-to-date with changes coming from more than one point on the network.

Oh yeah sorry, I misunderstood. I think what you’re looking for is local (network) versioning which I’ve had trouble finding in the past as well. I had hoped SyncThing would do it but it doesn’t. Versioning is something a service like git does perfectly (i.e. notifies of and/or resolves conflicts in text files on the fly, seamlessly). When I was doing a lot of writing from different devices I set up a private repo on Github (and later Gitlab) and got my text editor to auto-sync-on-save to the repo (from any device) and it worked great. There are very likely self-hosted solutions that wouldn’t rely on the cloud for that, but for me it worked fine as private repos because nobody but me would ever see those drafts (in a perfect world… we all know microsoft has almost certainly trained their shitty A.I. on my terrible writing versions over those years on Github because they own that platform).

I know there are ways to get Git working locally, probably for this purpose, but I don’t know of any simple ones to suggest.

I use LocalSend between all my devices (work, personal, etc). Mac, Linux, Android, Winblows. All. It’s fast, effective, lightweight. FOSS.

👆

Boats, planes, drones, phones, bikes… Anywhere that you can maximize storage cell capacity in odd shaped volumes and spaces/designs. It’s great.

You’ll find that with any major VPN. The IP addresses they use to proxy your traffic eventually get flagged and blocked by lots of major players. Which is why VPN companies cycle through them quite often. As others have said, you’ll either need to switch servers (and thus ips) or figure out another path.

I don’t use mull but most have a way to exclude a given url or site from the tunnel if you need it. i.e. the site will work for you but it’s coming from your own IP and unencrypted.

Yeah I know. https://blog.windscribe.com/windscribe-expose-mozilla/

If you use a DNS solutions you can block all the telemetry shit. Frankly FF has been phoning home in a lot of undesirable ways for many years even before this, like most browsers.