1. Paste each article’s raw source to ChatGPT, ask it to do it for you. If there are too many, you can automate it through the API for a negligible cost.
2. Is it not.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/russia-sims-3/

I don’t know anything about it, but clicking on “Trending” and scrolling for a little while gave me the Facebook horrors.

!newcommunities@lemmy.world is a very common one. I’ll put a plug also for !communities@ponder.cat. I also tend to look at the lists of communities from “good” instances and subscribe en masse to a bunch of them all at once if I like the vibe of the instance overall.

You are right that there really isn’t as good a way as there “should” be, maybe, but that’s what people do and it seems to work okay.

I think you should share this way of looking at security with some security professionals, and see what they say about it.

I know some people who recently wrote an article, for example, which said among some other things:

The simple answer is that you can’t and shouldn’t trust either free or paid VPN providers. … For some, using a VPN can be as dangerous as not using one.

And your government can seek grounds to demand access to your browsing data anytime it wants — including retroactively — which can also include demands to access data from VPN providers, defeating the very point of the privacy you sought.

Security experts consider the Tor network the gold standard of private browsing because it allows you to access the internet without censorship or surveillance.

Instead of relying on a single tunnel to hide your internet traffic, Tor works by encrypting and routing users’ internet traffic through thousands of servers around the world, shielding their activity from other servers and the outside world. Because of Tor’s implementation, no single Tor server can see your browsing data. That means even if a Tor server is compromised, the attacker still cannot access the users’ browsing data within.

Because Tor is open source, anyone can inspect its source code to ensure that it’s safe to run.

And so on.

You’re not wrong that a VPN will shield your non-web traffic, and if you’re doing something sensitive outside of HTTPS and the associated DNS, then Tor won’t help. It also won’t prevent someone from stealing your car or breaking into your house. And, the same very serious vulnerabilities that apply to free or commercial VPN providers will apply to all of that non-web traffic.

The same article with the above useful tidbits of information also includes a guide to setting up your own VPN, which can be made actually extremely secure against some threats, if you do want to secure non-web traffic. Tor is still much better at protecting your web traffic, assuming that you’re doing something for which it is suitable.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

Tor is for oppressive countries where anonymity and misdirection are more important than performance. It’s literally worse than a VPN in every single way unless you’re concerned with a major country coming for your head.

So it’s… … more secure? I generally agree with this statement. The performance is worse, which makes it unsuitable for some things.

VPN is not “a browser”, it’s a network stack. It is separate from whatever you use for a browser. If you use Tor, you still use a browser.

Yes, which makes it kind of silly that you originally highlighted a vulnerability in the browser as a problem with Tor. Tor is also a network stack, but it’s most often used through a bundled-in specific Tor browser, which sometimes has vulnerabilities. Most VPNs don’t bundle a browser, but the browser that’s using the VPN still sometimes has vulnerabilities. They stand in exactly the same relationship, in terms of vulnerabilities in the browser. Neither one is better than the other. That’s the point that I was making. I can absolutely assure you that I understand the technologies involved.

Actually, I should have said specifically: It is true that Tor is slower and unsuitable for some applications, streaming and torrenting being two of them. It was more your statement that it is somehow less secure that I was disagreeing with.

VPN-using browsers

VPN is not “a browser”

Diesel-burning cars

Diesel is not “a car”

See how language works? You need to relax man.

I typed up a long sarcastic response as to why this isn’t true, but I think I’m going to let you keep believing these things. If you think VPN-using browsers do not have vulnerabilities that need updates to fix actively exploited vulnerabilities, or that data is protected between the exit node of a VPN and the end path, then I’m going to let you keep thinking those things. I’ll never stand between a person and their dreams.

You shouldn’t use it for torrenting

True.

it’s frequently targeted by intelligence agencies for IP unmasking

I would take issue with “frequently,” in the grand scheme of things, but yes. It is a sufficient level of protection that state intelligence agencies have to have specific methods, which sometimes work and sometimes don’t, to try to specifically attack one specific actor on Tor if they care enough to do it. In contrast to a VPN, which any bumbling fuckhead in more or less any jurisdiction can generally defeat with a single subpeona, and even a fairly stupid intelligence agency can defeat without blinking.

Tor sucks

Your axioms don’t add up to your theorem. There are cases where a VPN is better, torrenting being one of them, that part is true.

Yeah the whole logic of “If I protect my privacy effectively, I won’t be able to use Google services anymore! O woe” is a little bit strange to me.

I like how the article boils down to, “Except for some isolated use cases, Tor is far superior to a VPN in both cost and safety,” and a lot of the comments boil down to “YEAH VPNS ARE GREAT GET A VPN.”

It is okay to read the article before writing a comment, guys. In some circles, it’s even encouraged, because you might learn something.

Tor has plans for free/mo.

What?

Yeah. You can give the resulting RSS links to anyone else who uses an RSS reader. But no one other than you can do it, unless they feel like using Lemmy also. That’s a flaw.

Hey, thank you! Yeah. The nature of the network can induce people to behave nice or behave mean, and to put a lot or a little effort into the stuff they are posting. I think a lot of the anonymity and ease-of-getting-on of the modern Lemmy-type internet means that you get kind of the lowest common denominator of human nature. It’s unfortunately true of commercial networks as it is of free ones.

You can do basically all of this with Lemmy communities and @bot@rss.ponder.cat.

You can create a community for “Alex’s Linux Feed,” and add any stuff you want to read to it, and it’ll all automatically get posted there from the linked RSS feeds. Then, if you want to create your own feed to organize those posts better, you can create a separate community for that, and hand people out the RSS link for that community, and post stuff to it by crossposting.

The only issue is that I think it’s possible that Lemmy hands out feeds that link to the Lemmy discussion, instead of to the underlying article, but I can probably make you an alternate RSS link that will instead link to the underlying article, so you can have that as an alternate feed if you want.

How’s that sound?

I absolutely think that’s the idea, yes.

The world is a complicated place. Part of the optimization our brain does, to even be able to make sense of it at all without being overwhelmed, is to absorb things that you see other people saying to each other, and incorporate them into how you see the world. So I’m always interested when I see a variety of people all saying the same thing, even though that thing is demonstrably not true if you think for yourself for a few seconds.

In this case I think it’s just some kind of internal cope that they’re doing for themselves, and the repetition leading to other people potentially absorbing it is purely accidental, but it’s still a dangerous pattern.

What did I say, in my comment, to address exactly what you just repeated?

Specifically I’m interested in this part:

Yeah, there was certainly a lot of propaganda and lies to help elect Donald, but let’s be very real here - leftists not voting or voting third party over Gaza wasn’t a major part of his victory.

That had a very specific answer in the comment you’re replying to.

Yeah. Sounds right. Me giving them a hard time is intended in the spirit of tough love. One part “hey, you guys are messing up, if you want people to take you seriously I think you should stop doing this” and one part unapologetic “if you didn’t want me telling stories about you censoring me, you shouldn’t have deleted my comments and banned me when I disagreed with your moderator. In any sane community, you’re allowed to disagree with the moderator, and I would like to be vocal to protect my right to do so.”