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Not only insurance companies, but many others.

Airlines do it too. One dark pattern I experienced during Covid was that the airline call system was automatically set to hang up after 30 minutes. If you were lucky you'd get to speak to a representative at around minute 25, but never get your ticket rebooked.


We use Syncdocs (https://syncdocs.com) to do end-to-end Google Drive encryption.

The keys stay on the client. It is secure, but means the files are only decryptable on the client, so keys need to be shared manually. I guess security means extra hassle.


It is a pity it does not apply in Australia. They search 40,000 devices a year there, and consfiscate your device if you refuse.


I travel with a dumb phone. I do this because if I get mugged, I'm out something I don't care about. I wear a tin wedding ring when travelling too.

I've been asked for my phone at customs, and I just hand over the "nokia". They can play snake all the like.


Many of the technical and science stuff is still pretty good. Not like it used to be, but it's a recurring theme, when the Internet expanded, UseNet also became rubbish, "infested by AOL'ers and spam" was the complaint in 1996.


You can use Rsync to copy everything from Google Drive as a cron job. If you want copies of your Google Docs and Sheets you'll need something like SyncDocs to download and convert them to MS Office format.


And while they've got your device, in Australia, the government can legally install rootkits on your phone or laptop without informing you.


IT employees can be legally obligated to sabotage or backdoor projects, too. Very nasty.


Would a factory reset remove these root kits or backdoors?


Hypothetically? Not necessarily as an attacker can stage malware in places that will survive a factory reset. Eg: Malware can live in firmware; or recovery volume not wiped in Factory Reset. An extremely resourced attacker could write malicious microcode to your CPU. Can’t reset that.

Realistically? it means CoTS gov grade malware like gamma finfisher etc, which should die when all persistent flash or disk storage is reset.

Practically, I would guess that it’s whatever the capabilities of Australian malware vendors are shipping feature wise for the products you are trying to protect.

“It depends on your threat model”.


OK, I will so in future.

I tried to summarize the article in the title. Will follow the guidelines from now on.


There are quite a few clients for Linux, I use Syncdocs https://www.syncdocs.com/ as it has built in encryption.

Non I've seen do a proper job of mounting as a drive, NFS or SMB would be nice.


Ah world.std.com, the first ever ISP.


The Mullvad app is huge ~100MB which is odd for what it needs to do.


My mullvad installation on Windows has 258MB but memory footprint is low. I find 5 entries in the task manager with a total of 14.6MB with active connection.


Maybe not Electron, then. Perhaps I'm confusing it with ExpressVPN's first-party app, which definitely was Electron when I tried them a few years back.


It does use electron. The source code is available on github.

https://github.com/mullvad/mullvadvpn-app


I believe it's Electron-based, which is another reason I've hesitated to try it out. I like Electron - from the developer's perspective, it's great! - but I do still try to avoid its resource impact until there's a compelling reason to take the hit.


That is one of the nitpicks that I missed, along with their downloads being excruciatingly slow when already connected to the service, for whatever reason (I may just be doing something wrong).


I've noticed that as well. The trick as I found (and even recommended by their support) is to download from their GitHub repo.


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