You should check Mint again, things in the Linux world are improving fast lately. Some people got their grampas into Linux and they are happy using it, with your use case it can easily also be the case, the terminal it’s not needed, may be sporadically and to setup some things as you like at first, like changing settings to not enter passwords, may be it’s not so safe but it’s not as unsafe as using Windows. Just get used to the good habit of making regular backups. In any case just make a post asking and we will be happy to help. Just go ahead and slowly you will get confidence to do more difficult things. The freedom that you experience using Linux really worth it, but it can take time to appreciate.

If you use stock android and proprietary software, YES. Everything you type can be recorded before it’s encrypted.

Don’t fall into the illusion that you can have privacy with stock android. Google has admittedly igrored user settings to continue spying them.

Still can’t place Kate in the system tray in that way, it doesn’t allow me. Can you?

Signal would only shrug and hand them metadata

So at the very least by using Signal the government can know everyone you communicated with, at what time and where. And still is considered a private messenger. Amazing.

Obviously you are missing the point. Even Gmail is private if you are going to do the job of encrypting your messages by yourself, but that’s irrelevant with what we are discussing here.

What we are discussing here is that if you are a company offering a service of encrypted communications located in the US, the government has all the power to force you to shut down if you don’t give them access to what they want. And that’s not speculation, they’re actively doint it because they are backed by the law.

Why people are so naive thinking that the government are not going to do something to get what they want when the law is on their side, when sometimes they don’t hesitate to do it even when it’s blatantly illegal?

The only way to avoid surveillance is with free, open source and descentralized software. If there is a company in charge of running the software that’s a vulnerability and, like the cases already mentioned, those in power are going to exploit it shutting the service down if the company doesn’t comply.

It doesn’t matter how much you like or trust the service, there’s simply no reason why they wouldn’t do it again when they already dit it successfuly. Why some people who care about privacy can’t see this obvious fact is beyond my understanding.

If it’s so easy why Lavabit and Silent Circle had to shutdown?

Since when is encryption dependent on the service’s jurisdiction?

The US has a law that applies to any US company operating within its borders: it is illegal to tell your users that the US government has asked your company to spy on their behalf. This is called a key disclosure law, and the US’s version of it, called National Security Letters, underwent an expansion with the PATRIOT act; by 2013, President Obama’s Intelligence Review Group reported issuing on average, nearly 60 NSLs every day.

Companies that don’t comply with this law are forced to shut themselves down, or remain open, and grant access to user communications to the US government. The Signal foundation is a US domiciled company and must comply with this law without being able to disclose that they have been issued an NSL letter.

Luckily we don’t yet live in that world

Comply with the government order of granting access to messages or shut down implies that we are already in that world, long ago. What makes you think that what happened to Lavavit and Silent Circle would not happen to Signal? Only wishfull thinking can make you think that, evidence tells you otherwise.

You are very naive if you think that a company located un the US can provide an encrypted messaging service that can be used by anyone including terrorists, druglords and US enemies without the government being able to access the messages. Lavabit was a famous case and had to shutdown because its founder rejected to comply with an order from the US government to grant access to information. If you are using centralized communication service located in the US forget about privacy.

”Lavabit is believed to be the first technology firm that has chosen to suspend or shut down its operation rather than comply with an order from the United States government to reveal information or grant access to information.[3] Silent Circle, an encrypted email, mobile video and voice service provider, followed the example of Lavabit by discontinuing its encrypted email services.[25] Citing the impossibility of being able to maintain the confidentiality of its customers’ emails should it be served with government orders, Silent Circle permanently erased the encryption keys that allowed access to emails stored or transmitted by its service.[26]"

“Levison (founder) explained he was under a gag order and that he was legally unable to explain to the public why he ended the service.[21]”

The only way to escape from that is using a degoogled phone and non proprietary apps/software.

deleted by creator

Tell them how governments, employees and scammers buy from data brokers the data collected from apps in their phones to surveil, blackmail or scam them. Do a research and send them a good summary with the links. When a told my brother in law about this, he was stunned. He’s still using his phone as always lol, so don’t have too much expectations.

“Good morning daughter, how it was the date last night? great motel uh? ;)”

Your toxic partner: “What were you doing at that cafe at 5:42 PM”

The carrier can track a phone without sim card but it’s not the case if you turn on airplane mode. The whole point of airplane mode is to prevent the phone from emitting any signal to avoid interference with critical aircraft instruments. I don’t see any company risking to circumvent such a critical security feature, it would be easily verifiable.

The whole point is that there’s no need so send audio, it would be childish to do so.

Twelve years ago Moto X was launched by Motorola, at that time controlled by Google. I had it and at any moment you could say “Hello Google, what time is it?” and it responded. I was constantly listening. All the time. And it was a perfectly normal phone regarding battery life or data usage. TWELVE years ago, imagine how much easier would be to implement that now, with more powerful and efficient chips and bigger batteries.

From an article about Moto X back then: “If you want to take a selfie, you should be able to simply say “Take a selfie!” In short, your smartphone should live up to its name. That’s the goal with the Moto Voice and Moto Assist software integrated into the second generation Moto X smartphone. And to do that, the Moto X is always listening, for verbal commands from the user and also ambient cues of the context. That emergent behavior is spawned by complex interactions between the software and hardware”

Only much latter I came to the conclusion that with Moto X Google was making its first tests on using the microphone for mass surveillance.

I’ve been using Debian with KDE Plasma for over a decade and I can count the crashes with the fingers of one hand.

Here you can find hardware for linux that requires no proprietary driver or firmware, in your case is ASUS BT400. I was in the same situation as yours so I bought it and it works.

It gives me exactly the same message but I’m not using a VPN. When I use the external viewer option with mpv using yt-dlp I only get video without audio. I can download the video fine using yt-dlp and then watch it with mpv, but if I try to stream to mpv while downloading to watch it real-time it gives an ffmpeg error: can’t recognize format… weird.