You might want to check sshfs but overall yes rsync works well. I just uploaded 200Go yesterday, no failure.

On my LAN if I want to share without downloading them then I rely on MiniDLNA/ReadyMedia for DLNA/UPnP meaning it works with VLC on desktop, obviously, Android video projectors, mobiles, etc.

Guess it depends on your usage but I stopped using Samba when I didn’t have Windows machines on my network. Never looked back.

Thanks for the clarification, found https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/3018/timeline-sim-card-registration-laws on the topic also useful.

connected to the cellular network should be considered compromised

What do you mean by compromised? Monitorable? Traffic shaped? Both? How about E2E?

get an anonymous prepaid SIM card. That is what I do: buy one with cash

Don’t they normally ask for ID? I know in France for example it’s typically not possible to buy a SIM without presenting an ID first. That wasn’t the case few years ago but not it’s common practice, if not mandatory.

Depends, as usual, on your threat model. I do not know where you live, where you went, what you do, who you are and thus who you worry about.

That being said :

• if you rely on someone else hotspot well you delegate the risk too. If they relay your traffic they can still shape or monitor your traffic. Obviously I would not expect your family member to do that… but if you are being monitored and there are data showing that you are not at home or work (wherever you usually are) and other data you are traveling together (e.g. plane tickets, border control with IDs checked, connection to services with different IPs) one could expect your surrounding to be potentially targeted. That is one extra hoop and it might protect from “shallow” surveillance but I would not be so sure.
• SIM main problem in your situation IMHO is KYC, basically that you can’t buy one without an ID and thus if you have expectation of anonymity regarding the provider of the SIM then it is not viable indeed.
• eSIM AFAICT do not enforce KYC (no scan of ID to send) and typically offer to purchase a SIM outside of the country one is visiting, unlike physical SIMs. Sure they might share ICCID and more but unless that piece of data is linked with your actual name then it might not be a problem
• honestly if you worry about “weird hacking attempts towards me from the government” then you better know a lot more about cybersecurity than I and random people on the Internet do. It’s one thing to worry about mass surveillance, with or without BigTech, but if a state agent is paying actual security professional to hack your devices or accounts then it’s another ball game entirely.

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Others have said it before but basically : what is YOUR (not me, not your best friend, nor your colleague, etc) threat model?

To clarify that means WHO is actually trying to threaten your security?

Typical for most people it would be :

• scammers trying to get pieces of your identity or your local cryptocurrency wallet or resources they can use to repeat that on to others.

For some people, like activists or political journalists it would be :

• national actors, e.g. governments, with their surveillance apparatus, who might end up on a list with a set of conditions that would trigger some automated scan to get e.g. Signal logs

For very very few people, say Edward Snowden, who within the previous group actually did trigger some action :

• actual team of hackers trying to hack into their devices

So as you can imagine if you are part of group 1, 2 or 3 then way you will protect yourself is totally different. What you will also have to protect is also different, e.g. if you have no cryptowallet but are traveling you might have to protect your phone physical phone and its data.

So… if you are serious about this, take a cybersecurity class. There are plenty available but how a computer works, software and hardware alike, is precisely what makes them simultaneously powerful and also dangerous. There are plenty of ways to break security (e.g. return oriented programing), plenty of ways that practically impossible (e.g. encryption) due to the very nature of computers (i.e. computational complexity) which IMHO makes this one of the most fascinating topic. Ask yourself come the credit card in your pocket (costing few bucks to make) can’t be cracked by the largest super computers (costing billions) on Earth?

TL;DR: no offense but you don’t seem to be ready for the answer without getting the basics first.

very much on the fringe

When mainstream is mostly consumerist attention grabbing bullshit, is it genuinely a problem?

It’s definitely a shortcut bus since the EU start GDPR it does force a lot of services, in the EU and elsewhere, to at least show some of the practices that are privacy threatening.

There are plenty of services in the EU that are not better than in the US and elsewhere so “buying EU” does not always mean buying better.

Yet… there are also not geopolitical changes that can’t be ignored. Sure the US had the NSA, 5 eyes, etc before with new regulations and examples like Microsoft, US company, that can’t even tell its relatively big French government client that its data will NOT cross the boarder despite the promise of doing so initially.

So again, yes it’s a shortcut, a heuristic, imperfect by definition, but at least it prompts most users to become customers, namely pay for services rather than get them for free and try to insure that they are indeed private then IMHO it’s an interesting trend.

PS: note that I didn’t even suggest “Buy European” so I’m not even sure why that was addressed to me specifically but because it’s a recurrent trend happy to try to address the concerns.

PS2: the EU is not Europe, the EU does not represent all countries, all members state have their own regulation, the EU itself includes the Parliament, Commission, Council, etc and Members of the European Parliaments go from the far right to the far left so to somehow imply it is all for privacy or all for surveillances is an oversimplification of a much more complex situation.

If their phone does not, they can get https://jmp.chat/esim-adapter

With pleasure, thanks for the positive feedback. I’m not an expert but I did write a little bit on self-hosting AI on my wiki https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence so feel free to have a look and if you have questions, happy to help if I can.

Forced to use WhatsApp? How does that work? Whoever “forced” you to do so didn’t provide you a phone?

You can probably get a local eSIM with a phone number, e.g. https://www.telekom.de/unterwegs/esim but AFAICT that’s also KYC, unlike data-only eSIMs, so that might not help you much, depends on your threat model (e.g. does T-Mobile share data with Meta or not).

Cheaper than to rely on the NSA because people have terrible privacy practices anyway?

Well vetted in that context might mean audited by 3rd parties that can show that even the services themselves do not have access to the data thanks to E2EE, HE, etc.

Check

• HomeAssistant/WebThings (open source gateways, no need for Internet connection)
• ZigBee/ZWave (dedicated IoT wireless protocols, not WiFi or BT)
• ESP32-C6 (small cheap low-end device that supports ZigBee and can thus become an IoT sensor/actuator via e.g. ESPHome)

because basically there is NO reason to rely on “smart” objects that are expensive, power hungry and, last but not least do not respect your privacy while giving you less control.

If your computer boots when plugged in (not only by pushing the power button) it would be feasible via a connected plug, but you’d still need a small computer, e.g HomeAssistant on a RaspberryPi, to convert the HTTP request to ZigBee, or a WiFi plug but I’m not sure which one would handle an HTTP request, if any.

Well what I don’t love is that it’s not open source. The interface is open-source, and it’s definitely an important step, but the actual “AI” or LLM and the backend it uses https://proton.me/blog/lumo-security-model is not.

That’s unfortunate because other open source project that use “AI” (quotes here because the term is… it’s just not intelligence but anyway) like Immich, even though focusing on another topic (namely images) could benefit from that for https://github.com/immich-app/immich/tree/main/machine-learning

So… I’m a Proton client, Visionary for years, and I do NOT like AI… but if they absolutely mush shove it down my throat at least :

• be open source with the whole toolchain
• tell me which models are used
• tell me how the datasets for models were collected
• tell me how much energy it users

otherwise I will assume something under is not right.

Overall it feels like Proton has great intention but more and more uses the excuse of privacy to keep secret that are unfortunately detrimental to individual users and the privacy community overall.

Prodigy Corp. is pretty trendy at the moment. /s

hard data

Have you ever met management? /s

I’m already in a shit-hole socially

So… I started to write down technical answers to your questions but honestly it’s really rare that people don’t want to communicate with someone solely because they don’t have the same tools.

I’m not saying you are doing anything wrong, socially speaking, but I want to highlight that there are usually ways to get back to people. Back in the days (yes… I’m going there) people didn’t have mobile phones and walked to phone booth. People even waited nearby another phone boot for someone else to call them back. I think it’s a good example that we forget how “inconvenient” it was. If people you want to get in touch with can’t handle an email (typically the lowest common denominator, I’m not suggesting that a “normie” as you say setup their own Matrix instance) then they are probably not worth spending time with anyway.