You're paying for any of these?

Instead of Startpage, try DDG (DuckDuckGo) - been using it now for several years instead of Google as I found no difference in search quality.

But their stuff just feels a bit weird somehow. I didn't really want to commit yet. I'm glad to hear you had good experiences.

Maybe try Immich?

Im happy to stop the freebies we give other nations.

https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...

This is a hilarious 'just asking questions' concern that doesn't address the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order it primarily helped build post WWII while threatening other liberal democracies like Canada and Denmark with invasions.

It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.

(IANAL.) This was reviewed by the courts themselves:

> The CJEU confirmed that the Belgian, French and Swedish prosecutors were sufficiently independent from the executive to be able to issue EAWs. […]

> […] Public prosecutors will qualify as an issuing judicial authority where two conditions are met: […]

> 2. Second, public prosecutors must be in a position to act in an independent way, specifically with respect to the executive. The CJEU requires that the independence of public prosecutors be organised by a statutory framework and organisational rules that prevent the risk of prosecutors being subject to individual instructions by the executive (as was the case with the German prosecutor). Moreover, the framework must enable prosecutors to assess the necessity and proportionality of issuing an EAW. In the French prosecutor judgment, the CJEU specifically indicated that:

* https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/legal-analysis/can-belgi...

The question that the OP asks is fair enough, but there's a lot of subtly and 'low-level' details on how things operate compared to the high-level question that is being asked. Also depends on where the OP lives and what he's used to: common law (UK/US/CA/etc) and civil law procedures and laws are (AIUI) quite different.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...

Who else is there with a major infra ecosystem? Russia? China? UK? Not sure these are better than EU. Japan seems quite inward looking.

Just to be clear, according to the DOJ, law enforcement officials in the US can search your home without a warrant if they suspect that you are a "Alien Enemy" [1].

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25915967-doj-march-1...

Unlike common law judiciary, civil law judiciary in and of itself has investigatory powers and judges don’t just hear arguments but can order their own investigations and are significantly more independent than in common law.

This can cut both ways, yes in theory the judge can accept evidence the prosecution obtained illegally, but the judges can also call the prosecutions bluff and call their own witnesses or order an independent expert to provide their own opinion, even if defense is unable to.

So what's the point of this comparison, since if I host my data in the US they don't need a warrant at all?

> An administrative warrant is a legal document issued by a government agency, rather than a court, that authorizes the agency to take specific actions such as conducting inspections, searches, or seizing property. Unlike judicial warrants, administrative warrants are frequently issued on less than probable cause of a crime.

> Administrative warrants are typically used for regulatory or civil enforcement purposes and allow agencies to enforce rules and regulations within their jurisdiction, such as health inspections, building code enforcement, or immigration-related actions.

> The problem with administrative warrants is that they make the agency both the prosecutor and the judge in the very same matter. The entire point of having agencies go to court for a warrant is because courts are an independent branch with an independent mission. Rather than solely focusing on identifying and prosecuting violations of law, courts seek to check agency errors and overreach. When the very same agency that wants to execute a warrant is the one deciding whether it issues, those checks disappear, and Americans’ security pays the price.

https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/admin...

EU is not perfect, but saver than the USA in those matters (if you want to only invest a reasonable amount of effort and money), which is kinda the point here, isn't it?

One of the problems with being on the US Internet is that we get lots of coverage of US police overreach and much less coverage of EU police overreach. That could have one of three causes:

- actual incidence is low

- it's not being reported

- it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse

(And the counter option: sometimes when you do hear about it, it's been laundered through weird US right-wing politics, like almost anything anyone says about Sweden)

Generally speaking, I trust EU countries criminal systems more then USA one. USA one is too procedure oriented - like for example with this rule.

Unlike in USA, in general European cops and prosecutors can be punished when they do illegal stuff. That provides better protection then the pretend fairness rule you just cited.

Are you certain this has happened? I never heard that happen in central Europe. I am pretty certain legislation of other countries is irrelevant, unless it would be an EU regulation - and I am unaware of an EU regulation that could bypass local laws and that has not been made a EU law. Which EU law specifically do you refer to?

While the EIO is s controversial instrument (I particularly dislike the excessive power it gives to authorities in issuing countries and the inability to question the warrant), it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process.

I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.

That said, yeah, EIO in the shape it exists is bad.

Was I wrong to assume that the average big-box-store Chromebook cannot be jailbroken, or has only driverless hardware, or are things changing here? If the latter, surely this opens a boulevard for Linux? Any insight much appreciated.

You get a dealbreaker keyboard because of the lack of an alt key and you don’t even save much money for the effort of working around the Chromebook restrictions. A laptop originally sold with Windows is so much more straightforward to work with.

I’d just grab something like an HP EliteBook 840 G10 on eBay. Around $300, upgradable RAM and SSD, and reasonably recent. Relatively modern/attractive aluminum build.

Or I’m sure there’s some other 2-in-1 not-Chromebook convertible model you can grab if you need the touch screen.

Name a country and it probably has its own problems: some combination of instability, corruption, authoritarian governments, collaboration with the US and EU governments that you want to escape…

ProtonMail is in Switzerland, so it’s perhaps the best mainstream bet. But the Swiss are absolutely not immune to US and EU pressure.

Been around since 2000. They're also working on JMAP support and are the top financial contributor to the Stalwart mail server (https://opencollective.com/stalwart) so I think they'll have a more compelling offering soon.

Also worth keeping an eye on Thunderbird pro which will also use Stalwart: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/

Yes, your own server at home. All countries have fundamentally the same problems, so you will have everywhere the same tradeoffs as a customer. So it really depends on what your specific circumstances and requirements are. If laws are your problem, then stay away from countries where you break them; otherwise, just don't go where they will sell your data for any random penny.

> or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...

WTF is this kind of demand? Those regulations do not concern you as a user, but can be very beneficial for you, don't you understand this?

I’m not sure you know what instability means if you think the US is unstable. If anything, the fact that the dumbest person on the planet is in charge of the United States and the country still functions as well as it does proves a lot about the stability of the USA. The country runs on geopolitical easy mode.

Maybe there’s a libertarian fantasy novel where you can host your services.

Google reviews: https://www.google.com/search?q=lcube&ludocid=91685905651961...

https://sr.ht

I tried it once, it's very opinionated and may not be suitable for what a lot of people think of when they're coming from something like Github. The required old-school patch-by-mail thing is a blocker for a lot of people.

[0] https://forgejo.org

[1] https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-forgejo/#public-...

[2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/professional-services/issues

If you got public projects, then something like Codeberg is in fact the place to go. If you got private projects, why push to someone's cloud-hosted git service at all? Push to your own service like Forgejo and sync backups to a local hard-drive or even online using rclone.

https://gitolite.com/gitolite/

Edit, it says indeed (right in your face on the front page):

Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting.

I just click... click opened a repo and set it as remote and boom. Never thought anything of it... Perhaps I'm... Tolerated for the time being?

Change directory to your local git repository that you want to share with friends and colleagues and do a bare clone git clone --bare . /tmp/repo.git You just created a copy of the .git folder without all the checked out files.

Upload /tmp/repo.git to your linux server over ssh. Don't have one? Just order a tiny cloud server from Hetzner or another European provider. You can place your git repository anywhere, but the best way is to put it in a separate folder, e.g. /var/git. The command would look like with scp -r /tmp/repo.git me@server:/var/git/.

To share the repository with others, create a group, e.g. groupadd --users me git You will be able to add more users to the group with groupmod.

Your git repository is now writable only by me. To make it writable by the git group, you have to change the group on all files in the repository to git with chgrp -R git /var/repo.git and enable the group write bit on them with chmod -R g+w /var/repo.git.

This fixes the shared access for existing files. For new files, we have to make sure the group write bit is always on by changing UMASK from 022 to 002 in /etc/login.defs.

There is one more trick. For now on, all new files and folders in /var/git will be created with the user's primary group. We could change users to have git as the primary group.

But we can also force all new files and folders to be created with the parent folder's group and not user primary group. For that, set the group sticky bit on all folders in /var/git with find /var/git -type d -exec chmod g+s \{\} +

You are done.

Want to host your git repository online? Install caddy and point to /var/git with something like

    example.com {
      root * /var/git
      file_server
    }

- small or midsize companies, or

- "hacker-minded people" (I know quite some "hacker-minded people" who rent a server or vServer at netcup),

since they offer quite a bit of value for the money. In opposite to Hetzner, netcup is more of an inside tip.

Regarding Migadu, after extensive research it seemed to be the best option, but man that 20 outgoing emails limit is just so off-putting and the next tier is so far apart. I would be comfortable paying 50-60 euros per year for 50 outgoing emails, but no, it’s either 20 for 20 euros or 100 for 90 euros

I've heard this before. Is this just to add another hop in the chain to make it harder for someone to track the user down? Apart from someone needing to order Amazon to pony up the details ("Which credit card was this Amazon item bought with?")

Is there another layer of privacy I'm missing?

Bonus that now the issues aren't vendor locked either

https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/trunk/doc/feature-ma...

– https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/LICENSE

If you don't want your software used like that, don't choose this licence.

You can't post-hoc decide how people behave.

But even if there were some "ethical reason" to do this, I don't think Gitea is the right project to play up as a victim. Their homepage [2] doesn't mention that Gitea itself is a fork either. Their Readme does, but is this so much better?

[1]: https://forgejo.org/2022-12-15-hello-forgejo/ [2]: https://about.gitea.com/

Untangling yourself from Google (or Apple, which is similarly hard), doesn't have to be all at once. Break it up in small steps that feel like individual wins.

One more note about using your own domain: avoid provider-specifict features like subdomain addressing (made it more work for me to move off Fastmail).

Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.

It's mostly an ideal. Like OSS. The practical reality means that such extreme adherence to only EU services doesn't do anything but make your life harder. It's like saying you only use open source, from the CPU to the GPU to your OS and everything else... make it all from open source, how big of a nightmare would that be? The only time it is practical is if you're doing really illegal shit and you need the data protection.

Can anyone recommend actually decent and free Android (and also web) mail clients for self-hosted use? Everything I've tried so far (but to be fair, it was a few years ago when I last checked) just felt clunky compared to gmail, so I've ended up sticking with it as a client far longer than I probably should.

In 2019 I decided enough was enough and registered a new domain and started moving my accounts over as new ones came up, or I updated addressing

I have very little left on gmail now other than spam from old services I no longer use. Top one in the inbox at the moment is Facebook telling my I have "530 notifications about X". Its sad how desperate they are.

There are some downsides, though:

  - No support for collabora online, so no way for collaborative editing of office files
  - Data is not encrypted

It also comes with a whole suite of software that you don't have to find EU alternatives for like Calendar, Drive, Password manager, etc

German e-mail service

The high ping kills the throughput on davfs and makes their website hosting a pain to update :(

The EU has still the strongest privacy laws world wide, and in contrast to others a strong ethical foundation. It may be slow, it may be torn, it may be overly beaurocratic, but sure enough not authoritarian.