All orders cost money. If they’re not charging you $5 per trade or whatever, then they’re taking a lot more than that by selling your “order flow” to someone who’s shaving more than that off it by creatively timing when the trades actually are going through and at what exact price.
Vanguard and Fidelity are both good. You can just use the web site, probably you can even just call them up and make requests over the phone. Vanguard is a little bit more for normal person investing (mostly index funds and no weird shit), Fidelity offers crypto and all the nonsense too if you want that, but they’re both pretty respectable.
Or do we just have some bad actors trying to stir the pot?
Yes.
People are hostile idiots sometimes, also, so that doesn’t help. But yes, people are definitely trying to stir up deliberate ballache for whatever weird reasons of their own.
I’ve literally never in my life heard of “this person was doing (whatever), but they were behind a VPN, so we had to do (whatever elaborate sting operation) instead of compromising the VPN.” I’ve heard that many times about Tor.
It’s possible that no one’s ever done something significant enough to make the feds interested from behind a VPN, just always used Tor, but I feel like it is unlikely. I feel like it’s more likely that they either have the ability to force the VPN companies to comply with some legal structures that give them the info they need, or else just wiretap the pipes going in and out of the VPN servers and can sort things out pretty straightforwardly if they really start to care about it.
VPNs are certainly useful; they make it a lot more difficult for non-law-enforcement people to know what you’re up to, which is a significant gain, and they are faster and generally more convenient than using Tor. But if you’re actually concerned about the government, I would use Tor 100% of the time over a VPN.
Yeah. As far as I know, there are some theoretical state-actor attacks, but nothing that anyone’s ever been able to make work in practice. Compromising something else is just always easier.
It was literally designed by professional spies to be resistant against state intelligence agencies. It was originally made by US intelligence for secret communication with their assets, and only released to the public when they realized they needed a bunch of additional traffic on the network that the US intelligence traffic can blend in with. At least as of the Snowden leaks (which showed NSA compromise of huge amounts of the internet including most HTTPS traffic), they hadn’t figured out a way to undo it for their own spying purposes, either.
🙂
Everyone knows throwing a fit when people ask the wrong questions and storming off the stage is a demonstration of unassailable right-being 🙂
Were you under the impression I thought I was the first person to come up with these ideas or questions? In history? No, the point is that you don’t want to answer them, not that they were somehow untouched by scholarship.
I’m happy to make the same offer for you, you can try to expose the flaws in my thinking by trying to ask questions I really don’t want to admit the answers to or am just unaware of.
But like I say, it’s clear that you prefer soapboxing to that sort of interactive discussion (even the Playskool version of it with one word answers). I wonder why…
It’s okay if you don’t know! I think you do, though, at least most of these answers you are probably aware of. I’ll make them simpler so there’s no time needed to put together a little essay or anything (which is probably better anyway, since it’ll be less subjective). One or two word answers.
I know, I know, you don’t want to participate. It’s easier just to talk down to me and soapbox, and from that format you can really easily refuse to analyze things that you don’t want to analyze that undo your mental models if you do analyze them. But there’s no reason you would be unwilling just to admit the answers, since your model is super-correct and I’m the wrong one.
Up to you
I’m not a debate pervert.
I mean it definitely sounds like you are lol
The fact that you use Trump and Stalin in the same sentence shows profound ignorance on your part.
They both aspire to throw their domestic enemies into a network of shadowy prison camps or kill them outright, they both claim the establishment opposition needs to be disposed of, they both claim that censorship is necessary because some ideas are wrong and the leader needs to be in control so he can keep the wrong ideas away. There are some important differences, too, but certainly they belong in the same sentence. Trump’s just a lot less effective, is actually the main difference I see.
There is no point attempting to have a discussion with people who have strong opinions on subjects they have no understanding of.
Sounds good! Let me check your qualifications, that’s a really good point, I did have a sense that there was no point to having this conversation with you, and this sort of gets to the heart of why lol.
Okay, this is clearly going to be a waste of time. Tell you what: You’re clearly never going to admit that you’re wrong about this, and obviously I can’t force you. It seems like you’re actually sort of enjoying how easy it is just to keep typing “freedom is an illusion anyway and that’s why I had all the opposition shot and that makes perfect sense” and similar things and no one can stop you.
Let’s do this: Tell me a format within which we can have this conversation, and get some kind of feedback or judgement about who it is that’s able to prove their case. If you want to propose a framing of some sort, and go within that, I’m happy to talk about it with you. If not, I think it’s just going to be you insisting that Stalin-style/Trump-style governance is justified until I get bored or frustrated and abandon the conversation.
The difference is that communists accept the need for censorship and are open about why some ideas need to be suppressed.
Because some ideas are so destructive to your whole model that they have to be suppressed, because these models in their practical application are often sort of un-defendable, and so the only option is to have secret police running around shooting dissidents.
It doesn’t mean that liberal democracies don’t fall into the exact same pattern, to some extent large or small. It is in the nature of human power struggle. It’s not innate to any particular political system (or it is innate to all of them because they’re all made of people). The difference is that we don’t celebrate it or make excuses for it. We publish books about what a lie the government is telling, we have a constant struggle between the forces of freedom in the streets and the government trying to stamp it out. Sometimes different factions get the upper hand, or it switches.
The difference, as you brilliantly demonstrated here, is that some of the most thickheaded of communist supporters get themselves turned around sufficiently that they start supporting the government trying to stamp it out. Most sensible people, when the government tells them that some ideas need to be suppressed, and they need to imprison or shoot anyone who’s opposing their power, can figure out that’s a bad thing. You apparently cannot.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/congress-passes-take-it-down-act-despite-major-flaws
Having to dox yourself to use the internet sure isn’t great. Having the government have a tool that can pretty plausibly be used to take down any speech they don’t like is much worse.
it makes me glad to be in the US
… You know with the TAKE IT DOWN act, there are no real safeguards against them just randomly declaring that anyone at all is hosting illegal content and needs to be shut down, right? They skipped past the UK’s whole inevitable “age verification for porn, oh hey you know that would be a good idea for everything, oh hey you know what I was thinking” progression and just went straight to “get this wrongthink off the internet or we’re coming for you.”
hope it stays confined to that one state
Something like Lemmy could form a pretty good foundation. Onion routing already has created a “parallel internet” that depends 0% on DNS, and Lemmy instances would federate today (with whitelisted federation) via /etc/hosts with no DNS involved. It wouldn’t work well, it would have problems, but if someone actually tried to make it work moderately well, the whole model of “admins running servers which it’s your problem to get connected to, and then they know how to federate to each other because all the admins talk with each other” could work itself around over time into something that actually had some pretty strong robustness to it.
There are other attempts (Holepunch, Freenet, all that jazz), but actually Tor and Fedi things probably have the best claims to being able to turn into something realistic that didn’t need DNS, over time. You just couldn’t talk to it until you set your machine up to be able to get the initial connection going, but that’s not fatal, the whole internet used to be a lot like that way back when.
Dude you’re on the instance where it is forbidden in worldnews to say “Fuck (a particular country which will remain nameless)”.
Literally the only one. You can say “Fuck the United States” or “Fuck Israel” everywhere on Lemmy, or near enough, which of course is as it should be. But if I start stepping on the wrong massive state actors’ toes from one particular instance…
Seriously. The reason CSAM merchants and drug dealers use Tor is because it actually protects their privacy successfully. Whereas, if you’re using a VPN or whatever cobbled-together solution, the feds just have a hearty laugh about it, send a subpoena by email or use some automated system that’s even more streamlined, and then come and find you.
Tor is not bulletproof; they regularly run operations where they take down some big illegal thing on the dark web. But they have to do an operation for it, and if there were any solution that was any better, that thing would be even more infested with illegal material than “the dark web” is. That’s just how it works. And listening to the newspapers when they tell you that it’s a sign you need to stay away from those actually-effective solutions because “terrorism!” or whatever is a pretty foolish idea.
Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers. I2P is scattered in implementation and cannot handle high load.
Physical bluetooth mesh networks or other technology is an example. Maybe even a new version of dial-up.
These are incompatible statements lol
Tor is fine, I’m looking at this on Tor Browser right now. I would say the jank level is about 20%. Quokk.au, actually, for some weird reason has significant problems with it (significant slowness and sometimes refuses to load a page). I actually have no idea what’s going on with that, but it and I think one other site are the only Fedi sites that have any kind of problem at all. The majority (but not all) news sites and things work fine. Some things do not and I have to bounce over to some normal browser. The jank level is definitely not 0, but it’s bearable.
I actually do agree about needing to set up a better architecture overall. Tor is an extremely special-purpose architecture for one thing only (near-bulletproof privacy and firewall traversal even against extremely aggressive government attempts to defeat both), which is honestly a pretty fantastic start, but there’s a lot more that goes into “the internet” than just slapping a slightly janky but super-safe VPN over the front of it.
The main point is: Hey! Don’t badmouth Tor, it’s good (and the jank level of starting from scratch instead will be super high for any forseeable future.)
Well, but we’re talking about how to prepare for the future where it does need to be fed proof. At some point, I think pretty soon from now in some places, it’s going to become necessary to either break the rules of the internet in ways that can actually get you in trouble, or accept that you have to do things like upload your ID to all these places, agree not to access certain types of content the government doesn’t want you looking at, not say certain political things on social media or else you’re going on a list, things like that.
I think option A is probably better and it probably makes sense to start to think about, how are we going to do that and not have the expanded-and-mission-creeped version of ICE showing up at your door for it to give you a citation or worse, a year from now.
Right now, yes, a VPN is fine. But that’s only true for as long as the government doesn’t strongly dislike anything that you are doing.