The number of times I’ve been directed to a useless discord chat while looking for help on a topic is infuriating. Can’t wait for this shit to stop.

Dammit but I thought I was as young as I feel!

Wait… That’s still old. Shit.

Freetaxusa.com does pretty much what turbo tax does. Federal filing for free, pretty sure they just charge $15 for state. If your taxes are too complex for freetaxusa you probably shouldn’t use turbo tax anyway.

Or Access, which is the real reason my office will never switch. It’s an ever growing mountain of labor to transfer that to something else

You are right, I had it a little backward. The e foundation makes /e/OS, and they sell a murena fairphone 5 with the OS preinstalled. So you can get a fairphone thay way, or just install it yourself.

https://e.foundation/e-os/

Fairphone uses their own custom OS to degoogle things and help ensure privacy. I dont think its perfect but its about as good as it gets. Otherwise you can buy a google phone and degoogle it with Graphene

Do all the harm

There are a lot of people living in the united states who don’t deserve to deal with this racist bullshit.

When he reaches the land of the dead only give him a walking stick with a compass in the handle. A broken compass.

My hands are tired just looking at it

Thank you, I did find myself thinking theres a reason why I have the DP cables for my PC monitors which don’t seem to have an issue running high resolutions… But then I’m not running 8k on anything so I wasn’t really sure about that

Absolutely. Always be open to changing jobs if you need to, and always keep that option as a back up plan even if things are going well. Know that if you find a new job it may fix some things while introducing new problems, there is always some risk to doing so. If you aren’t in a rush to get out try to line something up that makes the change worthwhile - get a promotion out of it, or at least some pay raise or other benefit. Often times annual raises suck enough that many people need to get a new job to find a decent pay bump anyway, so it’s good to be looking for that. If you haven’t interviewed in awhile line a few up as practice too, so when you find something you’re more serious about it will go smoothly.

No prob, this stuff is difficult to keep up with. I’m still always learning and hoping I’m doing it right

I’m not a security expert so my ability to explain is limited, but no, emails have long used encryption protocols like SSL to prevent such problems. However, your email provider may scan and read your emails. That’s not much different than a text message service reading those messages, but you can choose your provider. From what I can tell proton.me is the way to go for resolving that issue - they provide encryption which prevents their own machines and employees from being able to read your messages and other data. Otherwise, your email is basically as secure as your passwords are.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_spoofing

So, it’s not that the message itself is insecure, but the inability to verify the sender makes phishing attacks possible or similar things. I get a text from a random number saying “click this link to pay your bill!” And I don’t have any way to trust its legit.

SIM swaps make it so people can take over your phone number temporarily and then generate 2fa requests to gain access to accounts. Doing the swap usually involves bribing someone or gaining access to a providers database by other means, but its been done a lot.

There are ways to prevent this, but the most straight forward is using a MFA app. Barring that 2FA via email is the next best thing.

I still don’t trust them, especially when they announced they were scanning images. I don’t really care their reasons for it, that’s intrusive. I can’t trust any closed source tech, no matter what they say.

I have some crypto, some stocks, etc. For many things I still need standard banking though. Crypto just isn’t there yet. Maybe someday… But having money distributed is still smart either way, so I have many baskets for my eggs.

My banks are like that too. Of course I can’t speak to anyone who might influence that decision. Steam has better security than almost any other account I have. I appreciate them for that but it also seems ludicrous to me that my video games are more secure than my bank accounts.

Its essentially what the apple vs FBI encryption legal battle was about years ago:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple–FBI_encryption_dispute

I’m not really a fan of apple, but I was very happy they stood their ground on that one. They were absolutely right to do so.

SMS spoofing and SIM swapping have been around for ages. It was never secure and that’s always been known. The number of companies that rely on it despite sending me a zillion other fucking useless emails is too damn high! Email, or better yet, an authenticator app, are far more secure. Not perfect, but better.