That is the most bullshit thing I heard today. The EU is an achievement that has given Europeans an incredible amount of freedom, not least the freedom of open borders. It needs to be reformed and modernized so that future generations can enjoy the same (or even more) freedoms as we do. I hope you are aware of the cynicism of speaking of tyranny in light of what is going on in Ukraine and Russia.
I’m an EU citizen, have been one for 15 years, I still have to carry my ID card with me if I want to travel to Hungary and further West. Non-EU countries like Norway or Switzerland don’t have to do that. The joys of living in a second-level EU country (Romania, in my case).
The accession process did give us higher incomes, that is correct, but it also meant about 20-25% of the population (mostly young people) just packing up and leave the country (5-6 million out of a population of 21-22 million).
> It was signed on 14 June 1985, near the town of Schengen, Luxembourg, by five of the ten member states of the then European Economic Community.
> Originally, the Schengen treaties and the rules adopted under them operated independently from the European Union. However, in 1999 they were incorporated into European Union law by the Amsterdam Treaty, while providing opt-outs for the only two EU member states that had remained outside the Area: Ireland and the United Kingdom (which subsequently withdrew from the EU in 2020). Schengen is now a core part of EU law, and all EU member states without an opt-out which have not already joined the Schengen Area are legally obliged to do so when technical requirements have been met. Several non-EU countries are included in the area through special association agreements.
You are right, and wrong. You cannot drive through Switzerland (I lived there for two years so have personal experience) without showing passport. It works some of the time, but they do checks. For me it has been perhaps 25% of the time entering Switzerland I was stopped and passport for everyone in the car was checked. This was on a Swiss registered car with Swiss highway sticker on.
As part of the aforementioned EU law, there's a list of countries to which it applies. The two you've mentioned aren't on it. You can look it up in the Amsterdam treaty if you'd like :)
Count of disingenuous to argue for a multi-speed Europe starting from now on when we have been a multi-speed Europe already. I'd be perfectly fine with that, too, but getting rid of the unanimity thingie is just asking for trouble.
The „The EU has done a couple of things well, so you now have to support full blown centralization/communism.“ argument is luckily falling apart. We should focus on isolating the good parts (mainly free trade, external security) and get rid of all the undemocratic cruft
In an attempt to move everything out of iCloud (I only use Apple products), I missed a compelling, FOSS password manager. After some time, I found passwordstore.org. Unfortunately, there was no Safari extension, so I built it myself: https://github.com/adur1990/Pass-for-macOS
Anyone considering pass (https://www.passwordstore.org/)? It is written in bash and uses gpg to store credetials on disk. And it is developed by the same guy behind wireguard. Also completely FOSS. On iOS I use passforios (https://github.com/mssun/passforios) and on macOS I am the developer of Pass for macOS (https://github.com/adur1990/Pass-for-macOS) which is a wrapoer for pass containing a Safari extension. Sync across devices is done using git (or cloud drives if you prefer). I use this setup for multiple years now and it works really well.
One point I may have missed point out more clearly: The 6+ years I plan to use this thing is also due to environmental considerations.
First, I am a big advocate of the right to repair. I think it is consumer-friendly and more sustainable. One of my Apple Silicon concerns is, that the new Macs won't be as repair-friendly as the current generation. MacBook are already not repairable at all, I guess this trend will continue to the Desktop lineup (except the Mac Pro maybe).
Second, almost all my devices eventually have a second live, sometimes even a third live. My first MacBook (first white Intel MacBook) was used by my wife for 3 years after I used it 5 years. Then the plastic body started to fall apart, so I sold it on eBay for a decent price. My first Mac Mini (2,1) was used for about 6 years. Then, I upgraded the 32-bit Core Duo CPU to a 64-bit Core2Duo, got 4 GB RAM and a SSD. I patched EFI to support 64-bit OS and the Mac Mini runs as a little home-server (Pi-Hole, Time Machine, Nextcloud). And finally, my 2011 15" MacBook Pro still runs Catalina (thanks to DosDude's Catalina Patcher tool). This is were currently my music production and recording happens (yes, really!). This machine has still more juice than the new 13" MBP.
So, the point is, however, I want run macOS as long as possible on this machine and then give it a second live (what ever it will be then). And I'm afraid this will be a problem because either a) (if I buy Intel) macOS will drop support for Intel in 5-ish years or b) (if I wait for Apple Silicon) the iMac won't be upgradable and everything glued and soldered to the max, which also makes repairs impossible.
Do you have any thoughts on this matter?
And what I can read from your comments is
a) Don't hesitate if you need/can afford/can live with macOS and
b) it's probably time to leave the Apple ecosystem.
Anyways, you gave good points to think about, thanks a lot!
Honestly, when I first started working on mypass, I wasn't aware of "pass".
Anyway, one issue I have with "pass" is that it leaks metadata, as it uses the file system to organize different credentials, while only the files storing the credentials itself are encrypted.
Also "pass" uses GPG for encryption, which can provide additional security if you store your private key on an external drive or smartcard, and take additional measures to make it more difficult to obtain access to your password store and private key at the same time. But in the more common setup where the password store is stored along the private key on the same device, cracking your GPG passphrase will require less computation than cracking a passphrase using PBKDF2 with 256,000 iterations like used for key derivation in mypass.
That's awesome. I'm looking forward to any feedback. Not sure for how much longer I will keep monitoring this thread. But you can reach me either by filing issues on GitHub, or if you could at least drop me an email at sebastian.noack@gmail.com and share your feedback I would much appreciate it.
