Interests: News, Finance, Computer, Science, Tech, and Living

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Also decide what apps that you must have. If you can use the browser version or the progessive webapp version which is just the browser version installed that is probably better. Or if you do not need it on your phone use the browser version on you laptop.

    In the end though you will have some of these platforms for network reasons. Mostly things like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. Google is not one of them though except for android itself. You also do not have to spend a lot of time contributing to these platforms. Use them when you need to nothing more.








  • Security is always porous. The article really had no suggestions. They say 2FA but account recovery is often a combination of access to your email account or questions. None of this stuff is particularly secure.

    So yes security is an advanced feature usually not provided and normal users do not even try at being secure nor do most systems insist on it.

    Edit: Some sites are doing away with passwords and just sending and email with a link to login. Totally not secure but account recovery has long used the same method so it may not be actually reducing security much since there never was much security.


  • One way to find providers is to go to your states tax site and see who supports your state. This list is often a lot shorter list. The ones I would look at in general sorted by decreasing popularity of their web site last year:

    • TurboTax. 52%.
    • H&R Block. 31%.
    • FreeTaxUSA. 8%.
    • TaxAct. 5%.
    • TaxSlayer. 2.4%.
    • OLT.com. 0.58%.
    • 1040.com. 0.26%.

    The % numbers are really just relative website popularity of the options I listed at a point in time. As I said before, I favor FreeTaxUSA. Interesting they can import from TurboTax, H&R Block, TaxAct, TaxSlayer, CashApp, and OLT so they must consider those their major competitors. Also note that I believe the same company that is behind FreeTaxUSA also markets under TaxHawk and Express1040.com.

    TurboTax, H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer tend to be the high end products in decreasing popularity and price. The first three tend to be somewhat similar pricing, and TaxSlayer a bit cheaper. FreeTaxUSA, OLT, and 1040.com tend to be the lower end offerings again in order of decreasing web site popularity though not always decreasing price. FreeTaxUSA appears to be the low end market leader.

    I have not used all of these but I have used FreeTaxUSA and TaxAct. Both were fine. We finally ditched TaxAct a few years ago due to rising prices and their stupid tiered pricing plans. FreeTaxUSA is just so much simpler then many of the other providers because it comes without most the marketing BS and it has a good price/value ratio.

    Others, feel free to comment and make any corrections to what I have said.


  • Like others said FreeTaxUSA. We use it and like it.

    Just know one downside is that it does not do direct imports from financial firms or other data sources. You have to enter the data. Otherwise for individual taxes, it is pretty complete. It also does not do Form 1041 returns which is for Trusts and Estates as separate entities, that is under their own EINs. Most people do not need that.

    Edit: Looks like this year a few imports have been added. One seems to be W-2 from PDF. The other is last year returns from some common other tax return providers. Not tried any of these. They already imported their own last year data.


  • Not saying I like it. I actually have email running in my VPS. Pain to setup but did not have delivery problems but I only use it in limited ways.

    Reason I did not switch to this for general use is mail is too core and it needs to be something my wife can maintain if needed. Plus I would have had to have several VPSes in multiple data centers to guarantee 100% uptime and segment security. Plus auditing, patching, and upgrade work load.

    For now we use the mail accounts provided by my small ISP but at some point we will probably move to hosted domain mail. Maybe Fastmail or something similar as the provider.





  • I am annoyed by this too. The big limitation would have had you could not use IMAP as that is remote.

    The other issue is implementation. It would be easy to forward or attach or just store unencrypted in an insecure way which may not be desirable. Frankly for what I do I would prefer Thunderbird decrypt on receipt but place all content in a vault. If one wanted to add some more restrictions one could make it hard to forward by accident mail that was originally encrypted.

    The big issue with PGP has always been a combination of bad implementations and key distribution.