I also truly hate “family groups” where phones and accounts commonly associated with you get just pings on a topic to make you more malleable to the idea when you finally get the ads.

Domains cost like $1 if you’re flexible. Email hosting is what costs money.

Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there, what’s done with it, and why any rational person would be horrified if they knew the extent to which individuals were tracked. Simply put, short of showing them how their lives are made worse, they don’t care, and can’t be made to care.

For friends and family, you can do things like give them books or send articles explaining it slowly in parts. For everyone else, just ask them if they know how Google tracks what they do in Incognito windows and see what they say. If they say that Google can’t or doesn’t, they might as well say the Earth is flat. You can’t argue with that, even though it’s provably false.

The day I wiped all partitions from my dual boot and started fresh with no windows on the machine was a revelation. My heart sang and my soul wept with joy. Windows lives in a caged state now, a neutered monster I rarely demand dance for me because it is ugly and awkward and on an external drive I don’t care about.

I 100% agree with you about Clearview and Palantir. Really, 1,000%.

Putin, on the other hand, has passed his peak unless he’s gong to get the nukes out. His potential at this point is simply how much longer he is around to keep perpetuating his “3 day war.” Which is not nothing. The guy needs to go the fuck away, and the US justification for using nukes in Japan was that forcing a surrender via attack against civilian targets prevented a years-long slog and invasion. Well, here we are again. Justify whatever is needed to ensure he falls out a window one day this week. The power vacuum without Prighozin around is just going to revert to 1992 style robber barons anyway. It always would. There’s never been an alternative to that.

Well, it’s built to use Ooga, but it’s also set up to be able to handle Booga as well. It depends on the driver set you need to load Fire and Club.

Yes, but so are the ads!

What do they mean by “neighborhood”? The domain? Or the top level .LA?

Is your email something like myemail@subdomain.njal.la?

Seems harsh, but it’s hard to unblock a subdomain while blocking the rest of a domain.

Let’s say you use a VPN, and all your internet traffic comes from an IP in London. 178.238.10.1.

It doesn’t matter if you have a VPN, if you log in to anything with any account tied to your real name (yourname@gmail.com), your email and anything done on that London IP are all linked. Google builds a profile on you based on the activity on that IP. AND your browser profile. Private/incognito window or not, if there’s a Google tracker on the site, they connect it all. Google doesn’t care about private windows. If you go to reddit in a private window on the same IP as your gmail, Google sees that and tracks every page you look at.

So let’s say that you log into your email from work. Google now has a treasure trove of new info about you and people you know. Same for FB, who uses the fact that you and someone else were logged on from the same IP range to suggest new friends.

Let’s pretend that you live in China and still have access to a VPN and want to learn about the Tienanmen Square Massacre. But the government can ask Google about you. What do you need?

• an IP never ever used with an account associated with an account with your real name.
• a no-log VPN that won’t tattle on you if asked what sites did you access on a specific date.
• a browser fingerprint never ever associated with an account tied to your real name.

Since January Google has been using browser fingerprinting and IP triangulation to track across incognito windows.

Meta wants in the game as well. Nothing done on a phone with Meta apps is done in isolation.

Edit: seems like only vanilla mobile browsers affected. Brave was not vulnerable, DDG minimally so, and I expect Iron/Waterfox with uBlock would also not have allowed tracking.

https://securityonline.info/androids-secret-tracking-meta-yandex-abused-localhost-for-user-data/

No, you use one as the backup. That’s why I said use JShelter, but if a site breaks beyond use, switch IPs and then reload with NoScript instead to be more selective of what is blocked and what’s not. That way I can still block Cloudflare and Google and Apple and still let the actual site load. And JScreep seems (for me, YMMV) to treat each as distinct fingerprints.

IMO if you know you can have multiple fingerprint profiles anyway based on which combo of extensions you use that do roughly the same job, that’s a net benefit.

The why is browser fingerprinting. Which Google started using as of January to track everyone.

https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/

So if you go to ANY page with Google trackers, even in private mode, Google knows.

For vanilla FF I use multi - account containers, uBlock, and privacy badger.

For other FF forks like Librewolf, I get more blocky, like JShelter, a random agent switcher, and if that breaks a site beyond use I try Chameleon and NoScirpt.

Holy shit. Yes, it does. Thanks! Hadn’t heard of it until today

Because it’s an option already. “Transliterate to Latin letters.”

Edit: I should add that you should look at how many keyboard layouts there are. It’s kind of silly that for me to use an OSM based map and go to any county east of Slovenia I need to both have the keyboard AND know the transliteration of the alphabet.

Have you seen the Armenian or Georgian alphabets? What makes the K sound?

Did you know every dialect of a Slavic language using Cyrillic has it’s own distinct keyboard varied by mostly the letter for the nya sound and J?

Greek?

All while transliteration works fine in Google.

Destination search in all the OSM based maps is a challenge. The Latin letter transliteration only applies to large features. So if I want to find an address in a country try that doesn’t use Latin script, I literally need a keyboard in that language or do a lot of cut and paste from Google Translate. My address never, ever works on OSM. Gets the wrong street, can’t even handle house/building numbers. Works fine on Google.

This 100%.

Wealthy people essentially pay staff to do make things happen for them, and those staff don’t sign up for IG or FB stressing abou making sure to use their ONE email like RichieRich1975@hotmail.com for everything.

PA staff are both IT staff and human password managers, creating and curating massive sets of logins that are functionally disposable. With enough clout and money, if you DO have a problem with a social media platform, or your phone number, a PA calls an Executive CSR and sorts out the problem.

So it’s that their “privacy” is masked by the haphazard way they interact with things that track them. For them, tracking them is security to ensure you know who they are so that have a frictionless experience. If they want a dummy account to creep on people or be a perv, they get that easily, too.

I don’t hate Arch. Or Vegan diets. Or Crossfit. Or colleges outside of Boston, either.

But the people…well…

The problem with the money problem is the money part. As much as I actually do want to donate to ALL the open source platforms I use, I don’t have enough to do that equitably between platforms and even cover processing costs of the payment. 25 services split $100? Why bother?

A foundation with an endowment is actually the solution. The Open Source Foundation (or someone like them) needs to become a neutral arbiter and incubator.

But also - I would, and can, provide labor. I would love to give anything FOSS 20-30 hours a week of my time. But doing what? Should I get a part time job to support 25 FOSS services? Take Fivr gigs and donate it all? Or can I just directly hustle a part time work week somehow?

“Brad, I saw you cheating on Stacy at the club last night” [your pgp key here]