What this also means: you cannot have any private conversations with windows users anymore. They all have to be considered fully backdoored. Even if the agent runs locally, you don’t know what it all sends back to MS servers.

For people who have any slice of privacy consciousness left, this is the death of Windows. The difference between this and using a desktop directly from MS’ cloud is negligible - MS can get access to potentially everything that’s visible or readable on your desktop.

Stands for “fear, uncertainty and doubt”. It’s actually a very relevant term. In a lot of contexts. It’s when people influence you to either fear, have uncertainty about, or doubt something. Sometimes this happens without any intent, for example if you’re unsure about some new situation or thing, you tend to first view it more negatively because you have some fear or doubts about it (which might not be warranted). But sometimes, it can have malicious intent (e.g. right-wing extremists spreading FUD about human subgroups they don’t like. Usually the first step before more aggressive behavior happens).

It’s mildly interesting that this claim originated during a time (~ late 70s and 80s) when such claims also originated about rock and metal music. Both D&D and those were somewhat new (or at least newly popular) during that time.

In a way it was the analog equivalent of modern FUD and misinformation spreading on social media. Maybe even disinformation, but probably just misinformation and FUD.

On many websites, the cookies are created no matter what you choose. It’s a dark pattern to get you to accept all, yes, but In the end it’s often meaningless.

Use a decent browser like librewolf which isolates cookies so only the site that created them can access them and clears all cookies on exit - this protects you from bad effects of cookies so you can just accept all. However, you’re still susceptible to other methods of tracking (like IP address or browser fingerprint based tracking) unless you use Tor Browser or something similar.

How to Wagon your Dragon

Incredible community project. Massive scale. Looking forward to this much more than to TES 6. Also doubt that Bethesda is even capable of creating a top-tier game these days.

Not just themed Chrome but with Microsoft’s anti-features (data gathering) and unwanted integrations added on top. Or instead of Google’s. Not sure. Anyway, if you don’t want to freely give away even more of your browsing data to either Microsoft or Google you shouldn’t use any of those.

If you want a Chromium-based browser for the desktop, try Brave but be wary that you need to change lots of settings to make it behave well (but it’s still the least bad Chromium-based browser, when not counting Vanadium for GrapheneOS/Android).

If not, try Librewolf, which already behaves well out of the box and reigns among the top Firefox-based desktop browsers.

After you’ve already established security, you can add obscurity (without compromising security) on top for an even bigger gain in security overall. But you can’t do obscurity in place of security.

I read somewhere (and it seems very plausible, though I’m not sure whether it’s scientifically accurate) that the subjective feeling that time runs so fast is something you automatically get with increasing age, and it has to do with what’s still exciting or new for you in life and what is not. With increasing age and life experience, you get the feeling that anything is still exciting or new less often over time. You’ve kind of seen it all, that’s why days seem much more similar to each other than when you were still a kid (when almost every experience you’ve made was still a fresh one), that’s why each day is less memorable, that’s why it seems like time is flying by like crazy.

GrapheneOS is the best mobile OS. Even though the Graphene team has weird habits of communication which might be off-putting for some, the OS technically still is the most secure AND most private mobile OS distribution you can have on any phone. It’s literally at the top, according to many technical and data protection experts. It’s so good that Cellebrite can’t crack it even with physical access, and some police in some country (I think it was Portugal) will assume you’re a criminal for using it, because it’s so secure and private and they can’t stand the thought of someone fully utilizing their personal rights. Plus, it has great documentation and is easy to install. Despite it being so secure and private by default, it still allows you to shoot yourself in the foot by installing the sandboxed Google services and so on, if you really want to. So it can also be used like an off-the-shelf Android, just with some additional hardening and extra protections on top which you benefit from, but the benefit will be much smaller of course when you install and use spyware apps.

Generally, a Samsung phone isn’t great for privacy. Consider getting a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it. Much better Android baseline. More secure as well.

Any connection to Samsung’s servers is likely non-essential, but do check that OS updates work.

Google Play Services is Google’s main surveillance stack on every commercial Android distribution. It transmits a lot of unique device info to Google, every 20 minutes or so. The minimum data being transmitted is:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

However, this app might be required for Google Play to function. And also for some other apps. So check those dependency issues. In general, you should prefer using open source apps or any apps which don’t have such stupid dependencies. Some apps merely complain when you don’t have the Play Services app running (by displaying a popup) but still work.

There’s also the issue with Google’s DRM called “Play Integrity”. Some apps use Google’s Play Integrity API to “verify” that the device is an “officially sanctioned Android” and then act like any other Android is “unsafe” and then refuse to work. If you encounter this, be sure to complain to the app developers about this.

If you need the Google Play store but want to block network access for the Play Services app (which you should do), you should probably use the third-party Aurora store app.

About the Ironfox connections: not sure, but the “firefox-settings” hosts from Mozilla sound related to the Firefox Sync feature which syncs your settings/bookmarks/… with Mozilla. If that’s the case it’s also non-essential and can be blocked.

Used to prefer GOG over Steam. GOG did nothing for Linux gamers though, they didn’t even release their Galaxy client for Linux. Will prefer GOG over Steam again when this changes (they said recently they want to change this, but only after Valve has already invested a lot into making Linux gaming a real thing with almost zero friction). That’s also basically the best thing that Valve has done - they really did help to make Linux gaming a reality, and Linux gaming is an important step towards toppling Windows’ dominance. They deserve a lot of credit for that. But there are also plenty of other things that you can criticize about Steam.

If you’re on Windows though, you should definitely always prefer GOG over Steam because it’s DRM-free (you buy it, you own it). Of course, there are many more games only available on Steam, so it might not be possible all the time, but at least you should prioritize your choices.

We also have plenty of other monopoly problems, one of the biggest is YouTube.

Some good or at least decent stealth action games, some are open world, some not:

• Far Cry: most of these can be played in that way
• The modern Tomb Raider games (since 2013 or so)
• The Sniper Elite series
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon series
• The Hitman series
• Dishonored + Dishonored 2 + all addons/DLCs
• Deus Ex Human Revolution & Mankind Divided (also the very first Deus Ex if you can tolerate its “graphical fidelity” nowadays)
• Deathloop, but it’s worse than Dishonored and much less “serious” than the other games on this list

My take on it: most people do have foresight or at least understand the issue, but they still don’t act on it or ignore it as long as the status quo is still convenient enough. So it’s purely a matter of pain and inconvenience. Once enough pain and inconvenience has accumulated, they’re much more ready to make an actual switch. Thankfully, with Microsoft’s services also becoming increasingly enshittified (forced AI chatbot integrations everywhere, even more cloud dependencies, ever more expensive subscriptions, …) there’s also Microsoft shooting itself in the foot a bit in order to accelerate this process. Vile actions from the current US regime are also accelerating the process of course.

Data gathering and analysis is still happening in the background. They just won’t show you these 2 things in the frontend.

I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took a cat to the knee.

Yes, even the term “sideloading” is already a discrimination. Let us “install” (not “sideload”) software from sources we want or trust. A smartphone is a computer, and there are lots of reasons to NOT use the Google-approved app store. Fight scammers by educating people, not by crippling core features of an operating system or alienating existing users.

I’ve always wondered where the line was, or how blurry it is, between “haha, look at us, we’re the PC masterrace and those are the console peasants” and actual chauvinism…

Same here. Built a new PC like 6 months ago when it was all barely starting (good timing) and my notebook and phone are also fairly recent, like 1.5 years old. Tablet as well fairly recent, 2y old, but that’s really only used for home media consumption so it doesn’t even matter in that case. So I should be good for the next 5+ years or so. Hopefully the AI bubble has burst until then.

Arch on Desktops&Notebooks, Debian on Servers.