Love the summary format. Definitely a lot more accurate of a fingerprint using Chromium, many stats with Librewolf are jumbled up as expected. In fact, all is well in Chromium. I guess all but one of my machines are entry-level, ran the test on my second-most recent device (2019 ThinkPad) and it’s still characterized as “entry-level”.

It commented on Firefox RFP reporting UTC regardless of local time zone and I thought it was funny that I do in fact have my devices set to UTC even though I don’t live in Iceland. To be clear, not a bug, just my personal choice.

Especially github projects with instructions like:

On Debian/Ubuntu, install from my PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:totally/well-maintained

or on Hannah Montana Linux, build with

python2 mk-dependencies.py
fartify-next build --forceit 

Not entirely and with absolute certainty, but more than any proprietary software in general. The more eyes on it the better.

At the end of the day, you have to trust someone and a few black boxes in between as soon as you connect to the internet. So if there’s something I’d really rather not let out into the world, it’s either on an airgapped encrypted system or a piece of paper hidden where my keys get lost.

It’s good that one of Microsoft’s tracking mechanisms is getting attention, but with the way Windows is, using deGDID is more or less like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Have thought of selling things there, but stalled when it came time to think about how I’d handle shipping

Looking forward to freeing up a couple more hours of my week!

But seriously, finding search results of use is going to be even more painful.

My collection of hoarded media waits eagerly if this forces me to say goodbye to the internet outside of work obligations

privacy.com cards and prepaid Visa/Mastercard I believe let you enter any address of your choice. Of course, privacy.com would still know and some vendors might be a bit more restrictive, especially towards the prepaid cards in recent years.

Isn’t the PO box merely to hide your identity from the seller rather than the post office? Not casting doubt on your approach though, just curious if there was anything more to be aware of since I too am thinking about signing up for a PO box.

It could have been many moons ago. But about ten years ago, Google rolled out an irresistible deal for schools that included the workspace suite and unlimited storage. The schools took it up passionately and this is how we got students opening up a Google Docs browser tab that consumes 540 MB of RAM just to jot down a note two sentences long, and schools stuck with Google even as they aggressively whittle away at the promised ‘unlimited’ storage.

Realistically, the software doing the phoning home would have to run on the streaming box; the AAA batteries in a remote would be drained within a matter of hours or days if it were to continuously record and send it back. Software phoning home is a concern with off-the-shelf boxes, but on a Linux mini PC, it’s equivalent to plugging in an external mic. Still good practice to do away with it if you don’t need it.

To his credit, Rob’s videos introduced me to cell phone privacy. But his products are all just pre-flashed off-the-shelf devices. The bespoke Brax phone models are merely rebranded mid-tier phones from a generic ODM. None of it is more secure than what GrapheneOS on a Pixel offers and all of the offerings have alternatives that are cheaper or better audited.

Just curious, what kind of batteries are powering the remote and if rechargeable, how often does it need charging? Not saying they wouldn’t do such things, still a good preventative measure, but I’d be surprised if it could sustain telemetry with only the power of AAA batteries in a typical remote.

You could make it about equivalent to the protections afforded by the typical BIOS password, i.e. the attacker must first disassemble your laptop to reflash the spi chip or pull the hard drive. A grub.cfg like so would do, assuming everything in encrypted partitions:

set prefix=(memdisk)/boot/grub
set superusers="myuser"
password_pbkdf2 myuser grub.pbkdf2.sha512.10000.<your hashed password>
cryptomount -u <UUID of LUKS container>
search.fs_uuid <UUID of the root filesystem under LUKS container> root cryptouuid/<UUID of LUKS container>
configfile ($root)/@rootfs/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Assuming you boot directly to GRUB or locked out the SeaBIOS boot device selector, then GRUB will only ever look for a boot device matching your disk’s UUID; attempting to do anything else aside from entering the LUKS passphrase will prompt for the GRUB password. You’d still have your own recovery path by pressing Esc, entering your GRUB password, and dropping to the GRUB shell. Bonus points for patching the GRUB code so it doesn’t echo the UUID of your disk.

No, it isn’t bulletproof against physical access. But yes, I had the same question you did when starting out with coreboot and this was the solution I came up with.

Through my entire stint having to use it in Europe, the closest I could find was a webview for the web client: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.kuenzler.whatsappwebtogo/

Sadly, they enforce use of the official client to create an account and resync whenever the web client session expires. Even once got locked out for using the official client downloaded from Aurora Store, apparently I ought to have to downloaded the APK directly from their website, if not from the play store.

Edit: I also think potential legal pressure also contributes to a FOSS client not existing. Last time someone tried making a feature-complete FOSS Instagram client, they stopped after a cease and desist from Meta.

Obligatory, I would have loved to go without anything Meta in the first place, but if you’ve spent any time around non-techy colleagues in Europe, you’ll know how much of an uphill battle it is.

• TI-89 calculator. Got mine for college, wouldn’t trade it for any other calculator
• Thinkpad X230, quad core modded
• Librebooted HP Z220 desktop in authentic 2001 beige case and 1600x1200 beige monitor
• 90s-era UI via Chicago95 on XFCE
• Early 90s car with intact tape deck
• Personal website in pure CSS/HTML
• Beige speaker-subwoofer set with added mixer for multi-device connectivity
• Cash. Don’t worry, I won’t waste your time counting out coins; I save them up and deposit into my bank account at the end of each year
• Palm Pilot. Tbh, taking notes on my phone is just as easy, but I’m afraid it doesn’t look nearly as respectable in front of the speaker.
• If I need to deeply comprehend literature, I have to read it on paper. My mind defaults to skimming anything on a screen.

The one piece of old tech I don’t miss are bulky charging bricks. I use my GaN USB-C charger whenever possible, sometimes with the help of adapters.

Focus follows mouse and unchecking the option to auto raise the active window. Couldn’t live without it and being used to it has made me extremely clumsy when I do pick up my Windows work laptop.

I change the taskbar clock to be a one-line MM/DD HH:MM:SS format, drop in my customized locale (based on en-US for maximum compatibility, but without having to deal with US formats and units that I’m not fond of), and point the taskbar shortcut for my text editor to a script that creates a pre-named file and launches the editor with autosave enabled. Because having to manually save and come up with a name for your spur-of-the-moment notes sucks, automatically generating 20260831_text_1 is so much better than a, b, a2, etc.

XFCE specific, I get rid of the second panel full of launchers. Acquired taste, but also Chicago95 theme and icon pack.

As others say, where the use cases are so specific to each machine, it’ll be a headache juggling all of those images if your needs and workflow change down the road.

But I’d be remiss to say I don’t practice a form of what you mention, I would go insane if I actually had to reinstall from distro defaults. I have a single perfected VM image with customizations and software common to all of my machines. And yes, if you were to go this route, there are little quirks to iron out manually each time I image to a new machine, even old and well-supported ones. Some just cosmetic, some preventing graphical output. Although still much less time than setting up from scratch.

It works well enough for me, but it also frankly leads to a poorly-documented system that will accumulate cruft with updates, and can’t propagate changes in the VM to my existing systems easily, so I’m interested too to see what other people here suggest. Particularly for those niche customizations that land outside of /home and /etc (e.g. /usr/fonts, packages not provided by the distro).

Look into threat modelling, we’re all striving for more privacy-friendly ways to keep in touch with people, and if you seal yourself off too early, you’ll suffocate.

I know my friends and colleagues well in person, they know that I’m a privacy nut, and we agree to not report me missing just because I’m unreachable on a particular day. But knowing that they SMS each other their plans and that I’m probably not a target of the state, I’m cool texting them things like when we’re eating out together.

Also don’t be disheartened, I keep at it even though my methods are nowhere near airtight. Even if every move of mine is known, the surveillance capitalists will at least know that I am flipping them off and trying my best to make their jobs hard.

First thing I always do is set icon scheme to have colors. I don’t know who thought monochrome for the tools was a good idea, but it takes me twice as long to find anything.