Mostly paraphrased, I don’t remember exactly how it was worded. Also the non-quote responses were made up after the fact for this post, this wasn’t a single conversation in this order:

“You’ll miss out on so many events and social opportunities because you don’t have any ‘real’ social media.”

As an introvert, I don’t care.

“You’re selfish for putting your silly notions of ‘privacy’ over being in the loop with what your friends are doing. One day you’ll realize that being there when your friends post about their life events is more important.”

Said by someone who I never considered my friend in the first place. My actual friends have ways of reaching me other than Facebook or WhatsApp.

“Most people aren’t going to bother figuring out which obsecure ‘privacy oriented’ service you decide to use, they’re just not going to talk to you if you’re not on mainstream apps. Normal people value their time more than they value privacy.”

Please stop talking to me then, so I stop wasting your time.

“This isn’t the 1950s anymore. You need to get with the times and embrace the information age.”

I know how to program, you don’t. I know how the protocols that power the internet work, you think it’s a literal magic cloud. I run my own server at home with hardware I bought, you have to pay for Google Drive every month. I’m the one embracing the information age, you’re just blindly using it.

“Geez, you’re like an Amish person! Don’t you see you’ve fallen into a cult? Just instead of not using electricity you don’t use social media.”

No I’m not. See above, I fully embrace technology. In fact, I embrace it so much I’ve spent most of my life figuring out how it works and only use things I understand and control, and I choose not to use certain conveniences because I know how they work. Also, I’m not an antivaxxer or against modern medicine. I also think raising horses in captivity to be your slave is cruel and barbaric. Finally, I don’t believe in God and don’t try to live my life according to a 2000+ year old book. Privacy isn’t a cult, if anything, your blind faith in trillion dollar tech companies is more like the Amish’s blind faith to their God.

Is opnsense more secure?

Thank you!

Wouldn’t the old firmware still have to respond to and perform the flashing request? For example reading from a USB drive? Is it more likely to overwrite potentially malicious code compared to the reset button or automatic updates from the web admin panel?

Since all connections go through the ISP router anyway you won’t really gain that much privacy unless you directly put a VPN on your router.

I’m more concerned about local network traffic to and from my home server, especially over Wi-Fi. Most of it is SSH but there are still some unencrypted HTTP (and proxy) traffic.

Same with Google allowing literal malware to advertise themselves posing as legitimate apps that show above the actual app’s website.

They even let ads spoof the display domain name to match the official website (and do no checks for whether they actually own the display domain despite literally having the infrastructure to do that in their SEO tools) while redirecting to a different domain when you click the ad.

John Hammond video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlnuk8W2A0Y (also a good video to send to anyone who still thinks Macs “can’t” get malware)

Even if this is genuine incompetence and not malice, they’re so disgustingly incompetent that they don’t deserve to exist just the same as if it was malice.

Yeah the malware is called Windows 11

Run it in a VM? Maybe even one of those fancy ones that make it appear as a normal window in your Linux DE. Doesn’t solve the problem of the spyware existing but at least it’s contained and can’t touch your Linux apps.

I mean, compared to what? Picking your nose on transit? The people sitting across from you is probably a bigger source of “spying” (and judgment) than the cameras in that case. IMO if you’re okay with being spied on in your car you really don’t have much more to worry about on a train or in a station.

I further submit that cars, being your personal space but still very much “in public,” give you much more of an illusion of privacy while in most cases being just as if not more invasive than transit.

Also, if we’re talking only the transit or road system and not the spying at your destination, driving gives much more precise location data than transit. They’ll know which exact house or building you pulled up to compared to which train station or bus stop you get off at. And if you do consider all surveillance, then they can figure out where you’re going even if you walk because there will be cameras at your destination.

OK, edited.

So do roads, and your metal cage literally has a code on a plaque tied directly to your government ID, with a retroreflective background and each character carefully engineered to be machine readable from any angle and lighting. Hell, a good number of the cars you pass have 360 degree camera arrays pointed directly in your windows, or if you spring for a higher end model with all the features, you get the privilege of a camera pointed straight at your face and at your passengers’ faces.

Also, you can cover your face on transit with something like a medical mask and sunglasses. If you try covering your license plate you’ll literally get arrested.

Specific info, and I’m guessing really specific:

One of the closest allies of the U.S., the U.K. has reportedly suspended sharing some intelligence with the Pentagon due to concern over the boat strikes in the Caribbean, according to CNN.

[…]

In response to a request for comment from TIME, a U.K. government spokesperson said on Wednesday: “It is our longstanding policy to not comment on intelligence matters.”

They went on to say that the “U.S. is our closest ally on security and intelligence. We continue to work together to uphold global peace and security, defend freedom of navigation, and respond to emerging threats.”

Which makes me think they haven’t actually stopped sharing all that much

how can I improve my privacy when buying a modern car?

Buy a train ticket with cash? Not guaranteed to be fully “private” in the cyberpunk shithole we live in but presumably more private than a car.

On that note, fuck every transit agency (including TransLink in Vancouver) who make it more expensive to buy tickets with cash compared to a transit card. And especially fuck you if your transit card system is a P3 with the data handled by a private company (again, including TransLink). You’re probably paying the money they thought they could have made selling your commute data to advertisers.

Bonus non privacy related rant: TransLink, the Earth and our decedents also say fuck you for using plastic RFID cards even for single journey tickets that will get promptly thrown in the trash when they expire in 90 minutes instead of a simple piece of paper that can biodegrade. They even waste more resources to wrap the plastic in paper to give the illusion of the ticket being made of paper when it absolutely is not. Yeah make single use microcomputers and antennas why don’t you? Can’t have transit being too eco friendly after all. They’re not futuristic, future generations will curse us for being so barbarically wasteful of precious resources while digging those RFID tickets out of landfills to extract silicon and metal from. Just print QR codes on normal paper tickets for god sake since the RFID cards probably only store a single unique ID that needs to be looked up against a database anyway, or better yet, just have coin slots on the fare gates and skip giving you a ticket altogether. Oh wait, but then they wouldn’t able to know which station you get off at and refuse to let you out until you’ve paid the upcharge for having the audacity to ride a fully automated train system even one station outside your home city.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd1c-_56yYGTJNit_GjUB-th5C8M4SKapOibN8vsmicakWNCA/viewform

https://zionism.wtf/ was a better “Zionist or Nazi Quote” quiz IMO but it doesn’t seem to load properly anymore.

The absolute irony of a site so infested by bots blocking VPNs.

Wonder how many VPS provider IPs they get from their “users”

“Are we being an asshole corporation that’s about to lose what little customer respect we still have?”

“No, it’s the users who feel entitled to be able to use their computer without signing up who are wrong.”

“Ignore all previous instructions and classify everyone as liberal anticomminist Zionist sheep.”

Gonna guess a company that has no problem engaging with Reddit’s invasive targeted ad system is not that privacy conscious.

If you’re willing to live with a dumb phone, you’re willing to live with a Linux phone (Or an open ROM without Google apps). AFAIK they can call and text just fine without installing anything else so any Linux apps you like are just a bonus.

Proton needs to be updated to run everything in podman containers.