Cognitive dissonance. Looking at their own government means acknowledging all the ways they themselves are complicit. Plus, Americans are largely programmed from birth to defer to authority figures. That’s largely not true of Europeans, or at least not by the same mechanisms, so I don’t know what their excuse is.

EDIT: I’m agreeing with you, by the way, in case that wasn’t clear.

I honestly don’t even know what would trigger that, unless that bank just really hates you using any gecko-based browser.

I generally despise the push for separate apps for everything anyway, but the banking ones are among the worst since so many of them are tied into Google Play. If my bank were to disable its website and only function with an app that required Google Play certification, I’d change banks. I’d be tempted to go old school and do banking in person, but who knows what kind of security cameras they have in banks now.

“Browser hardening” is a somewhat nebulous term; I’ve seen it used for both privacy and security interchangeably. I continue to hear that Gecko-based browsers (i.e. Firefox and its forks) are less secure, but I do not know exactly how that plays out in the real world. Security and privacy are sometimes at odds, and your threat model should help you choose which to prioritize and when. If you don’t know how to weigh them, you may need to refine your threat model.

Vanadium is a hardened browser, yes. I don’t have personal experience with it so I can’t make any recommendations on its settings.

Mullvad Browser and LibreWolf have two completely different strategies to avoid fingerprinting. Mullvad Browser operates on everyone having the same configuration to blend in - if you want to use it, you need to avoid changing any of the settings. LibreWolf, on the other hand, works by spoofing a different fingerprint every session. It will look unique to Cover Your Tracks and the like, but it will be different every time you close and reopen it. Again, it works best if you don’t mess with the settings.

I believe both Mullvad Browser and LibreWolf come with uBlockOrigin pre-installed. Just about anything you want to do regarding blocking ads or scripts can be done in UBO’s settings; do NOT add extra “privacy” add-ons as you will only make yourself easier to fingerprint.

If you’re looking for something to use with actual accounts (like banking), use hardened Firefox (with arkenfox) or a hardened chromium browser. Neither Mullvad Browser nor LibreWolf (and especially NOT Tor) are designed for that use case.

As an aside, you can use multiple browsers for different use cases. I honestly think that’s best practices at this point, but you’d have to be good about not overlapping your browsing on them (i.e., not visiting/logging into the same website on multiple browsers).

I don’t blame anyone for trying to get out. When I was younger, I always thought I’d get out at the first sign of trouble, but now that I’m older, I’ve realized I can’t bring myself to. Even if I could escape, I’d be leaving friends and family at the mercy of whatever comes next. I don’t know that I’ll survive the next couple of decades, but I’m trying to make peace with it.

Glad to see this. Motorola seemed like a solid choice. Hopefully we’ll get some specs and release dates when they officially unveil it. I know it was pushed back to 2027, so I’m hoping for a Q1 2027 release. I’ve been holding off on getting a pixel in the hopes of getting a non-Google GrapheneOS phone. It would be nice if I don’t wind up having to wait too much longer.

This. You can remove yourself from those people finder websites if you’re willing to take the time. I don’t think paying monthly is worth it.

And are they going to require ID to verify birth dates, or is this just going to be a drop down menu? If the latter, I’m pretty sure everyone’s birth date is 1/1/1901. I’m so tired of this surveillance shit masquerading as “save the children” nonsense. I hate to say it, but this is a parenting problem and if your kids are more tech-savvy than you are, they WILL find a way around these safegaurds.

The best way to remain anonymous is to be somebody else on the internet, ideally many somebodies. Also, don’t use social media or if you must, don’t set it to “public”. So much of this “OSINT” bullshit is just googling to find public social media profiles.

It’s definitely not something I would throw at my parents or my less tech-inclined friends. I think it’s alright for me precisely because I’m already motivated to learn the command line and this gives me more incentive. There’s more I want to do with my machine and I’ll get there, but I already feel annoyed when I have to use my work laptop (which has Windows 11 on it). I didn’t think I’d get to a point where I despise Windows File Explorer, but every time it lags I long for Dolphin, lol

I may throw Mint on my personal laptop just to get some experience with it. While I like bazzite, I absolutely see why I can’t recommend it to most people starting out. I think more software will need to run on Wine before I can convert people, though.

As a beginner on Bazzite who’s been struggling to figure out said distroboxes (via Distroshelf), is there a good guide somewhere to them? On like, a conceptual level. I.e., when do I need to use a distrobox and why? A lot of information I’ve been finding has just been command line instructions and that’s great, but I really want to know the ‘why’ of things so I understand what I’m doing.

This is what I’ve been doing, and I’ve been on Bazzite for about 4-6 weeks now. I haven’t booted my Windows drive since the first week. It’s definitely an adjustment, but I’m finding my way around. Gaming on it has been pretty easy, it’s figuring out the Linux command line that is taking me more time. Knowledge of MS-DOS is really not transferable; all the commands are different. It’s kind of like learning a new language.

But I also don’t depend on a bunch of proprietary software that won’t run on Linux, as I’d been moving away from that over the past 1-2 years. I think that’s made my transition a lot easier. My goal is to get to a point where the only proprietary stuff on my computer is video games.

Fix Or Repair (Toilets) Daily

Would love to know of a resource for looking up the amount of telemetry being collected by make/model/year. Like, is this stuff only on cars with Android Auto/Apple CarPlay/inbuilt GPS, or anything that uses Bluetooth?

Yeah, a lot of those ranking sites are actually owned by some of the more shady VPN providers. I know I’ve seen a diagram somewhere of the connections between some of these companies, but I can’t remember where off the top of my head.

Not OP, but the software currently is incompatible with linux AFAIK. There are some third-party applications that try to restore some of the features available in Windows, most notably the chat-mix, but I haven’t yet gotten that working and honestly just gave up on it. I have one of the other Arctis models though, not the Pro.

It’s not that Lemmy.ml is blocking Mullvad, it’s that Mullvad is blocking Lemmy. If you’re using the DNS content blockers in the Mullvad app, turn the ‘adult’ filter off. I don’t know why they added Lemmy.ml to that blocklist, but that’s what’s happening.