Wow… The land of the free is really starting to fell like 1933 Germany now…

This is not a gratuitous visit. The clown up north badly needs the clown with the bad haircut.

Yeah… Whoever agrees to meet with Kim Jong Un clearly is a despicable world leader.

With Rosehip. But good news: it would appear my ticket finally made its way to the development team and to legal. They sure are taking their own sweet time like a good giant corporation dealing with a pointless single guy, but things seem to be moving in the right direction.

If they refuse again this time, considering they now acknowledged that my ticket is processed where it should be processed, I will contact the FSF, and name and shame. But for now they’re showing good will.

I rock a Fairphone4 running CalyxOS. Apart from the hardware switches on the Purism phone, I don’t quite see what I’m missing out on privacy-wise.

The camera does not take influencer quality photos

That’s actually a selling feature.

I gave $20 to the friendly wino who lives in the dumpster down my street. He’s reported a income growth of 1000% for today.

Because I’m not interested in being sued for defamation. Even if I’m totally right and they’re totally wrong, they’ll bury me in legal fees. I’m not rich enough to afford the law.

Thanks! I’ll do that if my last-ditch effort to knock some sense into them doesn’t work.

In other news, CNN says the best news source is CNN.

Do you know how many times some troll has posted about “rm -fr /” on Reddit and other shitty forums, which then gets gobbled up and laundered by LLMs?

Ironically, that now includes you 🙂

What’s privacy-focused ChatGPT? Is it like diet butter?

Hint: if it doesn’t run on your machine, it’s collecting monetizable data.

Install Linux in a VirtualBox virtual machine to try it out. No change to your existing Windows system is needed.

Better: install it in a virtual machine on a second hard drive: if you like it and you’re ready to switch, switch to booting the real Linux hard-drive and turn the Windows hard drive into the virtual machine, to use within Linux when you need it.

If you switch to Linux, this will happen:

• It’s gonna be tough: it’s a different system, you’re not used to it. Like everything else, it’s hard to change and get used to new things. So realistically expect some learning curve and some pain. It’s normal.

• If you give it an honest shot but you decide Linux is not for you, you’ll switch back to Windows. You’ll be back to your old normal, but you’ll start to notice how infuriating and spirit-crushing it is a lot more, having been exposed to a non-insane, user-centric OS for a while. And then you’ll be that much sadder in Windows and you’ll wish you had the best of both OSes - which you can’t.

Just be aware than exposure to a non-Windows OS will probably make you hate Windows more and make your life in Windows ever slightly more miserable, even if you don’t stick to the non-Windows OS.

CoPilot, ChatGPT and more are unable to use the Bing services so in turn are also not working or not working fully.

That’s sad, since one would logically expect any AI to get better if it loses access to Bing search results.

Privacy isn’t a cutesy. It’s absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, just like not doing stupid shit when you’re a teenager, you get to find out how important privacy is years later when the stupid shit you did years before comes back to haunt you and it’s too late.

The problem of course is that Big Data has made it exceedingly difficult and painful to maintain your privacy. Because of course the last thing they want is for you to have any. It hurts their bottom line.

Because of the corporate surveillance collective, in 2024, if you truly want to maintain your privacy, your life becomes significantly crappier than if you didn’t bother. But that doesn’t mean privacy isn’t as important today as it’s ever been.

The problem isn’t suddenly allowing third party browsers.

The problem here - the ONLY problem - is using a fucking browser to do everything, instead of… you know, browsing.

An app store app should be installed as an app. It has no business being specially handled by a browser.

That’s what you get when you turn browsers into mini operating systems: the thing’s attack surface increases by orders of magnitude.

All your anecdote tells me is that you have questionable ethics.

half of the video is solely a critique of NordVPN

I don’t know how good or bad NordVPN is. I have never used it. But I never will. EVER.

You know why?

Because they paid so many interesting Youtubers to shill their stupid VPN service, ruined so many otherwise interesting Youtube videos and wasted so much of my time that I swore I would never give them a single dollar of my money.

I can’t stand advertisement and advertisers, and NordVPN has been truly heavy-handed. They’re not the only ones: Brilliant comes to mind too. They can all fuck off. They’ve achieved the exact opposite of what their ads was supposed to achieve with me: I’ll never patronize them.

Is that any different than the trust we place in our ISPs?

It’s not. Your ISP is probably selling your data, and your VPN may or may not do that too. Just assume everybody sells your data.

The difference is, when you leave home and you connect to a wifi, you start using another ISP. If you then lose the wifi and connect using 4G, you’re using yet another ISP. If you use a VPN, you funnel all your traffic to a single provider all the time. In other words, instead of distributing the risk over several potentially bad actors, you concentrate it on a single one.

Like I said, that’s a lot more trust that I’m willing to place in a single company that only essentially pinky-swears won’t put me under surveillance.

Firstly, using a VPN ultimately consists in trusting the company providing the VPN service that it won’t be fucking around with your privacy. Considering that all your traffic goes through it, that’s a lot of trust to place in one company. And I generally don’t trust any tech company to resist the lure of selling your data for profit for very long in 2024 - even those that profess to be privacy-friendly.

Secondly, modern corporate surveillance doesn’t rely on IP addresses anymore. So if you think a VPN protects your privacy, it really doesn’t. All it does is tell Google et al. which VPN provider you’re a customer of - i.e. you’re giving them even more data that they don’t need to have.

That’s why I don’t even bother with a VPN. I only use one to evade geo-blocking every once in a while.