Is the situation in USA bad? Yes, in several aspects (and getting much worse if the current fascism movement wins out in the end).
Is the situation in China bad? Yes, in much more aspects.
Most important goal for USA right now is to ensure they’re not regressing into an authoritarian, fascist regime. Because then, the situation for US citizens will start becoming really similar to China or Russia. After that, goal is to combat climate change. And preventing World War 3.
Winter is on its way out due to climate change. In around the year 2100, it’s estimated that there will only be 3 seasons left, no winter. And summer will be much longer and much hotter. So the 3 seasons will be spring, then a 2-season long summer basically, then fall. That’s it.
But you can already see the disappearance of winter today because there’s much less snow and it’s much warmer than like 30 years ago. (Speaking for Germany)
Technically, everyone has a Facebook account, or at least a shadow account at Meta. Since they are one of the biggest data gatherers in the world, they gather data from all sorts of sources about people, not just from your active usage of their apps, sites and services. It’s extremely likely that they have quite a bit of data on everyone. Many proprietary mobile apps, for example, initiate connections and transfer some data to Meta or Google. Even apps that have nothing at all to do with them otherwise. Many websites do. Many applications and games do. Integrated proprietary software in various devices, e.g. smart TVs, does. Also, WhatsApp is used by I think ~30% of the world’s population now(?) and they started syncing/sharing all that data (mostly metadata but metadata is also very revealing) with Meta several years ago. Since WhatsApp also shares your whole contact / address book with Meta, they also effectively have a (mostly) full social connections graph on about a third of the world’s population, based on WhatsApp usage data alone… so overall they’ll have even more.
Unless you’re efficiently blocking or otherwise interrupting all of those connections, on every device, or are able to really effectively use different IPs and never reveal all of the IP addresses associated with yourself, it’s likely they still have quite a bit about you. If you’re logged into a personally identifiable Google or Meta account on your phone, for example, and your phone is in your WiFi, then it’ll have the same public-facing IP address as your computers, meaning they’ll be able to enumerate all of your devices based on what they gathered on that IP address alone. It means that IP address can now always be linked to your person for Google/Meta/and so on.
And then there’s always the possibility of the apps or websites not making your device directly connect to Meta/Google/… so it looks like only the 1st party gets your data (which always seems OK), but afterwards or in the backend it can still transmit or share the gathered data without your knowledge to those companies. This can also happen without the 1st party noticing it, because Meta and Google are often integrated in a lot of things, for example in SDKs or popular libraries. For example if you develop a mobile app using Meta’s SDK, then by default (opt-out) the resulting app will transmit various kinds of telemetry data to Meta. Unless the developer disables this consciously, which many do not know or care about, it will simply be on and active. Sometimes they also have special data sharing deals with certain companies. Google has even more ways of being included in all sorts of things, they are almost omnipresent. For example Google is doing checks whether your Android-based mobile phone is carrier-locked or not, on behalf of your carrier, not your carrier. Google also receives your (personally-identifiable) IMEI and telephone number alongside every single location request your phone is doing, even from an app that’s completely unrelated to Google. [unless your Android has configured a non-standard SUPL server, which isn’t even an option in most Androids, or you use GrapheneOS which uses a proxy SUPL server to strip that bit of personally identifiable data before redirecting it to the real SUPL server (which most likely is your provider’s, which in turn is most likely just a redirect to Google’s SUPL server in the end)]. These are just examples off the top of my head, there’s even more weird stuff happening of course.
So it doesn’t really matter if you have active accounts at those companies, or not. They still know a lot about you and your devices, and sell that data to governments and whoever else bids the most for it. And even if they don’t know you yet (if no link to your person is currently possible for a particular data set), which is highly unlikely but may be a possibility if you’re truly careful and use different IPs all the time, they still gather all these records, and it only takes one single mistake on your end and they’ll be able to link all records they gathered from that particular IP address to your person as well. Not only that, but they could even statistically calculate that based on what you visited or what you wrote somewhere online, or even how your typing style is, that you’re likely this particular person, even if the data is still “anonymous”.
It’s really hard and really inconvenient to escape all the data gathering, in practice the only thing you can do is minimize it. Most users don’t care at all or don’t want to deal with the extra effort and simply let everything flow out. It’s a much easier online life, but it’s also an almost fully surveilled online life.
Considering that it’s the FDP, they’re probably primarily doing it to protect corporate interests, not the rights of the general population.
What kind of world do we want to live in? What would be the safest theoretical thing? They can’t assign one police officer per citizen, as they don’t have enough police officers. So that’s a big resource constraint. But they will soon have the tech to videotape and audiotape every single cititzen using small insect-like drones that are almost impossible to find. And before that happens, they want to know who everyone online is, what they’re doing and what they’ve done in the past, present and future. They want to know what sites you visited, who you’ve spoken to, what you’ve spoken about, and so on. And after they know this in the online world, they want to know it in the offline world too (using cameras with mics and person detection capabilities). How far will they go with their securtiy madness? It won’t be long until the average citizen has zero (not just a little, zero) privacy, neither online nor offline, probably not even on the toilet or in the bed. And like I said, if you want the ultimate security, you need to assign one small surveillance drone per citizen for a complete 100% surveillance everywhere and all of the time. If you don’t care about privacy and only care about security, that is your end goal. Is that really the world you want to live in?
Problem is, when you don’t oppose stuff like that, stuff like that gets added more and more and it’s all opt-out and some day you’ll have an update and something’s turned on by default and you don’t realize that for a year or so and then you’re like “shit, was this really on all the time”. Even worse when they hide settings well in the UI, or use dark patterns to annoy or trick you to enable a setting that’s actually bad for you.
Opt-out stuff is just bad, even in small doses. It’s always kind of a scam. I wish Mozilla wouldn’t need that kind of stuff. I mean they could be the knight-in-shining-privacy-armor browser, compared to Chrome/Edge/Opera/… But they are all similar unfortunately (by default). Yes, Firefox is still less worse than Chrome/Edge/Opera are by default. But “less worse” doesn’t equal “good”. Yes, you can configure Firefox to behave well, and by using a good preconfigured user.js these settings also will stick after updates. But you shouldn’t have to do that in the first place. The common user doesn’t do that and shouldn’t have to. The Firefox forks like LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser for example do not have anything bad enabled by default. And it’s likely they won’t ever have anything bad enabled after updates. So it is possible. The only reason the common browser makers aren’t doing it is because that gives them (or their business partners) less data/money.
MI is great, I played 1+2 when they were new (in the 90s), they were brilliant back then. These days, they’re probably still good point&click adventure games. There were some special editions or remasters which probably make them play well on modern machines. They belong to a long list of awesome LucasArts point&click adventures during the 90s and early 2000s. Most of these games are great. You should definitely try them out, especially if there are remasters available. But you can also play the originals using ScummVM most likely. Ron Gilbert is like the mastermind behind the series. He still creates adventure games to this day. And they’re all pretty good, but the genre is kind of niche these days. It wasn’t niche back then. It was just as big as action or soulslike games are today. The Monkey Island titles were probably the most successful or popular ones of the bunch. But there are some others which are equally good. Adventure games are rare these days but basically they are like puzzle games where you have to solve certain situations by combining items, finding items in the first place, trying different approaches, and so on. You kind of know once you’ve overcome a challenge when you were able to progress further in the game. There’s little to no handholding, but also little to no handholding needed. There’s one timing-based riddle in the original Monkey Island which I never liked that much, but it’s still a funny one. It’s not hard but it doesn’t really fit the genre well because nothing else is timing-based. It does fit the game’s art, setting and humor well though. The soundtrack is nice indeed. This is probably the most well-known track: https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=FoT5qK6hpbw
Yes, but my post is for the people who DO care about privacy issues. I also don’t like the defeatist’s attitude. You can always start making things better. My post is for those who want to make a better informed decision, that’s all.
Reasons are the data transmissions happening by default and Mozilla’s questionable inclusion of add-on things like Pocket. See for example:
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/mozilla-firefox-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil20/
vs.
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/librewolf-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil8/ and https://www.kuketz-blog.de/mullvad-browser-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil22/
You might need to translate the site to English. If you compare that, you can see why it’s easy to recommend the forks over the original. That said, you CAN configure Firefox to also behave well, but that takes an extra effort. It is far from there by default.
Well, they’re only doing what they announced already like 1-2 years ago. So we knew it was coming. This is also accompanied by Google making YouTube more restrictive when viewed with adblockers. Google is (somewhat late, to be honest) showing its teeth against users who block ads. I always expected it to happen but it took them quite some time. Probably they wanted to play the good guys for long enough until most users are dependent on their services, and now their proprietary trap is very effective.
On the desktop, you should switch to a good Firefox fork right now. Firefox can also be used but needs configuring before it’s good. The forks LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser are already very good out of the box. There’s the potential issue of the forks not being updated fast enough, but so far these two have been fast. Mullvad shares a lot of configuration with the Tor Browser, so using it may break some sites. LibreWolf might be “better” for the average user because of that, but otherwise I think Mullvad is the best Firefox fork overall.
On mobile, Firefox-based browsers aren’t recommended, because on Android, the sandboxing mechanism of Firefox is inferior to that of the Chromium-based browsers. And on iOS, all browsers (have to) run on Apple’s proprietary Webkit engine anyway, but well this is Apple we’re talking about so of course it’s all locked-down and restricted. It’s one of the reasons I don’t even like talking about Apple that much, just be aware that as an iOS user, your choice doesn’t mean as much when it comes to browsers, and your browser might not behave like you think it does on other platforms.
So on mobile, I’d suggest things like Brave, Cromite or Mull. Or Vanadium (GrapheneOS). If the browser doesn’t have built-in adblocking capability which sidesteps the MV3 restrictions, make sure to use an ad-blocking DNS server, so your browser doesn’t have to do it. But you still need it. Adblocking not only helps you retain your sanity when browsing the web in 2024, but it also proactively secures you against known and unknown security threats coming from ads. So adblocking is a security plus, a privacy plus, and a sanity plus. It’s absolutely mandatory. As long as the ad industry is as terrible as it is, you should continue using adblocks. All the time. On every device and on every browser.
The ad industry is itself to blame for this. There could in theory be such a thing like acceptable ads, but that would require ads to be static images/text, not fed by personal data, and not dynamically generated by random scripts which could compromise your security, and not overly annoying. Since that is probably never going to happen, you should never give up using adblockers. Since they basically fight you by reducing your security and privacy, you have a right to defend yourself via technical means.
Long-time GrapheneOS user here.
Can’t say anything about Motorola gestures.
Banking apps MIGHT not all work on GrapheneOS, if unsure check first, or ask on the GrapheneOS forum. I forgot the reasons but it’s probably something stupid like the banking app blocking any non-“Google-sanctioned” Android versions via the Play Integrity DRM kind of feature. It sucks, especially because GraphneOS is way more secure and private than any commercial Android, but what can you do, bad decisions are being done all the time.
GrapheneOS is my recommendation, it’s easy to install and can be used by tech-illiterate people as well because almost none of its security and privacy enhancing features require any special configuration work from the user or require advanced knowledge, it all happens mostly in the background with good default settings. Even for tech-savvy people this has the advantage of not requiring any tinkering or maintenance work, it feels like using any proprietary Android, just hardened and much more privacy-friendly.
You should still maybe be aware of these potential minor issues:
Some apps might refuse to work on any “unsanctioned” Android version via the Play Integrity thing, but so far this seems to be very rare (thankfully). If you find any, make sure to tell the developers that they should stop doing that.
Some apps might simply require Google Play services to be installed. On GrapheneOS, you can install them via the “Apps” app, and they will be slightly less terrible than they are on any other Android because they won’t run with full system rights, but instead they’ll be sandboxed and can be completely shut down by using the standard permissions system, which the user is blocked from doing on proprietary Android systems. But then again, if you must use them, then of course they’re going to require Network permission and they’ll use that to phone home to Google, as they always do on standard Androids as well. So it’s not recommended to install any proprietary apps from Google on top of GrapheneOS. Even though on Graphene, the amount of things an app is allowed to do is more limited compared to the huge amount of data an app can read and phone home on a propreitary Android system.
Some apps include certain widgets like Google maps which, again, require the respective app or Play services app to be installed as well. Depending on how these apps are written, they might simply fail completely when this dependency is not there. But so far, I’ve had luck, and some apps I’ve used which integrate a Google maps widget still worked without it. So it depends on the app and the quality of its developers.
When not having the Google play services installed (default), you won’t have access to Google’s push notification system in the cloud. Some apps, even some privacy-respecting apps like Signal, rely on that. Signal will work without, but then it uses a power-inefficient alternative based on websockets instead, which means Signal without Google play services drains your battery faster than it would otherwise. There are ways around this by using the Molly fork of Signal (Signal is open source and there is at least this one fork often being used as well) with the open source app “ntfy” and an either self-hosted or a privacy-respecting ntfy server instance somewhere to go along with it, which will then act as your own push notification server in the cloud. So you don’t need to contact Google’s stuff for that, and less connections overall to Google equals more privacy overall.
If you do decide to install the Google play services app on Graphene, make sure to allow it to run in the background. But, again, it’s not recommended to use any proprietary Google apps/services.
Once you have Graphene installed, be sure to use its integrated browser called Vanadium (a hardened Chromium fork) to download and install an “app store” of your choice. When I first started out, I installed the F-Droid apk first, then from within it Aurora as a Play Store client. Giving me access to a lot of open source and Play Store apps, respectively. F-Droid unfortunately has some potential disadvantages, which is why I recommend using Obtainium instead of the F-Droid client (you’ll still access the F-Droid repository sometimes because some APKs of open source apps are only hosted there, but at least you’ll avoid potential issues with the F-Droid frontend application then). Using Obtainium instead of F-Droid will be slightly more work at the beginning when compiling your needed open soruce applications, but afterwards it’s just as easy.
Make sure to configure a privacy-friendly and ad/tracker-blocking DNS server, as well as something like RethinkDNS or NetGuard Pro to control which apps are allowed to contact which hosts/IPs. Otherwise, while Graphene itself won’t violate your privacy, many apps will still do that (especially proprietary apps often contain several trackers).
If you need tutorial videos on how to install or initially configure Graphene, or Obtainium, watch the youtube channel “Side of Burritos”, excellent content.
If any of that sounds scary, it shouldn’t be. Most of these issues are really minor and it’s unlikely that you’ll be too negatively impacted by any of it, so give Graphene a try without Google services. There are great open source apps out there for all sorts of functionality. Just felt I should mention any potentially small pitfalls.
Other Android variants or ROMs are inferior to GrapheneOS in terms of security and privacy, unfortunately, so it’s best to buy a cheap Pixel (8th generation recommended due to strong hardware-based security) and install Graphene on it. Otherwise you’ll miss out on Graphene’s very strong security and privacy features. There are some other privacy and security oriented Android variants like Calyx or /e/OS or things like that, or even LineageOS, but they all, again, don’t reach up to Graphene’s level of security and privacy.
HTH
Yes, though since it’s closed source, contains other proprietary libraries and probably was never properly audited (by a 3rd party) it’s possible (even likely, considering it’s Meta we’re talking about) that they keep a copy of the private key(s) and the messages, so that they’re able to decrypt them, and so still be able to gather the content, in addition to everything else, while they can publicly claim it’s all Signal’s protocol so everything’s “E2E”. And yes, the app also gathers a lot of other data (actual and metadata) besides the content of the messages (which Meta can’t supposedly see since it’s E2E, but I never trust anything from Meta). A Meta app (or Google, or MS, for that matter) should generate the same sort of privacy outrages and media/politics attention like TikTok does, but somehow they don’t. “Same shit, different country” was never so fitting.
Here’s a very good messenger comparison: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html
Though the early game is hardly important, because it’s always easy. Like a tutorial area. In pretty much all games. Mid- and end-game proficiency is much more important.
Looks healthy. There was activity and new releases in 2021, 2022 and June 2023. Also, the app might be near feature complete, and if that’s the case there will only be sporadic work left like keeping it updated/compatible or fixing security ssues.
NetGuard Pro - Allows you to see and control traffic from all apps, so you can prevent data flows to 3rd party hosts like the ones from Google or Facebook. The pro edition is paid and necessary, but it’s all open source, just not gratis
Aegis Authenticator - open source 2FA authenticator
LibreTube - alternative, privacy-respecting, open source YouTube frontend using the Piped API
Yeah, but a sizeable increase is still very important. These days, Mastodon, Lemmy and so on have decently sized communities everywhere so that you don’t feel like just talking to yourself and a couple of friends anymore. And that’s kind of a tipping point.
“Mass migrations” happen slowly, anyway. A lot of people are very hesitant to leave big social hubs just because of the value there is in having so many people around. But in the end, you have to. We can’t stay on these proprietary social networks forever. Social networks and communication channels in general need to be non-proprietary, decentralized and open, without the ability of companies manipulating what you see and don’t see. And without risk of losing everything when the one big company falls. It’s a fundamental problem of all proprietary social networks.
Valve is doing this for strategic reasons and also because they wanted to start the handheld PC market (Steam Deck). Strategic reasons: Microsoft could at any point buy several important gaming studios or distributors, distribute a lot of games (maybe exclusively) via their own store (they even announced that several years ago, but they didn’t do it in the end). MS could even implement small things which make Steam perform worse on Windows, as its 100% controlled by MS. If you compete directly with Microsoft on the Windows platform, you will eventually lose because MS can do some very tiny tweaks which happen to make your product be more annoying or slower to use than Microsoft’s own. That way they’ll still fly under the radar for anti-competitive behavior. So Valve has to ensure that their main business model (selling/distributing games on Steam) remains future-proof, and that means more independent from Microsoft’s agenda. To do this, they need to push a fully neutral, but viable alternative to Windows for gaming. Which is Linux.
Well it should be, because anyone who votes for Trump is voting to regress the country into an eventually authoritarian, fascist regime. It shouldn’t be a close race. It should be the majority voting to prevent that.