• Tor browser for anonymous/private regular browsing (without logging into personally-identifiable accounts)
• Vanadium (GrapheneOS’ Chromium-based browser, maybe it’s usable on non-GrapheneOS as well?) in combination with a good crap-blocking DNS server
• Brave is decent but has some bad default settings, can probably be configured to behave well (similar to regular Firefox)
• Firefox + forks are generally not that great (at least on Android?) because their sandboxing capabilities (and maybe other security features) are weaker compared to those of Chromium-based browsers. See also: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
• Proprietary browsers like Chrome, Edge, Opera, and so on all contain loads of on-by-default-spyware and should never be used

Yep. There’s always been spying from foreign governments’ intelligence services on allies (especially from the US and the UK because they have such vast surveillance capabilities and budgets), and there’s always been commercial spying (e.g. Google, Apple, MS, and others collecting vast amounts of data on everyone using their proprietary software), which then could also be bought by intelligence services to expand their data mountain. It’s really nothing new at all. Also, this was all basically part of the infrastructure already. Of course it’s going to keep running.

Also, there were these thin excuses of “data protection” agreements between US and EU like “Privacy Shield”, which were on incredibly shaky or non-existent legal grounds the whole time (some of them also got taken down already because they were such a joke to begin with), only to sort of “legitimize” and “make legal” the vast amounts of sensitive data that are flowing from EU to US when using US software and services, despite EU laws stating that many of those data transfers aren’t actually legal. Basically, to protect their own institutions as well as tons of EU businesses who are trapped in, for example, the Microsoft software ecosystem, so that they can continue to use these software products containing spyware and not feel too guilty about it because it sort of got defined as being lawful.

So all of this, including the hypocrisy behind it, is nothing new at all. In theory, we have all these fancy data protection laws, but in reality, almost everyone either ignores them or doesn’t get it.

What’s new is only that before Trumps’ 2nd term, this sort of stuff was “accepted” as either “necessary” (in regards to the intelligence services spying, because this always was excused with “national security” reasons, which has been the favorite universal wildcard excuse for any sort of mischief by government institutions) or simply as “irrelevant” (in regards to everything concerning data flowing somewhere where it shouldn’t be flowing to at all) by a majority of the population including politicians and other entities which could hit the brakes on this stuff. And it is only now when people realized that Trump’s 2nd term might turn the US into a fascist rogue country, that there is some kind of regret suddenly growing about the own previous mindset. But only now. As long as the US was interpreted as being our friendly ally, it was never officially considered to be any sort of problem, maybe even considered beneficial. Except of course by experts in the area, but who listens to experts, right?

An easy analogy that common users can understand is e-mail. E-Mail is also decentralized, everyone has an e-mail address but everyone uses a different e-mail host (the domain name after the “@”). So e.g. “john.doe@gmail.com” has an account at gmail.com but “jane.doe@mailbox.org” has an account at mailbox.org. Both are completely different, yet they can communicate with each other. There’s not one company controlling or storing every single e-mail account or inbox. It’s spread out and everyone can choose the mail provider they like or trust the most.

Then you use that as a bridge to explain Lemmy, or Mastodon, or other Fediverse social media platforms. And remind the listener that single companies having full control over everyone’s accounts is generally bad and opens the door for all sorts of abuse and manipulation or arbitrariness.

Sure.

• https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
• https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/Android_privacy_report.pdf … and when you use for example Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei made mobile OSses, it’s even worse of course, because then their own telemetry comes on top of that from Google as well. They want to have pieces of the cake too.
• https://www.kuketz-blog.de/google-play-services-die-ueberwachungswanze-von-google/ (you might have to translate that page. That guy is a well-known privacy and data protection researcher, white hat hacker and also a data protection official in a federal state in Germany. He’s very objective)

Just for reference, this is what the Google Play services app transmits roughly every 20 minutes to Google if it has network access:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

And that is when you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount this app is always gathering from every Android user using the Google Play services app, no matter what you selected. Other Google apps (like the Play store app) could then contain additional telemetry on top, this is just the common base of all Google proprietary apps. Or the minimum amount of privacy violations you get when using proprietary Google apps on your phone, no matter what.

If you use GrapheneOS, I’d recommend not installing/using ANY Google apps at all (not even Play store or Play services). To get apps, you should use (roughly in this order of priority): 1.) GrapheneOS’s app store for the built-in apps 2.) Accrescent app store (has several good open source apps, is intended to be more secure than F-Droid) 3.) Obtainium (for getting open source apps directly from their source repos) or if you really can’t get into Obtainium, use F-Droid instead 4.) Aurora Store (for getting apps from the Google Play store without sending too much data to Google. Only do this if there is no open source app available for doing the same thing).

To fully mitigate the removal of the Play services app, you also should probably install/configure something like ntfy to get battery efficient push notifications and ideally use apps which also use that, e.g. the Molly fork instead of Signal. It’s quite easy to do, just something to be aware of. Otherwise your battery drain might be a bit higher. Then you’re also independent from Google’s push notification infrastructure. But you need a ntfy server to go along with it, either self-hosted or use a public one. There are some privacy friendly ones public ones out there.

It’s going to get a lot worse because now they know that they are able to deport/jail literally anyone without facing any resistance. If a case gets too big on the media, they can shift responsibility around in a circle, e.g. USA says it can’t do anything, El Salvador has to do something. And El Salvador says sorry can’t do anything. And so nothing is done, both USA and El Salvador get what they want and the justice system and the victims can’t do anything.

This will soon become routine because they will expand their list of “unwanted” persons constantly. First “gang members” and “criminals”, then sexual and other non-criminal minorities, then non-criminal political opposition, then potentially everyone who’s not super loyal to the fascist administration (aka cult).

What worries me is how fast it descends into madness. Any innocent American citizen should probably sooner, rather than later, be prepared to fight for themselves and their loved ones against injustice, because there might be no one left in the system doing it for them when the system itself has become unjust and/or dysfunctional. I hope that you somehow manage to turn the wheel around but when looking at the speed of Project 2025 and the Trump administration becoming increasingly more vile, I don’t think there’s much time left. Fascism is growing at insane speed, fueled by disinformation/propaganda and fake news on the web and social media, and backed by obscenely rich oligarchs who never really liked the previous government and laws anyway.

And this is all happening in a time when humanity should work together, rather than continue fighting among themselves. Instead, humanity chose the worst path forward possible, the path which accelerates the problems and has no solutions at all. So now we don’t have anything against climate change and this will cause massive problems and completely new wars world-wide over land, food, water. And it’s not far out. If you’re young today, you’ll probably live to experience it. It’s probably the right time to prepare for the worst and adjust to a pre-apocalyptic mindset. Because we’re definitely not solving this if we can’t even solve fascism in Western democracies in 2025.

A fascist-run country does not care about allies or friends. In doing so, it becomes vulnerable and disadvantaged.

“AI” is good for pattern matching, generating boiler plate / template code and text, and generating images. Maybe also translation. That’s about it. And it’s of course often flawed/inaccurate so it needs human oversight. Everything else is like a sales scam. A very profitable one.

Fedora gives you a secure and functional desktop distro out of the box while with Arch, you can get that as well but have to invest more configuration time, since you have to configure things like Secure Boot, SELinux, disk encryption, firewalls, AppArmor and other security stuff by yourself, it’s not going to have all that jazz by default, since Arch is a minimalistic and modular DIY-like distro, so it’s up to the user to configure this. Arch doesn’t put obstacles in the way of the user but also doesn’t just preconfigure this stuff. But it’s all there if you need it. Arch also offers a linux-hardened kernel variant which uses various hardening patches of the GrapheneOS project for the kernel (not sure if Fedora offers this as well). Experienced Linux users tend to like Arch’s approach because of more flexibility, modularity and minimalism while still offering everything necessary, but the less experienced of a user you are the more you probably will have problems with this approach, and the more you want more things to be pre-configured out of the box, so that you as the user have to configure less stuff. The more you view it that way, the less suitable Arch is for you.

But both are excellent and modern distros. Fedora is generally for people who want to generally spend less time configuring their desktop distro. Arch is for people looking for either a more universal distro or something more modular, technically simple and customizable.

The RedHat backing of Fedora can be a blessing (lots of great stuff came from RedHat so far) but also could become a curse soon due to IBM’s influence (which bought RedHat some time ago, and IBM isn’t such a great company, and this can negatively impact RedHat as well) and current US politics (it’s a US-based company). Arch, on the other hand, is even more independent than Fedora is and it’s a fully community-run distro, and from all community-run distros, it’s of very high quality, similar to Debian. Both Debian and Arch are also quite democratic in nature. If IBM hadn’t bought RedHat, and US wouldn’t be like it is today, I’d maybe view this differently but as it is I’d rather use a community-run distro than a US-corporation backed one. Even if Fedora is still very independent as a project, or so it seems.

If you’re very well familiar with Arch there’s really no need to switch to Fedora, but it can save you some time or configuration trouble overall in some cases, while it could also mean more potential trouble with major upgrades than with Arch with its frequent but lightweight updates all the time and never a big major version upgrade because Arch has no versions at all, it’s purely rolling, whereas Fedora is a mixture of rolling and point release. That said, if you update your Arch very infrequently (e.g. only once every couple of weeks), you will also have a higher chance of update troubles (though these are often easy to solve for an experienced Arch user, but can be crippling for a newbie). To benefit from Arch’s update mechanisms, you have to update frequently, as in every couple of days, at the very least once a week. And you really should set up a fallback mechanism, e.g. via filesystem snapshots, so you can revert an update which went wrong. Although so far, one of my Arch installations here is like 7 years old and there were only very minor update issues during that whole time, all of which were solvable via downgrading a specific package, waiting 1-3 days for the fix and then upgrading that package. So I’d say Arch is much more stable than its reputation, but still, even objectively small update issues can be devastating for you if you don’t know how to solve them, so it again depends on the user.

Another factor is probably going to be whether the AUR or Fedora’s community repos have more of the additional packages that you need for your use cases, from the packages that aren’t in the default repos.

Which of the two distros makes more sense depends highly on the user, the user’s familiarity with Linux basics, the user’s available time, and general use cases. I’d say both choices are excellent for a desktop distro, and Fedora would immediately become my daily driver if I ever became unhappy with Arch. Which so far hasn’t happened.

Another option if you still can’t decide between those two excellent distros would be an Arch derivative like EndeavourOS or CachyOS, which pre-configure more of Arch for an easier desktop use out of the box. So they are more like Arch of course (based on it) but trade away some of Arch’s subjective “weaknesses” for Fedora’s subjective “strengths”. I say “subjective” because those weaknesses and strengths can be different for each user and use case. Sometimes this gets forgotten in discussions like this. It’s not a clearly defined drawback if your distro doesn’t preconfigure most stuff out of the box. Whether that is a drawback or not depends on the user. However I’d assume that most users probably prefer more pre-configuration. But still, one size doesn’t fit all.

Well this got longer than intended but I hope it helps for decision making.

If laws and the constitution are not or can not be enforced, they are mere “optional guidelines” for these people to ignore. Either you take action against blatantly illegal actions, or you might just as well welcome your next dictator with some presents, right now already actually, because it won’t get any better when they already start ignoring laws/constitution right now. It’s a pure downward spiral from there, and it sends a clear signal to the administration and all of its allies that laws are optional right now. Also, regular people would already be fined/jailed/shot for doing 0.000001% of the wrongdoings of this administration. If there is such a thing like an actual justice system and a system of checks and balances in the US, then wake it the fuck up or it dies in its sleep. Much sooner than later.

BNC Feed-Through Adapters (with Terminators if needed)

I’m kidding, I’m kidding!

For anyone too young, this was how you made gaming LAN parties in the early 90s when there was Doom, Doom 2, Duke3D and Quake 1 to play. It’s a switch- and hub-less network connection where every PC is literally connected to all others in one line which is fed through each PC. Making your connection extremely sh!tty if you were on one end or someone between you and the other guy had a terrible PC or had to reboot. Well, actually it was generally sh!tty. This problem went away completely when switches (even just hubs) became commonly available / cheap for consumers.

I do miss LAN parties though. Online gaming is also great but it’s just not the same.

It’s the other way around.

The mental illness is not “paranoia about Trump’s doings”, paranoia about Trump is normal when you’re a decent human being who is thinking clearly and fact-based, because then you should absolutely be paranoid about an unhinged, mentally unstable, dangerous fascist taking power in the US. If that doesn’t bother you, I’m sorry, but you’re probably simply uneducated. See old Nazi Germany for “prior art” on this one.

What could be considered a “mental illness” is what causes people to believe or support Trump, or the current Republicans, or the MAGA movement, or the current right-wing extremism in general. This is likely an issue of either low education, low intelligence or naive belief in various forms of internet propaganda. Or multiple of those issues combined. So it’s not really “illness” but rather a misinformed and/or radicalized person. Similar to what cultists become in real cults. Fascism is very cult-like in general. There’s usually a supreme leader and a doctrine (usually based on falsehoods) to live by, and everyone who doesn’t do that is considered an “enemy” or at least inferior. What you read on the internet and especially social media or “alternative news sites” is already often weaponized and might be able to radicalize you or lead you away from the fact-based truth. There’s TONS of disinformation, sometimes harmless, sometimes funny, but sometimes not. Sometimes it’s dangerous, especially if you’re not able to spot what’s likely true or not. If you aren’t able to filter out disinformation, propaganda, lies, half-truths, weird memes, i.e. if you are unable to stick to reputable sources, peer-reviewed science, and so on, then you WILL fall for at least some amounts of misinformation and you MIGHT even become part of a cult (e.g. MAGA movement, conspiracy believers, anti-vaxxers, QAnon, radical right-wing extremism, …). And again, it’s all weaponized and that is useful for various involved parties for various reasons. For example, Putin wants misinformation on social media because with it he can destabilize Western democracies, because common citizens fall for this stuff and lose faith in their own governments. The end result helps Russia, because Western democracies will then do less and be less united against Russian attacks. Billionaires like Musk or Zuckerberg want misinformation on social media because with it they can better control the narrative and extract more money from the users because polarizing and extreme content gives them more interactions and thus money. Billionaires also want less governmental regulation, which is why Musk already demolished several regulating bodies in the US. Autocratic fascists like Trump also want misinformation on social media because with it they can control the narrative better. What these involved parties all don’t want is the actual truth, so they are usually anti-science, anti-education, anti independent journalism, and so on. It’s better for them if the common people are uneducated and uninformed, and follow the newly created doctrine. It’s easy to tell that they want to create their own fake version of the truth, and control the narrative in that way.

The real test against fascism is whether or not the justice system and executive powers can stand firm against these fascist onslaughts (i.e., by effectively enforcing laws/constitution, which usually have safeguards against fascists written in them) or whether they can’t and so the new autocratic leader is allowed to basically do what he wants.

Haven’t read anything bad about Tuta so I guess it’s fine. Other good ones are Proton, mailbox.org or posteo.de. Anything that’s not by Google, Microsoft, and so on.

I use several, depending on use case:

• Tor Browser for general and anonymous web browsing (e.g. reading news, looking up stuff, and so on)
• Mullvad Browser as a clear web alternative for general use
• Librewolf for generally logging into sites with personally identifiable accounts (e.g. to buy stuff)
• Ungoogled Chromium for those few sites which only work with a Chromium-based browser, or other specific cases
• On Android (GrapheneOS): Tor Browser and Vanadium

All regular browsers have some hardening applied and uBlock Origin installed.

Since you only mentioned 25% gaming, I’d recommend against a gaming-centric distro like Bazzite. Instead, use a generalist desktop distro.

Since you mentioned that you’re rather new-ish, I’d recommend against Arch-based distros like CachyOS. Instead, check out e.g. Fedora, Mint, OpenSuSE. (Probably in that order of priority)

These aren’t hard recommendations, so you can do whatever and probably be fine either way, but it still doesn’t fit that well.

There are lots of great live bands but maybe these were most memorable for various reasons: Magma (just hypnotic), Lazuli (very entertaining live band every single time), The Pineapple Thief (great prog rock with incredible drummer), The Musical Box (playing and re-acting old Genesis. Too young to see the originals but just in time to see the remakes), Le Silo (super high energy duo or trio, don’t even remember, but man that was wild), Aranis (they don’t exist anymore unfortunately)

I don’t view it as badly. He’s probably overly defensive and paranoid and interprets some forms of criticism as attacks. But I do not see this as an argument against his competence or contributions to the project, or against using GrapheneOS altogether, at all. In fact, I even kind of like having someone paranoid as the head of a security-focused OS. Seems like a useful synergy to me. Also, AFAIK the GrapheneOS project now also has others posting about the project, not just him alone. I think this was also a result of his “miscommunication” in the past. Furthermore, the project is too important (there are almost zero high-security and high-privacy mobile OSes!) to escalate this into a problem. And furthermore again, there might also be parties involved who are ACTUALLY interested in attacking GrapheneOS and weakening its popularity, for their own gains. And so when your successful and also high-quality project is under regular attacks from various angles, you might get more paranoid and misinterpret some valid criticism as a result. Combine that with Rossman’s over-dramatic nature and high reach, and someone paranoid like Daniel might take it the wrong way. And then communication spirals out of control into various escalations. At least that’s how I interpret it.

Around 2.5-3 days. On a LAN party in 2003 or so. 2 nights without sleep. Lots of caffeine. It was fun at first but really started feeling terrible after the 2nd night.

He’s mostly correct about lots of things, but not about everything (for example, he hated on everything GrapheneOS just because its lead dev is a bit socially awkward). Plus he’s overly dramatic and verbose which can be annoying. Sometimes you must be to get abstract or complicated points across better, but I still feel he’s too aggressive in that regard. I also like what he’s trying to achieve with FUTO in general. Overall, he’s a great and valuable activist who has almost all of his eggs in the right baskets.