It’s well known that brooms are the pinnacle of cybersecurity among cleaning tools! Every smart device is a potential target for hackers, while these dumb tools stand as an impenetrable fortress. Forget about remote hacking; the only way to breach a broom’s defences is with good old-fashioned physical access and a hacksaw. As long as you keep your brooms locked up tight, nobody will be hacking them. Better yet, being 100% software-free, there’s no pesky malware or bloatware either. Brooms also take wireless security very seriously. No hardware kill switches are needed when there’s zero communication in either direction.

This is why it’s important to sit down and write a document titled “my threat model, 2026”. OP should figure out what they’re really worried about, how important it is, and what are they willing to sacrifice. Once that’s done, it’s easy to start putting that philosophy into practice.

And all of them have stellar security. No data ever leaks anywhere.

Pro tip: If you use a pen and paper to blackmail the FBI and CIA, they can’t trace it back to you using invisible yellow dots.

When they ask to see your ID, they probably also define exactly which parts of the it they want to see. If you choose to comply, you could still cover everything else from the ID card.

Ideally though, you would tell them where they can shove these requests. In reality, avoiding LI is getting a bit hard.

Unethical actions and profits tend to go hand in hand. Have been for centuries already.

Just think about the economics of kidnapping people in Africa and exporting them to slave camps across the ocean instead of paying white employees to do the work. How about using violence, exploitation and systemic injustice to acquire very cheap spices in Asia and transport them to Europe, and sell them for huge profits.

Some people have managed to diversify their income, but a hefty chunk still comes from ad money. That income is also wildly unpredictable, so it really makes economic sense to diversify. Being entirely dependent on a single source puts your business in a very precarious position. If your company fails as a result, it’s just bad strategy. On the other hand, you could also blame YT for being unpredictable, wild and turbulent.

The way I see it, the core of the problem is economic. Making videos takes money. Storage and bandwidth cost something too, so doing this on a small scale won’t make much sense.

There are a few medium scale platforms like Nebula, and they seem to be doing just fine. IMO those platforms are the way to go.

It’s not linear though. Price of perfection is infinite, and it ramps up quickly. With 1 € you’ll get a tiny bit of privacy, but if you want double that, the price is probably more like 5-20 €.

However, iOS does have a ridiculous degree of sandboxing and restrictions, which sounds familiar to those who have looked into Manifest V3. An iPhone isn’t really a pocket computer any more, because there’s hardly anything you can do with it. Like, browse Xitter, have ads shoved down your throat, and pay Apple for the opportunity to suffer maximum enshittification.

If you can come up with an application so gutted that it actually runs in spite of Manifest V3 shenanigans, there’s a chance that it might also run on iOS. Turns out, UBOL does, which is really impressive considering how hostile this software environment is.

Why go through all this trouble? The people at UBO really want to block ads everywhere, even on platforms that are actively fighting against ad blocking.

Totally worth every penny. Zero cost, zero privacy.

Can you specify? Like, lite comes from “light“. What else is there to say. I think I’ve covered pretty much every angle already.

UBO lite has fewer features, and is therefore “lighter” than the normal UBO – hence the name.

On Chrome, UBO relies heavily a particular feature that is no longer available in the latest version. Google didn’t manage to get rid of UBO completely, because UBO lite was developed in response.

Regardless, you can still run full UBO in a desktop Firefox. That didn’t change at all when Google started messing around with Manifest V3. Since UBOL exists now, the devs probably thought it might be light enough to run on iOS too.

Oh yeah, so it’s a 2-for-1 deal.

In one case, your data gets sold, but in the other you get thrown out a window.

Switched to Qwant about a month ago, and it seems fine so far. I guess it’s time to expand this experiment to my other computers as well.

Thanks! Looking forward to seeing it.

Sounds like there’s a story waiting to be unleashed. Please continue.

Since it runs Android, you should be able to use any app in the store, right? So, let’s say you need to buy train tickets, take care of banking, track package deliveries, check your PUK code, troubleshoot a wifi router, control smart lights, book a time for the dentist etc. There are a variety of random things where the modern world expects you to have either Android or iOS with you, so can this phone handle those situations too?

About 10 years ago, you didn’t really bump into situations like that very often, so you could get stuff done by making a phone call, using a browser etc, but the 2020s are getting increasingly app dependent. It’s just wild how many things you can’t do these days unless you have a reasonably modern smart phone with you.

That’s why fractions suck. The difference between 1/2 and 1/3 looks small, but it’s way bigger than the difference between 1/202 and 1/203. Same goes for coffee recipes expressed using rations like that.

When it comes to tiny fractions, just go with 1E-6 style instead. So much easier to compare numbers.

Exactly. if you’re worried about random hackers getting their hands on your emails, gmail is totally good enough. If you’re worried about something else, it might not be. Depends on what exactly “keeps you awake at night”.

The real question is, where do you draw the line. You can even make a convincing case that gmail can be trusted with your data. Actually, many people feel that way, so it’s not a bizarre or rare stance. Alternatively, you can also say that self hosting everything is the only way to be sure.

Yeah the hand is way too complicated and hard to identify from far away. Also, proper identification requires some amount of wind, which is not the kind of dependency you want to integrate into your flag design. That’s why stripes are so common.

LPT: Turn safe search off, and you don’t even need the NSFW subreddits. You can search for adult anything and those results are guaranteed to contain porn. Usually, the more you scroll, more hard core it gets. When you go deep enough, you’ll eventually start finding furries too.

No. Also some crazy things like project 2025 are entirely public, so those aren’t conspiracies either. When discussing scary things like that, you can just point to the facts and calmly explain what they mean.

Yeah, friction and convenience need to be balanced. Most people don’t even think about where they should draw the line. Sparking conversation about it can be useful, because once you’ve thought about it a little bit, you can make a conscious decision to sacrifice your data for convenience purposes… or slide down the rabbit hole and become a privacy hermit. Either way, making a conscious decision is better than going with the flow.

It’s a bit risky, for sure. You just need to express your point in a calm and professional manner. Appeal to common sense or ethics, stick with the facts, and you should be able to find common ground with most people. You’ll be fine as long as you don’t use aggressive language, or go into crazy conspiracies.

It can also be a good conversation starter. Some people genuinely don’t know or care about the social media corporations spying on us. You can have some interesting conversations with them.

If I built a system like that, it would become really complicated, since I would just have to include all sorts of convoluted unicode trickery in it.

ӏ і κ е ț һ ï ʂ

Back in the day, when forums were still a thing, I dumped a bunch of binary into my signature and waited for someone to figure out what it says. Eventually, someone did go through the trouble of converting it to hex, ASCII, HTML, ROT13, BASE64 or whatever random conversions I had access to at the time. Anyway, one day I got a message about it, and I was so delighted.

Those things are really intuitive, and anyone should be able to understand them. The digital world is completely different and alien, which makes it difficult to think about. People don’t understand it, so they can’t be expected to have a rational opinion about it.

Install Warzone 2100, start poking the game files, adjust various numbers and see what happens. Give your cannons massive range, make every unit super cheap to manufacture or whatever. Your imagination is the limit. Play the game however you want. The game itself is good, but hacking it is just so much more fun.

“It’s not what it looks like! I can assure you, our relationship is entirely sexual.”

They thought of that. It has to be a video and you have to move your head around as if you’re setting up face ID. Not creepy at all. Then again, this is Meta we’re talking about, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

For a brief moment, I had a a FB/Instagram account for testing purposes. After about a week, Meta started asking to see my face on camera. Needless to say, that experiment hit a brick wall.

I was just following and liking stuff here and there. Didn’t even post anything, but apparently that was suspicious enough for Meta.

On Nebula, the channel also gets a certain share of the revenue if you watch the video on that platform instead of on YT. Some channels actually publish their videos early on Nbula, while other channels make exclusive videos too. Either way, avoiding YT, and favoring other platforms benefits everyone.

Here are my privacy/security tips roughly in the order of importance.

Unique password that have upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters. Also, most passwords are at least 16 characters long.

NextDNS on my mobile devices for ad blocking and privacy.

Linux on my laptop + Firefox and uBock Origin.

No Whatsapp, or Telegram. I prefer to use Signal. If someone insists on using some spyware messenger, I’ll just SMS them.

No Meta, Xitter or other major platforms allowed. When using social media, I don’t share anything too personal. Also, no photos of me or anyone I know.

There are also lots of smaller video platforms built by youtubers. They publish advertiser friendly (censored) videos on YT, but put the real versions on their own platform. This way, fans can support their favorite channels, and get to see videos that are too cool for YT.

You see, the point is that privacy is really nice to have. However, it’s not worth it when the price you pay is your mental balance and serenity. There are easier and cheaper bits of privacy you can pursue, but you need to know where to draw the line. Some things just come with an unacceptable price. Maybe GPT is like that in your case.

Sounds like you might be sacrificing your mental wellbeing for some privacy gains. You should probably consider your priorities. Which one comes first?