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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ages ago, when Chrome was still a new kid on the block, I read an article about it. Turns out, this browser is spying on you so hard that it made me, nope out immediately. Somehow, people missed that article, and others like it, and pretty much everyone started using Chrome on their computer (see also: pro-mobile era).
It works! I typed in “blockbuster” adjusted upload time filter to “today” and started scrolling. Just scroll past anything that is less than 1 h long, and you’ll find movies pretty easily.
Before long, I found a few movies that had very special names like: “Rotten Tomatoes Full Movie | Blockbuster Movie 2025 | Action Movies Hollywood 2025 in English 2160p” or “60’s Sci-fi | The Day Mars Invaded Earth | Full Movie”. I also tried a bunch of other related keywords like: “movie”, “hollywood” and “scifi”. Surprisingly, finding bollywood movies is very easy.
The only problem is that you’ll never know what you’ll find. If you want to watch jurassic park, you could search for “dinosaur movie”, but I couldn’t make that work. Searching by genre seems to work reasonably well, but you need to get creative with the keywords.
When you do find a movie, copy the name into a text file and start collecting these silly names. Pretty soon you’ll notice which words appear frequently, so start searching for those. There’s no single universal word that always works. Here’s are a few words that seems to work for me: Rotten Tomatoes, Full Movie, film, blockbuster, action movie, hollywood, 2160p, adventure, Thriller, mystery movie, free movie
Close the door, turn off the lights, wear earbuds, pull a duvet over your head. Works every time. Might look a bit suspicious, but at least it’s private.
Seriously though, it’s getting pretty bad. I’m currently shifting my video watching habits away from YT. I have a feeling that sooner rather than later I may have to quit YT completely.
If you’ve never thought about threat models, here are some questions to get you started.
- List the assets that require protection. (Like credit card info)
- Who might want to gain access to those assets? (e.g. Hackers)
- How can you mitigate the risks? (Updates)
You may have a lot to say, so write things down to clarify your thoughts. Once your threat model document is complete, it will be easier for you to figure it which tools you really need, and which ones are only nice to have.
It really depends on your situation and the kinds of threats you’re trying to mitigate. If you need to have a spyTV, spyPhone, a spyPad or something similar in your life, using DNS filtering may be an appealing option. Ideally, you would have zero iOS or Android devices in your household, but life isn’t ideal.
Thanks. That was a good summary, and I appreciate that you brought up threat models.
People should think about what kinds of threats are worth their time and money. If that list of threats contains something where a VPN can help, you should totally consider getting a VPN. If your threat model doesn’t include things like that, VPN might not be the solution you’re looking for.
Brining up trust was another good point. People should think about how much they trust their ISP or some VPN company. Obviously, you can’t trust every VPN company out there, but where you draw the line is closely connected to your threat model. For example, if you are a journalist in dangerous country, picking the right company is a matter of life and death. If you are in a safer environment, your threat model is probably very chill by comparison, so you might be fine with some less secure options.
History repeats itself.
Some Old Thing (software/website/service/whatever) becomes bad, and people get really upset. Initially, many say that SOT is going to die. Techies switch from SOT to New Great Thing. For a while, techies at NGT celebrate and pat each other on the back for making this brilliant move.
Meanwhile, normies at SOT continue to use it. They hate it at first or even complain about it, but eventually they get used to how bad SOT is. Every now and then, they hear about NGT, but they just can’t switch because reasons.
After a few years it’s clear that, SOT hasn’t died yet, but also continues to have quite a few users too. Some people end up using both, while a small group of people vow to never touch SOT ever again. SOT and NGT both continue to exist, because apparently there are enough users for both.
I’ve seen these things happen so many times, that it’s about time to point out that there’s a pattern. Just look back at any tech controversy over the past 30 years and you can see it usually follows this pattern pretty well.
The tin can phone inherently provides end-to-end encryption. The acoustic signals, which are essentially longitudinal mechanical vibrations, travel directly through a taut string or wire. This physical medium ensures that the sound waves are converted into mechanical vibrations at the transmitting end and reconverted into sound at the receiving end, effectively eliminating any possibility of electronic eavesdropping or interception.
One of the most significant advantages of the tin can phone is its complete absence of a digital footprint. Unlike modern telecommunication devices that rely on electronic signals and data packets, tin can phone operates purely on mechanical principles. This means there are no digital records, metadata, or logs that can be hacked, traced, or subpoenaed.
The simplicity of the tin can phone renders it immune to a wide array of cyber threats. There are no software vulnerabilities, no firmware to update, and no risk of malware or ransomware attacks. The device’s operation is entirely analog, relying on the physical properties of sound waves and mechanical vibrations, making it impervious to digital exploits.
The physical nature of the tin can phone also contributes to its security. The string must be kept taut for effective communication, and any attempt to tap into the line would be immediately noticeable due to the loss of tension and degradation of sound quality. This provides a built-in tamper-evident feature, ensuring that any unauthorized access attempts are easily detected. On top of that, if someone attempts a man in the middle attack, you should be able to see it happening during the call and act accordingly before any sensitive data gets exposed.
The operational simplicity of the string and cans phone is another layer of security. With no complex interfaces or user authentication mechanisms, the risk of user error leading to security breaches is virtually nonexistent.
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.