I don’t see ads but if I were to, and despite all my precautions some would be on topic based on my past behavior I would methodically dissect to find out the leak. Namely I would try to automate the process :
- identify a place showing ads
- take an action, e.g. search or browser, on a verifiable unique topic (in order to prevent from generic suggestions, e.g medication during flu season)
- verify if the ads become relevant
- enable/disable any of the tools used, repeat
FWIW before whine about the lack of editing or digitization : take of photo of the result on your phone, auto-upload to your desktop or even server and voila, a proper process to have your cake and eat it too.
I very often take a basic A4 piece of paper, or even a napkin, whatever is around really, then sketch to summarize a complex situation, snap a pic and send it to myself. Amazing way to think, very flexible and intuitive, at basically no cost and entirely private. Sure you still have to re-draw it after, IF you want to, but typically the idea itself is already on a substrate, maybe that’s enough. If you want to edit it… guess what, you can edit the photo itself, no need to vectorize it first. Paper is great.
Pretty much all open hardware devices should be on such a list, e.g.
- NitroKey for both authentication tokens and storage (of e.g ssh keys)
- PGB-1 (based on RP2040) or Haxophone (based on RPi Zero) for music
- Precursor for token and dev (via its own FPGA)
so check CrowdSupply for more of such things.
I’d also add reMarkable. Sure you can use their cloud but you do NOT have to. It means you have your own Linux e-reader but also sketchpad entirely offline. You can work and sync with ssh or rsync and even setup your own cloud, cf https://github.com/ddvk/rmfakecloud . If you want something more open from the start check the PineNote but it’s harder to get and you have to tinker a bit more.
credit cards, debit cards, and now cashless vendors
FWIW in Belgium you can get prepaid nameless cards. The post and their bank partner know it’s yours (due to KYC) but not the shops and for online shops you can use drop boxes.
For membership cards I specifically reject because of that. It’s optional though so IMHO it’s precisely the easiest thing to escape, just say no.
FWIW in Brussels there are anonymous public transport cards. You can top up your card but it’s not attached to your name or ID. If you lose it though, it’s like cash, you can safely assume nobody will give it back because they can’t. Most people I know do not use them but maybe they do not even know it’s an option.
Sidetracked a bit but last week I was in the UK. I tried to visit a website (not porn actually, just private messaging on BlueSky) and it asked to verify my age. Initially I thought “Meh… OK… let’s see the process” which then lead to installing an app maybe (I’m not sure tbh as I was in rush). Clearly I didn’t want to do it because the DM was potentially urgent (scheduling to meet someone ASAP) … so what did I do? I switched from my browser to my VPN, connected from Austria, refreshed… no age verification. It took me a grand total of 5s to bypass the system.
TL;DR: maybe you can actually escape even though you are convinced you can’t.
- you owning a domain, e.g. familyname.potato , does not prevent you from owning 10 other domains. How you chose to use each is up to you. With whom you share each also.
- which services? I don’t understand. I typically use e.g. ProtonMail on my domain but I can have for each a different mail provider. I don’t see what somebody knowing which service uses is a problem as long as that service is secure.
- I’ve been using my own domain for years, maybe a decade now (can’t recall tbh) and had 0 problems, including with banking and public administration. Nobody knows even what it is or who owns what, just that it works.
- no idea, I know I’d use a free ProtonMail account if I needed sth disconnected from everything else
- your CV should be something public anyway, you’re trying to prove your are somebody with skills they can trust. If you have problems linking your skills with your identity something feels off. I have 0 problem saying I can do some locking picking publicly. Anyway your CV is also a temporary document. If somebody doesn’t visit your domain the moment they open your CV, chances are that years later it’s entirely irrelevant.
- yes, I have multiple domains because I don’t have to have 1 identity. I can share only professional things with you and personal things with others, or vice versa. Having different domains, and subdomains, for that help me doing so.
Tracking from WHOM and thus WHY should be the question.
It’s different to be tracked for profit, e.g. Google or Meta, versus for political or corporate espionage purposes.
The former is basically volunteering information through bad practices. Those companies do NOT care about “you” as an individual. In fact they arguably do not even know who you are. Avoiding their services is basically enough. It might be inconvenient but it’s easy : just do not.
The later is a totally different beast. If somehow the FSB, because you criticized Putin, or NSO Group, for something similar or because you have engineer something strategic to a business competitor who is a client of theirs, then you will be specifically targeted. This is an entirely different situation and IMHO radically more demanding. You basically don’t have to just care about privacy good practices, which is enough for the former, but rather know the state of the art of security.
So… assuming you “just” worry about surveillance capitalism and hopefully live in a jurisdiction benefiting from the Brussels effect with e.g GDPR related laws, either way is fine.
Thanks for sharing and the clarifications. I do think both the philosophy behind this and the technological choices are right but it’s also true that “How many people?” can it handle is important for people who want to actually try and onboard others. It’s one thing to try alone but as long as we ask others to join, knowing what the limits are makes everybody more understanding.
much procesing could it handle though? If it is only a handful of friends then what makes it better than Signal?
I don’t actually know the project but I think your mindset here is (and correct me if I’m wrong) “Does it scale?” whereas the mindset of this project, based on the name itself and the “small scale” in the description, is “no, it does not scale and that’s A-OK”.
Well you already have a desktop so the added value is that once you get the content out of the disk you don’t need them anymore. You can just store them if you want but not need to play with the physical thing, neither DVD nor player.
I mean if you particularly enjoy very specific things, e.g. bonus, or the physical feeling of the media (why not, harder to justify than with e.g. vinyl but still fine) you can still do that but otherwise the physical media isn’t actually needed anymore.
FWIW I had similar concerns and here is my suggestion :
- no physical player or even DVDs… just get DRM-free files
- if you still do want to do the whole thing offline I bought a brand new 20€ DVD player with USB input to plug on my Linux computer
- I then installed
dvdbackup - use it to get VOD files
- read directly with e.g
vlc - compress with
ffmpeg
- I then installed
Might sound complicated and first time maybe it took me 1h to setup, now I put a DVD in, start my script and 15min later I have a video.mp4 with everything I need. I can play it locally, share on LAN with miniDLNA and let any other device (phones, video projector with VLC, etc) play the content.
I then frequently go to my public local media library, get the content I need legally and the right holders get their cut, no data going to BigTech platforms.
I actually asked this morning at the post office specifically thinking about your remarks.
They do sell non denominative credit cards here. So your card is KYC (I imagine, I don’t think it’s possible to go around that) and they know who you are, ID and all, but stores, online or not, have no name associated to it.
Regarding online stores I do again advise to be cautious and not assume that because a contact field is there, it is mandatory. Yes it might be important for deliveries of parcels but that’s a moot point if delivery happens to a 24/7 box.
IRL : I’d argue most security cameras are, AFAIK, on closed circuits. I don’t think they can upload the data somewhere nor keep it for a long time. Also it takes quite a bit of power to process so unless there is a good reason for it, I doubt anybody nor even a computer vision algorithm, will process it to the point of face recognition.
Online : virtual credit card (not sure if they need your name) + PO box, post office or next door store compatible with the online shop. Most online shop I know do NOT require a mobile phone number. They might have a field for it but they are not using it for e.g. 2FA so if you were, by mistake or not, to put a random number I don’t think it would matter.
So at least some of the constraints can be changed.
You don’t have to trust F-Droid, you can verify that it’s the same build as the one from the original developer assuming they have done things right. I believe a good entry point is https://f-droid.org/en/2025/05/21/making-reproducible-builds-visible.html
I personally trust F-Droid and I believe their verification process with steps like https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/ is matching my needs. It’s not for everyone but I like it.
Ah, worry not only PeerTube takes bandwidth basically and that’s hopefully mostly distributed back per people watching!
PS: making this list (via docker ps) made me think I should generate the visuals of https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/MyCloudTransition programmatically. Right now it’s done manually via https://fabien.benetou.fr/Infrastructure/GraphReverseProxyNewShell as GraphViz as you can see https://fabien.benetou.fr/Infrastructure/GraphReverseProxyNewShell?action=source but it could be generated on every update instead.
Thanks for forcing me to stop back. I’ll consider it.
services
- gitea (forge)
- pmwikis (PIM) e.g. fabien.benetou.fr including… notes on self-hosting
- affine
- wg-easy (WireGuard, VPN)
- copyparty (prototype collaborative filesharing)
- ntfy (notifications)
- peertube (videos) e.g. video.benetou.fr
- Jitsi Meet (video meetings)
- immers (federated Metaverse, really)
- WebDAV (files)
- networked-aframe (live collaboration in XR)
- open-easyrtc
- telegram-pim-bot
- transmission (seeding linux ISOs)
- fireflyiii
meta
- nginx (reverse proxy)
- grafana
- cadvisor
- pushgateway
- prometheus
- caddy
- nodeexporter
- alertmanager
also locally (and beyond thanks to WireGuard)
- HomeAssistant
- Immich
- miniDLNA
Right… and to be clear every single Microsoft product can do so too. In fact every single proprietary software can do that. If you value your privacy and nobody can audit the code, you should assume it’s being used to report your behavior. It might be aggregated, it might be anonymized, but it might not be and it might be to your boss.
That’s the “beauty” of closed source : you do not know, so you should assume the worst.
Edit : “Oh but what about GDPR?” true, well check the ToS and probably find that data is being collected for “quality service and potentially other uses (including but not limited to AI)” in the fine prints.
My recommendation is to keep both separate. Your work phone should NEVER be your personal phone.
Use you work phone at work or on a mission. Not outside, not at home, it does not matter what your contract says, what the law says is what’s important (so check locally, depends on jurisdictions).
Now IMHO both options such. Apple is closed source and Android provided by work is not customizable so you have no control over. If you want a more radically approach and are serious about privacy, reconsider both.
Right, I still don’t understand how it relates to privacy though unless either it makes either fingerprinting easier (which I imagine could be limited if the UserAgent can be changed) or that the OS itself leaks information back, but at this point it wouldn’t matter anyway if you don’t trust the OS, so can you please explain specifically what information would be leaked and how, again as opposed to an independent engine being used?
Here is how I did it https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/online-hygiene/src/branch/master/index.js namely a local NodeJS Web server tracking my habits.
You can see the default configuration at https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/online-hygiene/src/branch/master/index.js#L52-L65
{id:"twitter",pattern:/.*twitter\.com.*/,perHour:1,perDay:12},
{id:"proton",pattern:/.*proton\.me.*/,perHour:6,perDay:6*12},
{id:"yt",pattern:/https:\/\/www\.youtube\.com.*/,perHour:2,perDay:12}, // allow for redirection
{id:"yts",pattern:/https:\/\/youtube\.com.*/,perHour:2,perDay:12}, // allow for redirection, consider merged IDs
{id:"linkedin",pattern:/.*linkedin\.com.*/,perHour:1,perDay:12},
{id:"reddit",pattern:/.*reddit\.com.*/,perHour:3,perDay:12,redirect:'https://lemmy.world/'}, // redirection then enough to read private messages
// reconsider the tridactyl check for permanently open pages, e.g TabEnter rather than DocStart
{id:"element",pattern:/.*element\.io.*/,perHour:1,perDay:12},
{id:"discord",pattern:/.*discord\.com.*/,perHour:1,perDay:12},
In retrospect I should make available outside thus work on my mobile too when I’m not on my LAN, created https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/online-hygiene/issues/3 accordingly.
Anyway what is fascinating IMHO in term of minimalism is that… I’m NOT actually using it anymore. Why? Well because the habits is now, roughly, ingrained. I don’t use it because it became mostly pointless.
That’s I’d argue what one should think of in terms of minimalism. Namely one provides a scaffolding that, yes, as others pointed out, might initially look like MORE work or tools than the typical situation. Yet, this only showcases how terrible the “normal” situation is. Once new habits are formed then remove the scaffolding and enjoy minimalism in a way most people expect, namely visibly less.
The problem though is that until that final step, it looks like more, BUT during that final step, it looks obvious to others, whereas they entirely miss the process that lead to it.
I haven’t watch the video (because YouTube) but knowing how easy it is to unlock modern cars with the right tools, namely https://www.404media.co/inside-the-underground-trade-of-flipper-zero-tech-to-break-into-cars/ and knowing ICE does both have a budget and a “license” not to care for the lawful process I can definitely imagine them doing it.
TL;DR: definitely feasible, no idea if actually done.
If there was no user interaction needed I’d agree but here, AFAICT, the user still needs to ask. If it’s truly entirely pointless then once the novelty fades away it won’t be used which deprived of precious data points, namely user feedback. For non interactive use I imagine streaming provides already a lot.
I use
- ProtonVPN mostly to bypass geoblocking or when specific Torrent trackers demand VPNs
- WireGuard self-hosted mostly to reach own devices outside my LAN
- TailScale also for self-hosting access but I pretty much migrated everything to WG
- ssh tunneling (arguably not VPN but still convenient)
I also use split tunneling, inclusive (e.g. everything but Firefox) or exclusive (e.g. only qbittorrent) whenever I don’t want to tunnel all my traffic.
Reposting from my comment https://lemmy.world/post/37758804/20109240 which I recommend to check, as someone did a test with Dark Souls 1 and IMHO was unsurprisingly disappointing, namely it does recognize the game (honestly, not bad) and get the right boss (which name is literally on screen) and make kind of sometimes useful suggestions. But like… what’s the point? Who would play a game and… NOT know its name? Or not be able to search based on a boss name or a weapon name with existing dedicated good online guides?
Anyway… if you still want to try yourself WITHOUT relying on Microsoft consider :
"If someone somehow wants to test this locally I suggest
- install locally a vision model, e.g. Moondream (which Ollama supports but alternatives too), then
- take a screenshot of your game,
- write a prompt like “How can I play this game better”
- query the vision model with the image and your prompt
marvel at how pointless and costly the whole setup is and how a basic query on e.g. DuckDuckGo with “game name” + prompt would yield way WAY better results from actual human, uninstall the whole, keep on playing with your actual brain.
At least now you can say you tried before you complain, rightfully, that it sucks.
For more check https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence
PS: I didn’t actually try this, I’m too lazy for that right how but feel free to report back if you do!
Edit : 2 potential optimization (despite not being sure it ever makes sense in the first place!)
- do so automatically, e.g. ~/gaming_screenshots directory (via e.g.
Spectacleshortcut) monitored viainotifythennotify-sendthe suggestion, thus stay in game during the whole process - fine tune on specific visual datasets, e.g. rely on fextra as mentioned in https://lemmy.world/post/37758804/20113877
" and again feel free to share back results.
reMarkable isn’t about replacing books. You can have a PocketBook with KOReader for 120EUR. It’s not a price per book comparison, IMHO it’s a price per sketch and thus ideas, work, presentations, etc because that’s where reMarkable is unique, low latency e-ink writing.
For “just” reading there are plenty of alternatives, including cheaper alternatives.