kyub

kyub, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Please don’t use Opera (or any other proprietary browser). It contains a lot of on-by-default spyware and it’s hard or impossible to disable everything.

kuketz-blog.de/opera-datensendeverhalten-desktop-… (post in German, but you can see what the browser transmits. It’s a lot. Including the domains of all sites you visit). The best way to increase your privacy with Opera is to uninstall it. Apparently, this is how they make their money nowadays. They used to sell their browser, but it’s free since a while. So users pay with their data.

Also, try not to use Chromium based browsers (not even if they are purely open source, based on the open source Chromium base). Its development is very much steered by Google and their interests and you can see the effects e.g. with their Manifest v3 which cripples ad blocking extensions, for example.

kyub, 10 months ago

Tor browser for mostly anonymous browsing, Mullvad browser as default non-Tor browser (it’s basically an open source Firefox fork made by Mullvad and the Tor team), but I also still have a regular Firefox configured with Arkenfox’ user.js and some important extensions, as well as a Chromium with zero protections except uBlock Origin. I switch between those browsers depending on use case. Each browser has a different theme to make them easily distinguishable from each other, the “insecure” browsers which I only use for rare exceptions (websites misbehaving in any other browser) have a red-like color. All browsers are being run sandboxed.

On mobile: Tor browser, Bromite and Vanadium.

kyub, 10 months ago

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.

kyub, 10 months ago

SuSE @ 1999, then Slackware in the same year.

Tried SuSE (bought as a box) as an alternative to the annoying, unstable and insecure Windows 9x, it was also the time when Linux as an alternative desktop OS was starting to get hyped in the media. Especially in regards to stability and security. Well, it wasn’t hard to beat Win9x in those areas. Tried it a bit, didn’t like it that much (I think it was KDE 1.x) and also didn’t understand much of it. I was still intrigued though and wanted to really learn it starting from the commandline, but I felt I couldn’t with all the SuSE stuff like YaST being preinstalled.

So I bought a big book (by Michael Kofler), it was the de facto standard book for really learning Linux from the ground up back then. And I chose a distribution which would be much more minimalistic (because I felt that makes it easier to learn). So I installed Slackware. I used it for like 3 years and learned a lot (all the basics), it was a hard journey though and other distros started appearing and they promised to be more modern or better than Slackware.

So I tried Debian next, then Crux, then Arch. This was all around 2002-2006. I can’t remember exactly how long I used each, but I do know I’ve used Slack for quite a lot, then Debian rather shortly, then Crux also not very long (basically I just wanted to test a source based distro but compile times were annoyingly long back in the day), and then it was Arch all the way. Arch was fast, rather simple, always up to date, and it had the great AUR. I didn’t ever look back.

I did take a break from Linux as my primary OS from approximately 2009 to 2017, mostly due to playing a ton of video games (Windows only, not runnable at all on Linux back then) and also due to my career path making me work with lots of Windows Servers, Powershell and other Microsoft stuff.

Since about 2017/2018 I’m back to Linux as primary OS (Arch, again) and haven’t looked back since. Even managed to fully delete all physical Windows partitions now (I only keep it in a VM in case I need to test something).

I’m testing NixOS on my notebook currently, it seems to be “the future”, but my main desktop will probably stay Arch for a bit longer still.

Looking back at using Slackware early on, I don’t regret it, since I learned a ton, but it was tough using Slackware around the 2000s. I still remember a lot of fighting with programs which wouldn’t compile due to dependency errors or other compilation errors. And a lot of Google searches for various compilation errors leading to rare and hard to understand solutions found in random forum posts. Compared to that, any Linux distro feels like mainstream these days. But it was an efficient way to learn.

kyub, 10 months ago

Nix

kyub, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Open source software usually doesn’t do any kind of tracking or telemetry. Sometimes it is there but then it’s usually opt-in (off by default unless you change it). Most Linux distros contain a huge amount of open source software. So all the code is in the open (which means usually no shady things going on, because a lot of eyes are looking at that code) and there’s often not even an incentive for the developers to gain money directly from the users, except through donations. So if you really like some open source project, please do contribute or donate to it.

So in the end it doesn’t really matter which distro, they all will be MASSIVELY more privacy friendly than any closed source OS like Windows, OSX iOS, or proprietary Android, although to maximize your “chances” so to speak you can go for a purely community-run distro not backed by any company (Ubuntu is backed by Canonical, Fedora is backed by Red Hat, OpenSuSE is backed by SuSE, these are the three big distros with a commercial background. I’m not saying they do violate your privacy currently, but they at least have a greater tendency to do so, because data gathered can be sold, so it might be a business incentive for them. Ubuntu sent users’ search queries to Amazon in the past to gain some more money, but the community outrage caused them to remove this anti-feature afterwards again. Fedora is currently proposing to introduce opt-out (on-by-default) telemetry, it’s not decided yet, but it’s a bit worrying still. So you see, such distros might not be the best choice for “maximum” privacy. But compared to Windows or OSX they’re still magnitutes of miles ahead.

For community-run distros, you can check out e.g. Debian or Arch Linux, or any distro based upon them. For Debian specifially, I recommend running its “testing” branch, because it’s more up to date. Don’t worry about the label - it’s still rock solid stable, because Debian has very rigid testing requirements. They test more and longer than probably any other distro, which means Debian “stable” is very well tested, but also quite outdated. To alleviate that a bit, you can use the “testing” branch. You could even use the “unstable” branch for even more up to date packages, but there’s at least a chance that you get some package dependency problems every once in a while or so, so not recommended for a beginner. Debian is also quite easy to get into nowadays, though maybe not as easy as some of the Ubuntu-based distros. Linux Mint (normally Ubuntu-based) also has a Debian-based edition these days, and Linux Mint is a great distro for beginners. Arch is hard to get into but great for modern desktop usage or gaming because it’s always super up to date. You can also check out EndeavourOS, an Arch-based clone with easier installation. Or just use any distro, really, it’s not that big of a deal currently. They all behave quite well. Mint, Kubuntu or Fedora are good starting points for beginners.

If you have to use a public computer temporarily, there’s really only one choice for a private usage in that scenario: Tails. Put it on a USB stick and use it whenever you’re on an “unsafe” computer. Tails ensures that ALL traffic will be routed through Tor so no one on the local network (or the web, for that matter) can sniff out your data transfers, among other things it does to enable anonymous computer usage (e.g. it leaves behind no logs, doesn’t save any info about your previous sessions, and so on).

kyub, 10 months ago

There seems to be a lack of good basic computer science education unfortunately. Schools and so on never caught up with the speed of technological advance. And back when I was in school, teachers taught things like “How do I use formulas in MS Excel” in computer science. It’s probably still that way, so it’s not neutral at all, instead you’re learning how to use specific software products (often, Microsoft’s). So relying on school education alone may be hopeless. But you can always learn for yourself or from others.

kyub, 10 months ago

Win7 was also the last “neutral” version of Windows in terms of integrated spyware (“telemetry”) features (or rather, the lack thereof). Since Win8, this OS truly rolls downhill in many aspects. Since Win10, with greater speed.

kyub, 10 months ago

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.

kyub, 10 months ago

The right way to implement telemetry:

• It’s off by default (opt-in). To increase visibility of this option, it’s OK to ask the user via popup, during setup, or similar, whether he would like to turn it on (shortly list the advantages)
• Once it’s on, the user should be informed BEFORE each upload takes place about the exact content which should be uploaded, and asked whether he wants to send it (Y/N)
• Transmission must only contain truly necessary data
• Transmission must be encrypted

kyub, 10 months ago

Already did. Purged all my Reddit bookmarks and account.

Generally: You have to be the change you want to see in the world. If you want to change others, change yourself first. I don’t think the mindset “I need to reach that big number of people over there so I’ll just be over there as well to teach them” works, or leads to the goal you want. Even though it seems reasonable at first glance. This mindset just leads to you giving the other people AND yourself more reason to never leave from there. Which is contrary to what you want. If you want others to switch to better alternatives, move yourself first, help grow the alternatives, and they will sooner or later also become interested in joining. Things like the latest Reddit and Twitter fiascos also show that no huge proprietary social media platform rules forever. The time to change to better alternatives has never been better than now.

kyub, 10 months ago

Arch, Debian, NixOS, Fedora Silverblue, Raspbian, GrapheneOS[Android]