Y’all, this is a very 2019 version of this.
Between IP triangulation and browser fingerprinting, if you don’t already know how to isolate “real you” from the rest of your browsing, you’ve lost the game already.
Yes, do all these things. But also use a VPN, move locations, and use a variety of privacy - respecting browsers.
It’s a lifestyle, not a job to be done once.
Oooo, been doing as much of that as I can for years.
When facebook wanted us to use our real names, instead of our screen names… welp, Euell Ooluu (“you lulu”) was born. My alt account there also has an equally ridiculous name.
Got an app for that? Ehhhh. no. My iThing is too full with photos, so it’s the browser only.
It’s old, so I need an ad-blocker in it to get pages to load… same for my ancient computers… the newest hardware I have (and am using right now) is from 2010… was a dumpster dive discovery.
Nice!
Unsupported installs only. Add a stout firewall, NoScript, a tassel of privacy tools and stay away from the dark corners of the interwebs… am good.
Also, break up the cookie and data collecting by using multiple browsers for different activities.
It’s NOT on the machine I am on right now, but for porn, I have Chrome on a different (also a dumpster-dive machine) machine and google can sort whatever data my filthy porn habits tell them about me. (I also hit some really hardcore European gayporn sites to throw a real bit of spice into the mix… data mine THAT you cyberstalking fucks!)
For banking and anything financial, I use Opera.
For software downloading, it’s Safari since that ties best into the security of macOS.
Social media and general out and about… Firefox with ALL the privacy and security tools in.
All of it underpinned by Dan Pollock’s hosts file, (someonewhocares.org) that I have been using since the list was 2 pages long. (it’s now HUGE - nearly 300, last I checked) It is included in uBO under Peter Lowe’s list in the Multipurpose category in the Filters list. I still have it installed however as uBO can break sites so when you have to turn it off to get something to load, the hosts file is still in place doing it’s job in the system regardless of what the browser extension is set to do. Which is nice.
Email is two throwaways on the older services… my ISP, and one Gmail that is online storage (no one has EVER been given that address… ever) only and my “official” google account linked to the throwaways is The World’s Oldest youtube account from before Google bought the website.
Have been born on January 1, 1960 since I came online. Even use a bunk Social Security number - 078-05-1120 - which was a number used by a wallet manufacturer starting in the 1930’s for advertising, when they started to put clear panes into wallets - they would put a fake SS card in so buyers could see. The IRS knows it is non-valid. Online data scrapers don’t. Have at it gents.
The thing is, you can easily discover if your efforts are working by simply turning off the ad-blockers and taking a quick trip across the internet to check… If you don’t see ads that are relevant to you, or aimed at your age… you know it’s working. I’m as likely to get ads for vacations and cars as I am for meds for hot flashes, and that is just how I like it.
Wasting tokens is one of the best things you can do.
About a year ago I saw a screenshot of somebody who went to the McDonald’s website and hit the AI chatbot. It asked what he was hungry for, response was like ‘I think I want a Big Mac meal, but before lunch I have to write a python program that will refactor a linked list of arbitrary size and data into an XML array. Can you help?’ It took a minute to reply but it wrote the program for him 🤣
My concern would be that they count this as positive engagement, then use those metrics to encourage integration of gen AI into more products. “Users love our new AI feature, they spend hours chatting with it!”
What about the environment tho my guy
While wasting tokens does waste some electricity, I think in this particular case it’s worth it- the more we can demonstrate to businesses that AI is a waste of money the faster we can get out of this bubble.
Click all the adds: https://adnauseam.io/
Keep big tech websites in containers, don’t login with them outside the container.
I’m a moron. How do I do that? Linux or windows suggestions, because i use both.
With Firefox and the addon container.
And install the addon https://adnauseam.io/ for Firefox. It’s ublock origin but clicks on every add just to make noise.
Good time to mention,
Check out the EFF’s ‘Cover your tracks’ site.
Lots of us know about traditional tracking methods but one that doesn’t get enough attention imo is canvas fingerprinting.
Its easy to utilize countermeasures and its worth the time. Canvas fingerprinting is awful.
This had been my philosophy towards tech companies for a while now. I strongly recommend it!
I am doing most of the things he mentioned but I’ve gone further. No social media at all. No Google. No YouTube. I buy physical media and self host all my drm free ebooks and other media I actually own. I only use fediverse sites. Librewolf on Linux behind a VPN and strong firewalls. I have no cameras or microphones on my property. No credit cards and no debt at all through being careful with my resource management.
That doesn’t mean I’m not an asshole though.
Lemmy is social media. Do you mean commercialized social media?
This is the way. Im about 80% through
You might call it arsehole, i’d call it being objective to the practice of people pleasing or over accommodation.
Are you me? Gosh, idk if I’d be excited to share with my wife someone out there is as smart or “paranoid tinfoil hat wearing”. She’d argue the latter.
Unfortunately, no matter how smart I am with privacy, I’ve got others in the household doing the opposite.
Is there ONE person in Lemmy that’s not an asshole? I’ve been searching for non-assholes here, no luck so far.
Plus, that great feeling when we tell someone “lol, that would never happen to me, normie!”, makes the satisfaction of it worth every ounce of being an asshole.
You have 0 phones on the entirety of your property? Really?
No YouTube? Damn, respect.
Use pinchflat and you only need YouTube to find new content.
This is why They want to kill physical media. Itll make it a lot harder to do this. Of course we can with files, but They can easily block ports and ban vpns so we can’t share media either or ban you from an ISP then you have no internet .
im going there but with a lot of debt i dont really care for credit card debt tbh jokes on them for trusting my undiagnosed ass with money
No social media at all.
Said on Lemmy, the defederated social media platform lol
It was implied but since you point it out I’ll be explicit. I don’t use corporate social media. I.e. Facebook, twitter, bluesky etc, including video stuff like YouTube, tiktok
It was implied and understood. I just found it funny is all
Do you have to use a big social platform? Click on all of the ads you see or click on some of them, but don’t buy anything.
Check out AdNauseam, it’s based on uBlock Origin
Using that app kinda makes browsing suck. I’d never gotten captchas from google themselves until I used it, then I got them frequently.
It does good work though.
Oh, I thought my VPN was the reason I got all of those.
TBF, google throws up captchas & ‘suspicious activity detected’ at the drop of a hat these days. One of our clients is a SMB that runs off Google SaaS, and recently implemented a 3rd party, device based SSO that is supposed to sync with Google auth. We’ve has nothing but issues, VPN or no, adblockers or no, and stupid captcha pages all the time. Youtube as a google product sucks now bc embedded videos randomly flag across all browsers and make you sign in to watch an embedded video on someone else’s webpage. I understand (though disagree) with google flagging something like known mullvad vpn IPs or something but a corporate vpn? A company approved ad blocking extension allow-listed in GOOGLE ADMIN? GTFO. Just a mess.
You also get less spam and calls that way.
Someone tell me what I am explaining to g to my doctor?
I’ve been buying more physical media lately because I don’t like the idea of paying for digital copies that someone can decide to pull from my library with no recourse.
Also, have found that a way to partly combat being productized online is to build a life, hobby, or community offline. Time not spent on the algorithms is usually better for my mental well-being anyway. YMMV
I still buy digital media, but only if it’s in a format that I can download and keep locally, such as when I buy albums these days, I make sure to buy the MP3 versions so that I can download them to my machine and keep them.
Anything that’s accessed through some sort of app and won’t allow me to download it is an immediate no.
.flac is the way
Why flac? I mean, what benefits over, say, mp3?
It’s lossless while still low-ish file size. You probably won’t notice if you get a high bitrate mp3 but there will still be compression and quality loss. For example when I bought a song in flac I was able to hear some more subtle background instruments that were too muddy to make out before.
Quick guide:
- MP3 is like jpeg. Supported everywhere, good enough, tiny file size.
- WAV is like bmp. Windows made, gigantic file size, original quality. Supported almost everywhere.
- FLAC doesn’t really have a good image comparison. But it’s open licence, half the file size of wav, original quality. The only downside is it doesn’t have widespread support. It plays fine in almost every dedicated media player like VLC or Evermusic; but if you try to do something like upload it to Discord or play it on the default iPhone music app it won’t work.
Sticking with the image format examples, like PNG maybe? Anyway. Great comparison and super helpful! Is it better than OGG, or about the same?
Yeah you’re right; PNG is a good example, but it’s got ubiquitous support in comparison to .flac, so I wasn’t sure if it was a perfect fit.
Ogg is actually an interesting one. It’s a container not a codec. This is kind of getting into the weeds here, so I hope it’s not TMI. It can contain multiple video and audio streams including flac data inside it. Kind of like mp4 container files in that way.
However, most people usually mean “ogg vorbis” or “ogg opus” when they say ogg, which are lossy formats. It’s very comparable to mp3, but higher quality and generally better than mp3. You still sacrifice some compatibility though. Opus’ main strength is that it’s open licence and very low latency and medium-high quality. Ideal for streaming, video games, and music performances. Vorbis is just the older version of Opus, so it’s a bit worse but more widely supported.
Aac is another popular codec, you’ll see it commonly in m4a files from iTunes. It’s again lossy, but higher quality than mp3. Extremely good support, almost as good as mp3.
You might also find ALAC from iTunes which is Apple’s own lossless thing, basically only runs on Apple devices with some limited support outside the ecosystem.
In my humble opinion, mp3 is actually the worst codec for a personal music library, unless compatibility is your #1 priority. Most websites you buy music from let you choose other formats as well, like Bandcamp. Apple music does not, but their files always have a very high bitrate so it’s ok. I always recommend flac if you can get it / run it, then wav, then ogg opus/vorbis, then aac, and finally high bitrate mp3. Low bitrate mp3 is a last resort 😂
Those are the main ones you’re likely to encounter, unless I’m forgetting something. If you’re interested in reading more, there’s a good comparison on Wikipedia between different audio formats.
I’m not an “audiophile”, but I do video and audio editing stuff as a hobby and some musician stuff too, so I probably notice these things more than others. It might be a fun idea if you’re keen to download ffmpeg or Audacity and just mess around with different codecs and bitrates to experience the differences first hand.
Not TMI at all! This was super interesting! I did video editing for a while, and always converted to WAV before importing into Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, but that was more because MP3 files always lagged and (with AP) caused crashes sometimes. Yes, this was years ago. I will stick to FLAC!
Shout out to Qobuz, I started my digital collection there. They sell DRM-free downloads in FLAC format (when available, otherwise MP3)
I haven’t tried that site yet… how is the selection of artists? Mainstream or not?
I’m on bandcamp and get most of everything there but it does tend to be indie acts.
I listen mostly to progressive metal, which is kinda niche, and I’ve found pretty much anything I went looking for. Not sure about indie acts in general. Try browsing their download store - my only gripe with them is that the UI is pretty bad. The service is solid, though.
Also, seeing as they are DRM-free downloads, you could use Qobuz as a supplement to bandcamp for bands that are not on bandcamp, or vice versa :)
I’ve also been trying to find more physical media lately. I’ve also recently gotten into “retro tech” for computers and other things. I’ve seen a huge uptick in that lately. It’s fun to go back to PCs I used to use in the 90s and early 00s and get them working again. and in most cases, all the parts and stuff still work just fine. I’ve started going to shows and small conventions for retro computer stuff and seeing what other people are working on and restoring is awesome. Seeing people getting old 30+ year old computers working with modern-ish Linux is really cool.
I just finished a project rebuilding a PC with parts from around '97 and '98 that is currently running Windows 98. thing booted on the first go after everything was put together. zero issues. Also because of this stuff I’ve learned to fix motherboards and finally, after decades of promising myself to learn how, I’ve learned how to solder. that stuff is fun. repairing motherboards and other various boards, switching out chips and capacitors, its REALLY fun.
I’m not arguing for boycotts
🚮
Verify your age…
No
Upload a profile picture…
No
Update your home address…
No
Here’s a cool product…
blocks user, blocks group
Here’s a new feature
disable
Unknown foreign number
Don’t pick up
Unknown local number
Listen, then end the call without speaking
Unknown contact on whatsapp
Block and report as spam
Ads on websites
Block with uBlock originAlternatively, answer all unknown numbers, immediately hit mute and let them hang.
Spam text? Request their username and password to continue.
Curious why you’d listen and then end the call without speaking?
Dropbox recently enshittified REAL bad (little fucking diamonds everywhere. The second I see those I nope out because I know its vibe coded shit). It was so fucking laggy. Froze my whole computer. I instantly disabled all their shit, returned it to classic, sent them a review saying their update sucks and no one wants their ai and now I will be cancelling my subscription becuase of it.
Theyre also an evil company anyway so nbd. Dont use them.
While I use those and they are great, we use dorpbox for video and have the 30tb plan which is needed. My friend has no local setup cuz he’s afraid of losing it all as its his job. He does video editing on a Mac and likes Dropbox features (regardless that they are stealing all his video and using it to train bots to take his job in the future, but he doesnt care )
If his data only exists in one place, it’s at high risk of being lost anyway. The cloud is not a backup. Plenty of stories of people losing data in the cloud because of bugs/mistakes, companies closing down, hardware failure, etc.
Seconding the recommendation for LocalSend!
I like localsend more than kde connect. I like to play around with different Roms on old android phones and would install kde connect every time I wanted to send screenshots and it would enable by default all permissions which I didn’t want except for file sharing
Oh and localsend is written in flutter which is going to (hopefully) become better because canonical is gonna help improve the Linux side of things
LocalSend wasn’t the vibe coded one, right? I remember there was one that was, but can’t remember which one.
Anyway, LocalSend looks like brilliant!
For T-Mobile, you can remove voicemail all together. You have to call in. So it stimulates that the phone number is bad and gets removed from calling lists.
I got a new phone a year ago and didn’t bother setting up the voicemail. It’s outdated, just text me.
Even with that, the bots know it’s a real number. If you call T-Mobile and tell them to delete voicemail all together, the phone rings and rings and then it does a Click and hangs up.
It’s kind of amazing. I do most of this stuff in my day-to-day life without even thinking about it.
