1-2 decades earlier maybe (meaning: 60s or 70s). Location… I don’t know. Maybe Norway, I’ve never heard anything bad about Norway. Might just be random selection bias though.

Portal 2 is THE highest rated game on Steam.

Doom or Tetris were probably the most influential ones?

Using it since many years on many Pixels and loving it.

Main pros: zero bloat, efficient, highly secure and highly private (about as private and secure as it can get on any smartphone), and it’s an Android without any of Android’s typical weaknesses (privacy issues, bloat, etc.). You get to utilize the advantages of Google (its security) and completely avoid the disadvantages (its many privacy issues). You get to use all the advantages of an Android mobile OS while completely avoiding all of its disadvantages. It’s like getting your cake and eating it too. You’re much better off in terms of security and privacy than almost(?) all other smartphone users. According to leaked documents, Cellebrite for example can’t crack GrapheneOS on Pixels at all. They can crack almost any other smartphone if they have physical access to it. Most smartphones are really easy for them to crack. iPhones may pose some trouble depending on model/OS. And Graphene on Pixel is the literal brick wall. And even on top of that it has tons of great security features, like auto-reboot after X hours of inactivity, charge-only-mode for USB-C when locked, distress/duress PIN entry to immediately wipe the phone, many things like that. On the privacy side it’s looking great as well: Some folks have analyzed Graphene’s network traffic and there’s zero privacy issues from the OS or its built-in apps. And the few connections it does make (for updates and so on) are all documented and work exactly like they documented them, and they only transmit the exact least amount of necessary data without anything beyond that (guess what - that’s super rare). And on top of that there’s even more great privacy features, some of which are invisible but well thought-out, for example any SUPL request goes through a Graphene proxy server first (configurable) which strips all personally-identifiable data from the request and then redirects it to your provider’s SUPL server (which is most likely Google’s SUPL server in the end). I’m seriously impressed by the quality of the GrapheneOS project. Maybe you don’t realize how good and rare such things are nowadays. Also the documentation is very good and actually answers most of your questions and doesn’t contain any marketing blurb. The social media feeds and forums are a great source of info as well. On top of all that it’s even easy to install GrapheneOS.

Main cons: it’s only available on Google Pixel phones, so if you truly despise Google and don’t want to buy or use anything from them, it’s not the right device/OS for you (or maybe buy it used?). However, the reason GrapheneOS is on Pixel is purely a technical one: Pixels do offer very high hardware based security already (probably the most, although iPhones have good hardware-based security as well. As is known, Apple tends to be produce good quality hardware, not quite so good software) as well as a very high degree of “platform neutrality”, i.e. it’s supported by Google to flash a different OS on it or use more advanced tools like adb without any sort of tinkering or unnecessary danger involved. Also you don’t have to register to unlock your phone or anything, you only need to be online once to enable the OEM unlocking feature (I think this is because Google needs your IMEI to check whether the phone is carrier-locked (cannot ever be OEM unlocked) or can be unlocked, and they will immediately receive some device data including the IMEI as soon as you go online with the preinstalled Android OS once [of course they will receive some more device data than just the IMEI]), so it’s best to not insert your SIM yet (and not do anything with the preinstalled OS) before you’ve installed GrapheneOS on your new Pixel. Do the OEM unlocking step on WiFi only, best on a public WiFi so Google has much less of a chance to identify you based on your IP or related data. Then install Graphene, then insert your SIM and start using your new phone. Other cons exist but they’re rare or pretty much irrelevant in daily use. If you have to hear them, read an older post by me about some potential downsides: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/19867254/12069767

Similarly helpful advice: a broken clock still shows the correct time twice a day.

https://itsfoss.com/bluesky-vs-mastodon/ This is a comparison about Mastodon vs Bluesky.

Misskey is most similar to Mastodon. Bluesky is also a bit similar to both but still the most different one from the other two. All three are different social networks. Mastodon and Misskey are ActivityPub compatible, meaning they can “speak with” other ActivityPub compatible social networks, e.g. Lemmy, Pixelfed or PeerTube. Together, that’s what’s called the Fediverse (different federated social networks being able to talk to each other). Bluesky is based on a similar, but different protocol called AT Protocol. It also means it’s possible for social network services using this protocol to be compatible to each other. But not sure if it’s there in practice yet, if there are even other social networks using this, and so on.

I’d recommend using Mastodon, and in general ActivityPub compatible social network services. They’re all open source, anyone can host a server (which is very important, because if the server operator ever does any bullsh!t you’re not forced to stay there and still can remain on the social network, just from a different node), they’re federated (servers can talk to each other and usually do unless some specific servers are blocked on purpose by the other server), and they’re compatible with multiple services also using the same protocol. And there are “big” networks already existing using ActivityPub, most notably Mastodon and Lemmy of course. Also, Meta’s Threads is also using ActivityPub, however some Mastodon instance hosts have decided to block Meta’s servers (there are good reasons for doing so but explaining this would make this post even longer).

Bluesky is controlled by a company made by ex-Twitter employees, I think its federation capabilities are still limited right now(?), and one can’t be so sure how its future is going to look like under these circumstances. We’ve all seen what happened to Twitter after Musk bought it, so I think only the true, unrestricted open source social network platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, Loops.video, PeerTube and so on are the future.

Just FYI I installed the apk from the github repo (not the google play version) via Obtainium a few days ago and it tried to make a connection to 2 cloudflare IPs during setup of my account. Without prior consent or any mention. So just be aware that there is still some form of telemetry or unwanted connections happening, even though they removed the telemetry flowing to Mozilla’s own telemetry endpoint. K-9 had zero of this, it just spoke with your mail servers and that was it. So be careful and block outgoing app connections by default. I did not analyze the data being sent, just that there were those 2 unwanted connectiins. happening.

You don’t need to stop informing others, I think stopping is bad. Just tune it down a bit, don’t overexert yourself with it. Most will not care but it’s still important to tell it to them. At some point, they might realize why it’s a good idea.

Also, Google isn’t immediately killing Ad/Content Blockers like uBO, they’re doing it slowly. Which is much smarter. It will mean less resistance. Boiling the frogs (users) slowly has always been the best way of eventually reaching a certain goal, without too much resistance along the way. If you push the goal too fast and too hard, there will be massive resistance, backed by an immediate media backlash. You have to wait that out, spread it out, so that users and media forgets about it again. Also, uBO Lite for MV3 browsers is less effective, but many users won’t notice a difference yet. Next steps will probably be to make it less and less effective over time, while claiming it will be better for the users overall, like offer better security from malicious addons that almost no one installs anyway, or whatever.

Probably because Google is actively and frequently banning many Piped or Invidious hosts, and is generally currently at war with “alternative frontends” to YouTube in an effort to make users browse YouTube directly and consume ads there, or buy YouTube Premium. This is in line with their current fight for more ad revenues across their products and services. You probably have to either search for another public instance which isn’t banned (yet) from accessing YouTube, or host your own instance.

Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS

Is the situation in USA bad? Yes, in several aspects (and getting much worse if the current fascism movement wins out in the end).

Is the situation in China bad? Yes, in much more aspects.

Most important goal for USA right now is to ensure they’re not regressing into an authoritarian, fascist regime. Because then, the situation for US citizens will start becoming really similar to China or Russia. After that, goal is to combat climate change. And preventing World War 3.

No.

Communication/Social Media isn’t for corporations to do what they want with it, or to manipulate their users. It needs a neutral, open platform. That means open source servers and clients and protocols.

I find it worrying how so many people noticed the decline of Twitter happening live and now continue to move to the next corporate, closed-down platform. Until the next time, I guess…

Yes, it’s a dangerous combination of media/IT illiteracy/incompetence within the general public and profit-driven proprietary social media algorithms that only aim to keep people engaged for the longest time, no matter the content they are being served. And usually, the more extreme the content is, the higher the engagement, the more revenue to be made from serving ads to the users and selling their collected data. This currently leads to a rise of misinformation, anti-scientific thinking, and so on. Which just so happens to align with extreme right-wing ideologies.

• No good operating system preinstalled by default
• No headphone jack anymore

I’m barely still a Millenial. Which is kind of cool. I don’t like the “generation names” before or after that much, and I liked that I grew up with non-invasive tech and non-existent smartphones during school. I was able to grow up with tech but none of the tech I dislike today. Also, tech was still easier to understand back then. I was able to learn how to create web sites for example when HTML, CSS, JavaScript and CGI was still in its infancy and not very complex yet. Of course I learned the growing complexitty as it all developed but the point is that it kind of grew with me. Which probably made several things easier to get into in the first place. Also, I still grew up with almost forgotten values such as privacy, and my whole youth life (as well as dumb things you did when young) isn’t available online and therefore “gone”. I kind of like it that way.

Answer is correct, I just want to clarify a bit more:

“Password protected” in your case probably just means that you have a bootloader password or a user account password. Both would not matter in this case. If you put your drive or partition anywhere else, and it’s not an encrypted partition, it can be read. Independently of user access rights. Any other OS accessing the same drive/partition can literally read everything if it’s not encrypted. Provided, of course, that there’s a file system driver available for the OS.

Windows by default doesn’t have any Linux filesystem driver installed. I’m not sure if that’s still the case when you install WSL. And there are 3rd party Linux filesystem drivers available as well.

But to protect yourself against robbery or a Windows which might in the future include a Linux filesystem driver, you should always encrypt all of your partitions. And when encrypting, use Bitlocker only for your Windows system partition, not for any data partitions, and certainly not for Linux partitions. For Linux partitons, use the integrated LUKS2. Bitlocker on Windows isn’t private encryption by the way, since a recovery key is being uploaded to MS’ servers automatically. That means MS has theoretical access, the US government has, and law enforcement has. As well as any hackers who manage to exfiltrate that key from somewhere. That’s why I’d use Bitlocker only for the C: partition, a 3rd party encryption tool like VeraCrypt for any other Windows partition, and LUKS2 for any Linux partiton.

AFAIK, browser choice is still limited (as usual with Apple) because every browser on iOS needs to use Apple’s WebKit engine. That means they only differ in UI.

Of course they do. It’s to be expected that big tech companies use all data they can gather for training AIs, tracking users, creating psychological profiles of the users and selling data to the highest bidders.

Microsoft is also known for creating tools and products which track employees and workers and provide nice looking dashboards and statistics for the employers. And they partner up with Palantir and other companies to create even more effective surveillance solutions for companies and law enforcement to use eventually. MS is a data company since a couple of years, just like Google or Meta is. Data is very valuable.

In the case of Microsoft Office and Teams, there’s also the issue of corporate espionage. Companies from all over the world are freely giving away sensitive data about their documents, employees and projects to a US-based megacorp. There was a time in history when this would be called corporate espionage which is supposed to be bad and illegal and so on. But, since they’re all doing it voluntarily, and there’s no definite proof of MS doing anything because it’s a black box and no one except MS can inspect what they’re doing, it’s apparently “fine”. It’s like we have collectively become dangerously naive.

So yeah, it’s all “fine”. Until it isn’t. Until it is revealed one day. Then we can all be shocked and say “how could they do this, how could they violate our trust like that, their marketing slides looked so nice and the consultant was so charming and said we needn’t to worry about anything they would keep our data safe”. Well, if you trusted them in the first place, that’s your mistake. You cannot trust a company like MS, Meta, Google, TikTok, and so on with a huge track record of privacy violations. Ever. Cloud = someone else’s computer. Host your own stuff. Prefer not to use software with proven track records of privacy violations. Don’t use products or services from companies with such track records. Prefer open source over proprietary because when the code is openly auditable that’s a plus for trustworthiness, and proprietary applications usually have a bad track record of privacy violations and other anti-user features, while open source software rarely includes such things.

And it’s only going to get worse. With upcoming things like Recall, that’s almost like having a permanent camera behind you recording your screen at all times. I feel bad for all Windows users, but on the other hand, I don’t actually have to care. Keep trusting them blindly, but please don’t be surprised when it will come crashing down on you one day.

Problem is, when you don’t oppose stuff like that, stuff like that gets added more and more and it’s all opt-out and some day you’ll have an update and something’s turned on by default and you don’t realize that for a year or so and then you’re like “shit, was this really on all the time”. Even worse when they hide settings well in the UI, or use dark patterns to annoy or trick you to enable a setting that’s actually bad for you.

Opt-out stuff is just bad, even in small doses. It’s always kind of a scam. I wish Mozilla wouldn’t need that kind of stuff. I mean they could be the knight-in-shining-privacy-armor browser, compared to Chrome/Edge/Opera/… But they are all similar unfortunately (by default). Yes, Firefox is still less worse than Chrome/Edge/Opera are by default. But “less worse” doesn’t equal “good”. Yes, you can configure Firefox to behave well, and by using a good preconfigured user.js these settings also will stick after updates. But you shouldn’t have to do that in the first place. The common user doesn’t do that and shouldn’t have to. The Firefox forks like LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser for example do not have anything bad enabled by default. And it’s likely they won’t ever have anything bad enabled after updates. So it is possible. The only reason the common browser makers aren’t doing it is because that gives them (or their business partners) less data/money.

Yes.

If you still want to play such “modern” games loaded with what is akin to spyware, I recommend a dedicated only-for-gaming PC (running Linux of course*) using a different IP address than your main system (probably a notebook), for example by using a VPN on one but not the other. I’d recommend using the VPN for the gaming machine, it’s less of a risk there, it allows for easy circumvention of geo-blocking, etc. If you need to access some services (e.g. chat) from both machines, create a separate account for it. Don’t share account credentials between machines. In fact, act as if the gaming machine is permanently infected with random stuff “required” for modern games, and isolate it accordingly. This is just an idea how to mitigate those problems and don’t let them creep into to your real machine where non-game-related data could leak out as a result. But you’re still going to support the developer doing this which is not recommended.

*) Why still no Windows, in this isolated case, you ask? Well, because it’s important to fight MS’ monopoly on gaming machines, so don’t support it by running it and contributing to its marketshare. Instead, run Linux and enjoy watching Windows’ sinking market share. In fact, if you can, don’t support such games either by not playing them, that would be the ideal solution. But this is written under the presumption that you or your friends still want to play it and you kind of feel left out otherwise.

Flameshot is great, I use it every day at work and home. The integrated editing/annoation/drawing functions are superb.