“Reactivating dormant IP” aka “Milking old franchises”, because it’s cheaper and safer than coming up with innovative stuff.

If someone starts the story by saying “I had a dream last night”, I know it’s going to be a long account of something totally nonsensical that I will be utterly uninterested in, that will not teach me anything of value, amaze me or amuse be in any way.

Depending on how much I care about not antagonizing that person, I might walk away without saying a word, lash out at them to shut them the hell up immediately, or politely listen while quietly escaping to my happy place in my mind while the torture lasts.

There are few things I hate more than people wasting my time telling me their dreams.

Is this in relation to the monetary value of cryptocurrency or the anonymity of cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrencies are just fiat currencies, like the dollar. They’re worth what people think they’re worth.

My beef with them is that they’re either pushed by scammer to empty honest but gullible people’s bank accounts, or they’re used to pay for illegal activities because they’re totally opaque and unregulated. My other beef is that they’re really securities and they’re not subject to the rules on securities for a reason that totally escapes me.

I don’t do cryptocurrencies both out of financial self-preservation, and also because I refuse to participate - and thus promote - stuff that’s generally bad for society as a whole.

And if you’re not convinced cryptocurrencies in all their forms are rotten to the core, consider this: Trump loves em. That alone is a red flag big enough to hang on a pole in North Korea.

MySudo is a proprietary aliasing software

Hard no.

Privacy.com is a proprietary financial transaction masking and aliasing tool.

Hard no.

Google Pixel phones

Hard no.

Yes, I know Pixel phones are the best option to run the best deGoogled OS out there (Graphene) but paying Google to escape the Google surveillance is just too rich for me. I’ll never get over that one. Fuck Google, even if it means running a slightly less secure OS (CalyxOS from the fine Calyx Institute, which you rightfully list).

Cryptocurrency

Hard no. I don’t partake in scams, even for the sake of privacy.

Other than that, great list. Thanks!

Remember: it takes two to tango. Threads might want to federate, but a lot of Fediverse instances want nothing to do with Facebook.

Oh no. NOOOO! The humanity!!! 😭

Ooh, piece of candy stuck in the couch…

I am just curious and want to understand how things work which no one else does.

It depends on how interested you are in a subject. Everything is interesting, but you may not find everything equally interesting, nor do you have time to know everything there is to know about everything.

For instance, if I fly somewhere, I have a general idea of how wings create lift. But if you try to explain it to me in detail, I’ll tell you to piss off because all I really want to do is travel from A to B.

But I know plenty about other subjects that I’m really into, that I could bore you to tears with and you’d end up punching me in the face if I tried to explain them to you.

It’s not okay to not know anything about something. But it’s okay to know enough.

I’m really disappointed with Lemmy’s idea of federation: all it is is a bunch of servers mirroring one another, but the user accounts are server-bound. No jumping instance and taking your identity seamlessly with you.

The stock Fairphone runs the stock full-blown Google spyware stack. Privacy isn’t Fairphone’s selling point: it’s repairability.

You can install CalyxOS very easily on it however. That’s what I’m rocking on my Fairphone 4, and it’s great. I have no issues with it.

rm -r *

Also, if you have to type that, don’t use the numpad: / is only one key away from *. If you finger snags the / key on its way to * and you happen to be root, your root partition will go bye-bye.

I never thought of doing that in 40 years. It’s a great idea actually. Thanks!

Here’s a rule I learned the hard way a few decades ago:

• If you type “rm”, take you hands off the keyboard and take one deliberate breath before continuing your command.
• If you then type “-r”, do it again.
• If you then type “-f” do it again.
• In all cases, re-read what you wrote before hitting ENTER.

That’s the catch: you can’t not use Google at all if you’re online at all, because Google has managed to insert itself into every little corner of the internet.

And that’s how the surveillance trap has quietly snapped shut on all of us without most of us noticing anything.

George Orwell had it wrong: the surveillance isn’t conducted directly by a tyrannical dictatorship but subtly, indirectly by the private sector in cahoots with the government. And the date he predicted was 40 years off. Other than that, he was right: we live in a full-blown dystopia now.

People coming here to rant about Reddit isn’t activity.

The good guys, like in every war, is everybody who doesn’t want to violently impose something on someone else - i.e. in this case, the populations of Israel and Gaza who aren’t IDF or Hamas and just want a better life for their loved ones without hurting anyone else to get it.

And like in all wars, that’s the vast majority of the populations of both warring parties.

I use a calyxos device to share VPN, as of a few months ago.

Hotspot & Tethering

• Allow clients to use VPNs

Oh wow I totally missed that. It works great! Genius!

Thank you for that. Suddenly it makes repurposing one of my old cellphones a very simple and viable proposition.

(and I’m posting this from my laptop connected to the hotspot connected to the Calyx VPN 🙂)

get a older cell phone. Put lineage OS on it, or calyxos… share your VPN over hotspot, these are the only two ROMs that I’m aware of that allow you to do that

That’s what I thought too. So I tried it on my CalyxOS phone and… it doesn’t work: the hotspot doesn’t route through the VPN. And from what I read, it’s by design.

I have an old Nokia 4.2 running LineageOS. I might try that one.

end-to-end VPN

Incidentally, do you know if the GL.iNet devices can act as a VPN server too?

At this point, I think China is well known for infiltrating local businesses and forcing them to sell networking gear with trojans.

The US is better known for surveilling people indirectly by exploiting corporate surveillance data collected by big tech monopolies doing their bidding for them and by directly “tapping the line”. I don’t think US officials asking US companies to compromise their products and keep quiet about it would fly in the US. At least not yet. But I wouldn’t put it past them either.

To be honest, of all three, I’d rather purchase something made in Europe, even for a premium.

Hmm… Touché.

There are others that aren’t Chinese but nothing anywhere near the price bracket you’ll get from GL.Inet

Can you give me some pointers to non-Chinese equivalents of those GL.iNet routers? I’m quite ready to suck up the extra cost.