Well, ever since Win8 or Win10 I stopped having much sympathy with Windows users. They deserve things like that, when they still remain on that ship. Since these things are being introduced in small portions (salami tactics), the users will slowly become familiar with these things and just accept them because they can’t change anything anyway, thus slowly incorporating a defeatist’s attitude towards all the bloat, ads and spying. AKA, learned helplessness. In a couple of years, Windows will be absolutely horrible, but people will be used to it. I’ll just say this: Windows used to NOT have this kind of crap integrated.

Yes. Even though not using all this crap may sometimes feel like you’re missing out on certain stuff, it is still the right thing to do. I don’t support abusive behavior, bloatware and spyware, so companies doing that will not receive any money from me if I can help it.

We’re basically just one step ahead of the general population, who basically (still) eats up anything that’s being served by big tech corporations, without any second thoughts or hesitations. The general population IMHO is currently at the stage that nerds were like 25 years ago, in that they tend to be naively enthusiastic about every new piece of tech. But nowadays, tech can be abusive towards their users, and so it’s important to choose the right tech. The general population hasn’t made that realization yet (or they don’t care, which also must change).

The media is also partly to blame for this, for example almost every new review of any Samsung or Apple phone is usually very positive, usually just reporting about the advancements in hardware and UI, without even mentioning any of the downsides these have on the software side. And so when reviews don’t even mention downsides anymore, there’s a lack of information available.

And it’s not even that regular users don’t like the alternatives. For example I convinced a friend to move from a regular spyware-infested Samsung Galaxy phone (which he was using all the time, and he even wanted to buy a new one) to a Pixel with GrapheneOS. He’s not missing anything, even though his transition wasn’t super smooth, overall he’s happier now, and he mentioned that he likes the OS being so clean and unencumbered. He doesn’t particularly care about the privacy and security improvements which he now also enjoys, which is a bit sad, but at least he’s happy with the lean and unmodified Android (open source) experience.

So, as usual, information/knowledge is power. People need to know that alternatives exist and that some alternatives are actually really, really good. And they need to know what the problems are with the “default stuff everyone uses”, so that they can make better informed decisions in the future. They also need to become less dependent on big tech companies. The alternatives have little to no PR and thus little public visibility in comparison, except via word of mouth, so we need to make the most out of that.

What she (and other climate activists) have done and do is spread awareness about this issue. As you can imagine, it’s important to keep important topics (arguably even the most important topic humanity faces, yes even more important than soccer (lol)) present in media and in people’s heads for them to not be forgotten soon after again. People need to be constantly reminded that our current way of life currently destroys our planet, especially considering that not much happened to steer against this problem within the last couple of years after the Paris agreement. And we don’t even know many of the tipping points that could accelerate disaster even further. When some ecosystems stop existing and food chains become disrupted, for example.

In a way, she’s like a PR person for the most important topic in science currently. And she (and other climate actrivists) is successful at it, considering it’s so often in the news and so many of the polluters hate her and try to discredit her and others.

Always remember though: it’s about the problem, not specific people. Of course we like talking about people, and the media does it as well, but as the saying goes, “small minds discuss people, great minds discuss ideas”. It’s about the problem at hand, irrelevant of Greta or other activists. She’s just trying to bring the point across to a mass audience, that’s all. We (as in: the whole humanity, no exceptions) need to take action against the problem, not talk about Greta. This “ad hominem” strategy is sometimes deliberately used as a distraction away from the issue at hand. When articles talk about Greta or try to discredit her or whatever, then the debate is shifted away from the actual problem at hand. Even articles about her in a positive light are, in the end, irrelevant. It’s not about her, or other climate activists. She even says that herself. If the activists didn’t exist, we’d still face the exact same problem.

I ask myself the same question all the time. So you supposedly have this super advanced space-travelling civilization, and they’re somehow interested in us, who aren’t even able to colonize another planet yet, and are destroying our only one planet in the meantime. We’re like monkeys in a zoo to them. Why should we be interesting for a much more advanced civilization? At best, they’d monitor our “progress” as a civilization from afar, and maybe make contact once we’ve become a Kardashev type 2 or 3 civilization. If or when that happens. Still a long way. We haven’t even ensured that our home planet is safe from us. Or maybe they want specific resources from Earth. But then we’d get much more visitors, who also wouldn’t be friendly I guess. So I think it’s highly unlikely, which means I also think this is being staged, intended to gain more funding.

Probably the “space theory” from the German BND (like the national NSA here). When they were confronted shortly after the Snowden revelations with why they’re illegally collecting network data in bulk on their own citizens (in addition to international ones) they basically said “Well, we collect the data from satellites in earth’s orbit, and because that’s not on German soil, that law doesn’t apply so it’s OK for us to do this”. I mean, of course they will do whatever they can to grab as much data as they can, and use whatever excuse or reasoning that allows them to continue to do so, and these kinds of institutions seem to exist in some extra-legal space anyway, so they don’t really have to fear a lot of repercussions unfortunately, but that excuse was REALLY wild. Also shows the absurd ways in which systems or laws designed to protect us from abuse are being successfully and routinely gamed.

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.

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.

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/opera-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil13/ (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.

Nix

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.

Why should I downgrade?

Apple’s stuff is:

• Locked down hard, meaning you get completely vendor-locked-in, and you can’t install alternative OS (there is none I think) or even apps from different sources without voiding warranty or using unsupported, unreliable hacks like jailbreaks for specific models.
• Privacy-invading. Sure, not as bad as proprietary Android distros, but still far from privacy-respecting
• Account-bound. Everything is tied to your Apple account. To even set up or use the product you need an account.
• As proprietary and closed source as it gets
• Ridiculously overpriced, so very low value for the money
• The company is known for its anti-competitive and monopolistic, even mafia-style behavior (e.g. when insisting on their 30% cut for all apps, insisting that apps use the in-app-purchasing system and not allowing “subscriptions from outside of Apple’s ecosystem”, stuff like that. If app developers don’t comply with ridiculous rules, they get their apps taken down, and since the AppStore is the only source for apps, this means they have 100% control and can kill any app which they don’t like or which they perceive as competition for Apple’s own apps.

Use GrapheneOS. It’s a secure, fully privacy-respecting open source distro of Android (based on the open source Android) without any Google services/apps by default, but with full Android app compatibility.

People can be changed, it just takes time and it might be hard. It also depends on how open-minded they are. Also, with technology, you have the additional problem that many people still don’t understand most technology even on a basic level, and they might not know anything better than what they’re currently using. If you show it to them, it might not even be so hard to get them to change. So I think there are a lot of factors at play. But even in the hardest cases, hard doesn’t mean impossible.

No. Soul = personality, nothing magic.

Also, what’s stored at Google is not only accessible by Google, it’s also typically accessible (probably paid for) by intelligence agencies and law enforcement. The Snowden revelations showed that. Same is true for every other big tech company. Even if you think that’s still not a problem because you’re not doing anything wrong, it could be a problem if you’re ever falsely accused of a crime. There are innocent people being thrown into jail for life. Our systems aren’t perfect, so don’t assume nothing will ever happen to you. Also, if you should find yourself living under a fascist government in the future, they could use your past data to actively target you. This is also not entirely unlikely, because the right-wing is currently quite strong again and who knows what will happen after massive socio-political changes due to climate change and more and more uninhabitable or flooded areas.

Don’t give those data hoarders more of your data voluntarily. Only give them the least amount of data possible. Keep private things as private as possible. Everything else can only have negative consequences for you down the road. And that road could be very long, many years long. Decades, even. The data about you never goes away. Storage is cheap.

Local GPG key pair + https://www.passwordstore.org/ synced peer-to-peer between devices via https://syncthing.net/

So the key is always local but the password database is being synced between devices.

pass on its own is great already (it’s basically just GPG encrypted text files with a good CLI frontend) but I make it even greater by using a slightly modified “passmenu” script which utilizes wofi (rofi for wayland) in dmenu mode to show a very fast popup of all your sites you have passwords stored for and by selecting it / pressing enter the pw gets copied into the clipboard.

Gnome. It just seems simple, elegant and smooth. It does what I need from a DE (not that much, I do a lot in terminal and Emacs). It has good keybindings out of the box and good virtual desktop mechanisms. It was also the first DE with good Wayland support. At first I was unsure if I liked Gnome’s concept and restrictions, but I’ve grown to like it fast.

Note: all of my youtube links go to a Piped instance for privacy reasons (like a youtube proxy), but you can simply replace the domain name with youtube.com if you prefer

• GoGo Penguin (1, 2) - probably my biggest positive surprise in the Jazz/Fusion genre as of late. Singlehandedly re-invigorated my interest in the genre. I basically didn’t listen to this genre at all for a very long time but they changed that
• Mammal Hands (1) - I thought I didn’t even like saxophone but this band changed that. Very unexpected, very great. Apparently I just listened to the “wrong” kind of Jazz bands before. Discovered them right after GoGo Penguin.

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.

• Deep Rock Galactic
• Valheim

GNU Emacs

Arch Linux