Oh, sorry, I’ve assumed that you are in US since you posted an article about FTC.

I don’t know if there is a similar service in Europe. I think you could get a virtual card linked to a crypto wallet, but this obviously comes with downsides

There is Privacy.com that gives you virtual cards to use for purchases. Money go from your bank account to them. Destination is visible on payment description still, but it may fool bank’s algorithm. Or you can get paid plan from Privacy.com and mask destination completely.

I guess there is a chance to see some of code, but I doubt about it being properly open sourced.

While we’re publishing the binary images of every production PCC build, to further aid research we will periodically also publish a subset of the security-critical PCC source code.

Source: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

Apple’s PR is better. With Microsoft all news titles were like “OMG Windows will take screenshots of all you do and send it to AI”, and with Apple it’s more like “Apple is carefully adding AI to their products, respecting user privacy as they always have been”.

Of course, when one looks into technical details they would find that MS Recall is strictly local and runs only on special hardware that people don’t even have yet.

Apple Intelligence does send your data to cloud and scans everything you have in Apple ecosystem, not just screenshots. Of course they say it’s done in very privacy respecting ways, and provide a lot of technical information to back this claim. But at the end it’s closed source and is subject to change at any time.

Having said that, Apple users are used to and value that Apple magically takes care of everything, so they are happy to pay premium for Apple’s products whatever the company does.

Yay, I can get some targeted ads about data center hardware!

Mullvad has a feature to add random noise into traffic patterns, actually

This is a good point. Maybe setting up a VPN at home would the good option for when I’m on the go

Thanks for the suggestion, but anonymity is not my goal with VPN. I known about tor etc, and it is not working well for everyday web surfing

The article says they replaced them with remote workers in India, I’m assuming with even lower wages

I’m running Nextcloud from a Turnkey LXC template that’s available in Proxmox. Runs solid, I have no complaints for performance or stability. But upgrades are manual and very involved. It’s not too complicated, but there is always something that needs extra attention or troubleshooting. I also wasn’t able to figure out Turnkey migration toolset that they suggest to use for major upgrades, such as to new version of OS.

Lots of good advice here, but many might be too extreme. I find such all-or-nothing approach intimidating for people who just started to think about improving their privacy situation.

Let’s see… you are angry about bloatware. It can come from two sources - mobile service carrier and phone manufacturer. How to get rid of it?

1. Buy only “unlocked” phones. Then the carrier will not be able to push anything to your phone. You will also be free to change the carrier as you wish.
2. Buy phones from manufacturers that don’t install too much bloatware. Google Pixel has only Google apps, Motorola also is almost vanilla Google. Fairphone is more exotic, but an interesting option. iPhone is OK too if you want Apple ecosystem, but customization is not a thing there.

Now, we are in a privacy focused community and I saw your later comments about Google being an opposite of privacy. I would argue that vanilla Pixel is much better than bloated and locked Samsung already. I see you get recommendations to replace the OS that your new phone might run, and these are valid, but come with significant downsides. There are other ways to improve your privacy stance by changing the way how you use your phone without changing what phone or what OS you run on it.

I use SimpleLogin for email alias, and username usually has to be associated with email address. So I just use whatever SimpleLogin generates for me

I’m using pi-hole + uBlock origin.

Adblock DNS, Pi-Hole, hBlock - these three do essentially same thing but at different layers - blocking DNS requests based on blacklists. I’m not familiar with hBlock, but I assume blacklists on each of these 3 are very similar. Using all three doesn’t slow down your internet connection much, unless your pihole server is underpowered. You can drop pi-hole from the mix if you are not using it’s other features (statistics, local DNS, etc). hBlock looks nice, and should add zero latency, but works only for local machine. So you still need network-wide blocker. Make sure you set your DNS on router, so all devices would get protection.

uBlock Origin is smarter than simple DNS blocking, but protects only your browser sessions.

Closest one for lower latency. However, the closest location happens to be in a major metro area and is banned by many financial organizations that I use, so usually I connect to the next closest.

It’s not just a web front end. I would call it a software development lifecycle service. On top of repos for source code management there could be a bunch of services: Issue tracker, CI/CD automation, static pages hosting, flexible permissions system, even pull requests - all this is not Git.

Forge is a nice and easy name, but not sure if many people realize what it means or recognize that meaning.

Depends on what you want exactly. Easy and self-hosted are not usually go well together unless you’ve got enough experience.

Easiest way for blog - use a platform. WordPress.com is great and has free tier.

More involved, but still relatively easy - static site generator. I use Hugo myself, there is Jakyll that is popular too. Host it for free on GitHub or GitLab pages.

I would not self-host a public web site for security reasons. But you can run a static site on some cloud service. A personal blog with small audience should be fine on Oracle free tier.

This is really cool! Thanks for posting this. I wonder if Jeff is on Fediverse so I could thank him personally - I have no Twitter account anymore.

Not my solution, but I liked an idea and thinking to use it too - copy backups on external HDD and put it into your car trunk. Maybe have two drives in rotation.

It eliminates a need to drive somewhere for rotation, and any cost of renting a safebox.

Doesn’t protect from a serious disaster like forest fire or earthquake or nuclear war, but I keep the most important data in cloud, and if my house and car burns I would be having other problems than worrying about some homelab snapshots.

That’s because many people have zero experience living near such pond! It’s amazing.

It makes me think of hoards of mosquitoes breeding in there. It’s pretty tho.