Yes. It’s basically about a ban or circumvention of E2EE, as usual. And as usual, this is not an option. Do not throw away your rights to strong, working encryption. Never.

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• Closed source (has always been bad for an OS, a 1-US-company controlled blackbox at the heart of your “personal” computer)
• Privacy nightmares (and getting worse)
• Forced cloud integrations (and getting worse)
• Forced AI integrations (and getting worse)
• More bloat and ads (and getting worse)
• More restrictions (e.g. local user accounts) (and getting worse)
• More dark patterns to try to annoy the user and get him/her to accept something that MS wants (and getting worse)
• More opt-out, on-by-default bad stuff being added (and getting worse)
• There’s probably more…

The question is wrong: it’s not why do you “still” hate Windows. I did like Windows 7. It was the last Windows I liked. After that, it’s just a downhill enshittification spiral. The only real question is: at which point will it be too oppressive for the common user that even the most common user will try to avoid it entirely. And I fear that there’s still more than enough room for MS to make Windows worse before enough people migrate away from it.

The “opposite” was just referring to those 2 aspects - Mullvad has stronger anti-fingerprinting which leads to more breakage. Librewolf has that aspect reversed. Of course, both browsers are similar overall. That’s just one detail where they prioritize differently.

Both are good. Librewolf is more like vanilla Firefox, just configured way better by default. Mullvad Browser is like a port of the Tor Browser (also based on Firefox) for the clear web (or for use with Mullvad’s VPN, or whatever). Also configured very well by default. Mullvad Browser has better anti fingerprinting stuff built-in but as a result of its unusual configuration some sites might be broken. Librewolf is kind of the opposite in that regard - sites won’t be broken but you’ll be easier to fingerprint. In any case, they both are at the top of the best Firefox variants I’d say.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary funding evidence.”

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.

Looks healthy. There was activity and new releases in 2021, 2022 and June 2023. Also, the app might be near feature complete, and if that’s the case there will only be sporadic work left like keeping it updated/compatible or fixing security ssues.

NetGuard Pro - Allows you to see and control traffic from all apps, so you can prevent data flows to 3rd party hosts like the ones from Google or Facebook. The pro edition is paid and necessary, but it’s all open source, just not gratis

Aegis Authenticator - open source 2FA authenticator

LibreTube - alternative, privacy-respecting, open source YouTube frontend using the Piped API

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

There seems to be a lack of good basic computer science education unfortunately. Schools and so on never caught up with the speed of technological advance. And back when I was in school, teachers taught things like “How do I use formulas in MS Excel” in computer science. It’s probably still that way, so it’s not neutral at all, instead you’re learning how to use specific software products (often, Microsoft’s). So relying on school education alone may be hopeless. But you can always learn for yourself or from others.

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.