The facts are it’s an oligopoly which is rapidly moving towards pairing this with totalitarianism. Propaganda is so pronounced today that finding actual news is a chore, and if shared it’s labeled as “fake news”. A study was recently published demonstrating political moves are made without any care for how it impacts the masses. It’s tough to see the decline happen in real time while most deny it’s occurrence. Most are too focused on owning others in the working class with alternative ideals.

But in the U.S., the natural beauty is phenomenal. Yet it’s being traded to allow conglomerates to squeeze more profit out of dwindling resources. If something doesn’t change the course soon, this answer potentially could land me in prison in the near future. Which is counter to what the country was supposedly established to prevent. It’s rough in many aspects, yet not entirely hopeless, at least as of this moment.

The only real option worthwhile is to get nerdy and play the same game. Change up how and what you connect online as well as running security and privacy based open source firmware + software on your devices. Aside from that, protesting would be another option with some teeth too!

Using cash to buy a prepaid card is always a decent option. Makes it very difficult to associate the payment with the buyer. As far as a MySudo alternative, keep an eye on JMP.chat! They do work in the EU now, but they only provide US numbers. However, they are actively working on being able to provide EU numbers at least.

The researchers believe it affects all VPN applications when they’re connected to a hostile network and that there are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user’s VPN runs on Linux or Android.

Once again, Linux with a win!

So Meta, Twitter, Snapchat and all the others who’ve redefined what data collection looks like and keep folks self centered is fine? The only reason the US is throwing this fit is because they can’t access the collected data like they can with US based data brokers, I mean social media. The key aspect of this ban revolves around freedom of speach more than anything else.

If you’re talking OpenWRT, then I totally agree. But something like Asus Merlin is a relatively easy change and still provides additional protection. While part of the Asus code is closed-source, most is open-sourced and Asus has implemented improvements developed by the Merlin team. This shows Merlin knows what they’re doing and are trustworthy too.

Running as much open-sourced privacy oriented software as possible. This includes on computers, routers, and phones. While this is 100% a marathon, not just a quick change, it’s well worth the time. Utilizing an encrypted DNS would be another solid move. NextDNS is a fantastic choice as it has a free option which still provides granular control of what is filtered online. A trusted VPN mixing your internet traffic with others is great, but like you said, it’s not a magic bullet whatsoever.

In the big picture, it’s due to the microscopic world having massive implications across life. I’ve also lost friends and family to autoimmune disorders and cancer, so my long term goal is to improve our understanding in the field. Immunology is super fascinating, but there’s more we don’t know than we know about the immune system. We don’t even understand how fever works or Tylenol from start to finish for example!

What makes you stoked about physics?

Mines a toss up between microbiology and immunology, but I also totally get your favorite as it’s the basis for all sciences!

Fedora SecureBlue is hardened Fedora, and Fedora is also the base layer for Qubes as it’s all in all quite secure and private with some setting changes. I don’t know, but Qubes is top tier in my book. Tails OS could be another option if you’re that big on privacy and security though.

Qubes OS is Snowdens daily driver, Fedora SecureBlue is also designed with security and privacy in mind.

Best bet will be to purchase Monero (XMR) anonymously, it’s literally designed to be anonymous, then swap it into BTC. You’ll then want a hard wallet to keep it secure until you have a reason to transfer it. Ledger is a decent option for a hard wallet, just be sure it’s paid for in the XMR you bought anonymously or the BTC you swapped for XMR. NanoS is my recommendation for the specific wallet, but the tricky part will be getting it shipped to you anonymously as you CAN’T trust a used hard wallet.

The influencing aspect here is almost certainly tied into the drop of search engine efficacy recently. Big tech finally collected enough data from you and everyone you know to now be able to alter what answer you find for the question you asked. Wildly, this same question now generates different results depending on the profile they’ve assigned you. MullVads Total Surveillance paper published last October highlights this explicitly. This is why data collection matters, not due to ads, but the ability of Big Tech to change how you view the world. Your data impacts the search results you see, as well as everyone similar to you…

Edit: Here’s the link to the MullVad paper https://mullvad.net/pdfs/Total_surveillance.pdf

Security enables privacy, that’s why they are commonly referenced together. From a hardware standpoint, Pixels are the most secure phones on the market and Google makes them with dev’s in mind. This is why Graphene OS, which is based on AOSP, currently only runs on Pixels.

It’s a fully open sourced app store for android. The code of all apps in the F-Droid repository are reviewed before being made available. So this is why the F-Droid version wont have these settings, as it’ll be an older version.

You could just use the version on F-Droid until Fossify releases their fork of it. But ya, wild how basically out of no where Simple Mobile sold out tough.

I had to change my address to my physical address from a PO Box in the first week of the year to prevent my account getting closed. This was with a major bank, and it’s all thanks to the patriot act. Then again, I do have a checking account with a much smaller bank and they haven’t said a word about it. I use the street address with a “unit number” for my box. Seems like they either haven’t dug into it and realized it’s a PO Box or they’re just small enough where they don’t care much about it like the big banks. So basically, you need a physical address these days, if you don’t you risk account closure.

In the top left there should be a search option. In settings preferences, be sure it’s set up to search all sources. I get tons of articles when putting in pretty specific topics.

Edit: It’s in the preferences under the file tab. Here’s screenshots of my home screen, plus the preferences I use for it to search papers.

I use JabRef for both finding research papers and generating bibliographies. It’s phenomenal and fully open source. Definitely worth checking out, I’m not even sure what I’d do without it these days!

Invidious has a related content option, it’s in the settings where you should definitely already go to ensure the proxy option is turned on too.