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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2020

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  • I thought signing up for Signal required a phone number and phone app – and all phones have IMEI besides many other nightmare anti-features.

    For the normies it’s fine but tbh I’m not sure it’s as advertised.

    What ever happened to that odd old app called tox?

    Honestly I could see a version of DeltaChat + GPG make some gains in popularity but I would argue the email relay servers and spam lists are rigged for max surveillance.

    Are we at the point where tech from 20 years ago may be the way lmao.

    XMPP, IRC, ICQ /s

    Matrix is probably the best bet but some of their apps and clients seem like dogshit. And I am saying that as someone who uses them daily. And the whole “server” thing is a PITA, or it used to be at least.

    I guess we’ll just have to use carrier pidgin and cypherto encrypt the cat gifs /s



  • If you dislike telemetry,

    Audacity => Tenacity

    Firefox => LibreWolf or FireDragon (GraudaLinux default, good in telemetry respects IIRC)

    You may like btop, Mission Control,

    Avoid any terminals and editors that advertise as “AI” – there were some big ones recently but the community thankfully overall was like nah.

    Get some decent browser extensions, ublockorigin, privacy badger, libredirect

    some people like to pihole their network, opensense/pfsense/ddwrt router is nice to have

    AVAHI broadcasts your services on the LAN IIRC.

    Obviously vscode has telemetry, if you use that try vscodium IIRC, personally I use neither but that’s just me.











  • Even owning Smart devices and having them always plugged in may potentially be a vector, Rob did a good breakdown on how this is achieved.

    https://odysee.com/@RobBraxmanTech:6/radio:64

    Did you know that your IOT devices are secretly communicating with each other? This includes IOT devices that are not in your home. Did you know that what your IOT devices do may be transmitted to third parties? Did you know that your TV may also have the capability and may currently be transmitting your activity far and wide?

    There are secret communications occurring between IOT devices using protocols like Bluetooth LE, Zigbee, Thread, 802.15, and LoRa that you likely didn’t expect or was not explained when you bought these devices.

    Just like Amazon Echo has been conscripted to work with the Amazon Sidewalk Mesh network, other networks are in operation




  • I think your best bet is to assume that everything you don’t control is a vector.

    The modems run binary blobs you don’t control.

    A standard modem with a singular hookup to a router is as good as it gets. Maybe you are contemplating the modem as a combo – if it is also a router and wifi, you can bet the ISP sees that as “Their Network” and not “Your Network” and any WiFi capabilities could be used to reverse hack insecure devices theoretically like smart TV or IoT.

    You could put the modem router combo in a Faraday cage to dampen the signal theoretically.

    That may not be answers to the query but I think the smart short answer is: yes, unless verified no.

    Edit: to go further, theoretically they can capture any traffic and if they get the encryption key decrypt the traffic.

    Or maybe with a quantum computer decrypt with ease. And if you have any leaks or there are backdoors then who knows what the consequences could be, cough cough xz


  • Block the ISP DNS and use your own on the router level.

    You could look into wireguard or VPN on the router level.

    Probably OpenSense.

    As long ad your device has a IMEI though not like it matters.

    There’s probably a million other things you would need too. Make sure your browser doesn’t use its own DNS, eg, Firefox + CloudFlare by default.

    I assume you could theoretically split traffic up over multiple ISP’s making it a PITA to try to make sense of.

    Also obviously separate trusted & untrusted devices, WiFi and wired into separate networks.