• 6nk06@sh.itjust.works
    9·
    6 days ago

    I had already cut ties with most spying companies. My last win is installing Linux Mint on an old laptop that I was not using anymore.

  • ken@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    4 days ago

    Went low-key public with our internal browser project by sharing here on the feddit. If you’re a dev, packager, Arch Linux user, or already build Firefox from source, this is for you (others can check back at a later date when perhaps there are more builds running and tested). More people using it becomes a shared privacy win. I humbly suggest that this is currently the most privacy-friendly general-purpose GUI browser out there1.

    Announce post

    Sources

    AUR

    1: Biased? I would never!

  • pound_heap@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    6·
    6 days ago

    My big win (in the making) is that I’m going to file my taxes completely offline. Working on the documents in isolated VM, using tax software offline, and sending paper forms wherever I can. Unfortunately New York state is not accepting paper forms, as far as I know…

  • Captain_Faraday@programming.devEnglish
    4·
    6 days ago

    I got my spouse to start using our cupid BitWarden vault and we recently setup a relatively hardened MBP for their work/now home use since their mini PC running windows 11 has basically bricked itself because windows… But yeah, they aren’t using the windows computer, so a hardened MBP is a win in my book even though Apple can be similarly privacy-invasive if their devices aren’t hardened.

    • Captain_Faraday@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Okay, someone had asked what I had done and I finally cobbled together some info lol

      I didn’t fully harden it like you might see in some YouTube videos, I.e bought with cash, no internet/bluetooth/airdrop enabled, location devices off, no Apple account during set up. My spouse didn’t want me to do that lol.

      I picked and chose some of the steps in this Naomi Brockwell video namely, though some I found in regular Google search.

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1g0RzOGxe40&t=1669s&pp=ygUdTmFvbWkgYnJvY2t3ZWxsIHR2IGhhcmRlbiBtYWM%3D

      These are some of the highlights:

      1. Disabled Siri

      2. Enabled FileVault

      3. Time server: pool.ntp.org

      4. Disabled any targeted advertising and diagnostics telemetry I could. Apparently to turn off personalized ads in recent Mac OS versions, you have to wait till first one pops up at a random time in Apple Store or something OR you can use the terminal to kill it before they happen. I think this was the one I ran: defaults write com.apple.AdLib allowApplePersonalizedAdvertising -bool false

      5. Installed LuLu for outgoing firewall so we can monitor apps like Adobe to see when they request outgoing connections and what they are requesting. (Spouse loves Adobe, I lost that battle lol)

      6. Installed Brave browser and made default over Safari

      7. Installed Proton Mail web app since we share account for home/critical stuff

      8. Installed BitWarden, although they still like using Apple Keychain for their personal passwords. Critical stuff and shared stuff goes in BitWarden so not isolated in Apple’s stupid Keychain lol. (Good luck accessing your life’s worth of passwords if you lose your Apple devices or they self-sabotage like spouses $$$$ iMac did one day during Mac OS update a few years ago…)

  • tomiant@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    Well, I went underground and hid from the government on principle and they listed me as a missing person which made my bank lock my government ID so I couldn’t access my funds which forced me to come out of hiding and identify myself and my whereabouts, which taught me that next time I will have to find alternative ways to keep my money that don’t rely on government ID, like crypto, which obviously brings its own set of problems, and highlights the big issue with a cashless society.

    I don’t have a clear solution yet but it was a very good learning experience that exposed some fundamental issues with fighting capitalism on a grass roots level.

    I am now more inclined to become a poisoned cog in the machine as a result.

  • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1·
    5 days ago

    Got two people (plus me) on Delta Chat so far. The easy onboarding really comes in handy for getting “normals” (like my parents and technologically challenged friends) to sign up, especially when compared to MossadChat (Matrix) and Jabber, and it has less metadata than both, and it eats less battery than both, and somehow it works better than both (MossadChat calls didn’t work because of the delay from pull notifications, Jabbers did but the battery life was atrocious, like we’re talking 20% in the background vs 1% of my battery on Delta.)

  • thenoirwolfess@lemmynsfw.com
    3·
    6 days ago

    I’d say my win is that my stack of self-hosted services have been running without unscheduled maintenance for about two months now. Regular updates, backups and storage cleaning, but no breaks, IP or routing glitches, unhandled memory leaks or anything requiring a fix. And that includes a 99% ad-/tracker-/hostile script-/spam-free LAN. (The 1% are source-injected ads on a couple of locations)

    • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1·
      5 days ago

      I’ve had a Linsys router that is supported on my table still sealed for like a year and a half putting this off. Was it hard? Is there much to adjust in the set up after or is it kinda just plug and play “plug into modem and set your passwords” type stuff?

      • pogodem0n@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 days ago

        It was pretty much plug-and-play.

        I downloaded the OpenWrt image (about 6 MB in size) and navigated to the firmware update page on my router’s web interface. Selected the image and it took roughly 5-10 minutes to install. All I had to do was update the default SSIDs and its passwords to match what I had before.