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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 16th, 2023

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  • Hot take, but your local community matters infinitely more than the construction of your house. Build somewhere you have neighbors yoh get along with who will stick their neck out for you.

    That being said, you can do the following:

    • Plant/build near large trees to cover from satellite/aerial photography

    • run conduit throughout so you don’t have to rely on wireless networking

    • install security cameras that feed somewhere local (I’m assuming nobody who breaks into your house gives enough of a shit to fins and destroy your recordings)

    • buy actually good locks, doors, and doorframes. Make sure you’re aware of what to expect from these, they wont actually keep someone out, they just make entrance louder and slightly more cumbersome.

    • build a secret sex room for you and your spouse. This is less of a privacy asset, and more just a fun thing to do.


  • Our local PD literally have access to stingrays, cellbrite/Pegasus (I don’t actually know which one they pay for) and military weaponry. In the suburbs, they have armored vehicles as well (tanks and APCs, not armored swat trucks).

    Obviously it varies by where you live because different departments will have different levels of funding and will ask for different toys from the feds, but you’d be surprised how comically over equipped many PDs are.



  • If OP was trying to secure themselves against interest from conventional state actor like a large intelligence service, I’d say they probably need to throw their phone in a woodchipper and start hitchhiking to the nearest professional spy training program.

    More realistic concerns that an ordinary person probably has are casual mass surveillance and local police fuckery. Random AOSP Roms are not sufficient to handle either of those threats.







  • What do you usually use and offer when people ask you for contact?

    Ask your family/partner/friends to use signal, it is idiot proof enough for most people. You can provide your email and phone number for acquaintances who you don’t speak with enough to justify installing signal.

    I’m not in any student groups, but you can make a dummy Facebook account and only login using their website from behind a VPN.

    Banking app I used has blocked me from app after few years of using it when they realized I have it from “unofficial” source - Aurora store.

    Just use their website and carry a physical credit card in the back of your phone case.

    What’s your way of transport after having few beers in pub? Do you use taxi via calling it directly or use that weird Telegram taxi addon?

    We literally just drive drunk here. Is public transit an option? Again, you can sandbox these apps or use their respective websites.

    Is there a way to convert google map pins to open source solutions and vice versa? What’s your recommended software for directions? What do you use for driving?

    Organic maps is good if you have an address and only need directions. If you need complete records of where local businesses are and traffic info, google maps is your only option. I’d set it up in a sandboxes container though, at the very least.

    Do you track fitness activities?

    No, and I’d argue that nobody other than serious athletes need to. That being said, you can get a tracker that does not connect to your phone or the internet.

    Do you have good phone recommendations? I know that GrapheneOS+Pixel is one, but what about others?

    Graphene+pixel is head and shoulders the best option, especially in places like the US where you have to worry about illegal searches. Privacy requires security. That being said, there are alternatives if you cannot afford a new device: https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm


  • Oh legality absolutely does not equate morality, although we obviously work to correlate them as much as possible.

    I will admit, much of my reasoning here is driven by the fact that I live in suburban America, and if I expect to buy literally anything, I buy it from or using a company that does something horrific. It isn’t reasonable to boycott based on even something as simple as “don’t kill people”, because…well I don’t have an alternative.


  • This is probably a hot take in many circles, but I do not boycott companies.

    The purpose of a business is to make money. I do not fault a business for doing something in pursuit of maximizing their money any more than I fault a goat for eating a tin can or a stove for burning my dinner.

    I fault our government for not protecting the human rights of the people that business harmed, and I fault the individuals who work in that business for knowingly helping to cause human misery.

    The sole exception to this is companies like meta, who have intentionally worked with foreign actors to subvert our democracy. That is treason, and by extension they have made their company an instrument of a foreign power. That entity should be forcibly dissolved and the people in power should be prosecuted under the relevant statutes.



  • Consult privacyguides.org for guidance regarding new messaging and email solutions. I imagine you’ll probably want to ask your family to sign up for signal.

    The only alternative to social media is the fediverse. The bad news is that the fediverse is not private. The good news is that frankly social media as a concept just isn’t mandatory, so if you need privacy, you can just…not. Once you break the addiction, you realize how unnecessary it all was.




  • Ok, so serious answer for our friends who don’t live in places without an active culture of protest:

    1. Vote. No, really. If people actually fucking voted, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

    2. Give money to advocacy organizations

    3. Give your time and money to mutual aid organizations

    4. Read the news (not just on lemmy either)

    5. CALL your congresspeople. Emails and letters are better than nothing, but do not have the same impact.

    6. Try to get your friends to do #1-5