Sounds like my experiences with Ultima Online. Right before they added paladins and necromancers, the shard where I played was quite “raw”. You really got the human experience, with everything: misery, dignity, psycopaths, etc.

it could also be because I mentioned oracle :P

You do you, of course. But, I think that combining the approach of immutable distros to either case would be a great way to add some security. Even if nothing is ever 100% safe, this would be very robust. Or, even without an immutable distro you can do Qubes or just any sandboxing (e.g. bubblewrap) to open documents and files.

In any case, being paranoid certainly is an elegant sport. Perhaps even more than golfing (:

In my case it doesnt appear in the App drawer but when I opened assistant it offered me switching to Gemini, which I did. Then within it, went to Apps to disable integrations like WhatsApp which by default was ON. Same with SMS and others.

Or if you prefer GUI on device apps, Shizuku and then use Cantata

Try Pangolin instead of cloudfare, though it requires a VPS (e.g. oracle free tier, or pay €1/month to ionos)

I hear thee.

Just an update, I learnt that GrapheneOS developers are ‘aggressive’ towards other FLOSS projects (following comments on other thread, but you can searx grepheneos+controversy and see for yourselves).

So now, I might just prefer an FP6.

I was trained on Arch, btw.

I love this resource, https://thebullshitmachines.com/ (i.e. see lesson 1)…

In a series of five- to ten-minute lessons, we will explain what these machines are, how they work, and how to thrive in a world where they are everywhere.

You will learn when these systems can save you a lot of time and effort. You will learn when they are likely to steer you wrong. And you will discover how to see through the hype to tell the difference. …

Also, Anthropic (ironically) has some nice paper(s) about the limits of “reasoning” in AI.

Only the failed attempts could be a Denial Of Service and throw you out. So, at least add an ever increasing delay to those. Fail2ban is important.

the reason: support for developers. You can install it yourself to save that amount.

There’s a deGoogled version too!!

I would prefer GrapheneOS (If I can live with the irony of getting a Pixel phone just to deGoogle it…). Sandboxing there is way better. But you lose the Repairability… Gotta check and compare the new EU metrics too.

They are just two different devices.

Like it or not, there are puscontrollers and joydicks in the world. You can use your hands or…

Signal, yes…

Or snikket (xmpp).

Or delta chat (email).

The three are good.

Though, if we compare nowadays distros like Bazzite with Windows 11…

I’ll probably never trust anything they’ve touched until I’ve taken it apart and put it back together again.

Me too. But the vast majority of users need guardrails, and have a different threat model. Even those that also care about privacy, if they just want a solution that comes by default, this adtech ‘fake’ or ‘superficial’ solution does provide something. And anything is more than nothing.

This is entirely different approach, sorry. Fwiw, I bought a wireless (2.4Ghz) keyboard that has a trackpad, and just use a zoomed-in KDE Plasma. Far from the eye candy of a kiosk, but with some customization you may achieve satisfaction (:

TPB is still around, only magnet links are around. They were hosting torrent files which is basically a list of trackers. That’s what they had to drop, in order to continue functioning. And their DNS is still banned like from almost every westernized country.

Regardless of technicalities, they were #1 biggest player. (Today they are like #3 or #5?) What I mean to say, is that they got busted mainly because of this. To make an example.

If your key is passwordless and sits on unencrypted storage… It may be a bad practice itself.