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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.
Last week I moved over my CloudFlare tunnels to Pangolin on a VPS. Went easier than expected!
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.
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:
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Disabled Siri
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Enabled FileVault
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Time server: pool.ntp.org
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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
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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)
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Installed Brave browser and made default over Safari
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Installed Proton Mail web app since we share account for home/critical stuff
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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…)
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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)
Been trying to use Lemmy/Piefed and Digg more than Reddit
I installed OpenWrt on my router this week
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.
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 you1. 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.
1: Others can check back at a later date when perhaps there are more builds running and tested, and more people have looked over the code.
2: Biased? I would never!
Moved over to lemmy, mastodon, and proton mail. Aiming for Linux in the next year or so also
