Big Privacy Mindset Shift: Less Stress, More Progress - Privacy Wins Of The Week!

Summary

In this engaging discussion, Techlore dives into the nuances of privacy and the practical applications and impacts it has on everyday life. From discussing mindset shifts toward privacy, challenges with digital security, and keeping up with trending technologies like AI, Techlore offers insightful advice on balancing privacy concerns with real-world demands. The conversation emphasizes the importance of asking how privacy benefits your life and adjusting your approach according to personal needs and comfort levels.

Highlights

• A lively start with community interaction about tech setup and chat questions. 🎤
• Deep dive into a privacy mindset shift, encouraging a balanced approach. 🧘‍♀️
• Introduction of some top-tier privacy tools and their applications. 🔧
• Discussion on the role of jurisdictions and laws in international privacy. 🌐
• Interactive Q&A with listeners, offering personalized advice and solutions. 💬

Key Takeaways

• Privacy should enhance your life, not control it. Find a balance. 🤹‍♂️
• Engage with privacy tools and learn what works best for you over time. 🧩
• Support and educate your community about privacy to create a collective impact. 🌍
• Stay updated on privacy news to adapt and protect your digital presence. 📰
• End-to-end encryption and understanding jurisdictions can offer substantial privacy protections. 🔒

Overview

The discussion opens with a lighthearted interaction with the live chat, setting a casual and engaging tone. Techlore takes the opportunity to address common technical issues and respond to community feedback, creating an interactive and inclusive environment.

The core of the conversation explores a user's privacy journey—Izzy's transition from extreme privacy measures to a more balanced lifestyle. This case study encourages listeners to reflect on their own privacy practices and how these align with personal priorities.

Rounding out the session, Techlore shares insights into using privacy tools effectively and understanding complex jurisdictional issues. Real-world applications of privacy strategies are emphasized, including thoughtful responses to audience queries on technology, security, and privacy tools.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction and Community Interaction The introduction focuses on setting up a live stream session, ensuring all technical aspects like sound and visuals are functioning properly before starting the main content. The speaker is engaging with the audience, asking for feedback and allowing time for viewers to join and settle into the session.
• 03:00 - 12:30: Privacy Strategy and Mindset This chapter focuses on mindset changes related to privacy strategy. It begins by introducing an active forum member, Izzy, known as the privacy lurker, who discusses significant mindset shifts. The chapter emphasizes lessons valuable for many people. Additionally, it involves an interaction with the audience, mentioning forum participants like Broadness 187, who is enjoying coffee, and Zach, who is laying in bed while participating in the forum.
• 12:30 - 18:00: Self-Hosting and Alternatives The chapter titled 'Self-Hosting and Alternatives' features a lively discussion among participants in a livestream. The dialogue opens with casual greetings and updates. One member, Matthew, shares his current project: a report about privacy concerning iOS language learning apps, capturing the group's interest. The host and participants express appreciation for the quality of the stream, both in video and audio aspects, and there is a warm acknowledgment of recent improvements in the streaming sessions. The conversation continues with engagement from various people in the chat, highlighting a friendly and interactive community atmosphere.
• 18:00 - 23:30: Choosing Browsers and Search Engines The chapter opens with an engaging welcome from the speaker who interacts with the audience and acknowledges their presence in the live chat. The engaging approach sets a friendly atmosphere before delving into the topic. The speaker confirms the anticipation of discussing a significant 'win' related to the topic at hand. Although specifics of the 'win' are not disclosed immediately, the teasing highlights its importance and builds anticipation among the audience, promising valuable insights to come.
• 23:30 - 29:00: Security Improvements: Rebooting Devices The chapter titled 'Security Improvements: Rebooting Devices' starts with a user greeting on a Friday, emphasizing the community engagement approach. The host explains their method of alternating between live chat interactions and discussing user 'wins' from a forum thread. Each 'win' is addressed sequentially, providing a structured but interactive session for viewers.
• 29:00 - 50:30: Community Wins and Privacy Practices The chapter discusses the host's setup for interacting with patrons and mentions that some regular participants might not be online. It briefly touches on an ongoing 4chan hack and acknowledges it as another data breach, noting that such incidents are commonplace.
• 50:30 - 58:00: Live Q&A and Community Engagement This chapter captures a Live Q&A focusing on community engagement. Users exchange greetings across different time zones, like from Australia and the Netherlands, reflecting the global nature of the community involved. A conversation on web browsers also takes place, with one user expressing a love for Zen browser but asking for recommendations for a faster, Chromium-based browser.

Big Privacy Mindset Shift: Less Stress, More Progress - Privacy Wins Of The Week! Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Okay, should be live. How we all doing? How do I sound? How do I look? Um, let me know if I have any glaring issues with the stream before I start talking and telling you things and then figuring out 10 minutes after I'm done ranting about something that you couldn't hear anything. That hasn't happened yet, but I really hope it doesn't happen. But, um, hello everybody in the live chat. Um, I'm going to give you all a few minutes to log in and get settled. uh let people join the live stream uh before I get into the wins. And this
• 00:30 - 01:00 week we are highlighting Izzy the privacy lurker on our forum who talks about some mindset shifts which I'm really excited to talk about. Um lots of important lessons that I think a lot of people should know about. Um and then let me go ahead and see who's in the chat. So we got Broadness 187 got a Cortado from their favorite coffee shop. So they're feeling pretty good. Uh really awesome to hear. Uh, I hope you can stay awake and maybe Zach should have got a Cortado because Zach is laying in bed. Saw this figure was saw
• 01:00 - 01:30 this stream was about to happen. So, figured I'd join. Um, how's the privacy penguin doing? Let's see. Matthew, I'm doing well. Currently writing a report on privacy and iOS language learning apps that should be published. Really cool. Cool. There we go. Sounds like an interesting read. Nice stream seems good. Good video. Good audio. Thank you, Zach. Love the more recent streams. Thanks, Benjo. Cool. We got Simon in the chat. We got Matthew, Benjo, Jaden. Hey,
• 01:30 - 02:00 everybody. Yes, Zach needs coffee. Um, hopefully I can keep you awake, Zach. Uh, Nino says hello everyone. Hello. If you're watching, make sure to say hi in the live chat so I can go ahead and say hi back. We're up to about 49 people. I'm going to wait another minute or two before I get into the into the winds. You're coming in clear and looking good, too. Thanks, Matthew. Um, let's see. So, just a teaser, this is going to be the win that I'll be covering this
• 02:00 - 02:30 week. A user says, "Happy Friday." Hello, user. Um, and if you are tuning in for the first time, uh, the way I generally break this down is I'll kind of cycle in and out between the live chat and the wins. The wins is a thread that's posted on our forum. Anyone can join the forum. Anyone can join the wins. and uh I'll be checking up on those and I'll be doing each win one at a time and then after a few wins I'll go back to the live chat, check in with all of you in the live chat. Um I also have
• 02:30 - 03:00 my phone up to the left of me here with the patrons and the tech laurans um who can also message me directly on there. So I'll be checking in on there, but I got a few messages that are our regulars might not be online today. So I'll see how active that one is. Um and that's uh kind of it. Let's see. We got um Ean uh how do you think what do you think about the 4chan hack? Yeah, it's still unfolding. Um I don't have many crazy thoughts about it. It's another data breach. Uh they happen all the
• 03:00 - 03:30 time. Um there's nothing like uniquely interesting about it other than the fact it's 4chan. Um user says happy Friday. At least to me, right? To me there might be something interesting to you. User says happy Friday. Yes, happy Friday. Um, for some of you it's probably already Saturday if you're like in Australia maybe. Um, hello from the Netherlands. Hello numerate. Um, Aron, man, I love Zen browser. Um, but I want the Chromium snappy feel to it in websites. Can you recommend me another browser? Chromium based. Yeah, Chromium
• 03:30 - 04:00 based. You're you're looking at like probably Brave or Vivaldi. Um, as like kind of the regular ones I see in the community. So, those are probably the two main ones that I've seen people use. Um, all right. Well, let's go ahead and get started. Uh, RBQ, Mr. Plasma. All right. All right. Definitely share the stream around, too, with any friends or family if you have anyone that you think would be uh interested in this kind of stuff. Uh, but let's go ahead and get started with the first win from Izzy. I really like this one. This is a personal favorite of mine. Um, their win
• 04:00 - 04:30 is more of a mindset shift. After many years of going towards the extreme end of the privacy spectrum, they've hit a limit with their threat model, and they're starting to embrace a bit more nuance and dialing back for it. Their tolerance for inconvenience was really high. So using Linux and custom ROMs were a given and this worked fine for them for several years. But as privacy was the main hobby, but priorities have changed in their creative aspirations and passion for privacy have been combating each other for a while now. And they're pretty much, you know, to summarize the rest, they get fatigue. Um, and they've been experiencing with
• 04:30 - 05:00 Mac OS and Logic Pro and kind of trying to dabble into like less privacyfriendly tools. and their final statement is a reminder to everybody that unless your life depends on it, you don't have to go to the deep end to make progress. I still use all my favorite privacy tools, but I'm not feeling held back. Now, I also say my conclusion so far has been that people make far bigger deal about the OS when the main threat is in fact a suite of apps. So, there's a lot to unpack here. First, I want to preface this by saying if you want to go as far as you can in privacy, I think you
• 05:00 - 05:30 should. So, this this win isn't to discount any of you who want to go that far. What this win really speaks to, and it's something that I see a lot, is people trying to go to the extreme with privacy, a without having necessarily a reason for it, which is fine. If you just enjoy privacy and you want to go all the way, please do. But they might not have a reason for it. And it's starting to impact other areas of their life negatively. Be it relationships, be it their professional life, be it their personal life. There's a lot of things
• 05:30 - 06:00 that like taking privacy too far can impact and this is why there's the whole concept of threat modeling and the whole concept of not everybody needs to go all the way to the extreme because there's inherent drawbacks to going to that extreme. So Izzy's pretty much got to the point where they said look like I've done it. I really enjoy privacy. This is something I really enjoy but I enjoy creativity. I enjoy my personal life. I feel like I've been taking it too far. And so they're embracing a little bit more nuance and trying to find the middle path for themselves. And I think
• 06:00 - 06:30 that's awesome. Um it's something that a lot of people take a while to hit. Um when I do my coaching with people one-on-one, the most common thing that people gravitate towards doing is too much. And the other issue with trying to do too much at once is you typically do the wrong things too much. Um, it's not uncommon for me to see people move to Linux, move to custom ROMs, move to so many different tools that are super inconvenient and they still haven't frozen their credit in the US. And to me, that's like a really big eye opener to like, oh, okay, so we're kind of
• 06:30 - 07:00 still missing the basics even though you've put all your time into the privacy thing. So, the way I like to look at this myself, and it's something that I would ask all of you to reflect on, is how and in what ways does caring about privacy benefit your life? That's the question that I want everybody to ask themselves right now. Why do you care about privacy? Actually think about it. Don't just say, "Oh, because it's a human right." We all agree on that. That's a universal truth for probably anybody listening to this stream. But ask yourself why exactly it benefits
• 07:00 - 07:30 your life. What is the exact thing that gives you benefit? And once you can kind of answer that, it's a little bit easier to figure out, well, how far do I have to take it to maximize that benefit? So for you, if it's just having peace of mind that you can use the internet without having yourself be profiled, um using, you know, a regular operating system or any operating system, but having a privacy respecting browser might be all you need to do to simply accomplish that. And maybe setting up
• 07:30 - 08:00 like a nice VPN if you want more peace of mind and then changing your search engine. You can kind of consolidate all of your uh privacy perks within your web browser if that's your only concern. Um, but if you have broader concerns than that, then of course you have to start implementing more and more things. But most decisions can come back to, you know, why do I care about privacy? How why am I implementing it into my life? And what both positive and negative impacts is that having more people were to ask those questions, they would
• 08:00 - 08:30 actually save themselves a lot of time and hassle. Um, and that's just been an observation on my end. It's something I've experienced myself. It's something other people I know in the space have experienced. So yeah, if you're listening, um definitely leave some of your responses right now. Like I'd love to kind of see um all of you people in the live chat. Like answer the question so that people get some kind of an idea like why do you personally enjoy privacy and what value does privacy bring to your life? Like please leave it in the live chat. Let's go ahead and share some of our personal responses. Um so that we
• 08:30 - 09:00 can kind of like get ideas from each other here. So for me um personally when it comes to privacy it's about peace of mind. Um, I like the peace of mind that comes from knowing that like there's certain parts of my life that don't need to be shared with everybody that stay with me or that stay with myself and my loved ones. Those are the things that I really appreciate privacy for. Um, and I also just fundamentally believe in it in as a human right and also as something that I'm passionate about and I think
• 09:00 - 09:30 that's probably something that maybe a lot of you resonate with. Um, but to pretty much take advantage of as much as I can for those two things. You don't have to go all the way to the extreme. Um, some things I do go beyond that. Some things I do don't go as far as enough far enough as they should. Um, but that's personally kind of my answer is those general two things. But I'd love to hear what some of you guys uh have to say here. Let's see. I'm missing a lot of live chats here. So, um, let me go ahead and see what some of you all
• 09:30 - 10:00 have to say. I'm gonna I'll go back to some of your other questions. Um, but I'd love to just get some of um let's see. Arian says, "I used to go extreme. Um, but now I've moved on with a hint of privacy." Okay. I enjoy privacy, so I attempt to go as far as possible, but when recommending to other people, I make it explicitly clear, this is extreme. You don't need this. I think having that awareness is really important. Something I see a lot is people do um pretty like objectively extreme things for their privacy that are not wrong or bad, but
• 10:00 - 10:30 they are definitely on the extreme end, but there's almost like an unawareness of how extreme it is. So when other people who are nowhere near that point are are doing just very basic things, they almost get upset like, "Oh, there's so much more to do." But to to the other people, you have to think about what you're doing and how it comes across to other people. They're like, "Oh my god, this person's like doing this extreme stuff and they're like guilting me for it." So, it's good to have that awareness and I'm glad you have that. Mr. Plasma's reason for privacy is minimizing data collection to prevent
• 10:30 - 11:00 third parties sharing my data. That's a very valid complaint. Let's see here. Trying to find relevant stuff to the exact win here. Uh, Broadness says, "I've wanted to go as far as I can with privacy because I thought it would be an interesting project, but when it got to using cubes for my desktop, I later ran into a bug that made it unusable." Um, as someone who's playing around with cubes right now, I don't think you need a bug for for that to be the reality for
• 11:00 - 11:30 a lot of people. I didn't say that. Don't quote me. Um, let's see. Very good questions to ask myself. Yes, I think everybody should ask themselves that question. Okay, so Donna Dayne, for me, privacy is to prevent subtle unconscious self-censorship. It's impossible for me to write in a journal, for example, if I'm not convinced it's 100% private. Same with chatting with friends. Really interesting. Uh I haven't thought of that one before quite like that, but that's a really interesting point. Like having the
• 11:30 - 12:00 confidence that your thoughts are your own, you know, like things that you think don't reflect the things that you say. Um and that doesn't change in a digital world. Uh so I think it's a really good point. you want your journal to be your own and you want your thoughts to be your own. Um, so kind of replicating the real world with the digital world in that way is really a nifty it's a nifty reason I got to say. Mr. Plasma, the middle ground for me is using Linux Mint instead of Cubes because cubes is overkill in my case, but I love Linux Mint as its ease of use and the fact it doesn't collect data by
• 12:00 - 12:30 itself. Yeah, Linux Mint's great. Nino, when it comes to privacy, I never consider going extreme because it's not viable. If I'm going to work on KY privacy, it's much easier if I don't hide everything. Okay. Linux is nice for things other than privacy like custom dros and other things like intrusive ads. Okay. Matthew says, okay. All right. HGN says, "I'm usually focusing on privacy to be safer in the long run and to be up to date with how tech and software are progressing. Plus, it's a great way for
• 12:30 - 13:00 me to be safer on the internet. Virus total, for example." Yeah, lots like be caring about privacy. I think what you're speaking to also helps your security in a lot of ways as well. Um, and I think everybody can kind of get behind the concept of security. Like security is like something that you only you should have authorization to and people don't want u unauthorized access to different things. Yes, Alex, uh, I am reading messages on signal. So, if you're in a signal group, go ahead and just send your messages along there. Um, I'll get back to some of your
• 13:00 - 13:30 other questions, but I'm still getting back to people's responses here. Nino, if I'm careful what kind of data I give out, I control what data collectors get from me. Where I can, I like to go towards privacy friendly. That sounds very reasonable. Let's see. Carter, hello, Carter. Welcome back. Hello. Um, yeah. Okay, cool. Um, so I really like some of your responses. Hopefully some of those resonated with all of you. Um,
• 13:30 - 14:00 if you're listening to this stream after the fact, which most of you do as I see the stats, um, please ask yourself the question. Feel free to leave it in the comments on YouTube. Uh, leave it on the forum. It's a good question. Everybody should ask, and I think it's really cool that Izzy, uh, opened up about this. Um, I know it can be hard in a privacy community to open up about being less private than you intend to be. Um, but I think it's a really important discussion. Really cool stuff, and I'm glad that you're trying to find the right balance for yourself. Uh, so good job. and everyone else listening would love to hear uh kind of your journey
• 14:00 - 14:30 with this as well. All right, let's go up to the top. So, Rolls Ice Cream uh said they're trying an aliases workflow using Duck.Go's aliases since they don't have the ability to pay for any service and they had to leave Simple login since 10 aliases is not enough. So, Duck.Go has an aliasing service kind of like addio and simple login, but it's free I believe. Um I don't know what the free limitations are. Um, but they're using that and I didn't know about this, but they uh actually have a tool called
• 14:30 - 15:00 Quacki, which I learned about on our forum. Um, and it's like an open-source front end uh to use Duck.Go aliases. So, I can't speak to how safe this is, but this is what this person is using um to generate and manage their DuckCo aliases. So, congrats rolls ice cream. Um, Unknown Ghost is a regular, so they're active. Uh, they bought an anti- spy for my Linux phone and generally started using it more. Um, they finished setting up their secure ass pseudonym,
• 15:00 - 15:30 which from now on I'll call V. I might even start using cubes because of this nim, but not now. Also, since I started giving names to my nims, the two ones which manage the Linux phones are M and H. Cool. Accidentally clicked the link there. Um, let's see. V for velocity, H for Henry, and M for who's the first M. Is there anyone's whose name starts with M here? All right. What does M stand for?
• 15:30 - 16:00 Live chat. You decide. V stands for M stands for and H stands for. You guys decide what they stand for. And then maybe unknown ghost can use those for the full the full names for the pseudonyms. Um Robbie's a silver tech. Welcome. Um, we opened up some new tiers on the uh forum, so you can now be bronze, silver, or gold. Um, so thank you, Robbie, for supporting what we do. Um, Robbie says, "Stod up my own fresh RSS instance. I love being able to parse
• 16:00 - 16:30 through news I want without all the noise." So fresh RSS, if you haven't heard of it, is like a self-hosted RSS thing that you can do. Um, so if you wanted something that's self-hosted and you control it, uh, check it out. Um, they moved to Kaji for search and they're really enjoying it so far, which is awesome. Um, we listed Kaji recently on our website. Um, a lot of people really enjoy it. It's paid, so keep that in mind. Um, but the people who use it really enjoy it. Um, they also gave Noten Snook a try. They've been self-hosting Joplin for a while, but the UX didn't excite me and honestly don't
• 16:30 - 17:00 want the burden of making sure I have good backups as I have a lot of important notes. I basically prefer to outsource this function for peace of mind. Migrating was simple and while it has only been a few days, it seems to align more closely and also they join the techware community. So, welcome. Yeah. and to kind of speak on the notes thing. So, I have a lot of mixed feelings personally towards self-hosting and I'm going to share those with you just to give you all something to think about. I'm not pro or against self-hosting. I actually self-host a few things and I don't self-host a few things. Um, people really don't think
• 17:00 - 17:30 about the complexity of self-hosting before they do it. With self-hosting, you're now in charge of if something's up all the time, it needs to be reliable. It needs to be stable. it needs to be online and it needs to be secure and if you don't know what you're doing, you could jeopardize any of those things and that can really ruin your day. So, um I haven't had any horror stories cuz frankly I'm scared to host any sensitive stuff that's self-hosted because I don't have the kind of
• 17:30 - 18:00 resources to ensure that it's always going to be up 24/7 and most regular home users don't. So, I'm not saying it's impossible and people shouldn't pursue it and that there aren't benefits, but the things that I self-host are very missionensitive. They're things that are like, "Okay, this is fine. It can go down for a week. Um, it can get hacked. It's fine. Worst case scenario, of course, I'm still going to do everything I can to make sure it doesn't happen." But um I think that outsourcing to a team that can actually ensure just like
• 18:00 - 18:30 basic standard of quality across the board is something to really consider and it shouldn't be demonized and I think self-hosting can still exist alongside those options as well. It just depends on the user and their priorities and what they're looking for in their software. So um I'm glad that you're not just locking yourself only into one group because there's benefits across the board depending on what you need. Omar, I may be the last person to know about this, but a few days ago I discovered Safari profiles. It's pretty good actually. I'm enjoying it. Safari
• 18:30 - 19:00 Plus Adguard now is my go-to browser on iOS. Interesting. Yeah. So, Apple not too long ago released um they released profiles kind of like Firefox profiles or Chrome profiles. Um and it's a pretty well regarded feature overall. Like I think it even connects with things like focus profiles. like it's very integrated in Apple's ecosystem. I've never used it, but people say a lot of good things. So, it's cool that Omar found the feature and I'm glad it's working for you. Um, if you ever did
• 19:00 - 19:30 move to a different browser like Brave or Firefox, there are ways to emulate that workflow as well on those browsers. So, if you ever do try something else out, you can still replicate that workflow um with those browsers. So, cool stuff. And everybody should probably use different browsers or at least different user accounts/profiles because they can really help your browser workflow. Let's see. Scott at Taserface says, "Thanks for the shout out in the live stream. I did a little research on digital gift cards I can buy with crypto. I'm in Canada and as far as I
• 19:30 - 20:00 know, we don't have a masked credit card service here, so gift cards might be the might be an option." Um, and just to confirm, I believe that is true. At least I haven't heard of a Canadian version of privacy.com. They installed a Crescent on their Android tablet. They thought it was only for graphing OS. That's a big misconception. App stores are available on regular Android. You don't need a custom ROM to use custom app stores on Android. Um, so they started using Ironfox. So far it's pretty nice. Yes, I know Mazil based browsers aren't secure, but I have a brave for activities that require security. Yeah. And I just want to like,
• 20:00 - 20:30 you know, just be careful with language. Um, there's a lot of language out there that Mozilla based browsers aren't secure. Um, where I think it might be better language to say they're they're less secure. Um, so don't use this browser and think, "Oh, anything I do on it is going to get hacked." That's just not reality. that's not based in reality. We don't see actual attacks like that in the wild. Um, but I think it's very fair to say, okay, yeah, this is my less secure browser. Um, but I do like to kind of push back on that language a little bit. Um, let's see
• 20:30 - 21:00 here. Yeah. Okay. Even anon says those are secure enough. Molvad browser and even Tor browser both Firefox forks, but it also depends on what exactly you wish to do. Yeah, I mean again guys, like Tor browser is considered one of the best um browsers out there, if not the best for your privacy, and it is based on Firefox. So, it's there. Yeah. Um, O asks, "Where is this website?" This is our forum, discuss.te. Um, and then we just caught up to Izzy's. So, actually, let me go back to the live chat and say hello to
• 21:00 - 21:30 all of you. I'm a little behind, so let me go ahead and try to rush through and catch up here. Um, let's [Music] see. Personally, I would trust Brave over Vivaldi. Yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat. I I see Vivaldi as like an alternative to Chrome. Um, but I don't see it as like out of the box it doesn't have kind of the same privacy and security protections as Brave. Uh, if you want to see what this looks like, I would check out privacyests.org. Um, they kind of
• 21:30 - 22:00 compare out of the box what it looks like. It's a little misleading because with Vivaldi, if you toggle on like its full tracking protection on setup, it's actually better than what it's marked as on the chart. So, um, yeah. Yeah, and you can always install Ublock Origin in Valdi and make improvements to Vivaldi. So, I know some people personally who use Valdi that really enjoy it. I know people who use Brave, but I do personally aim towards Brave myself. Um, what are your thoughts about Brave nowadays? There's a lot of controversy about Peter right after I said I'd move to towards Brave. Um, I
• 22:00 - 22:30 haven't heard about this with with Peter Teal Theel. Um, so I have to look into it. Um, they've had a lot of controversies. None of them so far have like impacted privacy in a way that makes me not use it. Um, it sucks because I haven't seen a great like privacy first uh version of Chromium that like works well out of the box if that makes sense. I know there's ungooled Chromium. I know there's even Vivaldi, but Brave is kind of a hard thing that no one's really done before. So, I'd love to see some like Brave
• 22:30 - 23:00 alternatives to just give someone another option. What is your good Android browser for privacy? It seems they don't protect from fingerprinting. Um yeah, I mean it depends on what browser you're on or sorry what operating system you're on. Um generally people really like Brave. Um there's like the Chromite um fork now uh which I forgot the name. So if somebody can let me know there was like an alternative continuation of Chromite out there. Um typically those are kind
• 23:00 - 23:30 of the best ones. Uh you can always just use regular Firefox as well. Um it kind of depends on which operating system you're on. Um let's see. But yes, also there's tour browser of course. Numerate says, "What is your search engine? Still searching for the correct one." Yeah. So our resources tech.teresources um kind of cover search engines if you want some options. Um personally I've been really liking duck.go but you know like I started with duck.go. I moved to Brave Search. I tried Mulvadetta for a
• 23:30 - 24:00 while, later, however you say it. Um, I've tried Kaji. I did my review of Kaji and lately I've been trying Duck. Go again and it's been better for me than it was. So, that's what I've been personally doing. Um, try them all. They're really easy to swap. There's not that much commitment to a search engine, and as long as you're not paying for Kaji, there's no like cost to you to try and switch from them. So, um, people also like Start Page. I like Start Page as well. So, try them out. Let's see. I already got back to a lot of these comments earlier when we talked about the win. Um, let's
• 24:00 - 24:30 see. Like this stream, y'all. Yeah. Yeah, like the stream, Arian. I see 36 likes and 130 viewers. So, there's a bit of a mismatch here. So, let's give the stream a like. Let's see. Monero and XMR bazaar. Cool.
• 24:30 - 25:00 Yep. Let's see. Yeah, I just answered the search engine. Um, our website details them like the ones that I generally recommend. Um, personally, I'm using Duck.Go right now, but there's no like hard reason for that if that makes sense. Um, I'm seeing a question here from Alex on our signal group. Uh, Alex says, "I don't know if you have any
• 25:00 - 25:30 experience on this, but what do you think about Alma Linux for servers? It is based on CentOS, so you can quickly configure it. Extremely secure." Um, etc. So, they ask about Alma Linux. Yeah. So, actually, I have an interview with Alma Linux that I've been really bad about, um, because I haven't published it, but it's pretty much edited. I just need to click publish. Um, so you'll actually get to meet some of the team behind Amma Linux and kind of get to know what it is and learn about it and it seems kind of perfect for people who uh got kind of cut out from the whole CentOS thing. Um, so
• 25:30 - 26:00 yeah, that those are kind of my thoughts. It's not something I personally use, but it seems like a really useful project uh to replace what CentOS used to be. So um yeah, that interview is coming soon. What do you think about Iron Fox? I'm still not really familiar with Ironfox, so I'm not going to comment on it right now, but I need to look into it. So hopefully next week I can have an answer for you. Yeah, someone's using Mulvad. Yeah. So Molvad search engine used to be only for Molvad customers, and now it's open to the public. So if you've never heard of Molvad search engine, it actually proxies Google and
• 26:00 - 26:30 or Brave search results. Um, so go ahead and try it out. It's extremely bare bones. Like seriously, if you use it, you'll know what I'm talking about. Um, but it might be all you need. And if it clicks with you, then it clicks with you. Let's see. Carter says, "Hello." I'm gonna say hello back again. I use graphine OS. I restrict
• 26:30 - 27:00 access to internet for apps when installing. How good is this in terms of using closed source apps that may not require internet? Yeah, if you deny um internet access to apps that like don't need internet access, especially the ones you don't trust, um that that's great. Like that's going to give you a lot of just peace of mind, a lot of privacy. Um so yeah, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Um there might still theoretically be like certain attacks that can be pulled off, but you're you're fine. That's not like a common thing. And I think that's that's even something that I've done. Like back in the day, um when I was
• 27:00 - 27:30 using a Gboard, I really couldn't find a better keyboard alternative. Now, there's some better ones like Fudo has a nice keyboard. Um, but I did just download Gboard and just denied internet access and that's like a perfectly reasonable solution, I think. Hello, Techlor. Hello. O hello. Let's see. Something cool to try is getting a Mulvad account over tour and using it after tour. You stay anonymous, but the target site thinks you're a VPN user, not a tour user. Fun. This person's having a fast
• 27:30 - 28:00 experience with tour. You should record it so we can see. I've never seen it before in my life. M stands for mulvad. V stands for victory. What does um H stand for though? You didn't say what H stands for. Unbelievable. Now what's what's what's their name? Now Robbie is not going to have Wait, was it Robbie?
• 28:00 - 28:30 Why am I missing? Whose whose pseudonyms were those? Oh, here. Unknown ghost. Unknown ghost now doesn't have a name for all of um the pseudonyms. All because Zach couldn't find one for H. I'm just messing it to Zach. Zach says, "The more you learn about tools just for fun, you'll be more confident in using it when it's not just for fun." Nothing wrong with that. Yeah,
• 28:30 - 29:00 good point. I started running a Monero node. A power surge killed my perfect uptime. Yeah, see the when you self-host, there's so many things you just can't control, like a power surge. Like, there's just a lot of things that are out of your control, and that's just one of them. Um, let's see. Alex said, "If you approve it to be a good OS and many others I talked about, I will switch." Yeah, I mean, if it's right for you, then it's right for you. I mean, there's so many Linux options out there, so
• 29:00 - 29:30 there's not like a reason you only can use Alma Linux, but Alma Linux seems to be an extremely trustworthy project with a lot of cool people behind it. So, definitely like no reason to avoid Alma Linux in my eyes. Let's see. Ah, I am getting caught up. It doesn't feel like it, but I am. I haven't heard of this exchange
• 29:30 - 30:00 shutting down. So, yeah. And what's my go-to XMR exchange? So, I don't really buy XMR natively. Um, I'm a lot more likely to just buy Bitcoin or Litecoin and then just swap it into Monero. I don't really care too much about on and off ramps with Monero. um because I just trust that once it turns into Monero. And I'm not doing anything crazy sensitive. If you have a higher threat model, then maybe um you can care a little bit more about your on andoff ramps, but for me personally, I don't care too much about it. Where is this website? discuss.techler.te. It's our
• 30:00 - 30:30 forum. Nino says, "Speaking of self-hosting, choose what you self-host carefully. Also, choose what you expose to internet carefully. I don't mind self-hosting whatever I can, but I won't expose everything to internet." Very smart. Um, it's a messy thing to do if you don't know what you're doing. So, just be aware what you're getting yourself into when you self-host. And I think people should try self-hosting. You'll learn a lot from it. You'll grow. You'll learn. It's great. Um, just be aware that there are risks. And I would do things that are not sensitive at
• 30:30 - 31:00 first if you're trying it out for the first time. What did I miss? You missed You missed a bit, Coffee Monster. Um, yeah. So, I would I would rewind and go through the privacy win. Quick question. Do you have a privacy focused file manager and keyboard? Didn't find much on the internet and everything that seems good isn't popular, so I have a hard time trusting them. Um, which operating system uh that can that answer can be very different across operating systems. So, uh, feel free to leave your
• 31:00 - 31:30 operating system and remind me what the question was. So, because I might forget, um, who like your follow-up answer was tied to. My win of the week is setting up Brave as my workplace instead of apps. Nice. Good win. They've been using Duck.Go and they're trying out search. Cool. If you try it out, definitely update uh next week. Thanks for the answers. Of course. I replaced Aurora with Google Play Store as graphine recommends it. Still feeling
• 31:30 - 32:00 somewhat unhappy having Google back. Yeah, you know, like I I wouldn't do it personally. Um I like Aurora. It's a great project. Um, and there are some genuine privacy benefits. You can like log in anonymously to the Aurora store. So, personally, I wouldn't do that. Um, so just take and you know what, you might disagree with my advice, but that's okay. So, that's just what I would personally do. Um, if you're unhappy about it, then like don't do it. There's not a one-stop solution for everything, you know? Um,
• 32:00 - 32:30 so just do kind of like tailor advice that you hear to what benefits you the best. Uh, that's a complicated one, Donna Dana. Um, that's that's a really big one. So, that's that's a little too big of a question for a stream. So, if you really want to like ask something a little more uh thoroughly, it could be a good forum question. Oh, yeah. My question might be too complex for this. Okay. Yeah, it's coming. It's coming. So, you
• 32:30 - 33:00 want still actual. What does that mean? Um, I don't listen to metal, but I respect metal. So, like we played a metal orchestra piece once, actually, and it was kind of my introduction to metal as a musician, and it was uh it was a mess. Like, it was so hard and it was but it worked. So, metal's really interesting. I think people associate metal with just like yelling or screaming or just odd odd
• 33:00 - 33:30 sounding stuff and it is sometimes but it's actually like very complicated very complex music. So really really cool stuff. Those are my thoughts on metal but I don't enjoy listening to it if that makes sense. Okay so Android for keyboard and file manager privacy. Yeah. So, there is the simple suite of tools um which now, oh my gosh, Fosify is the name. Got to remember things sometimes on the spot. So, Fosify, um is like the
• 33:30 - 34:00 continuation of what simple mobile tools used to be. And I believe they have a file manager and um a lot of uh suite and like out of the box tools that you'd expect to replace the regular things like your dialer, your contacts, your photos can be find can be found in the Fossify suite. Um as for keyboard, I've been hearing a lot of people just, you know, like random keyboards on Froid. Um I've been hearing a lot of good stuff about Fudo lately. I haven't personally tried Fudo, but people really enjoy the Fudo keyboard. So that's another thing that I've seen as well.
• 34:00 - 34:30 Um, yeah, Flores board. Um, that's one that I've heard about as well. Um, so yeah, try those all out. Let's see. Tried Ente Photos for three months. Loved it, but felt the price higher compared to others. Not using any cloud storage now. Would you recommend using iCloud? Um, yeah, it's it's a mixed bag. If you do use iCloud, try to enable advanced data protection, so you have endto-end encryption with your iCloud subscription. Um, and that will be a pretty good middle ground. you'll have end to end encrypted photos, but you'll
• 34:30 - 35:00 have all the features of iCloud. So, it's pretty nifty. Um, and it's cheaper than ent, but you know, then you're locked into the Apple ecosystem. I feel like sharing always sucks with iCloud, like with anyone who doesn't use iCloud. It works, but it kind of sucks. So, um, pros and cons. Uh, and that's kind of what I would recommend. Now, the the stream time, I'm trying to keep it consistent, and this is a time that I can kind of always do. So, um, yeah, it's hard to pick times, and I'm sorry it's not always great, but
• 35:00 - 35:30 all these streams are published after the fact, so you can always, um, watch them after they're done. Um, what do you think about Fudo? Again, I haven't used it. It's just I've heard a lot of great things about it, and it seems like a genuinely good keyboard and something that Android's been needing for a long time. Thank you, Carter. Yes. Okay, so Carter, what do you recommend to get a cheap and good VPS? Um, I really like Hetner personally. Um, and that's what we currently use for a lot of things. Uh, Pikapods are really fun if you just want something that's like out of the box and works. Um, I've been playing quite a bit
• 35:30 - 36:00 more with uh some of these different tools and I've been enjoying them. Um, yeah. So, those are kind of the two places I would start is like Hexner and also if you not something simpler like a Pika Pod if you just want a specific service. Um, I'm it's still something that I'm trying to figure out like what's good and not good and trying to give suggestions based on that. So, those are kind of two easy to recommend things that I can talk about, but if anyone has other recommendations, please leave them in the live chat. And thank
• 36:00 - 36:30 you for the tip, Carter. Um, you're awesome for that and I really appreciate it. Let's see. So, we got a question in the signal group from Alex. So, a while ago, I saw the video from All Things Secured where he was talking about a certain type of data deletion service that in his eyes causes more harm than good. What do you think about this topic? Here's an AI summary from the video. Many removal services like privacy be incogn. Yes. Okay. Um, yeah. Um, the
• 36:30 - 37:00 host mentions the utility of dashboards. Yeah. So, I I quickly skimmed over this. Uh, it's something I'm familiar with, so I can kind of just summarize the summary. So data removal services, there's a few ways to do it. There's three ways to do it. The first one is kind of the spray uh option where they literally like you submit your data to them and they just have a list of emails where they just send it all to. It's all automated. And a lot of services a lot of those services might not even have your information in the first place. So, apart from it being just automated and
• 37:00 - 37:30 not really something that's designed to like actually opt you out and it just requires a lot of trust, um it could just be giving up your information to providers that don't even have your information. So, for that reason, I also avoid and discourage using those services. The second way to do it is kind of what um a lot of these other services do, which is you upload your data to the service and then they'll like do a hybrid approach of like some automatic, some not automatic. Um, and then if any issues or a specific service
• 37:30 - 38:00 doesn't opt you out, um, they'll remove like check in manually with their agents. But those ones are a little better because they'll scan sites for your information first and then they'll submit to those sites, but then they still use a hybrid option. Um, there is a service, I don't know if it's public info or not, but the third way to do it is manual, and you go to the sites yourself, put in your information, and then opt out. And there's a service I know of that's again it might not be public info so just to
• 38:00 - 38:30 be safe I'm not going to say it. Um but they're working on essentially like an ondevice method of doing these optouts where you put in your information and it can scan it like on your system. Um, so yes, like that's kind of a cool thing to do is like it's on your system. Um, and then you can go ahead and opt out directly from your system and it doesn't actually use any third parties and they essentially automate the manual process. I don't know if that's public info yet, but it will be public at some point and then you all know about it when it's
• 38:30 - 39:00 there. Um, but yeah. Um, does anyone have recommendations for Carter uh and any VPS services that they like? Uh definitely want to follow up on that if any of you have VPS services that you enjoy. Let's see. All right, let's go back to the winds
• 39:00 - 39:30 here. Took a big break from the winds. So rolls ice cream. It's not a privacy and security win, but I'm currently testing out Zen browser. For now, the experience is fantastic. Uh soon they will have profiles feature in Firefox/Zen, so I could keep this on my watch. What does the profiles feature have to do with your watch? Oh, so I should keep this on my watch. I misread it. I thought you meant like on a watch. I'm like, what? Okay. Uh I got a new phone this week, which is actually up to
• 39:30 - 40:00 date with the latest Android, not like my old phone. And so I want to take this opportunity to test new privacy and security workflows with for example the pass keys. Um and I have now access to interesting privacy and security features like the always on VPN feature and I'm testing out with Crescent and that's for now it really exciting. I'm glad you're on an up-to-date operating system with likely security updates. That's a big win. Um definitely excited for the profiles as well. That's a really neat feature that I think um is really underrated and people don't take advantage of the profiles feature. And
• 40:00 - 40:30 then uh they are testing out Zen. So um I hope Zen keeps improving. I'd love to see it. I don't think it's in public release yet. I think it's still in beta. So I'd love to see like a public release of Zen. Let's see. Gojo says on the twist of irony. As much as it will overwhelm, hopefully it makes them want to give in and switch. Remember, give problem solution. So let's see. I've twisted my L, which obviously I didn't mention on the forum. my W that became
• 40:30 - 41:00 an L. It's a good thing I held off. What? I've twisted my L. Is there something I'm missing here? I didn't mention on the forum my W that became an L. Oh. Oh. Oh, your loss. Okay, I've twisted my loss, which obviously I didn't mention in the forum. My win that became an L. And it's a very good thing I held off. Continue. I gave in not deciding to switch the smallest company to Proton. to be honest, what they were using as an email is domestic
• 41:00 - 41:30 anyways, and so I don't think convincing them was going to do a lot despite giving the option of trying it myself first. Still disappointed by Proton Drive, but hey. Um, I've now decided to give my uncle a password via a physical note he will use to type from now on to decrypt my emails I send. Knowing him, he'll feel overwhelmed at first and then get used to it as I send more and do so. And hopefully they get used to replying inside the interface, too. If they need to, obviously, otherwise I can explain to them, they can do it. Now, this isn't a huge win by any means yet, but it's going to go a long way to encourage the more encrypted way either via PGP or by
• 41:30 - 42:00 using Proton themselves. Cool. So, you're setting up like kind of the seeds that will hopefully grow into bigger things. So, it's good. Sometimes um like sometimes when you have like a goal, you can't get them there right away, but you can kind of like plant the seeds to help get them there. And it sounds like that's what you're doing. So, good job. Thundercat shifted to NE photos. Everyone in my family shifted to it. wasn't using anything for photo backup, but other members were using Google Photos. It's another step closer to removing Google entirely from my family.
• 42:00 - 42:30 Everyone should think about their friends and family's privacy. Yes, really good message and a really good win. And Google Photos is a big one to get rid of. That's probably like one of the hardest things to move away from in the Google Suite. So, congrats and I think you're setting yourself up for a lot of success. Cosmos Cat created a shortcut in iOS to restart the phone every week. read that frequent restarts to your device is good for security. They uninstalled apps for food deliveries and Amazon shopping. They're going to install and remove them on a need basis.
• 42:30 - 43:00 And they moved from Apple Notes to Notnook. Paid for the premium tier. The free tier is more than enough, but I really like the product yet to migrate some notes from Obsidian. Yeah. So, some context on the reboot thing if people don't uh know or aren't familiar. Um, essentially, there is a lot of malware. um not a lot, I don't want to exaggerate, but there is malware on mobile operating systems um that it can infect your device, but very few of them are what we call persistent, which means that once a device is restarted and it
• 43:00 - 43:30 starts all of your processes from the ground up, um the malware still runs. And so there actually was a really crazy attack that happened within Kasperski. Um like Kasperski's internal devices that they were using were actually infected. I believe it was with Pegasus. and they were doing a lot of analysis on these devices and they found that most of them except a few of them weren't persistent uh attacks. So what was happening is they kept getting reinfected. So they would reboot the device, it would lose it but then the device would get reinfected with another payload and it would get malware again.
• 43:30 - 44:00 So the point is this kind of advice has actually extended. Uh even the NSA and like government agencies have put forward the advice of like reboot your phone once a week or once a day, however much you want to do it. Uh there's an app called IV verify on both iOS and Android. And part of the one of the features in it is actually a reboot uh notification. So yeah, it's something that you can do. You can create a shortcut to restart it manually or automatically or you can do it manually. And I'd say on the list of priorities,
• 44:00 - 44:30 it's not the highest. Um but it's definitely something that people can do. And personally, I like rebooting just because like, you know, it feels like the phone's snappier. It kind of restarts everything. Um it's just a good reset. I really like rebooting devices more just mentally more than anything and I'm glad that you're liking notes as well. That's uh really awesome. Let's see. And then they shared the shortcut as well. So if you want to see how it's done um a weekly routine, it's just restart the device. And I believe that what it is is it's the shutdown um option. And I think they
• 44:30 - 45:00 expand on that later. Yeah. So I don't have the restart only shutdown. I am EU based if that matters. And then they said here that it's like this exact one here. Add the shutdown action and click on the shutdown option to toggle it to restart. So that's how you can go ahead and emulate that if you're interested in doing that yourself. Let's see. Gujo said, "In continuation with the rise of cracking down end to end encryption, I thought I would take matters into my own hands,
• 45:00 - 45:30 but I could really use a practice with the community only. I switched my blog to hosting it to Infinity Free to now using Bear Blog. I was pleasantly surprised by it. I'm gonna keep paying for it. Um, and so this is really exciting. So they moved over to Cryp uh practice thread for mitigating. So let's pull this up. So it looks like a way it uses the signal protocol um to verify the intended recipient. Cool. Okay. I haven't heard of this before. So if you want to check out a really cool thing,
• 45:30 - 46:00 check it out. But yeah, if something's two years old, I don't know if I would trust it too much personally, especially something as sensitive as like a messenger. And uh we're still currently on bear blog. I like bear blog. So I hope you enjoy it too. Um it's a good little platform. I am looking at ghost right now just because it's a little more featurerich, but blog is really nice for just a nice simple blog. Um before I touch on cutie, let's go back to the live chat. See what we got.
• 46:00 - 46:30 Okay, JC asks, "How does a celebrity or public figure maintain their ops? I understand they don't have their privacy because they're a known person, but how do they maintain a clean record on the internet?" Yeah, so I'd actually really point you to an interview I did with Jonathan Steele, who's a attorney, who uh talks that's one of the questions I directly asked him. I directly said, "Okay, so the main thing that these
• 46:30 - 47:00 people are really concerned about is where they live and their residence." And so I kind of asked like what they do and talked about the different options. Um, it's a really good interview, really underrated. It should have performed better in my opinion because there's a lot of good advice in there that people should probably hear. Um, so I'd really check that out if you're interested in like keeping your physical life uh more private and like where you live and how you exist. And that's probably a lot of the advice that these people um have to take more into consideration um because a lot of what they do is public. It's
• 47:00 - 47:30 more about protecting their personal private life. Is there any update regarding to Apple versus UK? If UK wins, ADP can go for a toss. Yeah. So, the only update on the UK uh situation, um Apple pretty much appealed and said that they should be able to have a court case outside of the secret court in the UK and Apple actually won that appeal. So, at least some parts of the case now will be made
• 47:30 - 48:00 public so we can follow it publicly, which is a pretty big win um in my eyes. So, that's kind of the latest update. Still no major updates since then. Um but that's that's kind of it. So, we're following it closely. Some privacy creators I've watched have recommended hosting MailCow in a VPS for increased control, but I don't get how you don't have to trust a VPS provider. Yeah. So, I I don't think if my goal is like priv like if if
• 48:00 - 48:30 I'm giving you privacy only advice, even in that scenario, I still don't think that a self-hosted mail server is what I'd push you to. I still think that like trying to set up a Proton or Tudo account is going to get you further. Um because yes, you're trusting your VPS provider a lot of times. Um, you can do things to reduce the amount of trust that you put in your VPS provider that make it more of a non-issue, but a lot of people don't know how to do that. And
• 48:30 - 49:00 a lot of people aren't going to do that. And it's really hard to get everybody to actually guarantee good privacy and security with a self-hosted email solution. It's not impossible. It's just really hard to guarantee. And I personally find it much better and safer advice to give to an overwhelming amount of people to just use services that take care of it for you. They're not going to give you perfect privacy or perfect anonymity, but they're going to give you a substantially better amount than what you're going to get through Gmail. And I also think that like when I'm making videos, I'm not thinking about people
• 49:00 - 49:30 that um can self-host things. I'm thinking about people who've never heard of privacy before and are looking for solutions they can start integrating today. So, yes, I am not going to say that self-hosting is like the number one thing I'd say for email. I would be a lot quicker to say use something like Proton or TUDA or mailbox.org or startmail, whatever you want to pick. I just made a top emails video or top email providers video not too long ago with some of these options. And then if you want something really sensitive, don't use email altogether and use
• 49:30 - 50:00 something like an end toend encrypted messenger like Signal. I think that's much easier advice that's applicable to a lot more people. Um, that's my personal thoughts on it at least. Um, and then Alex uh said in the Signal group uh even on a dedicated server, you need to trust the server hoster. Yeah. So, there's Yeah, I I'll just leave it at that. I don't overall agree with that advice. If you know what you're doing, you can probably do it, but I think a lot of people don't. To give you context, I don't trust myself to self-host email at all. like the amount
• 50:00 - 50:30 of things that I would need to consistently keep patched, like consistently keep like the uptime required, like to have a server up all the time and to also not be flagged for spam and to deal with all the email complexities on my own is crazy. Like I do not want to do that and I would hate myself if I was going to put myself through that. Now, if you want to do that, please do. But those are kind of my thoughts on the email and why I personally don't want to self-host and why I don't generally recommend it. If you're an exception, then you're an exception. But yeah, I think I nailed
• 50:30 - 51:00 that one. Repeated myself a lot of times there, but I really want to drill home my thoughts on that. What's your prospect on AI and how it will affect privacy and security as a whole? Yeah, I mean, in the short term, it's been a pretty negative thing for privacy as a whole. Um, so it's hard to know where it's going to go from here, but so far, all I'll say is it's been overall a net net loss, I'd say. Oh, this is interesting. Arian, tell us your skincare routine and also what mic
• 51:00 - 51:30 are you using right now. So, I'm using the DJI uh wireless mic. Uh I really enjoy this mic actually. Um it's super convenient. It's super portable and it sounds better than like any other mic I've used. Um and it plugs into phones. It plugs into your computer. I love this mic. Uh yeah, I've never said I love a mic before. I hate mics. um it's really hard to get them to sound nice and like tinkering with them and I wish it was just plug-andplay and this is what I've always wanted. It's just plug-andplay.
• 51:30 - 52:00 So, the DJI wireless mic. My skincare routine is kind of obnoxious actually. Um so, yeah. Okay. So, I rinse my face in the morning and then Okay, so I have two days. I have I have a day one and a day two and I switch off day one, day two, day one, day two. So day one I do vitamin C in the morning and then I do a moisturizer and a sunscreen. Then midday
• 52:00 - 52:30 I'll normally reapply sunscreen and then the evening of day one is a um a dapylene. It's a it's a retinoid and then a lotion and then I go to bed. Um oh and before in my PM I'll normally use an oil cleanser. Um, I used a like non- oil cleanser before and it was really starting to strip my skin, so it might have been too aggressive. But anyway, my day two uh is a high uh what is it? What's it
• 52:30 - 53:00 called? It's an acid. Starts with an H. I don't know. Um, but there was like uh something I use in the morning on day two and then you know lotion, moisturizer and then in the PM I do um I forgot it's some complex. I don't know. It's I don't think anyone cares but um you asked and yeah that's like generally what it is and then sometimes I'll just put some like Vaseline on before I go to bed. Um maybe like once
• 53:00 - 53:30 or twice a week. So yeah, um I don't think there's like a that's just kind of like what seems to have worked for me. I've been playing around with a lot of different things and I've been really enjoying it. So it's been nice. Um let's see here. Gosh, I hate when it skips around. Let's see. Fakynet is also run by great and based folks. Cool. Hi Henry. I've been watching your channel for years and I
• 53:30 - 54:00 was wondering, do you play video games and is an open source Android keyboard? I recommend Flores board. Okay, cool. Another recommendation for Flores board. I don't really play video games. I made that video recently where I updated this like laptop or desktop next to me to Windows 11. Um, and that one is strictly used for gaming, but I kind of joked in the video. I'm like, "Yeah, as you guys can see, I'm a pro gamer, but I have like these like kind of normie games on it." Like, and I just have like games I used to play when I was younger. That's kind of all I play. And I cannot tell
• 54:00 - 54:30 you the last time I actually booted up one of those games on the computer to be honest. Like I booted up the computer to to do that video and update it to Windows 11, but I hadn't booted it up in like months. So I think it's probably been like at least 6 months since I played a video game. Um yeah, I I sometimes want to play them more, but then I like just want to do other things more. So yeah, sorry if that answer disappoints you. My other win for the week is setting up my gaming station without going Bluetooth at all. That's exciting. Sounds kind of hard though. How are you
• 54:30 - 55:00 going to do that? Hello. Um S3V1ET Ninja. Hello Savlet. Soviet Ninja. Hard to know. Okay. Kasperski is great to have. Very lightweight as well. Yeah, I don't know if I recommend their like their anti virus solution. It's just they do a lot of good research on their like within their team and they publish a lot of that research and they did this whole research thing about like persistent malware on some of their devices. I
• 55:00 - 55:30 switched from Google Keep to Obsidian to Notnook. Nice Arian. Nice. Is it reasonable for you to reach out to the more privacy first laptop manufacturers like Tuxedo um or System 76 to compare them to Nova Custom Laptops for example would be pretty expensive otherwise. Yeah. So, for that video, I'm leaning more towards doing just like a a digital comparison, if that makes sense. Um, they actually a lot of them seem to source their laptops from a similar manufacturer. So, really like the the hardware itself should be
• 55:30 - 56:00 similar. It's just the um the specs that are different as well as the operating system and the customizations that they offer that seem to be different. So, that's why I was thinking it could be better to do that. Plus, I always feel a little weird reaching out and being like, "Hey, can you guys just send me a device, please?" Um, I feel a lot better when they reach out to me first and then they say, "Hey, we'd love to send you a device." It's like, "Okay, well, if you're going to send me a device, then sure. I mean, I'm not going to say no." Um, so yeah, I I feel weird being the one to initiate that personally. Um, and
• 56:00 - 56:30 maybe I should just do it anyway. And like they'll they'll just say no if they don't want to. It's not a big deal. But um, yeah. Strong agree. Do not self-host email. Okay. Um, oh, am I caught up? No way. Okay. What app do you use for interviews or podcasts? I've been looking for a great conference call app for a long time. So, I actually um yeah, I actually uh do it all manually. So, I will like send over a booking link with cal.com to people who do interviews. Um
• 56:30 - 57:00 they'll book a time. I meet with them on Signal normally. Um I've done a couple times on Jity and every time I regretted it on Jity to be honest, it's always slow. It always lags and it always causes bad interviews. Um, I did an interview recently with the NextCloud CEO on Jity and there was a lot of like annoyances there. Um, it's good enough to publish, but you'll see it when that comes out. Um, so I use Signal. I set up OBS. I open up OBS twice. There's two instances of OBS and um, the first instance is like recording uh, the other
• 57:00 - 57:30 person's display and the other one is recording me. Now, ideally that um like that like recording is hopefully the backup. I really like people to get their own video and audio um because it results in much higher quality if they're getting their own local video and audio. So, I typically like to ask people to do that, but if they don't, then I'm just essentially getting a screen recording of the signal call. So, um I do it manually. Uh and it works
• 57:30 - 58:00 pretty well. His skincare routine is being young. Yeah, being young really helps. So, that's uh that's a huge part of it, too. Um, let's see. Thanks for the update. In my country, iCloud is significantly cheaper than Ente. Proton Drive for Photos is horrible. Hence, I'm in a dilemma. Would you suggest iCloud ADP or ENT? Yeah. Okay. So, iCloud advanced data protection versus ENT. Let me go ahead and give my thoughts. First off, ENT is open source, so there's a lot more transparency there. It's from
• 58:00 - 58:30 like a small organization, not in an insulting way. It's just it's not Apple, right? It's not a big tech company. You're actually in a lot of ways escaping big tech when you choose to go with Ente. The other huge win with Ente is that it's crossplatform. It's also even available on the web. So, as long as you have something with a web browser, you should be able to access your photos. It's available on Android, it's available on iOS, it's available on Linux. Um, and all their clients are open source as well. And you'll find them in really nice like open source communities on the Android side of things. So, that's the huge plus to
• 58:30 - 59:00 Ente. It's also easier to collaborate with other people because it's crossplatform. If someone in your family uses an Android device, they can still have the same access to your photos. Whereas, if you're an iCloud photos and you're trying to share it with a family, um, you might know how bad that's going to go. So, those are kind of the wins for Ent. The wins for iCloud, if you are in the Apple ecosystem, the integration is like crazy good. Um, and if you're okay with that and you're okay with being stuck in that walled garden, then that's great. You'll actually get a lot of benefits from it. Um, it's also got
• 59:00 - 59:30 probably a lot more features and it's a lot easier to use. It's more stable. Um, it's probably faster. Like there's a lot of just usability things that Apple has the resources to develop. Even end to end encrypted. Um, if you've ever used iCloud photos, advanced data protection literally doesn't really change anything about your experience. It's exactly the same as regular iCloud photos. They just also add end toend encryption. So, it's a pretty good place to be usabilitywise. Um, it's also cheaper as you kind of mentioned. Um, so it's really accessible
• 59:30 - 60:00 uh, in that regard. Uh, so those are kind of my general thoughts. I think that if you are all in on the Apple ecosystem and you're pretty committed to it, um, you it's not a bad place to be. They can't access your photos directly and you get a lot of privacy and security from it and it's much better than being on Google Photos. Um, but if you want something a little bit more private, privacy respecting from a company that's dedicated to privacy and it's not a big tech company and it's open source and it's crossplatform, but it's a little bit more expensive. Um,
• 60:00 - 60:30 then I think that's where ENT uh really comes in. So, those are generally my thoughts between the two. Um, I don't think either of them are bad options. Um, but I do think NT is like a better place to be if you're able to use it and it works for you. Libram 5 is a good phone. Okay. Um I'm gonna say I don't know formally because well I do know actually I do have one. Um but I haven't played around with it too much. Uh context I ordered
• 60:30 - 61:00 one way back in like 2018 uh with with my own money. They didn't like send me a review unit. They didn't commit to anything. I bought it with my own money um and never heard anything. I think they said it was like supposed to be delivered in a year. Um, and then a couple years ago, I made a whole video on this. So, if you want to check it out, check it out. But a couple years ago, I pretty much came forward because they I I waited so long. I waited 5 years for that damn phone. And they
• 61:00 - 61:30 reached out and they said, "Oh, like you know, your phone's ready to ship." Now, some context. I asked for a refund before they told me the phone was ready to ship. And what they told me was, "We can't refund you, but when your phone is ready to ship, then we can issue an re we can issue a refund." Like, you reject the shipment and then we'll refund your money. Well, they said my phone was ready and I said, "Well, I want the money." Like, I took them up on their offer and they said, "Oh, well, we can't pay you out." So, to this day, I rejected the shipment for my phone and I
• 61:30 - 62:00 still never got my money back. So, I have been scammed. Like, it's I I don't have an issue calling it a scam. Like, I gave them money. I asked for a refund. They never gave me my money back and I never got a phone. So, I can't in good faith recommend the Libram 5. I just can't. Um, funny enough, a community member got their hands on one and I uh I don't remember. Someone sent me a Pine Phone Pro, someone sent me a Pine Phone, and someone sent me a Libram 5. Um, one
• 62:00 - 62:30 of them sent me the device just completely for free just because of their goodwill. I even offered to pay them. They said, "No, it's fine." I don't remember if it was the Librim 5 person or not, but um either way, my point is like a random community member like was so much friendlier than actual purism. Um and yeah, so I can't in good faith recommend the phone. And yeah, I I made a whole video about it. Go check it out. Um it's borderline criminal in my opinion. Um are you married? Privacy. Come on. I care to hear about your skin
• 62:30 - 63:00 routine. I'm glad to hear one of my favorite content creators is taking care of himself. Yeah, I think I think it's okay for people to take care of themselves. It's good. Um, let's see. I abandoned Microsoft Office for Libre Office. I've also abandoned Windows and dual wielded Mac and YUbuntu with the long-term goal to daily Ubuntu. Nice. Those are like really good steps in the right direction. So, good stuff. Answering your question about my gaming setup with Bluetooth. I use an adapter with a USB port. The USB port has an extension of an additional three
• 63:00 - 63:30 USB ports. Cool. Yeah. Um, Bizarreup says, "Thanks, man. You have a good skill to explain things clearly to the point." Awesome. Yeah, that's good. Good to know. Is there a Sync thing like alternative to use with iPhones? There's Brazilio sync, but it's proprietary. Um, you there actually is a sync thing client on iOS. It's not the best. Um, but yeah, I mean, generally the sync thing alternative for iPhones is AirDrop. Um, unironically. Um, but yeah, there is a Sync thing client for iOS and that's probably the best thing to use. Otherwise, yeah, there's not that many
• 63:30 - 64:00 great alternatives. There is also um KD Connect. KD Connect does have an iOS client as well, so you can use that on iOS. All right, back to the wins. Let's stay let's stay focused. We're all getting sidetracked. You're asking me if I'm married. Come on. We're here for privacy wins. Um, cutie downloaded VS Codium but yet to make things to try it before considering doing the shift like the settings and download all the extensions. They left Edge for good.
• 64:00 - 64:30 Still missing the dual sidebar and Zen. Okay. Um, but good job leaving Microsoft Edge. They disabled four Zen extensions, disabled some mods, so for now I'm not getting any memory link leaks. Nice. Um, overall good stuff. I don't fully get the first one, but it sounds like you're trying to get VS Codium working, so hats off to you. I need a water break. Um, in phone they uninstalled two to three apps and replace them with
• 64:30 - 65:00 website shortcut on their phone. Um, so they got some web apps going which is awesome. Um, and then they kind of had to play around with it. It's a bit overwhelming because there's so many things in different browsers. Yes, but I'm glad you're playing around with it and you will lock in like the browsers that you enjoy for different purposes. They did the phone cleanup using SDM made and they deleted it because way too many permissions. Yeah. Um and I think you know a lot of people don't need those kind of services. So overall really good stuff. Let's see. We had some discussions there. Ozen
• 65:00 - 65:30 they started using Android profiles to separate apps. Huge win. So they have one profile for that use that you use once a month or once a week or so. mainly untrusted which includes their mobile carrier apps to check data and voice balance app for configuring Bluetooth earbuds another for entertainment like watching YouTube videos and listening to music and lastly one for workrelated apps to contact me not only does this help organize my work I find that I'm more productive since there are a few distractions from
• 65:30 - 66:00 notifications and there's a slight barrier of profile switching that I have to go through to procrastinate watching YouTube videos even if I end up watching a YouTube video there is a fear of missing out in important work messages or calls which helps me get back to what I should be doing. Nice. Um, and just to speak to that, like this is one of those moments where like it's more about privacy or it's more than just privacy, right? Like yes, separating things into profiles is great and it helps you become more private. It separates your data. That's good. But what this person
• 66:00 - 66:30 is also speaking to is like actually, you know, what are the profiles originally called on Android? They're called work profiles. The original intention of the feature is to separate your personal and your work life, which comes with tons of other benefits. It's historically like one of the biggest problems that people deal with is having a work life balance. And so having that be replicated on your digital devices is much more helpful than just benefiting your privacy. It benefits your mental health in a lot of ways and your work life boundaries and the relationships ideally that you can navigate between both of them. So tons of wins here and
• 66:30 - 67:00 it goes beyond privacy I think and it's cool that you're kind of sharing some of that other side of it as well. More use cases. is they made profiles for family members. So, one Android tablet can be used by many people. They use long but harder to enter passwords for main profile, but they use shorter ones um and the fingerprint to use other profiles, which is really good because um that way you can kind of like make certain things more convenient in your life. You know, normally it's like, well, if I'm going to have a super long password and no biometrics, then every
• 67:00 - 67:30 time you unlock your phone, it's inconvenient. But if you separate things a little more and you make those other things less secure, it can actually be more convenient and making it all more secure. So, good stuff. And I just wanted to clarify the way you're describing it, it actually sounds like you're using Android user accounts um because you're opening more than two um and you're able to set different like login credentials for each one of them. So, just want to check in on terminology there. There's two things on Android. There's Android profiles like work profiles and normally you only do one.
• 67:30 - 68:00 But if you uh do user accounts and that's like setting up a whole new user and that would have like its own login credentials and I think that's actually what you're doing just to make sure that we use the right terminology so I know what feature you're talking about. Um so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're talking about user accounts. Um let's see. If someone asks your phone for taking a phone call, check their emails. There can be a dedicated profile for guests. Yep. I love doing that as well. Can be backed up individually. Yep. Cool. So, yeah,
• 68:00 - 68:30 sounds like you're really playing around with Android and taking advantage of those Android benefits that Apple refuses to implement in iOS. We got a first timer here and they're a tech lauran. Thank you for supporting um what we do. Um and like cool that you just joined right off the bat. Um a few wins. They became a tech laoran. Okay, awesome. Yes, welcome. And they got their Yuba keys and they use them for 2FA now. Awesome. Um, I love my Ubi keys and I use them for every account that I can. Uh, they deleted unnecessary apps from their phone. So, they only have apps on their phone that
• 68:30 - 69:00 they actually need. Um, another thing that's like good for privacy but good for so many other things. Good for battery, good for your mental health, like good for just keeping yourself more organized. It's great. Um, they got their family to use Signal and Brave browser. That's awesome. Big wins. And they updated privacy settings on their social media accounts and they even deleted their Facebook account completely. So, congrats OE234. Um, those are all actually really big things and uh, if those are like your first steps, those are like awesome first steps. So,
• 69:00 - 69:30 congrats. And they said they'll be back next week with more wins. So, I'm excited to hear it. Fire Dragon is another Techloran. Don't know whether this is a privacy or security win, but a small win for me. I managed to receive a used laptop from a friend of mine. The laptop is a couple years old, but it has hardly been used. So, I did what any normal what any normal Linux enthusiast would do. I transformed it into a server. Nyx, of course, it now is going to be another extension of my home lab. Not sure what I'm going to do with it yet. Excuse me. But hey, the
• 69:30 - 70:00 possibilities are endless. Yeah. No, that's a good use. Um, I think one cool thing about being like a very techy person is that there's a lot that you can do um that other people might not think of um with their uh with old devices, right? So like for me um I really like the idea of using like an old Android device as a security camera um or converting something to be like an infotainment system or you know like an old t a tablet can be like a kitchen infotainment system or a laptop that
• 70:00 - 70:30 doesn't that isn't used anymore can be used um like you said for a server or maybe you can use it as like a testing device to test Linux distros like there's so many use cases for old devices so definitely don't want to pass that up. Um, Janelle said, "I now operate my 3D printer locally on my network. Internet connection has been blocked and everything still works as it should. I didn't think this would be so easy because Bamboo Labs is in a very negative headlines because of their cloud compulsion, but LAN only works smoothly." Nice. Um, let's see here.
• 70:30 - 71:00 Yeah, and then they go ahead and clarify there. Back to the live chat. We got a super chat from Jay. Hello, Jay. Um, I don't know how much this is, but Carter in the Signal group said it's $50. So, thank you, Jay. That's awesome. Um, and it's super appreciated. And they have a question. So, they said, "I've deleted WhatsApp and they're using Signal, although it's not popular here in India and will still be using it and telling others that I'm on Signal only and you can message me on that platform, but
• 71:00 - 71:30 still people don't want to install Signal app." Yeah. So, it's going to be really tough. Um, this is a really common thing I've heard, uh, context in a lot of countries outside the US, WhatsApp is kind of the go-to messenger. Um, and that is like kind of ubiquitous for messaging. So, you know, I I would I would this is going to be hard to say, Jay, but what is the alternative if somebody like you can't control other people and you can't control what they do? So, I think that what you're doing is great
• 71:30 - 72:00 and like getting on Signal, making Signal the default. I'm all for it. But what if someone refuses? Like you said, what alternative do you have? If you don't have WhatsApp, then is SMS the alternative? Like what other alternative are you presenting to that person? Because you can't control everybody? Um, and if they don't want to do it, then they're not going to want to do it. Um, and so where I'm going with this is if you are in an area where WhatsApp is the default, you might still have to have it
• 72:00 - 72:30 up as a backup. And I hate saying this because I wish everyone could just delete WhatsApp, but if the option is WhatsApp or SMS, I'm actually going to lean more people towards WhatsApp. At least there's end toend encryption and at least it's a modern protocol and it's based on the signal protocol. Um, so it has more advantages in my eyes over SMS. But more importantly, you need to be able to communicate with people. So I would try to have a backup ready to go. It doesn't have to be WhatsApp, but there should be a reliable backup uh in the event someone doesn't want to use Signal. Most likely it might have to be
• 72:30 - 73:00 WhatsApp. And if that is the situation, then I'd recommend setting up WhatsApp that's like separate from your regular Facebook account if you're able to. I'd recommend setting it up in like, you know, its own compartmentalized way. Like maybe you have a work profile on your Android device. Um or maybe a different user account on your Android device. Maybe you keep it on just one old device that's like, you know, you only check once a day. So maybe you tell people, hey, yeah, I'm on WhatsApp, but I only check it once a day. So really signal is the best place to reach me.
• 73:00 - 73:30 So, those are just different ideas. Uh, I can't really tell you exactly what's going to work for your situation, but I definitely feel for you. I know that's one of the hardest things for people is like actually getting them to also use privacy tools, but um, yeah, it's a tough one. Um, but I hope something there helped you out. And again, just it doesn't have to be WhatsApp, but have a reliable backup so you can still, you know, hopefully communicate with that person and not just cut off a connection outright. Um, those are my tips. Um, thank you so much
• 73:30 - 74:00 for your tip um to what we're doing. Um, it's hugely appreciated. And yeah, and yeah, someone mentioned iMessage. The only reason I iMessage for a lot of people and for myself is that really good backup from Signal. Um, I just know that iPhones and Apple devices are a lot less popular outside the US. So, iMessage being the backup is going to be a little bit less um common in um like countries outside the states. But um if you happen to have a lot of friends or family members that are on iMessage,
• 74:00 - 74:30 then that could be the good backup that I'm kind of describing. Um back to the wins. Hopefully final win, but fine. If not, another transition is to Aegis local local Android to NATO off. Not necessarily of the crossplatform usage, but rather I wanted to get comfortable enabling 2FA for most of my important services. Techler here and now Proton. Nice. So, good job. I really like NT off. It's a great service. Let's see. Alexander, they are a patron for us and they said they joined this forum and
• 74:30 - 75:00 they figured out that they had DNS leaks on the virtual machines they use for work and so they fixed some DNS leaks. That's a huge win. Good job and good job catching that. Um, and then they said not directly privacy specific but anti-corporate. They got bored of YouTube and memes and genuinely started reading even with interest. It hasn't happened to me for a long time and I'm so happy you experienced that. Um, like honestly reading is just so good and it's so relaxing and it it's there's
• 75:00 - 75:30 this thing in like health science and like especially when it comes to food, what is it in place of, right? So like one thing can be found to be harmful uh for your health, but when it's compared to what the average person is eating, it's still actually beneficial. So you always have to ask, well, what's this taking the place of? And I think reading is a double whammy because reading a is just like relaxing. You learn. You can make if you're reading fiction then you like become more creative. You get to disconnect a little bit from the world
• 75:30 - 76:00 in a more like helpful way. But it's also probably taking the place of like doom scrolling on your social media accounts or just like you know just engaging with videos or just doing things that like probably aren't helping you as much as they should. So for me it's a double whammy because it's inherently kind of nice to do, but it also like probably is taking like time away from things that would be otherwise in some ways harmful. So yeah, anyway, that's my long way of saying I'm really glad that you're experiencing that. Um, I took like a big break from reading during the pandemic and the last like
• 76:00 - 76:30 year or two I've been really getting back into it and it's something I've been really enjoying again and I'm currently reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Um, I'm on the Two Towers and it's super good and I'm really enjoying it. So yeah, welcome to the forum. Yes, of course. Let's see. We got Lightning Toaster. Happy smartphone win for me. They installed Klex OS on a fair phone. Um, yes. So, if you have a fair phone, Klex OS is supported on that and that's like a really cool workflow cuz I really
• 76:30 - 77:00 like what Fairphone's doing. Um, and having like an ability to use any custom ROM on that is also super cool. Divest OS used to be supported, but they got discontinued. So now Klex OS is like another great option for fair phone. So yeah, great stuff if you have the fair phone and you want a custom ROM. And um they also configured rethink DNS for both personal and work. Um if you haven't tried RethinkDNS, it's a really cool service. It lets you like separate out your traffic and it lets you customize like all the internet traffic on your on your Android device. Like it really gives you a lot of ultimate
• 77:00 - 77:30 control. Um and I even think the developers on our forum like it's a really cool project. Big fan of what they're doing there. And yeah, it does think like here this like you can run two separate VPNs, separate firewalls, separate DNS block lists on the same phone at the same time seamlessly. Like it's it's cool. Like if you haven't heard of RethinkDNS, check it out on Android. Genuinely a super cool service and when you start using it, you'll wonder how you didn't use it before, especially if you're someone who's like privacy forward. Uh really great service.
• 77:30 - 78:00 Rewire. A more minor privacy win, but I've been able to mostly get off of Spotify and instead listen to music locally on both my computer and my car. The car is more critical because it means I no longer need to connect my phone to my car anymore, but instead a simple flash drive. This is something I've previously had problems with as the car would insist that I give it contacts and other privileges when all I want is to play music. I do want to stop sharing my listening history with Spotify, but I still do have it on my phone as I only have 128 gigs of storage and I don't want to spend a fourth of that on songs. So, I still need to figure out some ways
• 78:00 - 78:30 to get away from Spotify without having to take up so much phone storage. Really cool. Um, definitely inconvenient for a lot of people nowadays. Um, but I think that having local libraries for things is like super admirable and it gives you that ultimate control and I love that. So, um, really big congrats and I'm sure it feels good to have like your own little library. Um, just my I'm always going to be overly cautious and I'm going to say a make sure you uh keep backups, right? like have a backup library and a backup way to plug in so
• 78:30 - 79:00 you don't use your li lose your library. I'm sure you already have backups, but just in case you don't. Um, and also I don't know of many phones nowadays. I could have sworn I saw a phone that like MKBHD reviewed or something that had an SD card, but if you are able to somehow get your hands on a phone that has an SD card reader in it, then that could be your way out of having to spend a crap ton of money on a phone just to get extra storage. because it's kind of crazy how much they gouge on storage nowadays for it doesn't cost that much, you
• 79:00 - 79:30 know. Two wins from Muhammad. They use Blue Sky more often after leaving Twitter. Cool. And they encrypted most of their files before sharing them on Discord. Super cool. So yeah, they just um encrypt them before uploading it to their friends. Nice. Um all right, I'm almost done with the wins. So, I'm going to finish up the wins and then I'll pivot over to the live chat and then we'll finish it out on the live chat. Um, I see your question, Alex, and I will get to that um soon. I don't know how much music you
• 79:30 - 80:00 have, but I highly suggest self-hosting a music server. Yeah. Okay. So, that's another option. You can always self-host your music server, too. And that is one of those things, you know, I talked about earlier like reserve self-hosting for things that are like not mission critical. I think that's a good example of one. like as long as you have a backup of your music library somewhere um like what you're you lose your music library for a day it's not the end of the world you know like so I think that's a really good thing to get yourself into self-hosting if you haven't already um Alexander a little update so I
• 80:00 - 80:30 finally got to try Gentu um at a virtual machine because I want to compile apps from source I really wanted that workflow for a while it took the whole day to set up stuff and the kernel didn't compile for whatever reason but still I'm super happy. I learned some Linux thingies along the way and got the ball rolling. I also read that Steam Proton can be installed on Genu, so maybe one day I'll set it up for games. Nice. Really big. And then there was a short on tech clips about someone who has signed up to open street maps. Yeah, that was from one of our live stream recent live streams recently and it was
• 80:30 - 81:00 from the win on the forum. So it all comes around, someone posts a win on the forum, I cover it in a stream, it ends up in a Techler clip and then someone brings it up back on the forum in the next week's win. and then we're going to repeat this. Um, and they added local markers. So, they said, "I'll do this as well." So, they also contributed to Open Street Maps and started adding their own markers and they said it feels good and that they get to say, "Hey, I added this." So, um, congrats and I'm really glad you're experiencing that. And again, if you're using Open Street Maps
• 81:00 - 81:30 and it's a project you care about, like you can directly make it better. And it's one of those easy ways for you to just make one small change and make it better for everyone. So, yeah. And that's it for the wins. Uh, thank you all for who left your wins. Um, and I really appreciate it. And now I'm going to pivot back over here. And again, you can already join next week's wins. The the forum post is already live, so you can join right now and leave uh your win on next week's stream. Um, Alex here left a question in the Techler group. Do
• 81:30 - 82:00 you know how secure fairone is with Kix OS on a scientific study? Um, fairones were the worst Android phone in the section of security. Yeah. So, there was actually an incident where I believe they published like the keys that were required to like for their verified boot. Um, which was not good. So, I can't speak super firmly to how secure it's going to be, but if you're already on a fair phone and you want something that's deooled and you want something that doesn't use Google Play Services, then I think Kalex OS is probably going to be the best option you have on a fair phone. So, it's all kind of relative to
• 82:00 - 82:30 like what device you have and what you're trying to accomplish. So, yeah, that's generally my response to that. If you want to start comparing Fairphone to Pixel, I'd probably still push people to a Pixel. Like, if you want the most secure device to use Kix OS specifically on, then like, yeah, try to go for a Pixel. Um, but if you are someone who bought a Fairphone and you have a Fairphone, then like I think there's still a lot of benefit to at least exploring that custom ROM option. Let me move the live chat over to my main display. Um, I'm now all yours. Everyone
• 82:30 - 83:00 who's live, I'm all yours. And I'll probably be on for like another five or 10 minutes, I'm thinking, based on activity levels. Um, but yeah, feel free to leave your wins. Uh, give me any questions. I'd love to go ahead and, uh, get back to all of you. Nice. Nice. Good luck. Good luck with that transition. Is Brave the most secure and private Chromium fork available or is it Chromite? Um, I feel like that's a it's a hard thing to answer. It's pretty debatable. Um, I'd say Brave has a very solid team and
• 83:00 - 83:30 they're both solid options. Um, it's going to be a pretty like debatable thing if you're going to try to figure out who's more secure in private, but I think you can't go wrong with either of those right now. Just off the top of my head, Henry is live. Yeah. Hi. It was hard to answer your question earlier because I struggle with knowing we can't have total privacy security without going all the way. I try. So, it's harder for hackers data collection and for people who watch me to know how privacy tools are out there. Yeah.
• 83:30 - 84:00 Um, no one's perfectly private, so it's a spectrum and the more that you can do without it sacrificing too much of your of your life, I think the better. Just know that there's always going to be diminishing returns with these kind of things. So, it's good to find kind of the limit of where you can go and then dial it back. And then maybe you go, "No, I don't like, you know, where this is. I still want more privacy." Then maybe you go too far. and you dial it back a bit. Like this is always adjusting. So use privacy to your advantage. Don't let it destroy you. Like be in control of your privacy
• 84:00 - 84:30 journey. Don't let the privacy journey control you. Yeah, that's that's kind of my that's how I would summarize the first 10 minutes of this live stream probably. Okay. So Jay said for backup they have Google RCS and Telegram. So I would just ask like like genuinely like um is like what about Google RCS or Telegram what are the advantages that that has over WhatsApp and it's a genuine question and like ask yourself and explore um if that's fine for you. Um so as long as you have a place to
• 84:30 - 85:00 communicate with people like then I think that you're good. So if your if your workflow is like hey I'm on Signal. Oh you're not on Signal? Okay. Are you on Google? Okay. No. Um are you on Telegram then? Um, and then with Telegram, make sure to enable secret chats. I don't think it's a bad workflow. You you set up multiple options for people. They have choice. They most likely have at least one of those options, and you've given them the best uh option first, which is hopefully Signal. So, I don't think that's a bad place to be. Um, and if you cut out WhatsApp, I think it's good to have
• 85:00 - 85:30 those multiple options available to people. Um, but yeah, that's my opinion. It's going to always depend on like what works best for you, of course. What's this blue thing here? Fan funding. Oh, okay. So, you can just sort it by fan funding. That's cool. Let's see. What's more effective, reading a book or listening to the audiobook? I don't know what like science says about that. Um, I'm
• 85:30 - 86:00 definitely a reader though. I've never really gotten into audiobooks. Um, it's harder for me to follow along. I can't as easily like stop and reread and kind of like take something in more thoroughly. So, I've always been a reader, but I like the aspect of audiobooks that like you can do them while you do other things. So, like if you're driving or something, you can still listen. Um, so yeah, that's a cool concept, but I never really gotten into it personally. My privacy win. I've been
• 86:00 - 86:30 changing my passwords for everything to random complex ones that mix both cases of alpha characters, numbers, and symbols. I write them down, but don't leave it uh by the machine. Okay, cool. Um, and I'd ask like, is there a reason you don't like password managers? Because that could simplify that drastically. But either way, I'm just glad you're using unique complex passwords. It's a big win. It's more of a security concern, but one of the main things I'm uncomfortable with switching to graphing OS is the lack of mobile payment. I just can't find a false alternative to Google Wallet. Yeah, it would be really cool to have that. And it would make, I think,
• 86:30 - 87:00 the whole like custom ROM journey a much easier for people if they had like an Apple Pay. Um, but on like a you know like a deled Android side of things, even Google Pay isn't great. Um, like Google Wallet, whatever they're calling it nowadays, they feel like they change the name every six months. Um, but with Google, like they kind of just hold your cards in the cloud for you, whereas with Apple, it's actually like on device and it's quite a bit more privacy respecting the way Apple does it. Um, so I'd love to see something like that on the
• 87:00 - 87:30 Android side of things. And funny enough, I think Proton is in the best position for it. Um, they released Proton wallet, which they made a Bitcoin only wallet for some reason. Um, and they even said in the interview like, "Well, will you add Monero?" And Andy said, "No, we're more likely to add fiat before Monero." And I actually wish like he would do that. Like I wish that they did like a Proton wallet where you can like link a credit card end to end encrypted to your Proton account and then like you can, you know, pay for things via that and you can like share
• 87:30 - 88:00 it with people. Like I think that's a lot more cool than just another Bitcoin wallet personally. So um just some loose thoughts there, but I think it would be cool. I have a question about fingerprinting. I'm using Brave browser and I was wondering if changing permissions in site settings would make me more fingerprintable. That's a good question. I'm not super familiar with how how permissions can expose certain data points. My guess is that it can. I
• 88:00 - 88:30 feel like almost anything you do um can impact your browser fingerprint. Um but I don't know for a fact off the top of my head. So that's something I'd have to look into after the fact. But it's a good question. Make a video t on self-hosting a music server for flack files. It's a bit off topic for tech lore, but I might do it. Um, it could be fun. I think people would rather have another uh tutorial for another typically self-hosted software first before I start doing it on other
• 88:30 - 89:00 ones. Yeah, I mean iOS I don't think iOS is the worst place to be. That's how that's how I typically put it. Like I think that being on like a Samsung device is substantially worse than iOS for privacy. And for a lot of people I know especially in the states like they're on iPhones and they ask like is my iPhone okay? And then I think about like the transition for them to go to something else that's better and it's not a realistic transition for a lot of them and if I told them that it would just push them away from privacy altogether. Um so yeah I think generally
• 89:00 - 89:30 speaking iOS is a little bit better. Um, so I don't have an issue and you can get very far in your privacy journey on iOS, especially now with things like lockdown mode and advanced data protection. Like there's some cool things on iOS now. Just canceled my Spotify subscription and started using my personal library with Plex Amp. Now I'm just on the hunt for CDs with the music I like and don't have yet. Nice. A lot of you are really moving local. It's kind of cool to see. Thoughts on immutable dros from Kiki Kinky Koala? Yeah, so I really like
• 89:30 - 90:00 them. So, um, immutable, just so you know, they're trying to be a little bit more particular with their terminology. So, they're calling them atomic distros now because technically they're not immutable because with unauthorized access they can be modified, etc. So, they're calling them atomic. Um, and what these do is they essentially like they're not supposed to be modified. The system files are kind of meant to be locked down. Um, so you get a lot more security and you're supposed to pretty
• 90:00 - 90:30 much install software using things like flatp packs on on the surface of the operating system. The concept is great. I think it's a great model for operating systems. It kind of models the way mobile operating systems work a little bit better which typically have better security. So I really like silver blue and silver blue is something I've played with and it's a really cool operating system. Um, and I think that if you're able to use an atomic dro there's a lot of benefits to using them and I hope that they are the future of what most people use. So, those are my general thoughts on them. Um, yeah. And then,
• 90:30 - 91:00 yeah, VPNs, like there are just things that are not there yet that are aren't ready for for these distros, but I think in time it it will be ready. I recently, Gosh, why does it skip around like that? Girl, I recently came across this when using Brave on Mac with website open and using the iPhone suggest me as Safari on Mac to be more clear using same Apple. What are you What are you getting at? Um, I don't know if I fully get. Was it a question? Do you use pass key at all? If
• 91:00 - 91:30 so, where do you store it in the password manager? Would that downvote the purpose of the pass key? Yeah. So, I I think pass keys are good, right? Like they for most people and the way most people store passwords and usernames, pass keys are an improvement and so they are an ultimate good. With that said, if you're someone who generates strong passwords, they have unique usernames, unique passwords, and you use a Yuba key for your 2FA, you're actually you have better security going that route because you're essentially combining what a pass
• 91:30 - 92:00 key does in addition to a password. So, that's personally what I do. Anytime a site has like Ubi key support, I use it as 2FA, not as a pass key. Um, so that's personally what I do. With that said, there is one service I use, which is OMG.OL, LOL, which is what my personal site is hosted on. And their login flow is completely obnoxious. Um, their login flow, if you don't use a pass key, is like you have to type in your email, they email you, and then you have to log in, and then it's it's just a pain in the ass. Like, I really hate their login
• 92:00 - 92:30 flow. Um, and pretty much it just pushed me to finally give up and just set up a pass key just with their one service. And for that, I use Proton Pass, which is my password manager. So, yeah, it doesn't like remove the purpose of the pass key. Um, I think that like using a pass key and a password manager is a more than safe thing to do and it's not too different than using a password in my eyes from a security perspective. Um, and it actually still has some benefits even if you do it through your password manager. But yes, it does not replace 2FA. Um, that is kind of the gotcha. So
• 92:30 - 93:00 yeah, RBQ says, "Great answer. Don't let the privacy and security journey control you. You control it for your benefits." Thanks, Henry. Have a great day. Yes, thank you to you, too. What do you daily drive for phone? iPhone, Android, custom ROM. Yeah, I got a lot of phones, so it's hard to like say what a daily driver is, but there's benefits to be had for all of them. I definitely agree that Proton be good for this. I'm going to make a suggestion right now in their forum.
• 93:00 - 93:30 Yeah, I think it'd be cool. Make that tutorial very clickbaity. When will you make a review on Simple X chat? Yeah. Um I it's not on the radar, but I think it'd be a great video to do. Honestly, that's a that's a good idea. The most privacy respecting VPS. Um off the top of my head, you know, like we used to use Orange website that I think had a VPS provider, but they don't the the issue with a privacy respecting VPS is it's all kind of based on trust in a way. So, it's kind of like whatever organization you trust the most
• 93:30 - 94:00 to host your VPS. Um, I am not fully aware and maybe someone can explain to me of like any VPS that just inherently has a feature that just technology-wise like gives you better privacy if that makes sense. So, I think that just trusting a like a trustworthy VPS provider is probably the best you're going to be able to do. And then from there, it's like well, how are you like encrypting your data and like how are you managing your data on the VPS uh server?
• 94:00 - 94:30 Yeah, good, good, good response. No, I have not. I should actually start keeping a note pad of things that I should look into because it's really easy for me to forget. Um, especially since I previously wasn't doing like the clips and like going through the live stream after the fact. So, no. But um I'm trying to find where I can write this down.
• 94:30 - 95:00 Uh let me see. I'll at least put it in my notepad here. Maybe I'm just going to start a notepad in Luna task stream followup openness of Google's RCS open standard. Okay, got it down. Do you think it's possible to be completely private online? Yeah, so you
• 95:00 - 95:30 have to define what completely private means. Um, but generally I'd say no. Um, but that doesn't mean that like there aren't immense benefits and it's just complete is an absolute word, right? Um, but for a lot of people like there's always some breadcrumb that can lead to another breadcrumb and etc. Like eventually like you can it just depends, right? Like like let's say you open a tour
• 95:30 - 96:00 browser for the first time and you create just a random Proton account. Let's assume Proton allowed that to happen. Um, like there are data points that they would get which aren't tied to you, but they're tied to a server that someone can go to that server and try to like work backwards and eventually try to get the most basic information about you. The point is there's no way to guarantee that like anything in the future won't happen where like a single data point isn't exposed, but then it's kind of your call like, oh, is that actually like an issue? Like let's say they get just let's say they get a region of
• 96:00 - 96:30 where you live, a country. Is is that does that mean you're completely private? Like let's say they got the country where you're from. Does that mean you're private or not? Like that's a debatable point. Like you could say, "Oh no, I still have a ton of privacy. There's millions of people where I live um if not hundreds of millions. So I still remained completely private." But for some people that actually could be a problem. They're like, "Oh, well, the country wasn't supposed to be known, and so I lost my privacy through this series of events." My point is, even the
• 96:30 - 97:00 concept of what completely private means doesn't have a definitive answer. And that's why I get really upset when I see posts online where people are like, "Well, privacy is impossible online." Or like it's like there's no way to be fully private or someone does the opposite and says, "This is how you achieve maximum privacy. This is ultimate privacy. This is complete privacy. We don't know anything about you." the way the internet works, it's very hard to know nothing. Um, and so it's debatable and you have to use services that align with your definition of what privacy means.
• 97:00 - 97:30 So, how to stay up to date with OPSSEAC news? Um, yeah, there's like the infosac uh like Macedon community. Uh, Nate and I cover a lot of in OPSSEAC news um on surveillance support if you want weekly news. Um, those are kind of the main places. I'd also encourage just like finding individual sources and using RSS. Uh slash do has occasionally some like OPS like security news there. So just a lot of random places to get
• 97:30 - 98:00 started. Okay. Well, I'm going to go ahead and start wrapping this up. Um things are slowing up here and there's still more work to be done. So um yeah. So I want to thank everybody who has tuned in today. It's been a lot of fun. Um, I will definitely be on next week as well. This is a weekly thing. And again, I want to showcase our forum briefly here. Um, only what? They're the same. Okay. Well, it's
• 98:00 - 98:30 supposed to be different. Anyway, um, okay. Alex actually sent one more question here, but if you go to discuss.techlor.te, um, next week's, uh, is already up, so you can already join the next week's wins. And I will be featuring these next week. And so I would love to get you all on there. Congrats on week 50. This was actually week 50 and in two weeks it'll be one year of the weekly privacy wins which I'm super excited about. Um so I want to thank all the people who left their wins. I want to thank all of our
• 98:30 - 99:00 tech laurans and I also want to thank all of you for being in the live chat um and just being a part of things and making these streams possible. Now Alex has one question here in our signal group which you can join our signal group by the way if you become a tech lauran. Um, one sec. Let me drink water. So, Alex asked, "This is a bit of a political question." Um, if it's off topic, no problem. I live in the middle of EU and oftentimes people said don't use US
• 99:00 - 99:30 services, not Microsoft or something, just no US service because of the cloud act, Patriot Act, etc. Now, I thought, hey, even in the EU, we have problems with that like chat control. So, I went with the option to use good, trustworthy, secure, and privacy respecting US services. Now after the Trump administration I kind of felt insecure and unsure with this decision and I don't know to ditch us at all or at least things you can control is an opt is a good option or just BS. Yeah. So okay this it's a very complicated question and it's something that I am
• 99:30 - 100:00 constantly evolving my views on. So what what I gravitate to telling people is that it's more about technology than it is jurisdiction. um right like if it's something's end to end encrypted if they guarantee that they don't collect as much data then it shouldn't matter the jurisdiction right and I think that's a really good position to take what we're seeing though globally is that sometimes that's not enough so a good example is proton proton does a lot of things to try to reduce the amount of privacy and
• 100:00 - 100:30 security risks that email can introduce but now we have Switzerland saying well if we classify proton as an ISP we can actually start backtoring encryption Right. And with Signal, Signal does a lot of things to protect their users, but you know, Sweden was knocking on their door recently going, "Hey, we we want a backdoor encryption." In the US and Florida, uh they are trying to also back door encryption. My point is that this is all a balancing act. So, you have technology and you have laws and
• 100:30 - 101:00 you want those to be as compatible with each other as possible. So, what you really want in my opinion, what I'm trying to look for if you're looking at this like a as apolitically as possible, and when I say apolitically, I mean like nonpartisanly because this is inherently political because it has to do with jurisdictions and laws, etc., but I'm talking like nonpartisan um advice. Look for services that their tech protects you, right? Even in the
• 101:00 - 101:30 case of Apple and iCloud in the UK, UK demanded a back door and Apple refused to comply. And to this day, I don't think they've actually turned off ADP for the users who had it on and it gave users a heads up. So the fact that users even used ADP actually protected them in this exact scenario. So use technology that is endto-end encrypted. Try to reduce the trust in these thirdparty providers. Try to avoid things that just say, "Yeah, trust me, bro, with your data and actually like guarantee trust with your data with technology." With that said, if you're in between
• 101:30 - 102:00 services, right? Let's say you have five different notes providers that all offer end to end encryption, which is actually not a like misleading thing. Like off the top of my head, I can name like Joplain, Standard Notes, Notes Nook, Crypty, and like Apple Notes, right? Just off the top of my head, that's five endto-end encrypted notes providers. Uh Apple Notes with um ADP. So, of those go through like what are the scenarios like what are the risks that you're choosing with each provider. Crypt is based out of Estonia which has like some of the
• 102:00 - 102:30 best like digital rights laws out there. Um and that's why they actively picked Estonia and John's talked about that in some of the interviews and so that's a really big thing for them. Um Apple right now is going through a lot of iffy stuff in the US and like right now they're perfectly safe and there's nothing to be concerned about. But we saw what happened in the UK and Apple could be a big target and we don't know what's going to happen with ADP in the future. Um, if you look at Notnook, I think they're Pakistanian and like kind of iffy like jurisdiction laws over
• 102:30 - 103:00 there. So like it's one thing to like it doesn't mean you don't use the service. It means just be aware of that. Um, and I don't know where standard notes and Joplin are based out of. And I think Joplin like you could self-host some of these. So, if you self-host, then that's like a whole another like thing to consider when you're looking at these services is the fact that okay, I can actually remove jurisdiction and actually host it myself. My point with all of this is it's very complicated. There is no easy solution. And I think that it requires a lot of nuance to try to make those decisions. And what I would start with and the most important
• 103:00 - 103:30 thing is trusting tech first. Don't think about jurisdiction first. Trust tech first because that is a much easier thing for people to evaluate. But once you kind of know the tech to look for, which is like low metadata, um high end to-end encryption, like good security and privacy practices, open source, like once you have those things nailed in, then you can start looking at jurisdiction and trying to pick providers that you trust the most based on where they're located. I wouldn't refer to like and I guess that's the
• 103:30 - 104:00 other thing you can always look at individual acts like the cloud act or the patriot act but I find what's a lot more important is like how strong democracy is or um like typically like how human rights have been respected in the last decade because that's a much better indicator of whether or not uh your rights will be violated in those countries. Um at least personally that's how I've been taking a look at it. So I hope that's useful. I hope that wasn't too rambly and too off topic. Um, but it's a very complicated issue and
• 104:00 - 104:30 everyone's going to have a different relationship with it, but that's my relationship with it and how I take a look at it. Um, and with that said, let me do a final check of the comments. And again, join our forum, discuss.techlor.te. Um, where did the comments go? There they are. Um, join our forum, become a tech lauran if you want to support what we do, and I'll see you guys next week. Um, and yeah, I think that's all I'm seeing
• 104:30 - 105:00 here. He's 57. He's in Nokia. He's never on the internet. No accounts. I was thinking people like kid might be the most private. Yeah, except all their SMS messages aren't encrypted. So, that's that's kind of a downside to that workflow. I would say that's a true statement. like it increases attack surface like all these new features like especially because they're probably being rolled out like that, right? Like everyone knows how rushed all these AI things are. I'd be a little bit more cautious. Um yeah, is it worth changing
• 105:00 - 105:30 my Gmail to Proton Mail? Um depends who you are, but generally, you know, if you're trying to find a more privacy respecting alternative, that's a not a bad one. I just made a emails alternative video recently um on the channel. I think it's our last latest video, so check it out. Um, that's all I have everyone. Um, we're coming up on an hour 45 minutes here. Um, I want to thank you all again for tuning in. Thank you all for your questions. Uh, thank you all for tuning in. Um, thank you all for leaving your wins. Uh, just lots of thanks to go around. I like love doing
• 105:30 - 106:00 these streams every week. And I'll see you all next week. Um, and be sure to join the forum and uh, oh, just for calling, not SMS. Yeah, but like it's still an unencrypted like phone call that you're doing. I still wouldn't be super confident in that personally. But anyway, um thank you all again and I'll see you next week.