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Joined 16 days ago
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Cake day: February 18th, 2026

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  • Threat modeling is simply knowing where potential threats to yourself comes from, and planning accordingly. Most of us have some sort of risk of surveillance capitalism. Companies tracking you across sites, Ai scanning your email and photos, that sort of thing. As creepy as that is, if someone is targeting you specifically as a stalker or trying to break into your accounts, or physically into your home, that will be more important to model for. The things you to to. mitigate one thing may not be the same as something else. Sometimes they can be almost opposite actions, though there are certainly best practices to have in general.

    If you know your threat model, you can find guides online of how to plan for it, and you can ask communities online more specific questions if you know what you are asking FOR.


  • Your technical knowledge as described is unironically far beyond the average user so I’d say you’re probably good. Depends on what you want to do though. You can occasionally have problems if you need to do something specific or are married to software that doesn’t exist on Linux. Word processing is down pat. You won’t have the app version of Microsoft Office, but there are open source alternatives like LibreOffice that are compatible with Office file types. For formatting, you may have to download some Microsoft owned fonts since they’re technically proprietary and not bundled with Linux/your office suite. In browser, Microsoft 365 and Google Docs works no differently than normal.

    As someone else mentioned, you can test almost any distro on a live USB. There is also this site where you can remote in and test the general look and feel for free. You won’t have an internet connection though:

    https://distrosea.com/







  • That is so true, and can’t be underestimated. The budget laptop market absolutely blows these days. I got a 1300x768 screen, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB storage (albeit HDD), and ~2 GHz CPU in 2016, for $500. That was at Best Buy, who tried to sell $100 HDMI cables at the time, and wasn’t even a great deal, though I was fine with it.

    Now the budget market is…pretty much the same. Slightly better 1080p screen, same RAM, 1/4th the storage (but usually an SSD), a significantly better CPU that has most of that CPU progress kneecapped by Windows 11. It’s GRIM out there.







  • They’re not that impressive specs wise, somewhere between mid range and a “real” flagship that has a Snapdragon Elite chip. The only reason to get it is the top of the line security features that allow GrapheneOS to function. Or the software if you’re into Ai and such and don’t want Graphene, but that’s like the opposite of privacy.


  • You’ve gotten some good answers kn fingerprinting so I won’t repeat that. I will add though: it depends on what you are trying to do. Blending in with Tor or Mullvad Browsers makes you less trackable, but logging into an account immediately breaks that. Brave et al will only fool naive scripts, sure, but telemetry and built in tracking is another battle to fight: you’re going to want a privacy browser even if you stand out amongst the sea of Chrome and Edge. The more of us who do make it more normal looking. At the end of the day you are probably going to want two browsers per machine:a logging in browser and an anonymous web search browser. So no it does not negate itself and is worth doing, but has use case limitations. I find it best to block everything possible in Brave but use it as the sign in browser. Not using Brave shields doesn’t make you much less recognizable anyway, you’d have to use Chrome for that.

    i would go through your privacy settings and delete and turn off everything you can, then if you can, change pii to nonsense burner info and deletethe account. Services like that can sometimes be useful, but not for accounts specifically. Personally I dont use them and send delete requests to people search sites myself.

    Tor + VPN is a VERY contentious topic. The one thing not to do is turn on a VPN in the middle of a Tor session. That’s agreed upon. VPN before Tor… it can make it harder to find who you are in some ways, but makes you seem more suspicious that you feel the need to do all that. It makes your activity stand out, and it may even be easier to bully your VPN provider into giving up your identity (if they have it from payment info, etc). But that’s just if they are monitoring the exit node, so mot particularly likely. Still, I avoid mixing them entirely. Of the two, Tor is more anonymous, but VPN is faster, hides all network activity even outside the browser and is just about required in many places due to stupid age verification laws and similar nonsense. So I like Mullvad Browser + always on VPN, but Tor is a good tool.



  • BladeFederation@piefed.socialtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlThoughts on Helium browser?
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    4 days ago

    It is the best combo of lightweight and fast without working your CPU too hard. But this is only really relevant on old hardware. My laptop with 1 GB RAM and antiX installed is somewhat usable online now. But there are more private options for general use. Also I hate that it only has an AppImage release, it’s terrible for a browser to not be able to auto update.


  • This is a little bit douchey with the wording but not entirely incorrect. Nintendo fans play Nintendo games, and that’s usually it. As much as they’ve gotten better at third party support, it’s cheaper to just buy a separate console or PC, which has games go on sale and have it run better. Rather than buying Witcher 3 running sub 30 FPS at full price years after release because Nintendo tax. But if you do that you’re not a “Nintendo guy”. You’re just really onto video games, so BoTW won’t surprise you.

    Similar to how Apple repackages features. If you use Apple products you’re usually either a tech guy or an Apple guy. The tech guys have a healthy respect for Apple but don’t appreciate the repackaging and business practices. The Apple guys are impressed, because Apple facilitates being locked into their ecosystem, and therefore they’ve never seen it.



  • Offline mode is available for free on the mobile app, but not desktop. Doesn’t work offline for browser extension at all, which is how auto fill works on desktop, which is much more useful. And offline mode for Proton  just means you can view the passwords you already created, not create more.

    There are true offline local password managers but as long as the cloud sync is encrypted, I see no reason to avoid using it and miss out on half the functionality. Auth is more debatable but I’ve found uses for cloud hosted Auth too.