They had a hardware issue, I believe with the firewall on the rack setup it sounded like?

At least for windows the hibernation file is stored as a file on the C: drive, so will be encrypted by bitlocker along with your other data.

The ultra-dark dark modes really bug me, black with various shades of black or dark colors is almost impossible to see UI elements on easily.

Dark modes should be like in the 50% gray area, where it’s dim but things can still have good contrast.

Modern sleep keeps a network connection active so it can still check your email or whatever stupid reason they came up with.

They can’t do it perfectly. But some things like list of plugins, sensor data, battery, connection, fonts installed, etc… don’t seem necessary for anything and could be removed.

Tor tries to make tor users all look the same as much as possible, but in the context of everyone using the internet tor is likely unique and stands out.

This is why using a local web proxy is a good idea

Do you have one you’ve used that I can look at for this?

From only thinking about it for a minute I’m not sure using a Linux x86 device vs a smartphone with a custom ROM changes anything, since all the traffic from websites, chat apps, etc is encrypted with SSL already. There could be other benefits I didn’t think of maybe…

IMO the best option is grab a google pixel, flash GrapheneOS, use a VPN, and only install open source apps that aren’t full of analytics. You can throw it in airplane mode if you don’t want to be tracked by the cell carrier.

A phone with graphene is also MUCH more secure than a Linux x86 device in terms of law enforcement searches or theft of the device. And is safer against malware and having your data potentially stolen.

Any android phone lets you disable the GPS and use airplane mode, so custom ROMs aren’t needed for that.

But de-googled ROMs do indeed have less/no data going to google, although the apps you install will be the same either way.

I don’t see how a hotspot for internet is going to be any different from using data directly on the smartphone.

If you don’t want it always on you can just enable airplane mode when you don’t need a connection. And turn off the GPS, wifi, and bluetooth if you don’t want those used for location stuff.

The GPS is usually part of the SOC.

But you can just turn GPS off in the settings.

There are tons of rugged smartphones out there, also some brands that focus on easy to repair phones.

The fact that they’re not well known kind of shows that the majority of the market doesn’t really care about those things.

This was the browser that required an account to even start using, it was just ridiculous.

Number of external connections means little without context of the content and what they are for.

Zen also attempts to remove the telemetry that firefox has baked in.

But Zen also has features other than just vertical tabs that are really useful, like Glance.

Make sure you enable airplane mode too, even without a SIM it’ll still be connected to the cell towers.

Probably quite expensive, and when doing something as a hobby it’s often hard to get the funds.

As long as they leave the local backup option that sounds like a good idea to me.

The lack of account mobility is really a huge problem with the fediverse, you lose all your stuff if you move to another instance.

Probably not by much, since CPUs have had hardware acceleration for AES encryption for a long time now.

I always prefer software over hardware for encryption, RAID, etc… Because it’s portable and not tied to a specific piece of hardware.