I am ecstatic about the ongoing development of the Librem 5. A true Linux phone, featuring easily-usable hardware switches, created by a company that holds privacy, personal autonomy, and open source technology central to its identity–I view the Librem 5 as a revolutionary product.
Anyway, I also enjoy the energy and expertise of this community, and I’ve been looking for more places to stay informed and up-to-date on issues related to privacy, FOSS, ethical technology, etc. It seems like some of the places that I used to like have sold out to our data-selling, privacy-invading overlords. Good sources for tech news and discussion seem few and far between.
I am aware of Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Software Foundation, and I admire the work that they do. Any other internet places that you would recommend to stay in the loop on privacy, FOSS, ethical technology, etc…?
Also, check out https://saidit.net and other reddit alternatives. There are some that forked from the last open source code, and there’s a few other link aggregators written from scratch. Some are decentralized / federated and others are working towards that goal.
As with anywhere on the Internet, don’t be afraid to hit that [block] button Some communities aren’t that great or are rather opinionated but, don’t let that drive you away. That’ll only keep the site unbalanced. Just post the things you want and you’re doing your part to make that community what it is and others will come, see, and enjoy.
I learned about mojeek search engine from the links you shared. That seems like a very cool company, since the other private search engines get their data from big tech companies, mostly from bing.
For now, mojeek operates by values I really like, but I didn’t see any protections in place for the future. If they “take off”, and become a huge, profitable company, will they abandon their values as so many other companies have done? This is where Purism could potentially become a model for such companies, by creating legal protections for their values, such as by forming as a Social Purpose Company.
Since a strong offense is a good defense, I would add that sites that give techniques for obfuscating one’s device fingerprint would be interesting as well.
I would be curious about this too. Do you have any suggestions on best practices or resources?
Pretty much, I’ve only done location spoofing and user-agent spoofing, but I’d be curious what other options are out there.
Faking MAC identifiers seems useful, and a more advanced product I’d like to see would hide fingerprint-able input patterns, such as typing or cursor movement. For example, a linux keyboard app that releases all queued keystrokes at regular 0.5-second intervals.
I thought that this video had some good ideas and isolated my google interaction inside of a separate vm on my main linux box. All of the vm’s have a vpn connection to algo vpn. Every month I bring up a new vpn (it takes about 10 minutes to do so) so I get a new ip address every month. Algo vpn also blocks ads with a local dns resolver so I don’t see any ads on those machines or my androids where I also use the vpn. Because I have not managed to get wireguard working on my home router, I use pi hole to block ads.
Interesting idea as countermeasures against individual input pattern fingerprinting. On the other side, services might think you are a bot and block access.
Yes websites will not like it, since it limits a revenue stream for them, selling individualized data. Many sites already try to block access for people who use adblock or tor. People will have to decide whether to continue using those services or to find privacy-respecting alternatives.
As for staying in loop on privacy and ethical technology, both of these sites do bring up ongoing issues daily among with other subjects. They have discussion or forum you could participate. Even they aren’t entirely focused on gnu linux since there isn’t much to criticize but they have brought up its subject from time to time.
Some communities aren’t that great or are rather opinionated but, don’t let that drive you away. That’ll only keep the site unbalanced. Just post the things you want and you’re doing your part to make that community what it is and others will come, see, and enjoy.