My dear sewer rat

I am shocked that you failed to understand the humour in what I wrote

What you have written in reply is meaninglesss to me.

I do not understand what you are trying to say.

I do not to respond directly to the questions people ask me, if I consider them intentionally confrontational. like calling me a smug know-it-all to a smug script kiddie asshole.

that is awfully rude and judgemental when you dont know me

I will not reply to people, who, selectively pick one sentence, or a selection of my words, that do not conform to, or meet, their personal agenda, and who’s sole purpose is to create a passive aggresive fruitless argument.

Especially when they have not read and attempted to understand what I have tried to explain or expand upon.

Unless of course, you are willing to pay me £200 for every 50 minutes of therapeutic work we do together. You will then get my full attention, congruence, love, and undiminished empathy. Maybe we could dismantle your defence mechanisms, and point you towards a more productive way of life.

You could then be a useful and fully functioning member of the human race, and stop acting like a sewer rat consumed by anger, toxic shame and hate.

Until then. I shall look forward to reading with interest your next privacy post.

Hey flatbield

Its the poor non techies that I feel for.

Buying stuff for convenience, being totally unaware of the data collection, lack of decent security and eventual enshitifictaion of the product range.

Thank you

Hey Libb

all you write sounds like my home.

There are humans who live here.

Real books are the key to a wonderful life, Its the smell that gets me, they are especially easy on my eyes as I have gotten older.

I have a small library of my favourite books. I have just started to re-read, Écrits by Jacques Lacan, its a bit of a tome.

By the way. I do not own a TV, I have not watched any TV since around 2000,

I think thats called autonomy

Thank you

hey furry toaster

Its very frustrating.

People are very odd when it comes to privacy and tech in general.

I have convinced half my friends to move from text messaging to signal and encrypted email but the other half totally refuse. Some have even changed to SimpleX chat and others to conversations.

I have explained to them how, just having my phone number in their contacts list, is hoovered up by all the other apps on their phones.

I tell them I use opencontacts because I respect their privacy, and that I do not share their phone numbers with any apps, so they should respect my privacy too. which they dont.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/opencontacts.open.com.opencontacts/

I put my foot down and say that I refuse to contact them or reply to any message they send, unless it is encrypted.

I also tell them to delete my number from their phones because I will not reply to them if they use my phone number.

they still cling on to gmail and the old text messages and dont bother messaging me at all.

very odd people.

Wow!

I was hoping that one day I could install edge on my arch distro and have the bestest ever, private and secure browser in the whole world.

But then I woke up from my dream. I told my psychoanalyst about my dream, and she said I was suffering from delusions and my dream was a narcissistic fantasy. Oh well.

++++++++++++++

I use edge-frfox so I can have the edge experience without all the drama, surveillance, tracking.

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/edge-frfox

https://github.com/bmFtZQ/edge-frfox

A Firefox userChrome.css theme that aims to recreate the look and feel of Microsoft Edge.

OH goodie.

glad to be of help

Hey eldavi

here are the guides to install e/OS on fairphones

https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP3/official

https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP4/official

https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP5/official

https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP6/official

+++++++++++++++=

or use the e/OS installer:

Ive not used thos so cannot comment on how good or bad it is.

https://e.foundation/installer/

+++++++++++++

or e/OS devices list:

https://doc.e.foundation/devices

Its working OK for me.

No problems over the recent weeks for the family.

https://mullvad.net/en/check

You can check which DNS server you are using by expanding the DNS box in our Connection check.

If you expand the “NO DNS LEAKS” for the server info.

The API section next to the FAQ gives more info.

you have to register with your phone number.

But you dont have to give your phone number out to friends or peopole you meet.

Some family members use Molly-Foss and have no issues.

I use signal-foss from the Twin helix repo, A fork of Signal with proprietary Google binary blobs removed…

https://www.twinhelix.com/apps/signal-foss/

Signal from the F-droid - The guardian project repo, is just signal.

I read that the issue was with signal using google firebase, and that it was easier for the fascist piglets to track your messages through notifications.

I have found that you can actually delete a contact via molly but cannot do it via signal.

With signal you can only block a contact, which for me, is a privacy issues.

If I meet a random person, say on holiday, and we swap details, I want to delete them, not block them, where they remain in my block list forever.

I swap between Signal-FOSS and Molly if I want to delete a contact.

It doesnt effect me.

I haven’t used google search since windows 95.

I switch between Qwant, Startpage, Ecosia, ghosterysearch, mojeek and searxng.deliberate.world

The nearest I get to ai manipulation is when I use Gumtree.

ai is absolutely shit

an example:

I have been looking for a phone to install linux.

I settled on the Oneplus Nord N10 5G

so I searched Gumtree.

Nord N10 5G: is changed to: road nw10 5g, WTF

oneplus Nord N10 5G: is changed to: oneplus nord 110 5g, WTF

Gumtree boosts customer engagement by a third with Phrasee AI.

customer engagement, they got to be fucking joking.

https://lovelymobile.news/gumtree-boosts-customer-engagement-by-a-third-with-phrasee-ai

it seems like they want me to type mobile phone in the search box, and spend 10 hours looking at every fucking phone for sale in the entire UK, until i find the one i want.

proper customer engagement, I wont play that game.

so Gumtree can fuck off

Thank you

I will check it out again if and when I need to do a clean out.

I do create a lot of duplicates as I move and transfer files between 3 laptops.

Hey Dessalines

I never got on with rmlint. It never felt safe to me.

I found fclones to be much better and safer.

Plus there is a GUI version for those not using the terminal

Gui Version https://github.com/pkolaczk/fclones-gui

CLI version https://github.com/pkolaczk/fclones

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Usage

fclones offers separate commands for finding and removing files. This way, you can inspect the list of found files before applying any modifications to the file system.

group – identifies groups of identical files and prints them to the standard output

remove – removes redundant files earlier identified by group

link – replaces redundant files with links (default: hard links)

dedupe – does not remove any files, but deduplicates file data by using native copy-on-write capabilities of the file system (reflink)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

I did actually test this by creating a directory with duplicates.

test_dupes 186 files

scanned directory for duplicates and created dupes.txt

fclones group . >>dupes.txt

dupes.txt

remove duplicates to another directory

/home/user/Desktop/dupes

fclones move target_dir <dupes.txt

fclones move /home/user/Desktop/dupes <dupes.txt

test_dupes now has 173 files

Hey PragmaticIdealist

I dont like him because he seems to intentionally pick controversial subjects just to get clicks.

I mean. how controversial can you get by using the headline “LineageOS is apparently not private?” and then go about trying to prove your point by not referring to Lineage.

I can only assume that loads of non techy people would be put off by his claims.

Lineage does not send any information to google nor connect to google. However the apps you choose to install could connect to google. Especially if you use closed source apps.

if you stick to open source apps via Neostore, droid-ify and F-droid basic you should be fine.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It is safe to disable Captive portal if it is already enabled on your phone.

I have disabled it on my aunts and uncles phones, they dont use lineage or any AOSP roms.

My aunt likes the idea of free wi-fi when shes out. she has a list of all the in-store wifi, in my local shopping centre, already stored on her phone, this means that she automatically connects to whatever wifi she is nearest to.

Lineage phones have captive portal disabled by default.

Looks like you are half way there.

A good VPN is also a good choice

Keep at it.

deepest apologies

thank you for the link

In my undergraduate mind I thought that the markdown language was an open source project

Hey illusionist

Thank you

I did try the three backticks but they remained in the post

I will try again

nope!

I was using ’ ’ ’ not three `

thank you

Excellent write up

Thank you

Hey PragmaticIdealist

The video guy is talking bollocks: plus he has about 50 crypto links to pay the wanker.

Honestly, I have install lineage since 2018 and installed CyanogenMod way before that.

He talks about “Removing bloatware Google packages” from Lineage, there are no bloatware google packages in lineage.

I have just plugged my oneplus 5T with lineage installed into my laptop, and typed this into my terminal: to give me a list of all the packages installed on my phone.

adb shell pm list packages -s >oneplus5-installed.txt

I have 213 packages installed. THERE ARE NO GOOGLE PACKAGES installed.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Captive Portal is simple to disable using adb. Its not scary.

It is the web page you see if you want to connect to Mcdonalds or costa coffee shop Wi-Fi.

find out what mode it set

adb shell settings get global captive_portal_mode

and set it to 0 zero to disable Captive Portal

adb shell settings put global captive_portal_mode 0

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

you can change your dns rather than rely on your carriers DNS. I use Mullvad DNS

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

The eu has public dns servers:

https://european-alternatives.eu/category/public-dns

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ not much info on itel-p55-5g on xda

https://xdaforums.com/t/i-want-a-vbmeta-img-and-boot-img-for-itel-p55-5g.4737042/

if you want to find out about Lineage, use their forums or use the https://xdaforums.com/ as above and have a good look around to see what people say.

Hey irotsoma

I do feel your dilemma

I would drive for an hour to buy anything from a small store rather than buying from amazon and increasing their profits. Obviously one person has no impact upon their obscene profits.

Amazon is the curse for small business and all its employees, drivers, sellers and customers.

good reseacrh here:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

The authors conclude that getting the best price on Amazon requires that you “first spend considerable time searching through pages of results and then utilize, at a minimum, spreadsheet algebraic capabilities to determine the product’s full price…[and] somehow de-bias from the psychological effects of anchoring, and labels such as ‘limited time deal’ and ‘Best Seller,’ as well as many other subtle psychological influences.”

Amazon says it’s entitled to use the consumer welfare cheat-code to get out of antitrust enforcement because it has so many bargains. But to get those bargains, you have to pay such minutely detailed attention – literally spreadsheeting your options and hand-coding mathematical formulas to compare them – that you’ll almost certainly fail. The price of failure is incredibly high – a 25-29% overcharge on every purchase.

The Amazon Paradox has dropped, and it drills into another way that Amazon overcharges most of us by as much as 29% on nearly every purchase, disqualifying it from invoking that consumer welfare cheat code. The new paper is “Amazon’s Pricing Paradox,” from law professors Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal, for The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology:

The authors concede that while Amazon does have some great bargains, it goes to enormous lengths to make it nearly impossible to get those bargains. Drawing from the literature on behavioral economics, the authors make the reasonable (and experimentally verified) assumption that shoppers generally assume that the top results in an Amazon search are the best results, and click on those.

But Amazon’s search-ordering is enshittified: it shifts value from sellers and shoppers (you!) to the company. A combination of self-preferencing (upranking Amazon’s own knock-offs), pay-for-placement (Amazon ads), other forms of payola (whether a merchant is paying for Prime), and “junk ads” (that don’t match your search) turn Amazon’s search-ordering into a rigged casino game.

From 2023:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/22/23885242/amazon-prime-tv-movies-streaming-ads-subscription-date

Fabulous guide

Even I can do this, and Im 69 years old, though I do have some arch experience.

Thank you Tony

I have downloaded the video to watch later and saved the git page

I wil give me something to dive into when I am bored

Yeah I remember him well

They used to play in my local boozer on a friday night…

It was a punk band.

If my memory serves me well, his stage name was, Robin Bastard.

The band were shit.

They used to charge a £5 fiver on the door, but you could pay £200 up front for a prime ticket to watch the same shit every night. and get your drinks delivered to your table.