Cognitive dissonance. Looking at their own government means acknowledging all the ways they themselves are complicit. Plus, Americans are largely programmed from birth to defer to authority figures. That’s largely not true of Europeans, or at least not by the same mechanisms, so I don’t know what their excuse is.
EDIT: I’m agreeing with you, by the way, in case that wasn’t clear.
I honestly don’t even know what would trigger that, unless that bank just really hates you using any gecko-based browser.
I generally despise the push for separate apps for everything anyway, but the banking ones are among the worst since so many of them are tied into Google Play. If my bank were to disable its website and only function with an app that required Google Play certification, I’d change banks. I’d be tempted to go old school and do banking in person, but who knows what kind of security cameras they have in banks now.
Who owns the Military Industrial Complex? Who owns the corporations? WHOSE INTERESTS ARE THEY?
If you live in the USA and you haven’t studied USA history critically, beyond what you were taught in school, then you really don’t understand it at all. I get that Citizens United is a tempting scapegoat, but it was not better before that; all Citizens United did was strip away some of the pretense.
“Browser hardening” is a somewhat nebulous term; I’ve seen it used for both privacy and security interchangeably. I continue to hear that Gecko-based browsers (i.e. Firefox and its forks) are less secure, but I do not know exactly how that plays out in the real world. Security and privacy are sometimes at odds, and your threat model should help you choose which to prioritize and when. If you don’t know how to weigh them, you may need to refine your threat model.
Vanadium is a hardened browser, yes. I don’t have personal experience with it so I can’t make any recommendations on its settings.
Mullvad Browser and LibreWolf have two completely different strategies to avoid fingerprinting. Mullvad Browser operates on everyone having the same configuration to blend in - if you want to use it, you need to avoid changing any of the settings. LibreWolf, on the other hand, works by spoofing a different fingerprint every session. It will look unique to Cover Your Tracks and the like, but it will be different every time you close and reopen it. Again, it works best if you don’t mess with the settings.
I believe both Mullvad Browser and LibreWolf come with uBlockOrigin pre-installed. Just about anything you want to do regarding blocking ads or scripts can be done in UBO’s settings; do NOT add extra “privacy” add-ons as you will only make yourself easier to fingerprint.
If you’re looking for something to use with actual accounts (like banking), use hardened Firefox (with arkenfox) or a hardened chromium browser. Neither Mullvad Browser nor LibreWolf (and especially NOT Tor) are designed for that use case.
As an aside, you can use multiple browsers for different use cases. I honestly think that’s best practices at this point, but you’d have to be good about not overlapping your browsing on them (i.e., not visiting/logging into the same website on multiple browsers).
Americans have had every participatory inclination beaten out of them (metaphorically speaking). Their political parties have no participation beyond asking for money and their unions are the same. They’ve been fed a steady drip of 24/7 news designed to keep them afraid of everyone they don’t already know, and that’s by design. Things are going to have to get a lot worse for the average American before they’ll be willing to organize in any meaningful way. I hope this changes, don’t get me wrong, but I expect that it’ll have to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Glad to see this. Motorola seemed like a solid choice. Hopefully we’ll get some specs and release dates when they officially unveil it. I know it was pushed back to 2027, so I’m hoping for a Q1 2027 release. I’ve been holding off on getting a pixel in the hopes of getting a non-Google GrapheneOS phone. It would be nice if I don’t wind up having to wait too much longer.
This. You can remove yourself from those people finder websites if you’re willing to take the time. I don’t think paying monthly is worth it.
The best way to remain anonymous is to be somebody else on the internet, ideally many somebodies. Also, don’t use social media or if you must, don’t set it to “public”. So much of this “OSINT” bullshit is just googling to find public social media profiles.
Working in elected office means dancing when your donors say dance. It selects for people willing to do anything for an extra buck. Anyone who actually had principles wouldn’t make it through the gauntlet that is campaigning in the US, and that’s by design. Why do you think neither party seems interested in campaign finance reform?
Would love to know of a resource for looking up the amount of telemetry being collected by make/model/year. Like, is this stuff only on cars with Android Auto/Apple CarPlay/inbuilt GPS, or anything that uses Bluetooth?
Yeah, a lot of those ranking sites are actually owned by some of the more shady VPN providers. I know I’ve seen a diagram somewhere of the connections between some of these companies, but I can’t remember where off the top of my head.
Not OP, but the software currently is incompatible with linux AFAIK. There are some third-party applications that try to restore some of the features available in Windows, most notably the chat-mix, but I haven’t yet gotten that working and honestly just gave up on it. I have one of the other Arctis models though, not the Pro.
The problems go back further than that, but the centralization of news media over the last 50 years has certainly made it harder for the average Westerner to come across information that disputes the CIA narrative.