evujumenuk

If you only ever use this mail domain to send messages to or receive messages from people who don’t know your name and address, why not. Any old infoleak would otherwise indelibly associate that domain with that personal info.

If your idea of a federated Twitter is a bunch of mini-Twitters that sometimes exchange indirect replies or something, then the Fediverse fulfills that purpose completely. Mission accomplished, we can all go home now.

If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time, even the thing Mastodon merged half a year ago that supposedly fetches all replies if you remember to navigate to the topmost post, and wait up to 15 minutes for your view of the thread to coalesce, falls short.

And this is why hosting Mastodon is cheap, it fundamentally cannot provide the functionality BlueSky offers. Of course, you might think that such functionality is not desirable anyway, and that’s entirely fair. But if you’re looking for the immediacy that centralized Twitter gave users, I don’t see a way for Fedi to ever provide that, whereas there is a path to BlueSky decentralization. It’s a fact that your UX is diminished if all of your followers and followeds are not on the same instance.

But in the end, I think there is space for both.

I must be the worst autist on planet Earth, because to “tinker with every facet of” my mobile phone is about the last thing I want to do.

So, definitely not iOS, because I’m pretty happy with iOS; also there’s no expectation of LARPing as a sysadmin for my phone, precisely because that simply isn’t possible to any meaningful extent.

I don’t deny that Old Prey was an innovative game. But stating that everything that wasn’t Doom was stripped out while implying that nothing else was added in feels a bit disingenuous.

What aspects of the newer Prey make it more like Doom than the older Prey? To me, that’s kinda like saying, “System Shock was just Wolfenstein 3D 🎶 in space 🎶”

Income tax doesn’t do anything to the 1%. You have unrealized gains, and borrow against your assets? You owe zero tax.

A wealth tax, or income tax on yet unrealized gains, would be better. Of course, that comes with its own set of issues. But, I don’t think they are insurmountable.

It really looks like Microsoft made the worst call with their Series S compatibility mandate. Now games come out so late that as an Xbox owner, you’re automatically a Patient Gamer, without the upsides. That is, if a port is released at all.

These days you can play games like Death Stranding more than half a year earlier on your iPhone.

Can I ask where the material difference is to a game that requires a Day 1 patch download to work? With a Game Key Card, that patch is simply very large. You can still sell the game, just like a standard cartridge. And the Switch cartridges never had infinite shelf life to begin with, so they’re not suitable for archival either.

That’s a good question, since it doesn’t have a trivial answer. Zelda is basically three or four different types of games in a trench coat tunic.

There’s the open world adventure that the original Zelda established, which is probably best represented by BotW.

There’s the 2D tile-based action puzzler, the quintessential of which is probably LttP.

There’s the 3D “interconnected small rooms”, which got its start with OoT and was so successful that to this day players are arguing that the newest two games are not really Zelda even though they stick to the original concept much more closely.

Finally, there’s Adventure of Link.

I finished BotW 100%, and am currently nearing 100% completion with TotK. Here’s what I would do if I were you.

Get the BotW demo. It’s free, and it contains the entire first portion of the game, the Great Plateau.

Play that, and when you’re finished, read the story synopsis on Wikipedia or wherever. Then acquire and play through TotK.

The Great Plateau gives you about 80% or 90% of what’s great about BotW in a tight, controlled package. If you’ve played Metal Gear Solid V, this is basically Ground Zeroes.

TotK is so amped up over BotW that there’s no “tutorial inside area” that showcases the mechanics of the full game, it’d basically be a carbon copy of the entire thing.

In terms of gameplay, this should give you something pretty close to the full experience.

Edit time! Looks like the BotW store demo was not actually generally available, let alone “free”. Since you’re only hurting for time, not money, you could still get the cartridge version of BotW and sell it after completing the Great Plateau. The rest of my reply should still apply.

Autists will also die if a wooden stake is driven through the heart.

As they are also vulnerable to silver bullets, maybe autists are werewolves, too?

It kind of has to be, if you’re trying to be persistent about the whole thing. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and burn out over all of the different threats we’re trying to defend against. I don’t see how you can keep at it for months or years if you feel no joy over it. But maybe being deathly, relentlessly afraid of the dangers around us is enough after all.

If you don’t even like doing this stuff, wouldn’t it be better to focus on measures that require little upkeep? This is what my example suggestion was getting at, something that’s as close to set-and-forget as possible, while getting you 90% of the way there. (Depending on your threat model, sure. If yours says that the sky is falling if Tim Apple gets your iCloud data, it certainly doesn’t apply.)

I’d sure hope so! Many of the things that privacy nuts like us do are not efficient uses of one’s time.

They might require constant vigilance. They might need recurring work for continued effectiveness. They might necessitate exposure to intrusive negative emotions (“what is Google doing this week?!”).

If you’re not having fun, focus on measures that you implement once and then never have to think about again.

For example, I wouldn’t recommend GrapheneOS to a journalist in an authoritarian regime. It might be “more secure”, but they have a job to do and can’t keep dicking around with obscure pointer authentication settings or whatnot. They should just get a current iPhone, enable Lockdown Mode if its tradeoffs are acceptable to them, and continue doing their best job, which isn’t “phone administration”.

LARPing as Jason Bourne, or prepping for the Rokobasiliskocalypse, is a hobby. It’s okay, I do it too. However, it’s not approachable or understandable to people who don’t share that hobby, or are not as alarmed at the general state of things as we are.

I used to run unbound on my laptop just so I could configure stuff like forwarding zones with more precision than what a stub resolver normally gives you.

It can also be your validating DNSSEC resolver, which also satisfied that sort of morbid curiosity in me.

In the age of DoT and DoH, with endpoints hardcoded in browser binaries, that sort of thing has a lot less punch than it used to. Even back then Go binaries would start ignoring your nsswitch.conf…

As long as everyone is having fun, I see no problem.

If you’re not having fun switching mail providers, researching Gecko forks, or being a part-time sysadmin for your Fairphone, you should probably stop doing those things.

It’s a gross approximation, but…

Your desktop or laptop computer is probably toast, your phone probably isn’t.

There’s no easy answer to your questions. It depends on what threats you’re trying to defend against. If your primary concern is adversarial law enforcement with Cellebrite et al., a current iPhone, especially with Lockdown Mode enabled, is certainly the next best thing to Graphene that we have.

Personally, I have access to Private Relay, but never use it. That’s not because I don’t trust it, but because I only ever use VPNs to spoof my GeoIP. And you can’t do that with Private Relay.

Just “encrypted”? Probably iMessage.

Anti-abuse measures such as this are generally designed to not provide that kind of feedback. The website developer is modeled to be an adversary, and you don’t volunteer valuable information on what has worked against your countermeasures, and what hasn’t, to your designated enemy.

Tello gives you a real (US though) number, E911 and all, for 5 USD a month. You get an eSIM you can activate from anywhere in the world via Wi-Fi Calling. Send and receive unlimited texts and get 100 minutes a month for the odd service that insists on verification calls rather than texts. I’ve had zero issues.