monovergent
member since 27 Nov 2023 05:06
Bit of an uphill fight with captchas everywhere. Do people here conduct all online activity over VPN whenever possible? Only for the sensitive stuff? Or perhaps the inverse because the bank already knows you? Maybe when travelling or getting around region blocking? Something else?
The one provided by my work aside, I realized that I don’t have any consistent rules around using VPN. Except sometimes, you know, when downloading ISO’s for my favorite distos.
privacy.com cards and prepaid Visa/Mastercard I believe let you enter any address of your choice. Of course, privacy.com would still know and some vendors might be a bit more restrictive, especially towards the prepaid cards in recent years.
It could have been many moons ago. But about ten years ago, Google rolled out an irresistible deal for schools that included the workspace suite and unlimited storage. The schools took it up passionately and this is how we got students opening up a Google Docs browser tab that consumes 540 MB of RAM just to jot down a note two sentences long, and schools stuck with Google even as they aggressively whittle away at the promised ‘unlimited’ storage.
Just curious, what kind of batteries are powering the remote and if rechargeable, how often does it need charging? Not saying they wouldn’t do such things, still a good preventative measure, but I’d be surprised if it could sustain telemetry with only the power of AAA batteries in a typical remote.
The one piece of old tech I don’t miss are bulky charging bricks. I use my GaN USB-C charger whenever possible, sometimes with the help of adapters.
Look into threat modelling, we’re all striving for more privacy-friendly ways to keep in touch with people, and if you seal yourself off too early, you’ll suffocate.
I know my friends and colleagues well in person, they know that I’m a privacy nut, and we agree to not report me missing just because I’m unreachable on a particular day. But knowing that they SMS each other their plans and that I’m probably not a target of the state, I’m cool texting them things like when we’re eating out together.
Also don’t be disheartened, I keep at it even though my methods are nowhere near airtight. Even if every move of mine is known, the surveillance capitalists will at least know that I am flipping them off and trying my best to make their jobs hard.
If I just learned of GOS now and didn’t have a Pixel, I would buy an unlocked unit cheap and used now. Motorola have gone quiet about their GOS phone in the months since the announcement. If it ends up flagship-priced, I’d have to settle for a used Pixel anyway.
But since I have a Pixel with GOS that is perfectly usable already, I’m holding out to see what Motorola comes up with. Either way, not too worried about specs since I don’t use my phone that much. Would be nice to have SD card, headphone jack (bonus ease of security points over Bluetooth and dongles), and replaceable battery, but have also learned to (begrudgingly) tolerate phones without those.
If those are your only copies, do buy extra HDDs first thing so you have at least a backup. Preferably then a third copy since otherwise, for a moment, only one copy would exist as you copy encrypted data back to the original drives. Technically, there are ways to encrypt in-place, but don’t ever do that when it’s your only copy of the data.
Overall, it would look like creating an empty partition on the new drive, creating an encrypted container on said partition (this intervening level differentiates it from an unencrypted data partition), creating the filesystem (formatting as ext4, btrfs, etc) within said container, and copying data into the encrypted filesystem.
LUKS is the best-supported encryption system for Linux. As an avid user of LUKS on nearly all of my internal and external drives, I highly recommend reading the Arch wiki entry: wiki.archlinux.org/title/…/Device_encryption. Section 4 teaches setting up the encrypted partition. Once everything is in place, most graphical file managers can handle detecting and opening the encrypted drives as well.
For non-boot drives, I’ve always used rsync to copy data over. If you use btrfs, then a btrfs scrub afterwards to double-check the copied files. I’ve never tried to see if I could rsync a root partition and leave it in a bootable state. Though I do have a way to migrate a non-encrypted root partition to encrypted without reinstalling, that’s a whole rabbit hole you are welcome to ask me about.
Get a feel for LUKS before you set up the root partition with encryption though, perhaps by setting up an encrypted install in a virtual machine. Recovering a non-booting encrypted install of Linux takes only a few extra commands compared to a non-encrypted one, but if you mess up encryption and lose the key, no amount of commands will save you. So before doing anything I mention here, always have backups.
My collection of hoarded media waits eagerly if this forces me to say goodbye to the internet outside of work obligations