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Joined 8 days ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2025

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  • Let’s say you use a VPN, and all your internet traffic comes from an IP in London. 178.238.10.1.

    It doesn’t matter if you have a VPN, if you log in to anything with any account tied to your real name (yourname@gmail.com), your email and anything done on that London IP are all linked. Google builds a profile on you based on the activity on that IP. AND your browser profile. Private/incognito window or not, if there’s a Google tracker on the site, they connect it all. Google doesn’t care about private windows. If you go to reddit in a private window on the same IP as your gmail, Google sees that and tracks every page you look at.

    So let’s say that you log into your email from work. Google now has a treasure trove of new info about you and people you know. Same for FB, who uses the fact that you and someone else were logged on from the same IP range to suggest new friends.

    Let’s pretend that you live in China and still have access to a VPN and want to learn about the Tienanmen Square Massacre. But the government can ask Google about you. What do you need?

    • an IP never ever used with an account associated with an account with your real name.
    • a no-log VPN that won’t tattle on you if asked what sites did you access on a specific date.
    • a browser fingerprint never ever associated with an account tied to your real name.


  • No, you use one as the backup. That’s why I said use JShelter, but if a site breaks beyond use, switch IPs and then reload with NoScript instead to be more selective of what is blocked and what’s not. That way I can still block Cloudflare and Google and Apple and still let the actual site load. And JScreep seems (for me, YMMV) to treat each as distinct fingerprints.

    IMO if you know you can have multiple fingerprint profiles anyway based on which combo of extensions you use that do roughly the same job, that’s a net benefit.





  • Because it’s an option already. “Transliterate to Latin letters.”

    Edit: I should add that you should look at how many keyboard layouts there are. It’s kind of silly that for me to use an OSM based map and go to any county east of Slovenia I need to both have the keyboard AND know the transliteration of the alphabet.

    Have you seen the Armenian or Georgian alphabets? What makes the K sound?

    Did you know every dialect of a Slavic language using Cyrillic has it’s own distinct keyboard varied by mostly the letter for the nya sound and J?

    Greek?

    All while transliteration works fine in Google.



  • This 100%.

    Wealthy people essentially pay staff to do make things happen for them, and those staff don’t sign up for IG or FB stressing abou making sure to use their ONE email like RichieRich1975@hotmail.com for everything.

    PA staff are both IT staff and human password managers, creating and curating massive sets of logins that are functionally disposable. With enough clout and money, if you DO have a problem with a social media platform, or your phone number, a PA calls an Executive CSR and sorts out the problem.

    So it’s that their “privacy” is masked by the haphazard way they interact with things that track them. For them, tracking them is security to ensure you know who they are so that have a frictionless experience. If they want a dummy account to creep on people or be a perv, they get that easily, too.



  • The problem with the money problem is the money part. As much as I actually do want to donate to ALL the open source platforms I use, I don’t have enough to do that equitably between platforms and even cover processing costs of the payment. 25 services split $100? Why bother?

    A foundation with an endowment is actually the solution. The Open Source Foundation (or someone like them) needs to become a neutral arbiter and incubator.

    But also - I would, and can, provide labor. I would love to give anything FOSS 20-30 hours a week of my time. But doing what? Should I get a part time job to support 25 FOSS services? Take Fivr gigs and donate it all? Or can I just directly hustle a part time work week somehow?



  • I do like this a lot.

    Since you sort of need to be there with the hat, it makes me wonder of you might get more response and/or geographic spread if you has some sort of leave behind. A sticker, or a card that you can slot in places.

    I do think that leaving it as the gpg key is better, not a QR code. It helps ID this for nerds like you and me. I would never scan a wild QR.