If I built a system like that, it would become really complicated, since I would just have to include all sorts of convoluted unicode trickery in it.

ӏ і κ е ț һ ï ʂ

Back in the day, when forums were still a thing, I dumped a bunch of binary into my signature and waited for someone to figure out what it says. Eventually, someone did go through the trouble of converting it to hex, ASCII, HTML, ROT13, BASE64 or whatever random conversions I had access to at the time. Anyway, one day I got a message about it, and I was so delighted.

Here are my privacy/security tips roughly in the order of importance.

Unique password that have upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters. Also, most passwords are at least 16 characters long.

NextDNS on my mobile devices for ad blocking and privacy.

Linux on my laptop + Firefox and uBock Origin.

No Whatsapp, or Telegram. I prefer to use Signal. If someone insists on using some spyware messenger, I’ll just SMS them.

No Meta, Xitter or other major platforms allowed. When using social media, I don’t share anything too personal. Also, no photos of me or anyone I know.

There are also lots of smaller video platforms built by youtubers. They publish advertiser friendly (censored) videos on YT, but put the real versions on their own platform. This way, fans can support their favorite channels, and get to see videos that are too cool for YT.

Using a 100% de-googled Android would be best, but it comes with some serious compromise, so this option isn’t for everyone. The second best options are also pretty good and quite practical in comparison.

It really depends on your situation and the kinds of threats you’re trying to mitigate. If you need to have a spyTV, spyPhone, a spyPad or something similar in your life, using DNS filtering may be an appealing option. Ideally, you would have zero iOS or Android devices in your household, but life isn’t ideal.

How about a NextDNS subscription? You can use that to filter out a bunch of creepy tracking, ads and other stuff. Ideally, you would only use devices and software that don’t do any creepy stuff, but the world is what it is, so using a custom DNS is a good idea.

I’m not touching an app owned by Meta. If people want to message me, they can use Signal.

Turns out, this policy has weeded out lots of useless conversations from my life. So, I see it as a win.

VPN: essential or snake oil?

My guess is, the people who care didn’t stick around. As s result, quality went down.

When you start studying a topic like this, you need to define some terms clearly. For example, if hackers grab your passwords, is that a breach in privacy, security or both? If Google is stalking you and knows your every move, desire and plan, what does that violate?

Once you have clear definitions for these things, it would be more helpful to see how different browsers compare on this scale.

So, the home page includes Peppa pig videos alongside with gruesome skateboarding accident compilations. Something for everyone!

I guess the convenience really depends on where you live. In my case, it’s really simple to do most of my shopping as a part of my daily commute. The place where I switch between a train and a bus, there’s also a shopping center right next to the station, so why not.

The difference in selection is very real. If you need to buy one of those once in a lifetime things, you’ll probably find those in Amazon. The local stores have no incentive to keep those in stock, because they will probably only sell less than ten of those things within the next 20 years.

However, when it comes to phone chargers, towels, garbage bags or soap, my local store is perfectly fine by me. I don’t even know how much cheaper those things would be on Amazon, but I prefer to keep the local stores around. If I happen to need a very specific kind of charger with some special features, I’ll just see if there’s an online store for that sort of stuff. Usually there is and it’s also within a 1000 km radius of where I live. Sure, shipping usually takes a few days, but I’m in no hurry.

Why do people buy stuff from a creepy company like that? Couldn’t you just stop by at the local whatever shop on your way home? If you live in the middle of nowhere, that may not be an option, but surely there are lots of other online shops to choose from.

Based on the number of partners some companies seem to have, they are far more promiscuous than most humans.

I wish it was legal to ddos the sites that violate this law.

They care about it so much that they probably have a full time UI designer whose job is to figure out new ways to trick and manipulate users to hand out even more data.

Oh I remember those thoroughly cursed menus where you have to manually disable 256 cookies one by one. Haven’t seen those in a while though, so I guess some piece of legislation is doing its job.

Most cookie consent dialogues:

1. There’s only one big accept button
2. If the decline button even exists, it’s grey whereas the other one is green.
3. The decline option could be buried deep under other menus.
4. The sizes of the buttons

Most companies are trying to actively manipulate you to accept all cookies, but nowadays there are a few companies that don’t resort to any of these dirty tricks.