Since I’m not in a good position to leave the States, I’m keeping my “human antivirus” performant and updated:

• Eating and living healthy, and exercising (or trying to)
• Vaccines, masks, preventative care
• Making a personal threat model for privacy and security and revisiting it frequently
• Staying in the loop on new security vulnerabilities
• Locking doors and keeping valuables out of sight
• Investing in a good dashcam and non-spying vehicle
• Being in the company of good people, knowing when to cut ties with bad ones, and having my community when stuff happens

Also keeping and rotating through a well-documented stock of emergency supplies. Wouldn’t rule out buying a gun, but I’d want to have some more training on the matter first.Problem with having weapons is, the powers that be probably won’t send someone out to get you in the middle of the night, they’ll instead send lawyers after you.

I think you fanned the flames with your edit

Don’t follow any of em, but if I did, anyone kissing up to Charlie Kirk ought to know:

I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage.

– Charlie Kirk

Building a threat model helped me figure out what was worth my energy and what can be put off to be done later at my leisure. This should be your first step.

What kind of phone and OS do you use? You can contain the spying a bit if you set up a work profile with Insular or Shelter, install your proprietary apps there, set a schedule for checking those, and turn off the profile otherwise. I realize that it’s not the easiest, but if you can find people to talk to in real life regularly, frequent access to messages / social media need not be a prerequisite to a healthy social life.

Getting hacked through the BIOS/Intel ME, while possible, is statistically highly unlikely, activist or not. If there’s a piece of technology I have to use, but don’t trust, I just keep it at my desk, fine as long as it can’t actively track me moving around. Don’t let perfection get in the way of your bigger goals.

While we’re at it, have you considered libreboot on the T480? A few tiny scraps of the Intel ME do have to be left in place, but realistically they’re not going to see an exploit anytime soon. And you’ll still have most of the satisfaction of liberating your computer.

I credit a good part of my success bringing friends and family over to Signal to the fact that it emulates what ordinary people are used to: a centralized service where people’s identities are associated with phone numbers. No need to teach them anything new, just download it, punch in your number, and then punch in my number. I think Signal is targeting exactly that and putting more anonymous and decentralized models way on the back burner. Concepts as simple to us as ‘instances’ are surprisingly difficult to explain to newcomers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if accounts not associated with phone numbers pose a discoverability issue.

This all might be sidestepping the question a bit since I haven’t dug deep into the issue, but my thinking is that Signal, in its current state, should be seen as a transitional solution until things like SimpleX become more mature and widespread.

Halite is a boring answer, but Potassium chloride (“No Salt”) is a fun rock to taste. Ice prepared with heavy water is the only sweet-tasting mineral that comes to mind.

Sal ammoniac is another fine-tasting rock. Copper ore might be the worst of the options here, I hate the taste of copper in drinking fountains.

• XMPP
• Signal
• SMS (contacts only)
• E-Mail (only a handful of important contacts, forwarded to an inbox specifically for my phone)
• Voice calls automatically dismissed with a missed call notification. Colleagues, friends, and family are aware that I’ll initiate the return call.
• Task reminders at one point, but later switched to paper planners.

Total: about 5 to 20 on any given day

Haven’t ever felt the need to get YT or other subscriber notifications and one of the first things I do when setting up a new browser is disabling all requests for notification permissions.

Personally a fan of XMPP, it’s about the only decentralized alternative to Signal that’s worked well and reliably “out of the box” for me. SimpleX is really nice in principle, but my messages end up stuck in limbo sometimes and it burns through my phone’s battery.

Haven’t used Briar much, was missing a couple features I wanted.

Just an ordinary rectangular pillow. Contrast with European square pillows, which are way too big. It’s served me well for the past 20+ years (yes, the same pillow) as a side sleeper.

Lol, I wish edible insects were more available for purchase in the states. They are delicious and chock-full of protein. Might have to farm my own.

Even without diving into ethics, lab meats avoid all the inefficiencies of a complete animal, while providing effectively the same product. Especially beef, no need to clear forests for pasture and worry about cow burps.

I sorely miss DivestOS for this purpose, but I’d consider CalyxOS (development sadly on pause) and iodeOS as runners-up. /e/OS got caught sending voice-to-text data to OpenAI, so I’d stay away for the time being.

edit: sad to see that iode has a freemium model on some of its features. see replies for more nuance on the /e/OS situation.

LineageOS will get the most years of support out of the most devices. While leagues ahead of Android for privacy, bear in mind that it still isn’t airtight with regard to the occasional piece of telemetry data sent back to Google. It’s about the only thing that can keep one of my older Pixels somewhat up-to-date.

LeOS is like LineageOS with all Google telemetry stripped out, but only in GSI form (no builds optimized for specific devices), so YMMV with hardware compatibility. I have this on my Samsung tablet.

I’ve also heard about Volla Phones (with VollaOS) and Brax Phones (with iodeOS or Ubuntu Touch), but haven’t taken a serious look since the screen sizes offered are too big for me.

I might try out a Linux phone next, but the relative lack of battery optimizations and edge-case issues leave me a bit hesitant. Also, check out detailed comparison of the common Android ROMs with regard to privacy and security: https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm

I’m very glad to see projects like libadapta as themable alternatives to the libadwaita dogma. I’ve painstakingly themed my desktop to look and feel like a cohesive, modernized NT 4 workstation and should seriously consider contributing to libadapta in anticipation of libadwaita coming to more and more programs.

I am very stubborn about my computer’s GUI, but also hopeful the community can bring back theming where GNOME is dead set against it. If they can make WindowBlinds for modern Windows, the equivalent in Linux is definitely achievable.

Good point, I remember being told as a kid not to have sweets before fruit, lest the fruit taste sour or bitter in comparison. Order hasn’t mattered to me in recent memory. Wouldn’t be surprised if sweeter fruits helped the bottom line, even if at the cost of more nuanced flavors.

Biggest changes that come to mind are strawberries and apples in the past several years. Either I’ve gotten good at picking the sweet ones or the sour ones have been eliminated by the increasingly sugary gene pool. I’m leaning towards it being a matter of selective breeding rather than GMO since they haven’t even deployed the low-hanging fruit of genetic security patches, namely Panama virus resistance for Walmart’s bestselling product.

With how sugary the Western diet has become, it probably isn’t too good. I’m not a plant biologist, but it would be a tragedy if fruits are now expending more resources building up sugar stores rather than vitamins and non-sugar flavor compounds. Recall the tragedy of the Red Delicious apple, in which the quest for a perfectly red fruit led to a tough skin and mealy, bland flesh.

How I wish my friends and colleagues weren’t. Sometimes I don’t have the heart to ask them not to post pictures with my face online.

Birds

Amazing to think about hummingbirds as dinosaurs miniaturized to play a similar ecological role to bees

Honor 90 Lite (CRT-NX1), attempting to get LeOS GSI on it or at least some flavor of AOSP GSI.

Flash drives are a cool idea for having a copy of your most important stuff on you, but don’t make them your only copy. I’d also encrypt them if there’s sensitive data you’ll be carrying around in public.

A NAS with automatic backups really helps keep the library in one place if you’re juggling more than a couple of devices. Could make it out of a VM on your main PC, a repurposed old PC, or a dedicated machine. Spinning rust is usually fine for a digital library, maybe a SSD cache if you need extra performance. Don’t forget to periodically make a proper cold, offline, and perhaps offsite backup so you don’t lose your hard work.

Jellyfin, Syncthing, and Samba are what I’ve used to access my library and keep things in sync. I’ve been ripping discs before the rot sets in and downloading Youtube videos before they make it any harder to.

Also, grab a copy of Wikipedia for Kiwix (you can download specific parts with/without media to suit your needs and storage capacity).

As for the flash drive, I like to keep one on my keychain with Live ISOs, diagnostic utilities, and a small copy of Wikipedia in the unencrypted partition and a collection of photos, music, and documents in the encrypted partition.

Looks cool, but unless I’m missing something, they’ve only published a few bits and pieces of the LibertOS code

How much does the Librem 5 satisfy what you want out of a daily driver phone?

Until substantially more people join the fight for privacy or something else fundamentally changes, I think there is a very real possibility of Google completely clamping down on Android while governments and workplaces mandate apps that only run on phones with all of Google or Apple’s bells and whistles.

But the folks at GrapheneOS, Calyx, and Murena seem to be a devoted and resourceful bunch, so I am hopeful that they can give something for us to work with, even if Google pulls the plug, whether it’s a fork of Android or rebasing to mobile Linux.

If that all falls through, I’ll look for whichever phone supports Linux best and eventually move everything over. The vast majority of the apps I use regularly on my GrapheneOS phone aren’t very demanding and have a decent alternative on Linux. And whatever apps are forced on me by other people will reside on a dedicated Android phone, ideally with a removable battery.

For this year, I’d still recommend a secondhand or reseller Pixel with GrapheneOS. Everything just works on it.