Are There any Linux Users on This Site?

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In EU the laws are more strict against corporations compared to USA in topics like privacy and monopoly.
Yes, but in terms of privacy, that's totally crazy and contradictory, because on the one hand they want to uphold data protection, but on the other hand they would like to be able to read all private encrypted chats in real time. No joke or conspiracy theory, they are really working on it! (Thank God my country isn't part of the EU!)

But this is not because of some technicality. It’s more because of an ideology where they don’t like the big guy
It's exactly as you say, it's only because they don't like large US companies because they are not EU companies.

This is why I asked what’s your definition of spying though.
Maybe when someone gains access to someone else's property or information in order to use it for their own purposes or against the actual owner?

Because even during communism, which I have lived in, the secret police didn’t flag everyone for daily convo. They flagged people for saying something against the system OR against the dictator.
And the naive ones probably just said that you shouldn't do this, then you won't have any problems... So there's no problem.

Data collection is ultimately a salesman coming at your house trying to sell you solar panels, windows, doors, lawn service and anything else. But if no one knows where you live, or if you live in a dessert, forest or monastery, then they can’t come, can they?
The comparison isn't bad, and Linux or other technologies would then be, in a sense, “the desert” or “the monastery.”
But then again, it's not just about "selling advertising".

For example in England or Germany the police might arrest you depending on what you say online. Linux or windows is not going to protect you against that because people are saying those things with their real name on facebook … in their brilliance … and windows or Linux doesn’t protect you from hiding your ip address … since you need to put a vpn … and windows or Linux doesn’t protect you to shield you from any government request if they demand the VPN company to reveal the ip address id they go after you.
In this whole discussion, we have to be careful not to confuse things that are not directly related to each other. Logically, Linux alone is of no use if I post something publicly under my real name or cannot hide the IP address. But that's not the issue here.
 
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Thank you for these responses. I am going to quote a couple of them since it's where i think we may need a bit more discussion.

Maybe when someone gains access to someone else's property or information in order to use it for their own purposes or against the actual owner?

The comparison isn't bad, and Linux or other technologies would then be, in a sense, “the desert” or “the monastery.”
But then again, it's not just about "selling advertising".

In this whole discussion, we have to be careful not to confuse things that are not directly related to each other. Logically, Linux alone is of no use if I post something publicly under my real name or cannot hide the IP address. But that's not the issue here.

I think a lot of misunderstandings may come from this definition.
When you gain access to someone's property without the owner knowing ... that's usually called stealing. In many countries.
And if you use the information gained in their house AGAINST the owner ... that's even worse and breaking some more laws.
You may call this some version of Spying though and that would be somewhat accurate. This is what secret services did during the Cold War and even now.

But in the case of the PRIVACY on the Internet that's not the case at all. In the case of the Internet you're dealing with advertising which is gathered from data collection. To break this down even further, that's what a cookie on the web is. If you block cookies, you can't even browse most of the web. So, what remains is TARGETED Advertising and NON-TARGETED advertising.
You're going to get the ads either way basically. However if you put an AD Blocker, you block them all and this speeds up your browsing and improves battery life on your phone.
The Internet identifies you by an IP address, just like the world identifies you by your birth certificate, name and home address.
If you want COMPLETE privacy then you have to essentially erase your identity in real life and you have to avoid the Internet in the virtual world.
Even people who live in monasteries, someone knows their location and name. Some more elusive ones are the one who live alone in the dessert of forest and live off the land basically.

So in terms of Privacy, no software can give you anything more or less. It's more of a marketing game, sort of like the marketing folks who coined the term "ai", which has no intelligence like we do but it's a nice catch phrase that sticks.

These are my thoughts based on your responses. Let me know what you think.

One more question.

And the naive ones probably just said that you shouldn't do this, then you won't have any problems... So there's no problem.

What do you mean by this?
As i said, even during the Cold War, the spies did not flag people for having a daily convo about shopping. Only about the system or the dictator.
The salesman will want to know about your shopping though so they can come at your house and sell you stuff. They did this even during the cold war in communist states. I mean the salesman angle has always existed. In the Internet is taken to the extreme where giant companies trade data from each-other. Just like a salesman in real life would do.
 
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You know who compiles your kernel?
I used to daily drive Gentoo, so I compiled the kernel myself.
Then I saw the scene getting overrun by rust folx, so I switched to OpenBSD. Now the kernel recompiles itself every time I boot up.
When I was younger, we always dreamed about a user-friendly unix.

Apple achieved that. I never imagined Linux advocates not being able to answer that question.
Unix has been user-freindly for a long time. You just have to hop & skip a few stones to make that suitable for yourself, but it's good for people to hearn how to build their own computing experience. But there are plenty of extremely beginner-freindly Linux distros out there now, which can run any windows program through wine out of the box.

Here's a taste of the home I've made with gnome 2:
Screenshot at 2026-01-07 22-16-48.png

I guess so far in this topic i see two main things.

1. Privacy
2. Spying

Anybody wants to have a coffee and discuss these two things? Or no?
My setup is complex, but simple, and not even google remembers me. No fancy proxies needed.
 
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My setup is complex, but simple, and not even google remembers me. No fancy proxies needed.

Very nice.
Does your setup include some sort of ad blocker or a ‘private browsing’ mode of some sort?
 
Very nice.
Does your setup include some sort of ad blocker or a ‘private browsing’ mode of some sort?
My browser is 'ungoogled-chromium' and Ublock Origin is all I use for an ad blocker. I don't use any private browsing mode.
The OS itself has its own sandboxing, which is by default very strict on the amount of system information any web browser can access.
I mainly connect to the internet through an LTE modem pcie card, which connects to a cell tower on an IP that many other people are using at the same time.
All DNS queries are resolved locally with a cached resolver, meaning when I go to 'https://christianchat.com/', I'm just connecting directly to the sites IP without a 3rd party server having to tell me it's 'christianchat.com'.

Admittidly my bowser fingerprint is still quite unique, so someone could still track me if they really wanted to. But I'm pretty sure I'd have to fall under three-letter angency suspicion before that happens.
I have the Tor browser too, but I only use that to access sites that block cellular IPs.
 
My browser is 'ungoogled-chromium' and Ublock Origin is all I use for an ad blocker. I don't use any private browsing mode.
The OS itself has its own sandboxing, which is by default very strict on the amount of system information any web browser can access.
I mainly connect to the internet through an LTE modem pcie card, which connects to a cell tower on an IP that many other people are using at the same time.
All DNS queries are resolved locally with a cached resolver, meaning when I go to 'https://christianchat.com/', I'm just connecting directly to the sites IP without a 3rd party server having to tell me it's 'christianchat.com'.

Admittidly my bowser fingerprint is still quite unique, so someone could still track me if they really wanted to. But I'm pretty sure I'd have to fall under three-letter angency suspicion before that happens.
I have the Tor browser too, but I only use that to access sites that block cellular IPs.

I have mentioned this in the past but if you want some network-level ad-blocking for ALL your devices in your house, then invest in some network-level solution. I use PFSense. It's open source. In this case it's the network who handles the "privacy" not the OS.
I understand that you don't have to do this if you have one or two devices.

On a constant basis the system blocks access to companies trying to find out what we do in the house so they can recommend more stuff based on what we do.

Looks like because i watched a movie in Netflix a couple of days ago called "Backstabbing for beginners" now Netflix is very interested in trying to 'sell' me more movies like it.

"I DON'T WANT SOLAR PANELS!" Go away! :LOL:


1767885356382.png
 
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I have mentioned this in the past but if you want some network-level ad-blocking for ALL your devices in your house, then invest in some network-level solution. I use PFSense. It's open source. In this case it's the network who handles the "privacy" not the OS.
I understand that you don't have to do this if you have one or two devices.

On a constant basis the system blocks access to companies trying to find out what we do in the house so they can recommend more stuff based on what we do.

Looks like because i watched a movie in Netflix a couple of days ago called "Backstabbing for beginners" now Netflix is very interested in trying to 'sell' me more movies like it.

"I DON'T WANT SOLAR PANELS!" Go away! :LOL:


View attachment 284058
I've been in the business of fleeing the wrath of virtual greece for a long time, so I've already known about most of this stuff. Back in my day, Pi-hole was what everyone sought after to do this job.

The last time I used netflix was when I was a much younger lad, when I accessed the internet on the Wii U continually. There were much less ads and telemetry on the web in those days, and everything was so much better to use.
Now apart from youtube, when there's a service that decides to make its profit by doing that kind of stuff, I typically won't be using it. I've adjusted my ways to have as little internet dependency as possible. If there's a movie I want to watch, I buy the DVD, and all music is just better to play and rip from the CD. My phone also does not use android or ios, but is linux also. Look up postmarketos.
 
@Ceph looks like you’re up to speed with this stuff and you’re well informed.

I don’t know how old you are but in another thread you mentioned that you’ve been out of high school for about 4 years and not sure what kind of career you want to pursue in life, but a lot of places can have entry roles to work from home making good money as entry level IT jobs while you learn more stuff like Microsoft inTune, application packaging or Powershell to name a few areas which are in demand now.

My kids are seniors in high school and they both want to do some sort of computer related majors … for now.
One of them is also interested in mechanical engineering and business/stocks.
They’re still young and trying to figure things out so they may change their minds later.

God bless you.
 
Good heavens but this thread has gone far afield since i last checked it!

Anybody wants to get my browser data, heaven help them. I never buy anything my browser recommends, and my user data could really screw up some averages.
 
Anybody wants to get my browser data, heaven help them. I never buy anything my browser recommends, and my user data could really screw up some averages.

But when the one world leader and one world government gets here, they'd better be able to see in your browser where you are singing the praises of the one world leader and one world government

If they don't then you'll be on their hit list :eek:

Sometimes it's what one doesn't do that gets them in to trouble as we will see when the time comes
 
But when the one world leader and one world government gets here, they'd better be able to see in your browser where you are singing the praises of the one world leader and one world government

If they don't then you'll be on their hit list :eek:

Sometimes it's what one doesn't do that gets them in to trouble as we will see when the time comes
It only matters if I want to hide it. And I don't.
 
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It only matters if I want to hide it. And I don't.

Cmon give brother JimmyTheLock a proper response which involves a sense of finesse and style.
He does a great job with his delivery too.

Maybe say something like :

“I’m in your mainframe now cos you left your Linux password blank and it says here that you’re a DEI hire? :eek:
 
Cmon give brother JimmyTheLock a proper response which involves a sense of finesse and style.
He does a great job with his delivery too.

Maybe say something like :

“I’m in your mainframe now cos you left your Linux password blank and it says here that you’re a DEI hire? :eek:
Shhhh! Let us have a little fun before you rat him out.
 
But when the one world leader and one world government gets here, they'd better be able to see in your browser where you are singing the praises of the one world leader and one world government

If they don't then you'll be on their hit list :eek:

Sometimes it's what one doesn't do that gets them in to trouble as we will see when the time comes
A stray grain of sand, buried several feet beneath the ground, in an obscure and uninteresting location of the sahara desert, is a more wonderful thing to think about than the minds of men who would willfully establish and maintain such a system as that for themselves.
The worst thing about that scenario, is the bit of shame I'd have to feel for being destroyed by a collective of beings who are alltogether less spiritually significant than an empty vaccum in space.


I perfer to focus more on whether the software I'm using is free software, more than privacy. You can see what it's about at fsf.org.
(I personally perfer the public domain and BSD licenses over the GPL.)
Once a series of bits has entered your hard drive, you physically own those bits on your hard drive, and you should be able to manipulate and modify them however you please, as if they were any other object you lawfully own.
But imagine of you bought carpentry tools, which not only received direct orders from the manufacturer about how you could use them, but you had to sign a contract that would allow them to sue you if you used them in any way that they didn't like.
That's what proptietary software does; it's like buying a bucket from home depot and the bucket says it owns your house now.

Free software gives you the freedom to be the master of the thing you own. Your virtual bucket is yours to overload, break, and fix with bondo, and give to someone else.
 
A stray grain of sand, buried several feet beneath the ground, in an obscure and uninteresting location of the sahara desert, is a more wonderful thing to think about

That would be a waste of brain time to think about



I perfer to focus more on whether the software I'm using is free software, more than privacy

Yeah, for some it's all about the almighty dollar