With gmail if you have an account like example@gmail.com you can then sign up for a website such as netflix with email example+netflix@gmail.com and gmail will forward it to example@gmail.com, but you’ll still see the full address on the To line so you’ll know where the mail came from. Anything after the + can be whatever you want. This lets you sign up with a different email address for every site you visit without having to create new addresses with gmail. You can also make a filter to hide spam if one of the addresses is compromised.
only works with very simple scripts though - I’d assume that checking for a ‘+’ in front of the ‘@’ and removing everything inbetween is very simple if your goal is to spam everyone from a data-leak
That’s very true. I cannot attest to the knowledge and skills of potential spammers. However, more common than data leaks are data selling, and I doubt any company would bother to manipulate the email addresses they buy from others.
There used to be an app called aegis that did something like this, it used texts to your phone to trigger stuff. It was made by one of the CyanogenMod devs, I’m not sure if it’s still around… EDIT: the github is here, but it hasn’t been touched in a while lol
If you don’t have much experience with linux you should not use nixos. I don’t think nixos is any different from debian or fedora in privacy, anonymity, or security. Many people even reduce their privacy by putting their config on github.
Nixos can be more secure than classic distros. First of all, you have atomic states of your system, so nothing can be added without rebuilding the whole system and giving it a new name
Also you can do impermanence to ensure nothing can slip in for sure, because the system will be recreated every boot
I mean yes you reduce your privacy by interacting with Microsoft GitHub in general, but posting your Nix config to the public isn’t much of a privacy concern since you shouldn’t have any plaintext secrets anyhow as a best practice since it would be compiled into the Nix store. There are a couple of different ways to encrypt secrets, as well as just not committing private *.nix to a public repository.
It’s like giving a map of your infrastructure to a hacker, but it depends on your thread model. Most of the attacks on home servers are automated, so it shouldn’t be a consern
Another thing if your thread model is different, then the situation is not that good, but you can encrypt a lot of stuff, especially when you’re making your config reproducible
I don’t know what gave you the idea that a particular distro would be an especially good/bad choice for privacy, etc. They’re all GNU/Linux with only minor differences in compile-time options in the kernel and different defaults in user-space. But they’re just that, defaults. You can reconfigure them to your preference.
With that out of the way, the issue NixOS attempts to address is reproducibility. You get a central configuration infrastructure that defines everything, from partition layout, through user creation and package installation to software configuration. The central idea being that migrating to a new machine or setting up a new development environment should only take a few commands.
What you do with that is up to you. You can barricade the whole system if you like. The defaults are sane, but not overly focused on privacy, etc.
Also it’s quite a learning curve as the documentation/wiki is incomplete and/or outdated.
People new to Nix/NixOS always seem to think that flakes are some kind of fundamental shift or something and if you don’t use flakes, you’re not going to be ready for the future or whatever.
No, they’re not. They’re “just” a standardised method of composing separate Nix projects.
In the most common NixOS case (and especially when starting out) you have exactly one external Nix project you depend on and that’s Nixpkgs. Flakes provide very little (if any) benefit in this specific case.
If you’re starting out, you don’t need to care one bit about flakes, experimental features and the documentation of features that are not intended to be commonly used yet (especially not for beginners).
The wiki is not even recommended, since some time already nobody has access to the wiki, even to put a banner “stay away, everything is not working and outdated”
The Matrix room is the recommended channel of support
I personally think it’s a bit a waste of somebody’s time to always sit there and reply
Also, when you start understanding how this stuff works, you can start using github’s search code so you can find snippets of code and make your own (or just look at the packages’ code, it’s very basic inside)
Ah, and forgot to mention because it’s too obvious, nixpkgs search, this is basically all you need for free movement inside “nixverse”
Most distros are somewhat equal when it comes to privacy, anonymity and security; with the likes of Fedora and openSUSE known for taking it more seriously out of the box than the other ‘big bois’, while some smaller distros like Kicksecure are known for their best-in-class^[1]^ hardening that they offer by default.
As for NixOS, it’s really its own thing (together with Guix), and thus very different from any other distros. If you conquer it, you would be delightfully met by a system that enables you to do things unheard of in other distros. However, the learning curve is very steep. And perhaps even hardening it to the level that Fedora or openSUSE provide by default might not be trivial.
Qubes OS is technically not a Linux distro. But it’s worth mentioning as one generally tends to run Linux within a qube (read: VM), and in regards to security and privacy; Qubes OS is simply unmatched, period.
So like… all Searx instances are independent, but I can save my preferences in a reproducible query string? Or like… how’s this a long-term, easy, good move for me? (I know ≈nothing).
Do all the Searx instances generate and keep independent indexes of the entire internet, or is it more like Lemmy (where, maybe, each instance is a window into the entirety of the index)?
Good question! I wish I knew, but unfortunately this is outside the scope of my knowledge. Someone on !privacyguides could probably tell you immediately
Kagi was my favorite but their pricing model is a little too high still. If it was $5 for 500 searches I would do that but the unlimited for $10 is just a bit too high for me.
I get that not everyone has extra cash to spend. I’m very fortunate to be able to throw $10 at a problem. I don’t begrudge you if you need to save cash (I have no kids to raise, for example). But I think $10 is fair if you search a bunch. Maybe I’m overvaluing it; I have heard great things about Kagi, but I’m still fucking around on Google cause it’s “good enough,” even though it’s in great decline. Fuck it, I’m a hypocrite.
They seem to recommend AirVPN pretty heavily. This comment points out some potential issues with that recommendation.
I just posted a thread on that sub inquiring about it, because I haven’t really seen it addressed by that sub yet. I guess we’ll see what the response is.
I think between daiqo and the users at privacyguides the concerns you mention are well accounted for. To me, this from daiqo stood out as why AirVPN ends up being an easy choice for a lot of users.
“Additionally, there are not that many alternatives left. Mullvad is obviously the gold standard and IVPN follows, but both don’t have port-forwarding anymore. OVPN got acquired by Pango. Proton is a good alternative but not so viable for macOS users. There are a bunch of others but you’ll always need to compromise much more than with AirVPN.”
Surprise, your local cops are authoritarian pieces of shit who think the law only applies to citizens, who they view as an invading force here to harm cops.
All Cops Are Bastards, and the systems that uphold them as well.
This is the most important point. Governments at every level are discarding constitutional law, and embracing fascism in opposition of American ideals. Cops couldn’t do this without the support of city, county, state, and federal programs to give them what they want.
Thanks for recognizing this. It’s the cops, it’s the DAs, its the Prosecutors that work for the city/state/nation (RIP Aaron Swartz, a victim of one of those), it’s the judges who take all cops word as unfettered truth and do nothing but view regular citizens with unbridled skepticism and contempt, its the mayors/governors who are scared of the cops and keep capitulating to them because the cops just won’t do anything except draw a paycheck if they don’t like what you’re doing politically. The feeble milquetoast broken losers that bend over and take it from the cops because they’re scared of the cops abusing them or the fucking MAGAs abusing them are the enablers. We’re seeing the pinnacle of it right now, endlessly using kid gloves on Donald “Literal Treasonous Spy” Trump because “oh but he might appeal” and “oh but his followers might do nasty things to us, so we don’t want to upset them.” What a bunch of loser ass fucking pussies. So worried about their own skins that they’re going to let us fall into fascism under the waffling of “But it’s not our fault the Republicans and the Cops and Judges hate citizens and think they’re all criminal scum, we have to follow these crazy, unhinged laws that they wrote after literally rigging elections to benefit themselves. There’s literally nothing we can do!” They’re enablers because anybody who gave a single damn would know there’s plenty they could fucking do, and yes it means calling Republicans on their bullshit chicanery and fucking doing something about it.
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