I’ve been using this a lot lately, and it’s been great after a bit of a learning curve. It even incorporates some of the functionality from the addons and userscripts that I needed for YouTube, like getting rid of clickbait titles/thumbnails and blocking specific channels. Since you never really have a tracking profile when using YouTube this way, it’s very obvious when YouTube is trying to shoe-horn in political channels and clickbait, and you can just continually keep blocking those channels in the recommended section until you get all of them. I’m still missing a way to boost the volume on certain videos that are too quiet for me, though. I use LibRedirect to auto-open YouTube links in FreeTube. FreeTube has occasionally broken because of YouTube API updates, which requires them to figure out the problem and push a new FreeTube release (which could take a day or more), but other than that I’m fairly happy with it.

I don’t have any experience with iCloud Private Relay, but I’d be surprised if enabling it will make you un-fingerprintable (in which case what are you really trying to accomplish by using it?). Also, who are you trying to stay private from? Do you personally believe that Apple and/or Cloudflare aren’t selling or trading your data? Would you be okay with them being the only ones that control your data if they’re not selling it? It’s a nuanced topic, and likely you’re the only one that can answer your position on that. It’s cliché, but defining a threat model can help a lot with deciding how many conveniences you are okay with giving up. I would likely argue that an Android phone with LineageOS can be made more private than an iPhone, but at the cost of security. Does your threat model need to sacrifice privacy for security?

Regarding iPhone vs Android, I’ve only ever used Android, but my friends with iPhones and Macs never seem to have access to the open-source software that I use and recommend, so I feel like that’s a big part to consider also. You’ll get roped into a proprietary ecosystem where it seems like every little app is trying to charge you money and won’t show you what it’s doing behind the scenes. If you already have an iPhone I’d understand if you need to weigh the economic feasibility of buying an entire new phone just for privacy as well.

Personally, I don’t really trust anything unless I’m given infallible reason to trust it, e.g. cryptographic proofs, audits, zero-trust models etc.; in this world it seems inevitable that someone will take advantage of your trust either today or tomorrow. If someone is truly on your side, they will do everything they can to take the need to trust them out of the equation, and failing that they should make it as clear as they can what trust is still mandatory and why. If you want to trust someone that doesn’t meet these standards, you do so basically at your own risk, and you’ll have to start doing some mental calculus on what they could get from you, what they might want it for, and how eager you think they would be to start misusing it (e.g., if you pay for a service, the servicer may feel less compelled to subsidize their income by selling your data).

I’m speaking from an American POV on credit cards: getting a good credit score requires doing a lot of things that don’t really make sense. I’d just make your peace with that and play the game. Opening as many credit cards as possible, never missing a payment, and sending a small payment through each one once a year to keep them active is an extremely good way to build a solid credit score. Before you read further, please note that opening credit cards temporarily dips your credit score due to hard inquiries, but all forms of credit score dings are removed after a specific amount of time based on their severity; generally you can expect hard inquiries to go away after ~12 months.

The system encourages you to have a lot of accounts, and it encourages you to have a long average account age. People who never use credit cards may have a poor credit score due to lack of history, and people who only have ~one long-running credit card will have a fragile credit score due to the average account age being prone to literally breaking in half as soon as they open any other credit account. Opening as many accounts as early as you can will temporarily dip your score, but it will come back much stronger. Sometimes you’ll get rejected for a credit card and will still have to eat the hard inquiry, so it’s a delicate game of trying to open accounts and also trying not to appear too desperate. Having a lot of income also helps credit card companies be more amenable to your thin history.

Also as a last note since you seem like someone who “takes money seriously” enough to not be in debt: at least in America, credit cards are great for your finances as long as you pay them off. Credit cards do not charge you any interest or fees as long as you pay your balance on time, and generally you shouldn’t be applying for any credit cards that have an Annual Fee charge. It’s not too hard to get an unconditional 2% cashback card, which means they will give you 2 cents back for every dollar you spend (this doesn’t count as taxable income). You can further diversify to get specific 5% cards for your most-used categories like gas and utilities.

I’m not a security expert by any means, but here are a few things I know as a regular user:

Always keep your system up-to-date and only download and execute software from the official Arch repository if you can help it. Malware often takes advantage of outdated systems that don’t have the latest security patches, so by staying as up-to-date as possible you’re making yourself a very difficult target. The AUR is a user-based repository and is not inherently trusted/maintained like the official Arch repos, so be careful and always read PKGBUILDs before you use AUR software. Don’t use AUR auto-updaters unless you’re reading the PKGBUILD changes every time. Ideally try not to use the AUR at all if you can help it; official Arch Linux is usually quite stable, but AUR software is often responsible for a lot of the “breakages” people tend to get with Arch. If you have to run sketchy software, use a virtual machine for it, as a 0-day VM escape is almost certainly not going to happen with any sort of malware you’d run into. ClamAV or VirusTotal may also help you scan specific files that you’re wary of, but I wouldn’t trust that a file is clean just because it passes an AV check. Also, never run anything as root unless you have a very specific reason, and even then try to use sudo instead of elevating to a full root shell.

Don’t open up any network ports on your system unless you absolutely have to, and if you’re opening an SSH port, make sure that it: isn’t the default port number, requires a keyfile for login, root cannot be logged into directly, and authentication attempts are limited to a low number. If you’re opening ports for other services, try to use Docker/Podman containers with minimal access to your system resources and not running in root mode. Also consider using something like CrowdSec or fail2ban for blocking bots crawling ports.

As far as finding out if you’re infected, I’m not sure if there’s a great way to know unless they immediately encrypt all your stuff and demand crypto. Malware could also come in the form of silent keyloggers (which you’d only find out about after you start getting your accounts hacked) or cryptocurrency miners/botnets (which probably attempt to hide their CPU/GPU usage while you’re actively using your computer). At the very least, you’re not likely to be hit by a sophisticated 0-day, so whatever malware you get on your computer probably wants something direct and uncomplicated from you.

Setting up a backup solution to a NAS running e.g. ZFS can help with preventing malware from pwning your important data, as a filesystem like ZFS can rollback its snapshots and just unencrypt the data again (even if it’s encrypted directly on the NAS). 2FA’ing your accounts (especially important ones like email) is a good way to prevent keyloggers from being able to repeat your username+password into a service and get access. Setting up a resource monitoring daemon can probably help you find out if you’re leaking resources to some kind of crypto miner, though I don’t have specific recommendations as I haven’t done this before.

In the case of what to do once you’re pwned, IMO the only real solution is to salvage and verify your data, wipe everything down, and reinstall. There’s no guarantee that the malware isn’t continually hiding itself somewhere, so trying to remove it yourself is probably not going to solve anything. If you follow all the above precautions and still get pwned, I’m fairly sure the malware will be news somewhere, and security experts may already be studying the malware’s behavior and giving tips on what to do as a resolution.

They could be you! They could be me! Admittedly, there’s a higher chance that it’s me.

I haven’t used Arch in a while but from this news bulletin it looks like the [Community] repository doesn’t even exist anymore, which is where the OP article supposedly says rye-init resides.

I am paid a fuck-ton so my answer is definitely yes, but I really think it would vary person-by-person. “Should” people need to work 5 days per week to get that pay? My answer is probably no.

This might be the funniest possible direction for this to go. Purported savior of X11 and anti-DEI dogwhistling developer writes X11 code so bad, asked to leave commit history.

My corporate job is one of the better ones in terms of pointless BS and people pretending to be their corporatesonas, but every time I take time off I’m reminded that we’re wasting our entire lives with work. I take a few 4-day work weeks and suddenly my house is clean again, I’m cooking more interesting meals, writing code for fun, hanging out with friends, catching up on shows, etc. Imagine how much progress, art, and innovation we could have if everyone’s natural talents and interests were given space to exist. Long-term we would have so much more of everything, and everyone would be happier and healthier. Unfortunately, short-term we’ve gotta layoff 4% of our workforce again because Mr. AI said it might make the line go up.

How so? I feel it is an example of the effect because customers are drawn in with a low price and are surprised by a plethora of seemingly-sneaky fees, which take up a large portion of the total bill. Customers feel negatively about the long list of fees and the implication that they’ve been tricked, but they wouldn’t think twice if the fees were just included in the base price. It is against their best interest to be automatically and opaquely charged for all regular services (i.e. normal airlines) instead of being transparently given the option to forego those that they do not care about (i.e., fee-based airline).

I remember someone talking about an airline that advertised very low prices up-front but then added tons of fees for every individual thing, and when adding all the fees up for the service you’d expect with any other airline the end price would be the same. However, given that all the services/fees are technically optional, this is actually an ideal pricing model since you don’t have to pay for any services you don’t want.

It’s important to use services with a workflow that works for you; not every popular service is going to be a good fit for everyone. Find your balance between exhaustive categorization and meaningless pile of data, and make sure you’re getting more out than you’re putting in. If you do decide that an extensive amount of effort is worth it, make sure that the service in question is able to export your data in a data-rich format so that you won’t have to do it all again if you decide to move to a different tool.

I like DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection a lot, and I switched from my paid SimpleLogin account to it. DDG is free and unlimited, the aliases are human-readable, and sites rarely block them. The downside is that they’re sort of hard to manage in multiple respects, but Qwacky helps a lot with the generation of them. The only way(?) to disable an alias is to receive an email through the address and then click the link at the top. There’s also no dashboard to see all your aliases, but I store each DDG email alias in Bitwarden next to the relevant account; that way if I start getting spam from an address I can figure out which account is doing it by searching my vault for it. Creation of an account also requires downloading their extension or their browser I think? You can uninstall it immediately after and manage with Qwacky instead though.

It definitely feels too good to be free considering the competition, but I’d honestly be happy to start paying for it again if they start asking, and I trust DuckDuckGo to not disappear overnight and leave all my accounts fucked. I’m also guessing DDG will eventually implement a better dashboard and management tools, so I’m okay with limping along on an okay UX experience for now given the end results.

Using Retrieve a post from the original server on the sidebar I was able to fill it in that way; is that expected to be used often? I wouldn’t even know to use it if I didn’t have another account on lemmy.ca, so it seems weird as a feature.

I’m still noticing this sometimes for communities that are already subscribed on piefed.ca. For example, this post on !otters@lemmy.world which shows up on lemmy.ca but not piefed.ca, even though I’m subscribed to the community on both instances. I’m using my lemmy.ca and piefed.ca accounts interchangeably at the moment so sometimes I notice these inconsistencies on my subscribed view.

Isn’t one of the problems with X that applications can log your keystrokes in other applications and record your screen? Obviously you shouldn’t be installing compromised software, but who knows if Borderlands 2 now includes some malicious code in its DRM or something.

I wonder if this opens up any new opportunities for cool Distrobox usecases.

I usually use GNOME Disks (gnome-disk-utility) when I need a GUI for disk management. If you’re not doing anything complicated or scripting disk manipulation the GUI is probably sufficient.

By default, Wine/Proton has access to your full Linux filesystem under the virtual Z:/ drive from within the Wine environment, so any dedicated adversary could include your Linux stuff into its data collection. The odds of this already occurring are probably low-ish. You can use bubblewrap raw to start sandboxing resources (e.g. blocking network access or masking directories), or there’s a project called sandwine which presumably auto-configures the important stuff through bubblewrap (though I’ve never gotten around to trying it). Wine itself can also be configured to drop the Z:/ drive through its winecfg tool.

Without a dedicated configuration, I’m not sure Wine has any real priority or guarantee about sandboxing your original system from Windows executables, which is also why it’s important to remember that Windows malware can still do damage when running on a Linux system. The malware doesn’t really even have to be aware that it’s running in Wine if it just tries to encrypt any files it can reach.

The comment collapsing I think is fine; Lemmy-style forums already heavily rely on voting to move content around, and I think net -10 is a pretty good indicator that the comment in question has bad info, is a troll, or is otherwise not good content (as voted by the local community).

The low karma icon I’m seeing out in the wild and honestly, so far every time I see someone with that icon I look at that profile and sure enough there really are a lot of downvoted comments and antagonistic behavior. It’s probably handy to determine whether someone is sealioning, trolling, or just otherwise has a lot of bad takes (again, as voted by their local community) before deciding whether to waste energy trying to engage in a thoughtful conversation.

4chan screenshots being reported is pretty opinionated (the rationale being that it’s not about the content itself, it’s about the normalization of 4chan and the enablement of the alt-right pipeline it provides), but hopefully it’s at least optional?