There isn’t a 1-step perfect solution as far as I know. You can use Tor in combination with other technologies, and it’ll likely help you avoid a lot of surveillance, just not specifically the NSA. (Also keep in mind anyone/commercial actors can run Tor nodes with the intention of spying on Tor users. You need a lot of nodes to catch anyone, but I wouldn’t assume it never happens).

The main thing is to own your software and hardware, and disconnect what you don’t own from the internet. If you can’t meet those conditions, then it’s impossible no matter how vigilant and knowledgable you are.

My recommendations is to play your computer games on an offline computer via GOG purchases, or if you want Steam games, then just give up on securing that device. Have two networks. Have your secure computers for your general online tasks and chatting, and have the unsecure computer for interacting with DRM and services that lose a lot of functionality if the surveillance vectors are blocked.

Bad attempts at hardening often don’t work, and have the adverse effect of making you more unique for fingerprinting. It might be worth foregoing some hardening advice if you can think of workarounds the hostile actor might use, which you don’t know how to counter-act.

The security of Tor is built on the assumption that one actor owning a majority of the nodes is improbable to the point of being written off as a non-concern. The tool has always been run and maintained by the USA government. When they opened access to the public, they owned the majority of the nodes, and with the amount of compute available to the NSA (look up the size of their official data-centres, add in their hacked bot-farms), it’s almost certain they still do. If it wasn’t their plan to always have supremacy, they aren’t doing their job. The purpose of Tor is to hide traffic from USA’s enemies. A few tens of thousands of private users is just reducing their power bill and painting targets on their own backs, not successfully hiding from the NSA.

Smug Reddit-level takes left and right in this thread. The kid successfully hacked a website, you can assume he knows what he’s doing better than you and followed all the best practices short of not using Windows. They didn’t get his account from his Edge credential store. He probably used some Firefox-derivative. Tor browser if he was stupid. He probably “hardened” Windows every way he could think of, again, short of disconnecting from the internet. Windows simply does a good job of spying on you, that’s all it is.

There are even people in the thread recommending running Windows games on Linux as a way to avoid this surveillance. If you put Microsoft Flight Sim on your Linux computer, then that’s now a Windows computer. Microsoft owns that computer, same as the Windows one. If you install Nvidia drivers, Nvidia owns that computer, and the USA can ask Nvidia for your accounts and whereabouts instead of Microsoft. If you put Steam on your Linux computer, that’s now Steam’s computer and the USA can ask Steam.

There is no “safe” amount of malware.

There definitely are things you grow out of. Things you liked as a child, that maybe you remember fondly, or can categorise as ‘thing I liked’, but won’t entertain you as an adult. So I understand the core of what you’re saying. But there are more things you liked as a child that, assuming the thing and context hasn’t changed, you would still like as an adult. Did you like Pizza at 13? Did you stop liking Pizza since? Or chocolate cake. Or beer. Or the film Back to the Future?

The things you liked about Minecraft are still around in modern Minecraft. It’s more likely that you’ll still like it on the same merit than that it appealed to a part of you that has changed.

The game came out in 2009. If you started playing as a two-year old child then, you’d be an adult now. A thirteen-year-old child would be a thirty-year-old adult.

Excellent. Thank you. But using an online AI provider to me seems against the stated goals. I know online is the preferred option for most people, but you should provide them alongside connecting to a local server.

How do you tie the URL bar size to the sidebar size?

How many protestors did cops in Hong Kong kill? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like your phrasing is intentionally designed to imply a number greater than zero.

Steam used to upload your whole resolver cache to Valve (So they could sidestep things not showing up in history when you use private-browsing). And they’re mandated to share everything they have on you with the NSA. So if you’re coming at this from a “I’ll trust Steam but not Wukong” angle, then yes, you are unreasonable. If you’re coming at this from a “All these private Chinese companies have insane privacy policies and send me hundreds of cookies, I’m not trusting anyone they work with!” angle then that’s completely reasonable. Closed source software is never safe, and capitalism doesn’t reward treating your customers well.

Is this even the privacy forum? A lot of people here implying OP should consent to the spying for better service. Cloudflare absolutely does gather as much as Google, and with much deeper access. If you can go without those websites, then block Cloudflare.

Probably someone tipped them off that the kids are writing “IOF”

If you have an open browser tab, it can pull info from it.

Please elaborate on what you mean here.

I feel the same way about smartphones but it’s now completely normalised. Glasses are less paranoia-inducing since you can clearly see where it’s pointed and it’s at eye-level. I’d rather discourage smartphone use than smart-glasses use.

Discord is private social media, and most users think their messages aren’t shared with government without a warrant. Of course it’s possible in this case Discord didn’t even provide the messages “to police”, but that the police just subscribe to their commercial data-sharing and enjoy the same real-time access that way.

If only your distro would support more than one desktop.

I will say though, Gnome dropping support for other window managers does suck. That is them removing infrastructure that non-(or semi) Gnome users depend on.

Does it have any sort of on-board NPU to make it AI-oriented?

They’re probably tagged outside the image. If you rely on watermarks, then someone needs to spot them with their eyes.

He wants entire buffer countries. He wasn’t content with just Donbass.

Demilitarising Ukraine makes Ukraine the buffer-zone. I didn’t mean to say that the aim was for Donbass to be the buffer. I just said that missiles in Donbass is particularly scary. Donbass was supposed to become independent from Ukraine to further Balkanise and weaken Ukraine and their ability to threaten Russia. Donbass being independent republics or federated with Russia doesn’t change the effect drastically.

He poses a much larger existential threat to Ukraine

Not Russia’s problem. Putin isn’t the president of Ukraine, and doesn’t make decisions for the good of Ukraine.

It’s an absolute nonsense argument that tries to justify Russian exceptionalism and imperialism.

I’m not saying it’s moral. I’m saying it’s rational. Conquest is less rational. And more importantly, if your concern is ethical rather than campism, then on top of being more rational, it’s also much easier to work with and manage, to prevent wars. If the western powers were acting morally and wanted to minimise suffering among Ukrainian people, then using this model where we assume Putin has been telling the truth since 1999, then we could’ve given him concessions that would’ve made this invasion and the annexation of Crimea irrational. That would have prevented all this death, and allowed whatever economic integration with the EEA that Maidan proponents want.

This war is the result of years of intentional provocations by the west. Is Russia guilty for invading? Yes of course, they could’ve chosen self-destruction. Or perhaps there still was room to extract concessions from the west by grovelling and begging harder. But neither of those are rational actions. Who is also clearly to blame are the NATO powers who engineered and provoked this war, and destroyed off-ramps as they became visible.

This is also not imperialism. Imperialism is creating an empire and extracting wealth from your vassals. The Donbass will not be subject to unequal wealth extraction. That would be too risky with their precarious legitimacy. This is called expansion.

He uses nuclear blackmail to force other countries to let him take Ukraine

He’s using nuclear threats to deter attacks against Russia. Other countries are already trying to prevent him from taking parts of Ukraine. There are foreign weapons actively being used in Ukraine, foreign countries have enacted official sanctions against Russia, and yet Russia has never used a nuclear weapon on anyone. More than just foreign weapons and soldiers, the Ukrainian army is cooperating with the USA for military planning. Clearly no one is deterred.

I haven’t seen anyone making fun of Putin for not starting a nuclear war.

Okay. If the reference doesn’t resonate with you, then your preferred media probably isn’t guilty of it.

He’s really not making a secret of his imperial ambitions. I don’t know why you’re trying to sell a different narrative.

I’m repeating the Russian messaging as told by TASS and RT, and by Putin in foreign interviews and from what I’ve seen of the yearly Putin Q&A. Is your impression formed from primary sources like the ones I mentioned or psychoanalyst pundits and ‘Russia-experts’? You were upset that OP would link a primary source earlier.

Initially I thought you were arguing in good faith and simply had a skewed understanding on some details. But your most recent reply is very disappointing and shows no effort on your part to consider my arguments or even understand the argument I was making.

Why do you believe Russia won’t cede land when it’s inconsistent with the map data? Russian battlelines wave in and out, while Ukrainian battlelines stay ridged until collapse. What their specific tactics are isn’t moralistic or something we can derive their quality from. I don’t know which of the two tactics is better. Perhaps they’re both the best tactic for their given army, irrespective of their goals. But you had it wrong. Why?

Why do you claim to want to find truth, but shun primary sources? And if you shun primary sources, why are you linking Ukrainian sources?

Why is it so important for you that Russia be unknowable and irrational? Is the reason that your world-view is built on a shoddy and precarious narrative that doesn’t survive scrutiny?

That’s certainly what they want you to accept. What Putin wants you to believe.

The USA empire doesn’t work by having individual governments enter secret conspiracies to obey the USA in favour of their own interests. The USA government and military are just stewards of the empire, the empire doesn’t exist to benefit them.

Ultimately the majority of oligarchs whom the USA empire exists to serve are born in Europe, or they come from European dynasties that happen to live in the USA. It’s simply a system of systemically and organically empowering those who benefit capital.

The EU, which has incredible sway over the politics of EEA nations, is explicitly an organisation that exists to create oligarchs out of capitalists. And who are the European capitalists? Are they staunch nationalists? No of course not, they’re globalists with huge amounts of wealth tied up in USA stock exchanges. That means that with only one level of separation, the EU’s explicit mission becomes an implicit mission to strengthen the USA empire’s power over EEA nations.

But this is clearly a case where US and European interests diverge.

I would recommend this video to you on the topic: https://youtu.be/J_4srRdIK4k It’s recent and current, made by a person who supports social democracy, that is to say, he’s not a socialist or a Marxist. He doesn’t use marxist dialectics in his analysis but still comes to the same conclusions. I think you’ll find him more agreeable. He presents clearly without making assumptions about prior knowledge, citing all his claims, as much as possible using Western sources.

I’m not. BrainInABox is the one talking about a movie. I’m not.

I was explaining the joke. BrainInABox was obviously making fun of what you said, because it’s a silly thing to say. Imagine a comment saying “They ate mushrooms to grow bigger” and someone replied with “Source: Super Mario”.

Putin wants to control Ukraine. At any cost. He wants Stalin’s empire back.

No, this is wrong, this is a story that is pushed by western pundits, but it’s based on nothing. If we instead assume Putin’s statements are true, then he has been consistent for decades. In fact, you’ll often see a sort of double-reality in the words of western commentators, where they both make fun of Putin for declaring and stressing his red lines (and then not following through with the threats), and at the same time stating that there was no way to predict what actions would lead to retaliation. One thing that has been abundantly clear to me following this war, is that Russia has been able to maintain their narrative in the form of goals and roadmap since the very first day of the war, and that the NATO-aligned countries have to adjust their narrative rapidly.

The much more realistic assumption, rather than Putin role-playing Bonaparte, is that Russia feels NATO in Donbass is an existential threat and wants a buffer region. This is consistent with Russian statements, with Russian war-goals, and with the reality that NATO is dangerous and destroys countries.

He’s waging his war because he lost his puppet, and he wants to prevent Ukraine from making its own independent decisions.

This is true.

They throw ridiculous numbers of soldiers at pointless human wave assaults just to gain a couple of meters ground.

If this was true, then we should see a large discrepancy in the number of dead soldiers between either side. Russian causalities are published, so the data is easier to gather. But either way, sites like Mediazona and UAlosses.org compile lists of confirmed dead, and it’s similar between the two armies, despite Ukrainian losses being confidential and unpublished. Why is Ukraine worse at fighting? They probably aren’t, the more likely conclusion is that you’ve read a stupid article with cartoon-logic, and that in reality Russia uses the most effective tactics available to them.

Generals don’t want to lose ground

There’s a website called liveuamap.com, where you can see troop positions over time. And something it shows clearly is that prior to fortifications being installed somewhere, the Russian army does not stick around when there is even the slightest amount of heat. The actual evidence is the complete opposite of your narrative. They’re extremely willing to give up ground. Why do you believe a narrative that’s so disconnected with reality? Is it a one-off or could it be that the bar for evidence is low for the outlet that sold you that particular narrative?

It’s a dysfunctional mess, but every part of it makes sense for the people involved.

Maybe. But let me pitch you the Russian narrative, and you can see if that fits the reality better, and makes everyone out to be more rational actors.

• Russia claimed they were going to fight a war of attrition, not conquest. The reasoning is that their goal is the complete demilitarisation of Ukraine.
• Russia has ramped up production of military equipment and is now producing more than the combined west. This makes sense for attrition, but it doesn’t make sense if you want a big push and expect to break through quickly, as building and staffing factories takes years.
• The combined west has sent weapons to Ukraine as they could spare them, but are running out or low and weapon shipments have decreased over time, meaning Russia is winning the war they themselves say they are in.

And since this started with you saying we shouldn’t trust TASS, you might think that I’m saying Russia is completely trustworthy. But I’m not. Just that on the war, their interests align closer with being honest. In this news story about POW exchanges, there are only two possible sources, Russia and Ukraine, anyone else wouldn’t be able to verify the information. So it makes zero sense to dismiss the Russian account if your goal is to find truth among narratives. You’d be left with a single narrative, and at best your intuition for bullshit.

And if you pay attention, you can see similar perverse incentives at work in western countries too. People as rational actors is a lazy lie used to justify dysfunctional systems.

I never made any claims about people. I made claims about sufficiently large organisations. Rather than blaming dysfunctional systems, you should analyse if there is a reason why institutions you rely on would intentionally fail you when they fail you, and then you should test your hypothesis across as much data as you can test against and adjust as you’re proven wrong. Eventually you’ll end up with Marxism.

Also consider IDF soldiers committing cartoonishly evil atrocities against Palestinian kids because it makes sense in their heads. That doesn’t make it any less evil.

The sadists are people. People don’t need to be rational. The IDF is rational. Their goal is genocide. To further that goal, it makes sense to promote, protect and enable sadistic and evil individuals. It’s rational for the state of Israel to push dehumanising narratives about Palestinians. It’s rational for the oligarchy to direct their servants (USA and European governments) to give Israel as much support as they need, to allow them full reign, while taking on as little responsibility and complicity as possible, and that’s exactly what’s happening in Israel and in the EU and beyond.