I’ve never used obsidian but the people who make thousands of anki cards, release them for free, and allow the community to add important ones of their own has saved me many times.

same with proton

I would say her track record as a district attorney while making a complete public 180 during her presidential campaign is reason enough.

Could it be that Chinese people just trust their government

This is my personal takeaway as well. The article seems to insinuate that because VPNs by themselves don’t do anything meaningful for privacy, they’re useless. It seems defeatist, since one could take measures to mitigate fingerprinting. But like you said they’re only one of the important parts of maintaining privacy.

I am not more technically proficient than the average user. I have little experience in hosting anything, let alone hosting something that will tunnel all of my internet usage. I’d rather put my faith in my current provider to take the proper precautions and put more effort into things I feel comfortable with. It seems better to me than trusting an unknown VPS provider, my own skill and/or my awful ISP.

I just don’t want to be tracked and profiled, especially for ads. I only sign into accounts with personal information for absolute necessities and browse websites without accounts. Plus my ISP openly tracks and sells history to third parties. It’s not viable for me to use tor for daily usage.

+1 v0

Downgraded my entire flac library and went from 300 GB to 120 GB while sounding the same to my ears. Fre ac is awesome

Undiscord is wonderful. I used it for the servers I had access to. I will say that their delete profile has gotten ever so slightly better. It now doesn’t tie a unique username or ID to the deleted user. It’s obvious in small servers or DMs but it’s much harder to figure out who sent what if a server has more than one deleted member.

Now I only use a fresh discord to voice chat under an alias email and fake phone number. Matrix for friends that agree to join.

Its a modification to an official install of firefox. In firefox you can go into about:config and modify each setting individually. All arkenfox does is set everything for you with a script and you can make an overrides file to tweak their config. See here

For people who don’t want to tweak I generally recommend librewolf. Its a forked firefox client that has quality of life features and ability to change certain settings within your browser’s settings tab. The only downside of using librewolf is updates can fall behind, which can be a security issue. Their team has been on top of updating though.

Its the best browser for privacy that doesn’t use tor. It has the capability of fooling naive scripts but also may have some protection against stronger fingerprinting methods since you blend in with a crowd.

Personally I prefer arkenfox because I dislike letterboxing, want sync, want to have control over my user overrides. Disabling these things in mullvad will likely make me stand out. IMO if your threat model is that high I would just use tor and a hardened FF or brave for normal use. All individual preferences though.

Here is the arkenfox dev’s thoughts on a lot of the popular extensions.

Bitwarden+ublock+libredirect

I see a lot of people using decentraleyes, no script, privacy badger, etc along ublock. Just wanna point out that these with ublock are generally redundant and actually increase your fingerprint.

He was in one of my instance lists on the extension, that’s disgusting. Removed immediately. Even if you forget how disgusting his views are, how can you can you trust an instance that monitors activity and keeps track of what you’re doing?