Melody Fwygon

Ah; yeah. Mullvad Browser is what I mean clearly; as I mentioned it’s maintained by a company, which while they are currently trusted by most people; are always a few management changes away from becoming corrupt and abusing customer trust.

In general Fwy does not agree with the Privacy Guides assessment; and feels that the concerns about the project are simply not credible without stronger evidence of excessively slowed or missed updates.

Project devs do have lives and I’m not personally going to punish that; so long as the software remains reasonably maintained and free of bugs while still considering the project’s number of devs.

Is it better than Mullvad Browser? Probably not in the strictest sense; but I’m also not happy with “Mullvad Browser” either; as this browser makes more choices that breaks functionality than Librewolf does in the pursuit of privacy.

Additionally; I cannot trust that “Mullvad Browser” will not enshittify; it is maintained by a company who is REQUIRED to some extent to make profits. That breeds enshittification. Mullvad would be one bad CEO or core executive team shift away from potentially being targeted as a profit vehicle and it’s privacy benefits weakened or removed entirely so the company can make money.

In general I trust Librewolf on a pretty regular basis to protect my privacy when my Addon-driven version of manually hardened Firefox breaks up a websites functionality too badly. It provides essential privacy protections without breaking too many things and serves as a good baseline browser.

As a rule; I keep several different browsers installed to mitigate lack of website function and isolate away any websites that would be more invasive in what privacy protections must be disabled to use properly. “Setting-Hardened and Privacy-Addon-driven Firefox” is what I use day to day, but “a semi-Amnesic* Librewolf (Incognito windows if untrusted website)” is second and is used daily in trusted website scenarios or in case a website is breaking too badly from plugin interactions. Finally; a fairly vanilla and infrequently used copy of Ungoogled Chromium is kept on hand for situations where Chromium is just required; where I can spin up empty profiles easily for anything I don’t trust and configure it to just flush everything on exit.

Nice writeup as always. I always wondered about Session but it seems like they have the same “I rolled my own” crypto nonsense as Telegram has; and we all know how bad that one actually is as it’s not correctly implemented at all; even if the underlying protocol is otherwise good.

I actually don’t agree with this video; and firmly believe it is more than a little biased.

For example, the Pixel, AOSP and Android are given several undeserved points due to lack of proper information or understanding of how certain features work. I imagine this is the case too for the iPhone; if a bit less so.

The review apparently doesn’t deep dive into settings or attempt to maximize privacy by turning off unwanted ‘features’ when settings switches are available to the user; nor does it assume that you set up accounts in as private of a manner as reasonably possible or toggle off as many default-on consent switches as needed.

While I would support scoring and dinging each case or instance for “Privacy Settings that don’t actually work”…this video really doesn’t do a lot of legwork and leans on the anecdotal evidence of scary news stories too much.

Worse was the fact that the entire video felt like they were shilling for Graphene OS; which is known to have a slightly unfriendly maintainer and community surrounding him to say the least.

No mention of Lineage or other privacy oriented Android ROMs were analyzed. AOSP too, was unfairly lumped in and dinged for specific points of the Default Pixel configuration…and yes there are major differences between AOSP and Pixel Android; even though Google tries to be less in-your-face invasive than the other OEMs. Not enough credit is given for the “On-Device” smart features implemented properly on the Pixels.

Out of personal experience; I’d actually rate a proper Lineage OS install of 4 whole Android versions ago to be more private than stock. Not quite as private as Graphene; but not quite as invasive and much more enforcing of privacy. The debloating provided by a clean AOSP-like ROM, such as Lineage, as opposed to a “Stock Android” configuration from a major OEM is stark.

Most importantly I personally feel that the privacy model chosen for the video is far too thickly detailed for an average person. Most of the privacy concerns listed on each card contained concern points that might only tangentally apply or don’t apply at all to mobile phones. The way that each card was scored and applied felt low effort. None of the points on any of the card(s) were weighted with average users in mind.

I really hope someone goes into a much deeper dive; this video is basically clickbait that parrots the commonly parroted advice in the privacy community; which isn’t even good advice, it’s just ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ style advice which gives the user no room to make necessary ‘Privacy vs Convenience’ tradeoffs that they themselves could have made if they understood proper threat modelling.

Microsoft is stupid, someone high up is getting greedy or desperate.

Patching HWID is annoying and doesn’t stop piracy. In fact it will break a lot of legacy systems in general; which is probably what they intended and why they are guilty of corporate greed in this case.

I hate Micro$hit but I am REQUIRED to use Windows by too many stupid fucking different idiots, apps, and games to count. Linux is still not there yet for me usability-wise; though it probably is still improving.

No; I will never accept that CLI is an acceptable end-user implementation; GUI is required; along with ease of use and the polish that comes with it. I don’t mind CLI interfaces; but I do feel they’re not user-friendly enough usually. They REQUIRE YOU to LEARN a few things to get used to them; which is the opposite of an intuitive interface.

NOTE: I am very FLOSS accepting when it meets my needs; but I will not hold back criticism. Do not try to shout me down. You will always be wrong. Windows is factually more user-friendly and application compatibility diverse than Linux.

I genuinely hope that Linux finds more ways to 100% match Windows functionally without forcing the user to compromise. We need to punish Microsoft for all these years of monopoly holding and reclaim computing more effectively.