Another main reason why I took off my hat back then was because I was a broke college kid with garbage internet speed and my only computer was a laptop. Torrenting shows sometimes means I need to have my laptop on for days. Now I have an entire homelab setup with a dedicated VM on one of my servers for torrenting and I can afford fast internet. I was pleasantly surprised how efficiently I can torrent when I got back sailing recently.

Some malicious users do use VPNs to send spams and many websites automatically bans these IPs. Normally switching to a different VPN server will resolve the issue.

Donated $20 to GrapheneOS when I first installed it. $5/mo to Signal. Local charities in my hometown.

Informative tech content. I'm right leaning but more towards the center so I don't agree with everything he says politically speaking, but I have no issues viewing his content since at the end of the day he's still libertarian and anti-establishment. I also have no problems holding conversations with the anarcho socialists on lemmy, because at the end of the day they're also not advocating for more control over my life, we just have disagreements on the technical details of how society should work.

I use Brave as a secondary browser mostly for government websites because sometimes my firefox privacy settings breaks them and since many of them are poorly designed a technical issue over your account may result in hours on the phone to resolve.

My mom is tech illiterate and I buy all her devices for her. If I gave her a Mac she'll just use it without knowing what OS it is.

As a Canadian I approve this message

That's only true if the engineers following the order clearly know what they're doing is wrong, which is often not the case. Most software engineers are as ignorant about privacy as their customers. They do not give a damn about FOSS nor privacy and are often users of these products themselves.

"Strong opinions loosely held"

Implying you should have the courage to fight for what you believe is right but not hold onto them once you're proven wrong.

I learned this as a company culture thing from one of my previous employers and not sure if there's another source for it. I did not like that employer very much in the end but this quote has been stuck with me since and I live by it.

I spoof my user agent on Linux and appears as a Windows user to websites. So I'm actually contributing to the Windows stat.

fedora 38

This is actually what I wanted to say to a lot of people. During peace times, allowing a foreign adversary stealing your data is a lot less damaging to your personal freedoms than your own government stealing your data. We need to be wary every time when our own government tries to tries to introduces surveillance laws under the disguise of "national security".