In the late 90’s my brother, who worked in the area of digital security, told me that anything I did over a network, he could find and publicize in a matter of minutes. He said there were really only 3 choices. You can unplug and not engage, you can try to hide, or you can go through life accepting that what you do is not private. I chose the third option. I know others may have excellent reasons for choosing otherwise, but for me, this was the right path.
Likewise. Privacy has been an illusion for quite a while now for almost all of us.
I use some basic safe hex to reduce my exposure to a drive-by, & mostly assume that whatever I do is trackable by anyone determined to do so.
This article has well known info with some new details. And well enough written that hopefully some of my younger friends will take in the info within it.
I like Pop OS! personally but that's just my personal preference. Pretty much any flavor of 'Nix is going to give you way better, granular control over your system but if you are coming from Windows, I'd suggest Mint or Pop.
I installed Debian on my LG Gram, which was designed to be used with Windows. I have not yet experienced any issues related to drivers or hardware that were not simple to resolve with a few Internet searches.
I guess. 2-3 decades in IT deskside support, including teaching it for 7 years. I mostly work in software now in an entirely Microsoft environment, so my tech skills have been getting a little rusty.
I just bought this new ai-centric mini ‘supercomputer’ to replace my 10 year old xeon workstation with a tesla p40 data center gpu that i have been using for ai experiments the last few years. 15 years ago, this system would have cost me 25,000. I got it for 1000 bucks used on ebay and after some heavy tinkering got it running some fairly large local LLM systems but I am at the point now where I needed to upgrade to something more robust because I am teaching myself how to vibe code since all my developer friends that know half a dozen languages are telling me ‘code is dead’ and that if you don’t know how to vibe code, you are not going to be able to work fast enough to compete so it was basically do or die at this point. i think i made the right choice. the thing was pricey but not TOO bad considering it has 96GB of unified ram shared between the cpu and gpu and I can run MASSIVE 70 billion parameter models on this thing at speeds comparable to what I have been paying 20 bucks an hour to use on the cloud. This tech is going to change everything and people that are not on top of it are going to end up left in the stone ages.
I switched from Win11 to Debian a few months ago. Debian was recommended over any Ubuntu-like flavour by a friend with more IT Sec knowledge than I possess because fewer Snaps make security a bit simpler to implement.
I tried the Wayland GUI, but found it to be a bit buggy.
I am finding the KDE XFCE GUI more stable & much closer to my Win expectations.
My prior linux experience has mostly been on CLI only Ubuntu servers, so there is still a fair bit if a learning curve. But this is definitely a preferable experience with so much less intrusiveness.
Win11 seems to be designed for corporate use in a Microsoft network environment. And it does work well for that purpose. My experience has been that Win11 is not a good choice for personal use.
Absolutely top notch article. Already knew a bunch of it, BUT have never seen anyone put so many of the key elements and challenges of personal cybersecurity together in a single article better. And I certainly did learn a bunch from it. Thanks for writing and posting it. I have just restacked it and would love to take you up on your offer of a year subscription if possible, as I cannot possibly subscribe to many very valuable accounts here without seeing all of my own Substack income immediately disappear to others accounts. Again, many many thanks for this.
Thank you for this amazing article. It’s utterly disgusting that people are being arrested in England under Britain’s Communications Act for their online posting. I don’t want to be “Margaret”. Do you think that scenario could happen in the US?
In the late 90’s my brother, who worked in the area of digital security, told me that anything I did over a network, he could find and publicize in a matter of minutes. He said there were really only 3 choices. You can unplug and not engage, you can try to hide, or you can go through life accepting that what you do is not private. I chose the third option. I know others may have excellent reasons for choosing otherwise, but for me, this was the right path.
Likewise. Privacy has been an illusion for quite a while now for almost all of us.
I use some basic safe hex to reduce my exposure to a drive-by, & mostly assume that whatever I do is trackable by anyone determined to do so.
This article has well known info with some new details. And well enough written that hopefully some of my younger friends will take in the info within it.
Great article ! Is there a linux that you would recommend ?
I like Pop OS! personally but that's just my personal preference. Pretty much any flavor of 'Nix is going to give you way better, granular control over your system but if you are coming from Windows, I'd suggest Mint or Pop.
Thanks. I have been planning for some time to get a linux laptop.
I installed Debian on my LG Gram, which was designed to be used with Windows. I have not yet experienced any issues related to drivers or hardware that were not simple to resolve with a few Internet searches.
You must have some degree of talent then. Debian isn’t exactly the easiest distro to use.
I guess. 2-3 decades in IT deskside support, including teaching it for 7 years. I mostly work in software now in an entirely Microsoft environment, so my tech skills have been getting a little rusty.
I just bought this new ai-centric mini ‘supercomputer’ to replace my 10 year old xeon workstation with a tesla p40 data center gpu that i have been using for ai experiments the last few years. 15 years ago, this system would have cost me 25,000. I got it for 1000 bucks used on ebay and after some heavy tinkering got it running some fairly large local LLM systems but I am at the point now where I needed to upgrade to something more robust because I am teaching myself how to vibe code since all my developer friends that know half a dozen languages are telling me ‘code is dead’ and that if you don’t know how to vibe code, you are not going to be able to work fast enough to compete so it was basically do or die at this point. i think i made the right choice. the thing was pricey but not TOO bad considering it has 96GB of unified ram shared between the cpu and gpu and I can run MASSIVE 70 billion parameter models on this thing at speeds comparable to what I have been paying 20 bucks an hour to use on the cloud. This tech is going to change everything and people that are not on top of it are going to end up left in the stone ages.
I switched from Win11 to Debian a few months ago. Debian was recommended over any Ubuntu-like flavour by a friend with more IT Sec knowledge than I possess because fewer Snaps make security a bit simpler to implement.
I tried the Wayland GUI, but found it to be a bit buggy.
I am finding the KDE XFCE GUI more stable & much closer to my Win expectations.
My prior linux experience has mostly been on CLI only Ubuntu servers, so there is still a fair bit if a learning curve. But this is definitely a preferable experience with so much less intrusiveness.
Win11 seems to be designed for corporate use in a Microsoft network environment. And it does work well for that purpose. My experience has been that Win11 is not a good choice for personal use.
Always assumed this to be the case. It is sobering to hear it though.
Absolutely top notch article. Already knew a bunch of it, BUT have never seen anyone put so many of the key elements and challenges of personal cybersecurity together in a single article better. And I certainly did learn a bunch from it. Thanks for writing and posting it. I have just restacked it and would love to take you up on your offer of a year subscription if possible, as I cannot possibly subscribe to many very valuable accounts here without seeing all of my own Substack income immediately disappear to others accounts. Again, many many thanks for this.
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Thank you for this amazing article. It’s utterly disgusting that people are being arrested in England under Britain’s Communications Act for their online posting. I don’t want to be “Margaret”. Do you think that scenario could happen in the US?