You can make your own decisions, but if you just grab any random arguments, you’ll find a reason to doubt everything.

Agreed. Especially if your source is Dessalines. 🙄

Important excerpt:

“Introducing a scanning application on every mobile phone, with its associated infrastructure and management solutions, leads to an extensive and very complex system. Such a complex system grants access to a large number of mobile devices & the personal data thereon. The resulting situation is regarded by AIVD as too large a risk for our digital resilience. (…) Applying detection orders to providers of end-to-end encrypted communications entails too large a security risk for our digital resilience”.

I agree that most websites don’t load without JavaScript, but you don’t need seven or more different domains with java allowed for the main site to work. Most sites have their own, plus six google domains, including tag manager, Facebook, etc. I whitelist the website and leave the analytics and tracking domains off.

Who would of guessed

…would have guessed. You may be thinking of the sound of the contraction, “would’ve,” a joining of would and have that sounds similar to “would of.”

I’m nor a cash-only convert, but I have some anecdotal evidence for you.

I’ve visited Boston five times in the past thirty years. Every single time I used my debit card at Thanuel Hall for food, my card was later used for fraud. Always caught and never a big inconvenience beyond replacing my card, but still not ideal. I only ever use cash there now.

Online shopping, before the Amazon monopoly on e-commerce, my card would get compromised every few months.

Now I use privacy.com for all transactions that allow it, and its amazing how often those cards are stolen. Thanks to the way the service works, the stolen cards are useless to scammers or thieves, but my declined transaction filter has a few charges declined each month.

My point being that if you want to avoid fraud, and you can do it, cash is king.

Librewolf supports Mozilla sync

Okay, I do recall that our software had a feature that could classify on "DHCP requested options’, but it was low-fidelity, unreliable. Ultimately, the software works best with known devices, and isn’t very good at reliably classing unknowns.

As you say, just the first few seconds of actual traffic from a device is so rich in terms of ID characteristics compared to DHCP.

I used to provide commercial end-user support for a network intelligence product that used as much metadata as possible to help classify endpoints, shuffling them off to the right captive portals for the right segment based on that data.

I can tell you that the things you’re saying are transmitted in a DHCP request/offer are just not. If they were, my job would’ve been a LOT easier. The only information you can count on are a MAC address.

I can’t view that link you shared, but I’ve viewed my share of packet captures diagnosing misidentified endpoints. Not only does a DHCP request/offer not include other metadata, it can’t. There’s no place for OS metrics. Clients just ask for any address, or ask to renew one they think they can use. That only requires a MAC and an IP address.

I suppose DHCP option flags could maybe lead to some kind of data gathering, but that’s usually sent by the server,not the client.

I think, at the end of the day, fighting so that random actors can’t find out who manufactured my WiFi radio just isn’t up there on my list of “worth its” to worry about.

I bought a used Pixel 5 in Feb for my daily driver. Replaced my Pixel 3 only because the power button was flaky. They both still run great. By my standards, getting two years out of a phone I paid $150 for is better than getting three years out of a $700 phone.

Re: DuckDuckGo:

You can sign-up and manage your aliases from any browser on any OS

But not on the TOR or Mull browsers on Android:

ETA: I use both DDG and SimpleLogin. I recently bumped up against the ten alias limit in SL, but I prefer the ease of creating outgoing aliases in their dashboard vs the DDG method of manually typing with underscores. That said, they both come in handy and I have dozens of DDG aliases that helped me break my dependence on gmail as my single email provider. Never tried Addy.

I’d use the find command piped to mv and play with some empty test folders first. I’m not familiar with Nemo, though I’ve used it for a short while. I’ve never tried the bulk renaming features if they exist.

Depending in how much variation you have in the preceding underscores, REGEX may be useful, but if its just a lot of single underscores you can easily trim them with a single version of the script.

Edit: corrected second command typo. I think there’s a rename command I haven’t used in ages that may have args to help here too, but I’m away from the PC

If you dare, you can automated it with some simple scripting. If I had more than 20 or 30, I’d probably go that route.

Yeah, that sounds like a better long-term solution for you. Once you change your workflow, you shouldn’t have to do it again anyway!

Not a fix, but a workaround I use when symbols and punctuation are treated this way: I use lowercase letters to precede folder names to get the sort I want.

aFolder1
bFolder2

Not elegant, but it works in your case. You could also try other file managers, like Thunar to see if they manage sorting differently

And for good reason

If you’re unfamiliar with the change being implemented, Google is using every android device to detect every other device and report that location to a central database. You can then go to the Find My Device app or website and your device can be located if it’s been seen by any other device.

There’s no need for the user to access anybody else’s device.

My concern is that my privacy is now being invaded by all the scanning devices in my area, and everybody’s movements are even more transparent for the data brokers.

Bingo!

Everybody else’s devices.

The email has a link to opt out too.

Here it is for anyone else interested: opt out of the network

I’ve been expecting Google to kill it like they tend to do with everything people start to like, but it’s been over 7 years already, and still going.

Don’t jinx it!!! 😉

Aurora

I’ll be checking this out tonight; thanks for the tip!