This is just the beginning. It will not get better, because after this current shitshow there’s the climate disaster growing and coming with full, unmitigated force. This will cause mass migrations, deaths and chaos world-wide. Humanity just fucked it up. Make the best out of it but don’t expect anyone who’s young today to have any sort of positive future.

What this also means: you cannot have any private conversations with windows users anymore. They all have to be considered fully backdoored. Even if the agent runs locally, you don’t know what it all sends back to MS servers.

For people who have any slice of privacy consciousness left, this is the death of Windows. The difference between this and using a desktop directly from MS’ cloud is negligible - MS can get access to potentially everything that’s visible or readable on your desktop.

Stands for “fear, uncertainty and doubt”. It’s actually a very relevant term. In a lot of contexts. It’s when people influence you to either fear, have uncertainty about, or doubt something. Sometimes this happens without any intent, for example if you’re unsure about some new situation or thing, you tend to first view it more negatively because you have some fear or doubts about it (which might not be warranted). But sometimes, it can have malicious intent (e.g. right-wing extremists spreading FUD about human subgroups they don’t like. Usually the first step before more aggressive behavior happens).

Is that real? (In 2026, one can never be sure if something is satire or real)

Propaganda needs to be spread.

It’s mildly interesting that this claim originated during a time (~ late 70s and 80s) when such claims also originated about rock and metal music. Both D&D and those were somewhat new (or at least newly popular) during that time.

In a way it was the analog equivalent of modern FUD and misinformation spreading on social media. Maybe even disinformation, but probably just misinformation and FUD.

This. Use as much ethical open source software as possible for you, while supporting and advocating for important projects in that space. And don’t let yourself get sucked into some closed platform or ecosystem you don’t like. For communication and social media, use only open and decentralized servers/protocols. Use as much end to end and strong encryption as possible. Minimize your data footprint. Buy from local and ethical shops. Be the change you want to see in the world.

Incredible community project. Massive scale. Looking forward to this much more than to TES 6. Also doubt that Bethesda is even capable of creating a top-tier game these days.

What I don’t really understand as a non-US citizen is why no one from the current US regime (except Trump (who has legal immunity, which is already laughable and highly problematic)) got into any sort of legal trouble over any of the unlawful and unconstitutional acts that were done for many months or years now. Even when considering that Trump himself is immune, why does it seem like all the others are immune, too? Is nothing working over there? Is the US justice system already completely and utterly broken? If you steal candy from a random shop you probably get 100% prosecuted (and quickly), but if you act against fundamentally important laws or even the constitution, you just get away with it?

If you read “national security” as a reason anywhere, you can read that as “bullshit”. True for any administration.

After you’ve already established security, you can add obscurity (without compromising security) on top for an even bigger gain in security overall. But you can’t do obscurity in place of security.

I read somewhere (and it seems very plausible, though I’m not sure whether it’s scientifically accurate) that the subjective feeling that time runs so fast is something you automatically get with increasing age, and it has to do with what’s still exciting or new for you in life and what is not. With increasing age and life experience, you get the feeling that anything is still exciting or new less often over time. You’ve kind of seen it all, that’s why days seem much more similar to each other than when you were still a kid (when almost every experience you’ve made was still a fresh one), that’s why each day is less memorable, that’s why it seems like time is flying by like crazy.

This is not just a dark chapter. If they also get this power, they can eliminate or disappear anyone at will. It’s one of the last major things they need to gain full dictatorial powers.

Fascism doesn’t want education or truth. It just wants loyalists who follow the fascist doctrine

Fascism doesn’t want education or truth. It just wants loyalists who follow the fascist doctrine

In this particular case, I don’t get what’s in it for them. Of course they generally want more power and wealth, while ignoring everything else. But is this also really about that? If so, how? Also they are alienating even a big portion of their stupid base with stunts like this. It doesn’t seem useful, any way I look at it. It doesn’t seem lawful evil or neutral evil like they usually are. It seems chaotic evil.

GrapheneOS is the best mobile OS. Even though the Graphene team has weird habits of communication which might be off-putting for some, the OS technically still is the most secure AND most private mobile OS distribution you can have on any phone. It’s literally at the top, according to many technical and data protection experts. It’s so good that Cellebrite can’t crack it even with physical access, and some police in some country (I think it was Portugal) will assume you’re a criminal for using it, because it’s so secure and private and they can’t stand the thought of someone fully utilizing their personal rights. Plus, it has great documentation and is easy to install. Despite it being so secure and private by default, it still allows you to shoot yourself in the foot by installing the sandboxed Google services and so on, if you really want to. So it can also be used like an off-the-shelf Android, just with some additional hardening and extra protections on top which you benefit from, but the benefit will be much smaller of course when you install and use spyware apps.

• mullvad.net
• dnsforge.de

Generally, a Samsung phone isn’t great for privacy. Consider getting a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it. Much better Android baseline. More secure as well.

Any connection to Samsung’s servers is likely non-essential, but do check that OS updates work.

Google Play Services is Google’s main surveillance stack on every commercial Android distribution. It transmits a lot of unique device info to Google, every 20 minutes or so. The minimum data being transmitted is:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

However, this app might be required for Google Play to function. And also for some other apps. So check those dependency issues. In general, you should prefer using open source apps or any apps which don’t have such stupid dependencies. Some apps merely complain when you don’t have the Play Services app running (by displaying a popup) but still work.

There’s also the issue with Google’s DRM called “Play Integrity”. Some apps use Google’s Play Integrity API to “verify” that the device is an “officially sanctioned Android” and then act like any other Android is “unsafe” and then refuse to work. If you encounter this, be sure to complain to the app developers about this.

If you need the Google Play store but want to block network access for the Play Services app (which you should do), you should probably use the third-party Aurora store app.

About the Ironfox connections: not sure, but the “firefox-settings” hosts from Mozilla sound related to the Firefox Sync feature which syncs your settings/bookmarks/… with Mozilla. If that’s the case it’s also non-essential and can be blocked.