You can also pick one that avoids the worst industries ie defence and oil. They will still invest in evil shit but they can still avoid the biggest no-nos.

It was obvious to me. Even without the context of being posed to linuxmemes it’s a silly-sounding story. Not sure why so many people in the comments seem to be taking this seriously—even if they couldn’t tell the original was a joke, it’s posted to a memes community.

Also, you can use a burner email and vpn if you want to add an extra layer of obfuscation in there for privacy.

It’s still all tied to one account. They could say, for instance, the same person searched for “beans”, “onions”, and “rice”, as opposed to not being tied to an account where those 3 searches could have come from 3 different people. Of course, a search engine like DDG is only promising to not track you to try figure out if those 3 searches came from the same person, but various anti-fingerprinting measures could make it infeasible for DDG to do that. For a paid search engine, you’d have to pay for a new account per search if you didn’t want it tied to any other searches, if you don’t trust that Kagi isn’t logging searches (which you shouldn’t, because you shouldn’t rely on trust for any threat model).

I really hope I don’t come off as a shill for them. It’s one of the few companies I actually really like.

Don’t worry, I get where you’re coming from and I most certainly think some people have a use-case for it.

Kagi’s an interesting one. The main reason why I don’t go with it is because you’d have to have an account, de-anonymising you. I know they have their “privacy pass” feature but that seems to essentially rely on trust that they aren’t tying your private searches to an account. And also $10/month for a search engine is just pretty steep for my budget.

I’m not looking at strangers’ phone screens close enough to figure out if they’re using GOS but I’ve noticed strangers using GOS a fair few times. Likely would a lot more if I were looking for it but I’m not trying to read everyone’s phone screens…

It’s a fairly common OS and it’s fairly widely acknowledged that GOS is a big driver for Pixel sales.

That’s a good point, I forgot that stuff like SearXNG are only frontends so in order to add personalisation to them you’d have to modify your queries to Bing/Google/etc I assume, rather than do what Google etc do with whatever algorithm they use for providing search results.

Reading books or playing video games. If I have the energy then also working on projects.

Won’t your state know you’re using the VPN based on the fact that all your internet traffic is going to the VPN lol

Mullvad or AirVPN. AirVPN has port forwarding so good if you need to torrent

I know. I never said otherwise. I’m responding to someone who said they can’t seed at all without port forwarding.

idk I don’t port forward and have 10+ ratios regularly

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=j2TyrLZT0r0

I don’t like the aesthetic but a lot of my stuff is “gaming” branded for functionality reasons (eg high refresh rate monitor; mice with extra buttons; the mech kb I wanted happened to be gaming branded but I would’ve bought a keyboard with same specs and price that was not gaming branded). The gaming aesthetic is a bit weird when you think about it.

I think it would be fine if it were opt-in, but then you wouldn’t get enough data to get accurate traffic estimates

Can I ask what the job was?? That sounds like such a dream job if you can do other work at that job and pays well

I was also confused at first, but OP is using “plausible deniability” to mean “depending on what decryption key you attempt to use, you get different ‘decrypted’ data”, so you can have an alibi I suppose. Not “plausible deniability” in the sense of “plausibly this isn’t encrypted at all”.

Depends on your threat model, the degree of interest in you from states, the resources and competency of the states interested in you, etc… Also, I think privacy for privacy’s sake and without any real threat to which it’s responding to, is entirely fine and understandable. If nobody were interested in my data at all I’d still practise a reasonable level of privacy because I think it’s creepy for other people to know my business.

I don’t have a pressure cooker and cook beans on an electric stove, but I imagine it’s similar