TheProtagonist

Which Distro would you recommend for a relative newcomer? My PC was once “high-end” but is already a bit older (2016/17?). Still quite powerful, I guess.

OK, thanks for the information, that sounds really interesting. I was playing Doom Eternal and Metro Exodus some time ago, but I made a bread and didn‘t pick it up anymore due to a lack of time. Many years ago I was also trying a bit of Linux on a Netbook (small notebook). By then it was really a different world than Windows.

However, I am not sure how easy that is to manage with getting the right Linux distribution, then Wine, then Proton and then getting all tricks and tweaks right… - I am not a tech expert, so leaving a system that works out of the box is a bit of a hurdle for me.

What would be the best Linux „Distro“ (I guess that‘s how it is called) to start with? I would prefer if I would not have to deal with command line stuff… ;-)

What is “Proton” in this context?

I have a custom built PC running on Windows 10, which has no TPM and therefore cannot update to Win11. I might consider Linux as an alternative on some regular laptop, but I’m afraid that my games might no longer be running if I switch the OS from Windows to Linux.

even a scathing rant about surveillance capitalism becomes fodder for the machine, as you can clearly see with the ads on this page.

Ads? I can see no ads…

Never been happier to see some cookies (I can delete or block).

Okay, Orangeman! Now it’s getting personal…

This has nothing to do with privacy! Criminals have their techniques and methods to protect themselves and their “businesses” from discovery, both in the real world and in the online world. Even in a complete absence of privacy they would find a way to hide their stuff from the police - at least for a while.

In the real world, criminals (e.g. drug dealers) also use cars, so you could argue, that druck trafficking is a side effect of people having cars…

I think you are mixing here two different aspects of this and of similar past cases. I the past there was often a problem with takedowns of such sites, because german prosecutors did not regard themselves as being in charge of takedowns, if the servers were somewhere overseas. Their main focus was to get the admins and users of those sites and to get them into jail.

In this specific case they were observing this platform (together with prosecutors from other countries in an orchestrated operation) to gather as much data as possible about the structure, the payment flows, the admins and the users of this before moving into action and getting them arrested. The site was taken down meanwhile.

If you blow up and delete)such a darknet service immediately upon discovery, you may get rid of it (temporarily) but you might not catch many of the people behind it.

I am not even so much concerned about Google / YT getting my IP (by using a VPN), but I would only watch it though an alternative ad-blocking frontend (like Invidious, Piped, FreeTube) and not the standard YT website or app.

None of my previously used alternative apps / frontends seems to be working anymore (at least that’s my recent experience). Not sure what the difference to (Android) apps, that apparently still work (NewPipe, PipePipe) actually is, but it seems that these apps are the only remaining alternative frontends.

I have no Android, so sadly I cannot test / use this setup.

Is this even possible? My impression is that nowadays Google, whenever they have the impression that a connection to YouTube may been proxied, require a sign-in to prove that "“you are no bot” (I wonder which bots are watching YT videos), but in fact to avoid access via VPN or proxying via Invidious or Piped.

That’s the reason why YouTube is essentially dead for me now.

Heylogin looks pretty cool, thanks for the hint. I will definitely take a deeper look into that!

“We’re going to check out how things are going there”

WTF should be going on there JD? None of your business!

It was not HIS deal…

Same here. I was a uMatrix user for a long time and I was astonished sometimes how bloated some sites were with scripts and tracking domains. Nowadays I mostly use Edge on my work machine which is somehow ad-free but all sites work.

Firefox with uBlock / uMatrix needed often too much fine tuning to make sites work properly.

Even if you find an alternative it might not help you if not all the others would follow, too, and you could find the type of content and contacts you currently have in FB on that other platform.

Same problem with many social networks that became toxic, but that can’t be replaced easily, because in other, better places, you might not find the same content and contacts.

Me neither, but I guess the tracking will also take place when you just browse the internet and visit websites, that have Google Ad Tracking technologies implemented (which could be the majority of websites). Tracking and Ad-Blockers like uBlock might help a bit, though.

The specifics are complex—these are the algorithms that ingest all the data signals you give off when browsing the internet on any device, some based on who you are—device, IP and credential identifiers, but also the sites you visit and apps you use as a map to be followed and analyzed.