For me it started going south just after Windows 2000. XP started ‘thinking’ for you, forced online activation and hid all the settings away in little fluffy Fischer Price boxes. That was the point that your computer started not belonging to you, in my opinion.

Treat the cause, not the symptom.

Which bit are you referring to?

Wait a minute. How did they collect those statistics?

It’s a shame this is necessary, to be honest. It’s the same argument with Windows users: “you can just run a debloater and fiddle with the registry to disable tracking”. It shouldn’t be needed in the first place.

Totally agree. Which variant? KDE or GNOME?

Try setting your vpn to listen on UDP, port 53 (usually used by DNS. If that fails, it’s going to be some sort of deep packet inspection, yes.

If you migrate to it, I promise we’ll shut up.

Nordé VPN

Everything on the archive page you are viewing*.

Potentially the .ru scripts could rewrite or censor part of the page or redirect you somewhere, but cannot modify the page permanently. Nothing really dangerous or privacy-invasive though, unlees you’re the type to fall for primitive phishing attacks.

I see this as a none-issue. Block the counter/event domains via an adblocker or dns and nothing goes to Russia an nothing gets modified or censored.

Not answering your question directly but have you heard of Nuclear Music Player? It searches the Spotify API for track names and plays them from Youtube.

https://nuclearplayer.com/

Using a Pixel 6 with Graphene here with google services in their sandbox. It’s pretty neat, especially with apps like Firefox+uBlock and GrayJay, which let me also block 99% of ads, which was very important to me. I have not had trouble with any banking apps either.

Was the road ok?

LettuceConnect