iPhones & MacBooks are beautiful, powerful pieces of hardware That you can ‘rent’ from Apple — that’s about it Why did I specifically use the word ‘rent’? Sorry for triggering any Apple fanbois: the only thing you ever ‘buy’ from Apple is their marketing. All Apple devices — natively run their proprietary operating systems and are entirely owned by Apple. They can shut down your device, track you using their own proprietary technology, using a mesh network botnet of other Apple devices around you, all while sugarcoating it under the Apple brand....

2021 is the year I complete my general-schooling, plan ahead, catch-up on my backlog Because 2020 has taught us that anything can happen at times when we are the least prepared Covid was the highlight of the year, but let’s hope for the better. I’m sure we have all heard-of ‘New Year resolutions’ — this post about that, but I am writing this two weeks before new-years, I plan to dive head first, cold-turkey, whatever you want to call it, taking on’ 2021 with a fresh-mind....

Google is probably your search engine. Chrome your web-browser? Google flavoured Android + your OEM skin, the OS your phone runs on I’m talking about — Xiaomi’s MIUI, OnePlus/Oppo/Vivo’s Oxygen OS, Color OS, Samsung’s OneUI, literally anything other than iPhones probably run Android + proprietary Google software. YouTube? — it’s the 2nd biggest search engine after Google Often the only source of video hosting at such a cheap, subsidized rate. Not to mention censorship 😷 / corporate gaslighting....

“I trust Mozilla more than Google; but Mozilla trusts Google more than you” Google is the default search engine on Firefox. All their app store screenshots feature Google Search. No self hosted F-Droid repo. It’s again Google Play. Google is their primary & only ‘real’ source of income. Ironically their only real competitor. Do they want to promote privacy friendly social media? I see no PeerTube or Mastodon accounts to follow; it’s again Twitter & YouTube....

Whaat? you use Linux? aRe yOu sOme hAcKeR? No, that’s not how I perceive it. People & the media - have confused us with the term hacker. I mean hacking as in a hacksmith someone who is playfully clever. Tinkering stuff, not just computers, hacking as in life-hacks, not breaching security as such, they too are hackers but not the only ones :0 A musician has total control over their guitar, an artist over the paintbrush 🖌 me & (hopefully) you over our computers The flexible/tinker-able nature of GNU+Linux is one of the reasons I use this over Windows, iOS or MacOS....

If you’ve searched for privacy oriented messaging apps Signal is probably on that list. By now you’ve probably heard about Signal the centralized, navy blue, metadata resistant messaging app, now anchored by an ex WhatsApp co-founder. Signal out of the box still lacks a bit of polish. When compared to competition like Telegram or Element/Matrix (As of 2020-10-20) No usernames, hiding phone number visibility. Unsending messages with no trace. End to end group calls on the desktop, signup via the desktop app and better group management....

Unless you’re from the USA (the land of free SMS) you probably use a messaging app like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal Why? You get cross-device-sync, better features, ditch phone numbers as – identifiers, huge privacy gains, stickers & share media in an instant! SMS is costly, outside of the US. At least in India — I don’t think I have ever used SMS other than receiving OTP codes, when signing up for some services....

Wait? What’s wrong with Twitter? YouTube or XYZ platform? These apps are centralized, are funded by advertiser whims. Need non-free software to run. Hard to scale or port. Unnecessary walled-gardens that keep normal users who don’t have an account — out. I don’t like centralized social media anymore. I think it isn’t worth my time in the long run. I switched to something called the fediverse which I covered in my last blog post....

China — heard about China in these recent days? The app bans and censoring websites of Chinese origin under the so called name of national security and safeguarding the privacy of fellow Indian citizens? Geopolitics reigns: the real issue of data-protection & privacy is not going to be talked about. While I think: we should not use apps that collect this much data. I would never bar someone or ban/censor apps....

The quickest way to call me? 🤙 VoIP calls: polarhive.net/call A dilemma ~ privacy? or instant connectivity — you can’t have both There’s the obvious privacy issue, the cellular radio in the phone is screaming all day to towers near you to keep you connected 24/7 wherever you go. I have the phone-app disabled on my phone. I have Airplane mode turned on. I only rely on WiFi to connect to the internet....