Kill All CEOs
If you have been on computers and the internet for a while, have you ever wondered how you could browse sites on a 56kbps dial-up connection, and now, with hundreds of MBs of bandwidth, sites still lag? How you could run software with 128MB of RAM, and now, with several GBs, the new version of the same software is still slow to open? Well, it’s because now there are thousands of different domains and scripts tracking everything you do everywhere. All big sites, every major software, are selling your data so you can be tracked and profiled. Even your own OS allows thousands of shady companies to access you so they can see what you’re doing. A big achievement of late-stage capitalism was turning clients into products. They are not just selling to you, they are selling you.
If it were just some new way for capitalists to fuck you over for profit, like the microplastics destroying your brain that you have to accept because it made the rich richer, or the continuous insect extinction slowly destroying our whole ecosystem that can’t be stopped because it would sadden shareholders, but Big Tech moguls actively lobby governments to destroy your privacy, track everything you do, spy on all your habits and movements, and maintain constant, unchallenged surveillance - tools governments love as well. And since we are always one whim away for a deranged spoiled prick put in power by a legion of cretins to go full-fledged fascist, you either fight the control Big Tech has over you and help others do the same, or just watch the boot stamping the human face forever.
Fuck Windows, Fuck Apple, Fuck Google, Fuck Meta, Fuck X, Fuck them to Death!
They will lobby to end Net Neutrality while pretending to oppose it. They will push for laws requiring you to show your ID to use a computer and claim it’s to protect the children. They will pretend it has nothing to do with monitoring and profiling you for ad targeting, and governments are not in the least sad that they can know the location of anyone they might dislike at any time. They will say it's all about selling a customized experience, not about selling you out.
First things first: Big Tech got you through social media and the contacts it create. Migrate and help your friends and relatives do the same!
The Fediverse
The Fediverse is a free and decentralized open source social media network where anyone can host their own server and communicate with others through its protocol. Of course, you don’t need to host your own; there are several servers available, each with its own identity and set of rules, so you can choose the one that fits you best and quit the surveillance medias billionaire fucks created to control you. The common ground you’ll find on Fediverse is no tracking, no telemetry, no data selling, no ads, and no using you for AI training. But of course, one could create an instance that does all of that, and it will be your choice to join or not. Threads (Facebook’s Twitter) is beta-testing integration, which it plans to extend to Instagram as well, so people with corporate probes up their asses, as well as those on lighter dildos like BlueSky, can communicate with the conscious ones and vice versa.
Although counting several millions of users, the Fediverse size is still pretty small compared to the Big Tech products. Gladly, with the exception of Threads and those brain-rotting short-video apps, all other traditional social media are in decline, and you should quit them as fast as possible if you care about your future. The Threads and BlueSky bridges are great tools to not lose contact with your awareless friends while still being free from Big Tech’s predatory algorithms and engagement-bait content. But if you absolutely need to check something on their non-Federated services, do it through Privacy-Friendly Frontends, and if you absolutely need to interact with it, then do it through The Onion Router.
Yeah, dude, if you own a business and it became dependent on the reach Big Tech can provide, sure, remorselessly use them for your promotion, but I'd also recommend linking your Fediverse page there so people know they can follow you elsewhere. Are you a passionate content creator and you want to be discovered? Post previews of your work on Big Tech and link them to spaces that respect your privacy and security. For your sake, though, stop sharing your personal life and interests on Big Tech, for they are using them against you.
One big consequence of the progressively predatory algorithms created by Big Tech to drive up mind-numbing "engagement" was the promotion of the stupidest humanity has to offer and a general stupidization of people trying to achieve the same status. So if you are part of that sub-human taxonomic class also known as "Influencer", then sure, being a corporate marionette is the best option for you. Unlike Big Tech, the Fediverse won't show you a dozen pieces of stupid bland content they consider high engagement instead of showing what your friends, relatives, and the people you are actually interested in seeing have been posting. Your personal feed is a timeline of real people, not a "trending" section of clowns desperate for attention.
• Mastodon
Mastodon is a microblogging platform alternative to X/Twitter. I know if you get too many options to choose from for something you don't know much about it can get confusing, so if in doubt, join mastodon.social, which is the more general instance with more active users. If you want to dive deeper, you can check for different instances here and here – these are not a full list of servers, just a curated list of instances following the same basic ethics. As it's free and open source, nobody can control instance creation, but sadly there is peer pressure to defederate from those they deem "problematic". On a personal note, I'm not the least keen on the American political discourse and their WASP cultural background addiction to guilt and shame that poisoned the world through mainstream social media and was amplified by its echo chamber-creation function. A lot of people ran to the Fediverse but took with them the same crappy mentality, and those who grew up and were socialized in the 2010s or later are neck-deep in social media standards. I find it extremely infantile to search for a mirror in others and expect "perfection" from them – as seeing your carefully engineered community-conforming opinion as a standard for perfection. I don't think the Fediverse is close to escaping the homogenization process started by Big Tech, and it's up to you to be true to your feelings and thoughts instead of faking it just to fit.
As I said, if you are unhappy with your Mastodon instance, you can always look for another, but there are also other microblogging platforms on the Fediverse, and my other personal recommendation, with more than a million users at the moment and a few extra features, is Misskey – it's Japanese-based, so not very affected by American antics. As for features, since userbase doesn't matter because you connect to the whole Fediverse anyway, Akkoma is quite cool too. The Fediverse has tons of possibilities – but in a perfect world, instance admins could choose the feed their instance receives but not who the users can connect to. If instance A defederated from instance B, users from instance A could still manually follow and interact with users from B on their instance if the connection was not cut from their side too. I hope a full integration with Threads, Instagram, and BlueSky can lead to this mature and free communication.
• Pixelfed
A decentralized photo and video sharing platform alternative to Instagram. I talked enough about the Fediverse, so you already know how it works. If in doubt, join pixelfed.social, as it's the most popular; else check more instances here. Yeah, dude, while we don't quit Instagram and join decentralized alternatives, they won't have the same possible reach. So, as I mentioned previously, if you need Big Tech to advertise your business, go ahead (through Tor), but think about using them just to direct your followers to a platform that respects yours and theirs privacy.
• Peertube
A decentralized video hosting alternative to YouTube. Yeah, YouTube is the biggest social media there is; even among Big Tech, they have nothing close to it. So if you move to PeerTube, your possible reach will be nowhere near as big, but also, if you don't move, we will never have a way to remove the corporation's hands from around our necks. So if you are a passionate content creator, but, you know, a real person with a job and a function in society, and not some clown calling yourself an influencer and trying to be an internet celebrity, consider not quitting YouTube at all, but only posting previews there and linking to your full content on PeerTube.
• Privacy-Friendly Alternative Services
It's not just the big Big Tech that is aggressively selling your data, using it to train AI, and bombarding you with telemetry surveillance; even smaller, more niche networks are doing that. So if you care about your privacy and future, also consider these alternatives:
• Lemmy is a decentralized link aggregator alternative to Reddit. Here you can also browse instances on Mbin and Piefed, other Fediverse link aggregators. And remember, the servers communicate with each other across the federation. Choosing which to join is more about what you identify with and what kind of communities you'd like to create, but if in doubt, just join lemmy.world - Oh, and they have frontends available for you to change how it looks too.
• Wafrn! is an alternative to Tumblr. Yeah, I bet, like Reddit, because it is more niche and a felt alternative, you thought Tumblr wasn't as aggressively selling your data, training AI, and letting you get tracked by random bidders... guess again. On another note, Tumblr is about to join the Fediverse, so you will be able to follow its content through your federated account.
• Matrix is a Discord alternative that encrypts your communication. You can even use bridges to join Discord channels without getting tracked and sold.
• BookWyrm is an alternative to Goodreads. I haven't said "Fuck Amazon" before, but yeah, Fuck Amazon! they are one of the most disgusting mega-corporations, with extremely predatory behavior and awful work ethics. They own Goodreads, and all the data you enter there is used to profile and target you.
• OwnCast is an alternative to Twitch. Did I say "Fuck Amazon"? They own Twitch too.
• FunkWhale is an alternative to Spotify. So if you are an artist, consider uploading your songs there - but there is no monetization (like everything in the Fediverse).
Bandcamp is actually a pretty okay service, but you might also consider putting your music on Bandwagon.fm just because of the Fediverse integration.
Oh, another service that you probably thought was cool for looking alternative or having an alternative community is DeviantArt, but they also don't give two fucks about your privacy, so consider posting your art on Pixelfed instead.
If you are looking for a Facebook alternative, there is Diaspora and Friendica, but they are not very active.
Resist Surveillance Capitalism
Nope, you are not the client, the user, not even the consumer; you are the raw material. But like in the real world, the capitalists just own the means and are not actually producing anything, it’s us who do. So don’t feel the least bit bad about wanting to check those spyware platforms’ content. Luckily, many are aware of their malicious intent, and they are working on creating ways for us to check those places without being subjected to their trackers, their data bidders monitoring our traffic, or even their targeted ads. And here come the frontends to protect us:
• LibRedirect
LibRedirect is a cool browser addon that you can use to automatically use frontends for the most popular sites, so their app gets bombarded with shady connections and not you. The downside is that, in the majority of cases, this lets you browse the sites but not log in and directly interact with them (again, if you need to, for your sake, do it through Tor). The list they provide is very cool to also know frontends available so you can use them directly if you wish. LibRedirect is highly customizable, although I think a lot of the options are overkill, and the smaller projects, if they are not well maintained, the link redirect might break.
If you are really worried about your privacy and security, know that each addon your browser uses helps give it a unique signature, and a technique called fingerprinting is often employed to try to identify users even when they are concealing their real IP. This can be used from advertising companies to governments and law enforcement, and they consider even mouse movement patterns and typing rhythm (yes, you best start believing in cyberpunk dystopias). So perhaps using such a unique addon like LibRedirect might not be in your best interest depending on how private you want to be online. I'm studying the possibility of a python browser wrapper to intercept and rewrite links with the frontend URLs on the go at system level so there is no in-browser fingerprintable activity, and when it's ready I'll put it on GitHub for review, but I don't promise any update on that anytime soon.
Fucking Quit Google and Don't Look Back!
What is now a widespread practice actually started with Google. If you have been on the internet for a while, you know why Google became the standard search engine, and you also watched it slowly becoming shit with sponsored results and unrequested stuff, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Besides their dangerous social engineering project of feeding biased results and putting people inside confirmation bubbles, their "predictive analytics" and "behavioral profiling" surveillance methods for shoving you ads, because they know the stores you went to or snooped around your emails, are also used for "dynamic pricing," where sites will increase prices of their products and services because they know you've been searching for it for a while... we should be petitioning the legalization of CEO shooting.
• Startpage
Even though DuckDuckGo is the most popular privacy-friendly search engine, my personal pick for trivial daily use is Startpage. It's basically a Google frontend that strips all their predatory shit and gives you a clean result without cookie and profiling bias. Google is a behemoth and its crawled and indexed addresses tower above all the other search engines combined, and my pick for Startpage is mostly because of that, but they also have a cool feature called "Anonymous View" that puts the site you are visiting inside a proxy wrapper and the info they get is that it's Startpage that is visiting them - it's not the same thing as the frontends from the previous section, for they scrape and reconstruct content instead.
• DuckDuckGo
Using Bing and some other minor crawlers, DuckDuckGo is also an excellent service with a lot of features and they are pretty straightforward about their data collection policies - they do log searches performed, but not IPs or any identifiable data, and they serve ads based on keywords entered instead of cookies or any tracking. If it's good enough to be Tor's default search engine, it's good enough for me.
Brave Search is also cool, they are building their own index from scratch, and although it's small compared to Google and Bing, they still have over 30 billion pages listed with around 100 million new or updated results daily while filtering out automated generated crap. The Brave ecosystem tries to balance privacy-friendly with a welcoming familiar feeling for general daily use, so it's really a good option to recommend to your friends and relatives that are not very tech-savvy.
Mullvad is creating a very powerful privacy and security-oriented ecosystem, and their search engine Mullvad Leta, using Google and Brave index, is very promising, but at this moment they are only serving text results.
• SearXNG
A very advanced open-source metasearch engine, it's the ultimate tool for private and secure search. There are several instances online you can use, and you can host your own as well, however, it requires a lot of fine-tuning for it's extremely customizable and can use the index of tons of different search engines and services. For light daily use, I don't really recommend it unless you are up for working around the settings, but depending on how deep in the rabbit hole you are, this is a tool to check out.
I Guess SkyNet Will Kill Us All Anyway
We got the genie out of the bottle and it won't go back until we nuke ourselves back to the stone age. Although a pretty incredible tool, AI is a whole different level of threat for humanity, but I won't bother you with that now; this page is not about that. If you are worried about your privacy, there are a few open-source AI Chat models you can run locally. They require a bit of config and a lot of RAM though, but if you are interested, you can check Mozilla's Llamafile, and also Kobold.cpp, which supports image generation and speech recognition.
• Duck.ai
The only online AI chat service close to respecting your privacy. You can access the most popular models, they have a contractual obligation of not logging any identifiable personal information, and DuckDuckGo acts as a proxy for you. You can check more about this here. So purge Copilot and forget about accessing Chat GPT directly.
Get a Good Browser
First, consider you don't need to use only one browser, you can use several different browsers for several different activities, but you absolutely have to toss Chrome and Edge in the garbage and take a huge dump over them.
• Brave
Brave had a few shady decisions in the past, and they collect some anonymized telemetry, and some of the more privacy-concerned people don't trust it very much, but it's still a very privacy-centered browser with advanced tools to prevent tracking and fingerprinting. For it being very mainstream-friendly, it should work with everything. If your daily use includes popular streaming services, yeah, Brave is the way to go - also, Chromium-based browsers are the best option for mobile.
• LibreWolf
On desktop, though, Firefox-based browsers champion privacy and security. Firefox itself is not that bad, but it requires a lot of custom configuration to get it closer to Brave. LibreWolf, on the other hand, strips down everything that could leak data, completely removes telemetry and DRM-crap (so some big streaming services won't work), has enhanced tracking and fingerprinting protection, comes with uBlock Origin by default, and also defaults search to DuckDuckGo instead of Google. It's a great community-driven browser that can be used for everyday use, but consider turning on history and saving passwords in the options for convenience.
• MullVad Browser
Mullvad Browser is a mini-Tor. It's extremely secure and also ships with uBlock Origin and is optimized to be used with VPN (preferably its own Mullvad VPN, but it works with other VPN services as well). It's better than LibreWolf in protecting your privacy and identity but not as extreme as Tor because it doesn't use the onion relay network. It trades more stable anonymity for a better connection - and also, by default, it doesn't save history and passwords.
• Tor
What a VPN does, The Onion Router does three times over, changing every 10 minutes, trying to make your traffic untraceable, which can substantially throttle your connection. So using Tor for, like, watching YouTube, is very unpractical, but if you have some activity you really don't want other people snooping around, then Tor is a first step. Like the previously mentioned, it also doesn't save logins and history by default to increase security, and to prevent fingerprinting, it's better to use it raw, without any addon. It has tons of built-in features to block tracking and ads, and with DNS-level help, using uBlock Origin is just a security/fingerprinting risk. There is also discussion about using it with VPN or not. VPN connections are easier to identify than Tor ones, and having a VPN connecting to Tor might just make you stand out, but as VPN use gets more and more common , perhaps now there is a large enough user base to make you just be one more guy using a VPN that didn't configure it to ignore your Tor browser and you disappear in the mass.
My take: consider using Brave or LibreWolf for privacy-friendly stuff you want to stay logged on, like the Fediverse. Use Mullvad if you have an identity you want to conceal better, and don't want it to be so easily linked to your other browser activity. And if you really need to log on some Big Tech service, because, yeah, especially for business activity we can't beat their reach of oblivious normies, do it through Tor - because where you are and what you have been doing is none of their business.
Get a Good Email Service
You know how opening someone else's mail or looking inside their mailbox is a federal crime? Well, not for Google, Microsoft, Yahoo... because they openly check your mail to serve you ads... and who knows what else they do with that information?
• Proton Mail
Proton is another company developing a great ecosystem focusing on transparency, open-source software, and privacy. If you are willing to be a premium user, they provide you with some great features, but on the free level they are already awesome. Proton Mail uses Zero-Knowledge Encryption, which means they don't know your password and have no access to it. When you create an account, a hash function is encrypted to it, and when you enter a password, it generates a hash code, which is then stored on their server and compared to grant access to your mailbox when you login. Your mailbox is automatically encrypted so all the content there can only be accessed through your password. Your hash can't be reverse-engineered because they don't know the algorithm that created it, and one can only access your box by entering the exact same code that generates that hash, so even though they know the hash it's useless. Even if they wanted, they couldn't snoop around your email.
The emails you send are automatically E2EE (End-to-End Encryption), which means its content is hidden until it reaches its destination (meanwhile, all other popular services around work like a "postcard," your email content is plain text that can be intercepted). However, if the recipient mailbox isn't encrypted, its content can be accessed by their provider. Proton Mail also comes with 10 free aliases for you to use. Those are "fake" emails you can use to register or message someone without letting them know your real address. Say, if you register somewhere using an alias, and that alias starts getting spam, you know that fucker there sold you out.
• Tuta
A great alternative to Proton Mail, also using Zero-Knowledge Encryption and E2EE, and also having a free tier. If you feel like Proton is too mainstream for you, then check them out.
• Other Providers
Mailbox, Mailfence, and Posteo are some other privacy-friendly services that are not as sophisticated as Proton and Tuta and also don't have free tiers and aren't open source. You will probably need to use Mailvelope or Thunderbird for better protection. I'm not linking them because I'm not actually recommending any, I'm just letting you know in case you are looking for more options.
Still on "not as sophisticated," which means they are not natively using Zero-Knowledge Encryption or E2EE (so you need Mailvelope or Thunderbird as well), but that will double down on their privacy and security ethics, you might also want to check Disroot Email, and depending on your ideological inclination, autistici.org, and the even more private, RiseUp.Net.
Back in 2013, the US government ordered Lavabit to give access to their clients' mailboxes, and they chose to terminate the service instead of selling their users out. Wanna know the kind of people that would always choose people over governments and corporations? Those above.
• Aliases and Disposables
On the free tier, only Proton Mail has aliases available, but if you want them, or more of them, you can also use DuckDuckMail and the open-source alternatives SimpleLogin and addy.io.
Lastly, when creating an account in some service, is that account really that important that you can't replace it and really need to recover if you ever happen to lose your password? Consider using a disposable email. There are tons around you can easily find on search engines. You can't trust them for shit, but you can also create your account and then change/remove the recovery email, so even if they keep that email instead of destroying it, there's not much they can do. Guerrilla Mail, however, seems pretty cool. Alternatively, there are several open-source options to self-host a disposable email as well, and this way you are going to have full control over it - but it requires considerably more effort, and if you are capable, I'm sure you don't need me to list any of them here and you can do your own research.
• Clients and Addons
For encrypting the content of your mailbox (not the mailbox itself) and the emails you send, your two best open-source options are Mailvelope, a browser addon that is very easy and simple to use, and Thunderbird, a desktop client with tons of features. Both are very good, but remember, addons help in fingerprinting, so consider that for how anonymous you want to be online.
Get a VPN ASAP
When you connect to a VPN server, it's the VPN that is connecting to what you are browsing, and not you. Especially for countries that are under censorship, or where simply searching about themes that concern your own body and what you do with it is considered a crime, a VPN is a lifeline. However, a lot of companies are out there offering VPNs just for you to avoid geolocation blocks of streaming services or securely download stuff without getting ratted out by your ISP (the first one that will share and sell your data, trust none of them), and they will monitor and log your activity and even sell it. In countries like the USA, where the population is forced to repeat mantras like "Land of the free" from a young age, but are actually under draconian surveillance laws, even if a service promises to not keep logs, it can be forced by the government to do it and not be able to warn its users because they are under a gag order. The following services not only have a strict no-logs policy, but they are regularly audited by third parties to check it:
• Proton VPN
Of those really privacy-centered, with servers in 117 countries, Proton is the only one with an unlimited free tier, so if you need to set a good VPN quickly, go for it. Premium features include Port-Fowarding support, the only VPN to do so, so depending on the kind of network you are running this is a great ecosystem to join.
• Mullvad VPN
With servers in 49 countries, Mullvad goes further on its no-log policies by not even having any disks to save data, it's all processed on pure RAM, so even if they wanted, they can't save it. If you are already using their browser, another great ecosystem to be in.
• IVPN
Another service that puts your privacy first, having servers in 32 countries.
• NordVPN
NordVPN had some trust issues in the past, like delays to report breaches, it's not fully open source, they may request too much personal information, so depending on your threat model, there are better options. However, it has passed every audit, has servers in 126 countries, and it's also processing all its data on RAM-only.
Fuck Surveillance, Block Them at DNS Level
Have you ever wondered why your calculator wants access to your camera?
When you enter a site, the vast majority call several other domains to serve you ads and collect your data. If you are using the browsers recommended here, they will deal with most of it, but it's not just your browser that does strange connections without your knowledge, everything on your device does. If they are data-mining you for ads, selling it to other companies to profile you, tracking your location, or if you straight up got malware and it's calling home to send information, there are tons of cool guys around honeypotting the shit out of these fuckers to discover their domains and prevent your device from connecting to them.
• Mullvad DNS
By now you have heard of Mullvad quite a bit. It has a free DNS server, apparently no query limit, and it uses customized blocklists. Although I don't know much of their content, it's a high-trust company so they are probably good lol
• AdGuard DNS and NextDNS
AdGuard DNS and NextDNS can be set manually, but they both have installers to do it for you, making them kinda more "user-friendly". They both have tons of lists and are highly customizable, but HaGeZi no longer lists NextDNS on his page because, although it "just works," it lacks customer support. Both have a limit of 300k monthly queries on the free plan, but that's a pretty big number.
• Other DNS Services
The guys from NextDNS seem to be focused on DNS0.eu now, which seems to lack customization but most probably is serving the same blocklists from NextDNS. ControlD and DNSBunker are both services using HaGeZi's blocklists and are recommended on his page - but I find ControlD's free tier very lacking.
• Host Your Own!
I've been mentioning HaGeZi a lot, he's an amazing guy maintaining several blocklists you can read more about here. If you want full control, customization, and also full privacy and security (even though all those services linked above are cool, you are still technically showing them your whole traffic), then you can self-host your DNS resolver with HaGeZi's help using Technitium or pi-hole (Linux only).
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Get Snitches at Firewall Level
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