A dedicated place to share all of our wins! Welcome to our 48th week of privacy & security wins
Now, this only works if you all want it to work. That means:
Don’t be shy! Even the smallest win is something you can share. The more of you who contribute the better it is for everyone
Be positive. Remember we’re all in different places of our journey. Someone enabling 2FA on their first account can be just as excited as someone who figured out how to install Qubes on their new system. Give each other some love!
Join The Weekly Stream
Each 2025-03-21T21:00:00Z@Henry will be streaming on YouTube to share your wins on the Techlore channels. Don’t miss the stream, it’s a great way to live-engage with others and see your comments be featured
I guess a universal win today is the “SignalGate” that happened that caused an increase in users?
tbh it’s no wonder i got the usual signal spam dm but aside from that, a universal win and I hope Americans stick to using it!
Nonetheless a universal win is pretty rare and something like this kinda feel like a jackpot of Universal wins.
It appears EPIC, the SAAS medical office software solution many doctors offices use (appointments, prescriptions, chatting with your doctor/staff, past visits, health results, etc etc), implemented TOTP for logins. LONG awaited.
Partial win, partial loss. I’ve been trying every month to try and import my Proton emails into Tuta to attempt to use Tuta as a daily driver.
The win is I had the most success, the loss is it’s not enough success. The Tuta import tool is still super buggy, gets stuck at the end on the last email and never finishes the import despite the emails appearing to be imported? But then it says some imports failed, followed by everything imported without issue.
Tuta’s search is also not very strong and makes it hard for me to research specific emails to test if everything imported properly.
Long story short: Not ready for me personally. But cool to see progress.
Both. Always good to experiment to see if what I’m using is still the best option. And it’s good for me to have first-hand experience with tools I cover.
But, I also just overall prefer Tuta as a company and would love to use them. Nothing against Proton, but I much prefer the way Tuta handles themselves.
I Have My Last Wins For This Month And it’s Installing My Muslim Friendly Apps From GitHub And The KeepassDX Libre Version From its Official Website Using Obtainium
Many wins in the last couple of weeks after a month following Techlore:
Installed Linux Lubuntu on a very old Toshiba laptop circa 2009.
Painstakingly switched all my TOTP accounts over from Authy to Ente Auth.
Downloaded all my Google Data from my Drive and have begun the deletion process of the account. Moved all G Docs over to OnlyOffice and have begun using it with a bit of a struggle. Have not yet found a worthy replacement for G Voice in terms of user-friendliness, bare basic features and cost in order to port my G Voice number to.
Closed my Telegram account, opened Signal. No success in convincing anyone I know on WhatsApp to migrate to Signal.
Downloaded Virtualbox and have tinkered with a virtualized Fedora Silverblue with some success.
Have begun using email aliases from Apple “Hide My Email”.
Downloaded and installed Postmaster Firewall.
Downloaded and installed Reeder and subscribed to a ton of RSS feeds.
But… in the not-wins column:
Had issues using Cryptomator on Windows - after installation being successful and creating a vault, selecting “Reveal My Drive” always brings up an error stating the drive cannot be found and that it may have been moved or deleted, which is not true. Have searched everywhere and have not managed to find answers for this issue.
Backed off on my commitment to adding a dual-boot environment on a Windows laptop and adding Fedora Silverblue alongside it after reading some known issues on Fedora forum regarding Silverblue not being friendly to dual boot systems. UPDATE Half-win on this… Managed to install Fedora Silverblue on this Windows laptop BUT for some reason I cannot get the grub menu to show on boot and the system loads directly into Linux with no option to let me choose Windows, only resource is to boot into BIOS to change boot order and then have system boot into Windows with no option to select Fedora.
As I said in the last stream, I’ve had some troubles being as private now that I’m on android. The main issue for me was that I had previously relied on Apple Maps for private routing. Initially, the only serious map applications to consider were Waze and Google Maps. I knew about OpenStreetMap, but the map in my area had very little detail, so I went with Waze, as they said they didn’t share data with Google.
That was until I heard that anyone can edit OpenStreetMap. I created an account and began to make contributions using my local knowledge, correcting roads and adding businesses I know of. I’ve even started to do some surveying today. It’s now good enough that I can use it for basic purposes, but I’m going to keep improving it.
Even though I still supplement with Waze, once it’s good enough, I plan commit to Organic Maps (which has a much more user friendly UI than OsmAnd) for fully offline navigation.
TLDR:
Switch to LUKS encryption for full-disk encryption for all Linux machines.
For cross platform USB data transfers went with SiriKali,
SiriKali works on Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows Operating Systems, if you chose some encryption method it provides it even works with android with DroidFS (make sure to use exFAT for newer android and FAT32 for old ones).
Paid for a year of Tuta to check it out. Moved my DDG alias to it too. We’ll see how it handles Taco Bell emails. If I like it, I might move from Proton. Proton’s politics aside, Tuta is a little cheaper and since I use a VPN other than Proton’s I think this might be worth the hassle.
Still need to find a European/private domain registrar to get a cheap url for emails though.
My phone phoned! It was actually easier than I expected. I just had to launch the lomiri-dialer-app (which is pre-installed, since this is ubuntu touch). I though it only supported Mir, but it actually works just fine on Xorg.
If you want a Linux phone, buy a PinePhone, install PostmarketOS with Phosh and continue enjoying your life. In the meantime, I will continue trying to receive phone calls, SMS messages, notifications and the “_” character
It would be difficult to provide a guide, since this phone’s configuration is split between two of my pseudonyms.
I’ve been using https://njal.la for a couple of years, never had any issue with them.
They seem to have put some thought into the service, e.g. they PGP encrypt all e-mail notification, so others can’t use the emails to learn you own a given domain.
Months ago, I bought a used Thinkpad T470s with the hope of installing a Linux distro onto it. Unfortunately, that laptop’s plastic is infused with perfume. It’s been stored in my shed with the hope the smell will reduce over time.
Brought it into the house yesterday and, after letting the machine warm up, got to work. I downloaded Fedora Silverblue. At this point, my headache from the perfume got to be too much. Laptop is back in the shed for another couple of months.
My wins this week is deciding which distro I’m going to be using and finally trying out this machine long enough to know it’s a damn nice computer.
In hindsight, I should have bought new even if that meant buying a computer with lower specs.
tbh I do encourage people do their research rather thank blindly linking them to it
sometimes they may end up preferring organic maps instead in this instance…
Doing their own research is one thing and should be encouraged if they are at least tech savvy to understand all they may be researching.
My comment is specific in that if one is talking about a specific tool, I’d like it linked for the reason mentioned in my last comment - it’s easy to get to the exact tool a member here is talking about instead of mistakenly finding something else if you search it independently.
The link doesn’t necessarily or automatically by default means this is the only instance available as it’s going to be clear that the tool at the core is still Organic Maps (in this case).
But all this notwithstanding, it’s still protocol to link something one is being specific about. It’s an unwritten rule though and not mandatory of course - it’s just nice to see and find the tool right from the comment itself like I said.
Welcome to our 48th week of privacy & security wins 
