Week 50! What a milestone, letās see if you have some huge wins!
A dedicated place to share all of our wins! Welcome to our 50th week of privacy & security wins
Now, this only works if you all want it to work. That means:
Donāt 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 weāre 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
At 2025-04-11T20:30:00Z@Henry will be streaming on YouTube to share your wins on the Techlore channels. Donāt miss the stream, itās a great way to live-engage with others and see your comments be featured
Context
With Jordan formally leaving Techlore to do the project I guess Iāll try to take care of the weekly wins thread
Iām trying an aliases workflow using DuckDuckGoās aliases, since I donāt have the ability to pay for any service, I had to leave SimpleLogin since 10 aliases is not enough for me.
For now the experience is going pretty good, that migration process is actually easier as I use Qwacky, itās a fantastic project !!!
I have bought an anti-spy for my Linux phoneā, and generally started using it more.
I have also finished setting up my secure-ass pseudonym, which from now on Iāll call V. I might even start using Qubes because of this nym (but not now)
(Also, since I started giving names to my nyms, the two ones which manage the Linux phone are M and H)
Stood up my own Fresh RSS instance. I love being able to parse through news I want without all the noise.
Moved to Kagi for search ā really enjoying it so far.
Giving Notesnook a try. Iāve been self-hosting Joplin for a while now but the UX didnāt excite me and I honestly donāt want the burden of making sure I have good backups as I have a lot of important notes. Iād basically prefer to outsource this function for a peace of mind. Migrating was pretty simple, and while it has only been a few days it seems to align more closely to the experience I am looking for.
@Henry Thanks for the shoutout in the live scream.
I did a little research on digital giftcards I can by with crypto. Iām in Canada and afaik we donāt have a masked credit card service here so the giftcards might be an option.
I installed Accrescent on my android tablet - I thought it was available only for GrapheneOS.
Started using Ironfox. So far, itās pretty nice. Yes, I know Mozilla based browsers arenāt secure but I have a Brave for activities that require security.
They are secure enough. I mean, Mullvad browser and Tor browser are both FF forks. But it also depends on what exactly you wish to do to require or need even higher security.
After many years of going towards the extreme end of the privacy spectrum, Iāve hit a limit with my threat model and Iām starting to embrace a bit more nuance and dialing back for it. My tolerance for inconvenience was really high, so using Linux and custom ROMs were a given and this worked fine for me for several years as privacy was my main hobby but priorities have changed and my creative aspirations and passion for privacy had been combating each other for a while now and mixing that with perfectionism plus OCD I was putting myself through fatigue and hell and I think not allowing myself to acknowledge it was getting me in a rut. Now thanks to advice from @anon52464727 & @GorujoCY Im starting to take a more practical approach.
Iāve been experimenting with dailying macOS as Logic Pro is the only DAW I can realistically see myself using and while I hate to admit it as a long time linux enthusiast I am kind of enjoying its perks. My conclusion so far has been that people make far bigger deal about the OS when the main threat is in fact the suite of apps.
I share this as a reminder to everybody that unless your life depends on it you donāt have to go to the deep end to make progress I still use all my favorite privacy tools but Im not feeling held back now
Also, not necessarily a privacy/security win but Iām currently testing out the Zen Browser, for now the experience is fantastic with it and Iām even considering switching to it as my main browser in my workflow
Apparently, soon there will be a new āProfilesā feature in Firefox/Zen so I should keep this on my watch.
Oh and also, I got a new phone this week which is actually up-to-date with the latest Android (not like my old phone lol), and so I want to take this opportunity to test new privacy/security workflows with for example the passkeys (which I couldnāt use in my old phone as it used an old Android version). I have now access to interesting privacy/security features like the Always-On VPN feature, Iām testing out Accrescent and thatās for now it
On the twist of irony:
As much as it will overwhelm hopefully it makes them wanna give in and switch:
Remember: Give problem, sell solution
Anyways
Iāve twisted my L which obviously I didnāt mention on the forum my W that became an L and itās a good thing I held off. In the continuation of L, I gave in not deciding to switch the smallest company (2-3 people) to proton, tbh what they were using as an email is domestic anyways and so I donāt think convincing them was gonna do it alot despite giving the option of trying it myself first. Still disappointed by Proton Drive but hey.
Iāve now decided to give my uncle a password (via a physical note) he will use to type from now on to decrypt my emails I send, Knowing him heāll feel overwhelmed at first then get used to it as I send more and do so and hopefully they get used to replying inside the interface too if they need to obviously otherwise I can explain to them that they can do that.
Now this isnāt a huge win by any means yet but it does go a long way to encouraging the more encrypted way (either via PGP or by using proton themselves).
Shifted to Ente photos. Everyone in my family shifted to it. Personally I wasnāt using anything for photo backup. But other members were using Google photos. Another step closer to remove Google entirely from my family.
Everyone should think about their friendās and familyās privacy.
Created a Shortcut in iOS to restart the phone every week. Read that frequent restarts to your device is good for security.
Uninstalled apps for Food deliveries and Amzon shopping. Going to install and remove them on a need basis.
Moved from Apple notes to Notesnook. Paid for the premium tier. The free tier is more than enough but I really like the product. Yet to migrate some notes from Obsedian.
In continuation, With the rise of cracking down E2EE, I thought Iād take matters to my own hands but I could really use a practice with the community (Android only unfortunately)
I also switched my blog to hosting it on InfinityFree to now using bear blog! I was pleasantly suprised by it Iām sure gonna keep paying for it
Context: @gorujokun.cy on Bluesky
Downloaded Vs Codium but yet to make things to try it before considering doing the shift like the settings and download all the extensions
Left Edge for good ( still missing the dual sidebar in Zen )
Disable 4 Zen extensions , disable some mods , so far now i am not getting any memory leaks
In Phone
1 . Uninstalled 2-3 apps and replace them with website shortcut On my phone ( i kinda find figuring this out a bit overwhelming cuz there are so many things and different browsers to have different profile of life like a different for my academic , a different for personal , a casual browsing one etc etc )
2. Did the phone cleanup using SD MAID SE app ( then deleted it cuz it needed way too many permissions )
Hmmm Interestingly, you can create multiple workspaces and set specific container tabs as defaults, achieving seamless containerization if thatās your goal.
Or is there anything else you want from the upcoming Profile feature ?
I know about workspaces and containers, but what I really like about profiles is that itās like a secondary browser but on the same browser, if you know what I mean. You get your different extensions, themes, settings. Something you canāt have on workspaces and containers AFAIK.
But you are right, they are seamless. But they wonāt be useful for my usecase.
one profile for that use once a month or once a week or so (mainly untrusted.)
mobile carrier apps (check data and voice balance)
app for configuring Bluetooth earbuds.
another for entertainment
watching YouTube videos
listing to music.
lastly one for
work related apps to contact me.
Not only this helps organize my work, I find that Iām more productive since there are few distractions from notifications and there is slight barrier of profile switching that I have to go thorough to procrastinate watching YT videos. Even if i end up watching a YT video, there is a fear of missing out an important work massage/call (from a messenger application like Signal) which helps me get back to what I should be doing.
more use cases:
Make profiles for family members so one android tablet could be used by many people.
Use long but harder to enter password for main profile but use shorter pins and use fingerprint to login for other profiles.
You can configure one profile to connect only via a VPN.
If someone asked your phone for taking a phone call or check their emails, there can be a dedicated profile for guests.
Profiles could be backed up individually. (need to explicitly backup app-data and files)
Welcome to our 50th week of privacy & security wins 
