A dedicated place to share all of our wins! Welcome to our 66th 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!
Since there was no thread last week, the stream tomorrow will be a celebration stream for the recent global wins like opposing Chat Control and other positive news:
I got my the person I message the most to try Signal again! So far it’s going well, but we’re giving it one week to see if any problems come up and then we will reevaluate.
Last time we tried Signal there was a problem I experienced where I would not get the notification on my phone for minutes after it was received. That was a deal breaker for them so we compromised and switched to WhatsApp. If that problem doesn’t come back then I think I’m in the clear!
I’m excited to share that I have finally deleted my WhatsApp account after using it for around 15 years! While WhatsApp is very dominant in my country, I have gotten the most important people in my life to switch our conversations to Signal. I also wrote a blog post that goes deeper into this decision if anyone is interested.
This week I made the jump to Qubes - kind of. I am still dual booting fedora as my machine is not powerful enough to play games on top of the heavy OS. Loving it so far now that I know what I’m doing sort of.
I’ve started using web apps for certain platforms I don’t necessarily trust, like news sites, discord, etc.
I went through all my accounts and enabled 2fa codes and security keys for any that would allow it (Including This Forum :D). It turned out to be more than I thought.
Finally, I convinced some more friends to join Revolt (Now Stoat - For some reason) from Discord. It’s not easy and moving people over is way harder than moving them to signal, at least in my experience. Now just wishing they would add end to end encryption like they’ve been promising (but don’t seem to be too focused on)
I moved my both work and personal numbers to jmp.chat and got a data only sim from them. Working perfectly fine for my use case.
Its not for someone who make lots of calls and use data, but im mostly on wifi and most of my contacts use either signal or whatsapp.
I cant move out of WhatsApp bcz if i does so many of my contacts will start making normal calls so im keeping WhatsApp and enabled Passkeys in WhatsApp so i dont have to depend on the sms verification with the new voip number.
Went all-in on GOS. Using Obtainium and PWAs mostly, with 2-3 apps via the anonymous account on Aurora store. I switched from an iphone13 pro, but am really not missing iOS at all.
Set up Molly with Unified push. So far, it’s turned out to be a more reliable option for calls and notifications than Signal was. Maybe it’s the split tunneling that I’m using like a pro these days, after some inspiration from Techlore
With all of the above, I’m allowing my separate Proton Unlimited account of 2 years to downgrade to a free account. So now exploring Mullvad VPN instead of Proton.
Convinced partner to switch to Brave browser and search, on both mobile and laptop. Demonstrating Brave Ask was instrumental in affecting this change. Helped them set up profiles and PWAs to keep their workflow easy. Helped them change important passwords, and moved them to Proton Pass. And so on…
I’ve gotten many of my friends and family on Signal, but mostly, I’m the only one they’re chatting with on it. So now, upping my anti-Meta, pro-privacy activism by a couple of notches.
I often read about lifetime subscriptions. Most startups get sold. What happens to the lifetime subscriptions after that? Does anyone have any experience with this?
I’ve never taken out a lifetime subscription because I generally don’t trust companies.
As support for Windows10 is ending this week, it was finally time for my grandma (and maybe my dad in the near future) to move on. She is not the most computer-literate, but she uses the computer for some basic tasks like email, looking up recipes or managing her photos (no banking or anything or anything really sensitive, so maybe she would have been fine on windows10 but we wanted to be safe, rather than sorry). I was pleasantly surprised that all the (proprietary) programs she uses were either in the repos, downloadable from the web or had a foss alternative that she liked. Also, the printer was plug-and-play, so hardware support has definitely improved since the last time I tried to print something myself.
As the change happened just this weeks, I have not heard back on how she likes it, but as I have been the technical support in my family anyways, I don’t think that will be a problem.
Now my dad: he does way more stuff: banking, taxes, online-shopping… Currently he is considering signing up for Windows10 extended support, but that only pushes the problem for a year, so the topic will come up again.
Both of them were running Intel 7th-gen, so CPUs that are ~9years old. I really don’t get, why Microsoft decided, that these (especially for their use case) very capable CPUs are not good enough to run Windows11…
Nice! If only I can do that with my mom.. because my mom doesn’t like me messing with things. And she’s scare of linux. Well she doesn’t much about computers.
Welcome to our 66th week of privacy & security wins 
Going live at the normal time 