A dedicated place to share all of our wins! Welcome to our 67th 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!
I have one. I was looking into hosting my own SearXNG instance. I made (or I should say, chat gpt mostly made) an easy way to install your own instance on linux or mac. Posted it on github (invisi101). Maybe someone else might find it useful. Really enjoy your youtube videos by the way.
So, first time post here, just joined the forum few minutes ago, after watching few videos ( maybe more than few ) ….old IT guy .. started with C64.. 286..386 , adlib sound cards and TURBO button on computer .. my setup, main computer.. games and editing videos and pictures.. media computer connected to TV and a laptop. Media and laptop were win10.. can’t update the windows so I was looking into rufus and doing it that way, but decided not to. and one day I just snapped and installed Ubuntu on my main computer, separate disk from Win, weekend and I will install Mint on laptop and media computer ! So, I didnt get rid of Win11, just separate partition and booting into linux as default. Managed to get one game that I play in Wine and running on Ubuntu, Brave as browser , and looking into proton ecosystem , but need some time to decide whats best for me. No problems with Linux ( I did hate linux for years ) except I can’ get used to no desktop shortcuts/icons and procedure how to create one and run a program like that ( chatGpt ftw ! ) So I would say this is kinda half win . Second part of my story is Pixel 7a and GrapheneOs, installed this week, still have my Samsung because this is even worse than Linux.. watching too many videos, reading too much, and then experimenting, but its all fun and games . I think this is a step in good direction. Getting rid of Google…. Microsoft.. maybe Facebook.. and probably Whatsapp .. Got Signal installed and 1 managed to get one of my friends to install it , so, small steps still finding myself in Linux and GOS !
Well, I sort of just started my privacy journey recently but I figured I’d share my early wins! I have begun migrating from Microsoft 365 to Proton, I have finished migrating my emails, I have migrated all of my files from OneDrive, currently in the process of moving my passwords from Apple Passwords to Proton Pass and emails for various accounts to aliases, as well as enabling 2FA on everyone of them using Proton Authenticator (this is taking a very very long time ). My next win is joining the Techlore forums to get more involved as I really like the vibe
I reinstalled graphene os. And now I discovered you can make rss feeds from youtube channels with the https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[channel_id], where [channel_id] is a unique identifier for the channel. Looking for a way to activate rss feeds for this forum now.
Edit: I replaced google play books with PocketBook (offline) and google speech recognition (offline). One comment on Plexus said turn off network permission after downloading the languages. And it still works!
I started running Libreelec (Kodi) on an old computer I had laying around so I could stream movies and such from my jellyfin server without a proprietary tv dongle.
I also started self hosting my photos. I used immich running on the same NAS running TrueNAS.
And I set up two different user profiles on graphene to separate some apps I don’t wholly trust but need to have like the app for the proprietary router I have (Working on fixing that ;D)
My privacy win is that I called my state and federal representatives in the US to oppose any version of age verification for installing software like what we’re seeing in Texas.
At this point I have a note on my phone where I copied down the phone numbers of all my reps’ offices so that I can easily call all five of them every time I hear about a stupid escalation of the government’s invasion of our privacy.
In my mind, I am in this for the long haul and need to regularly apply pressure on my reps to do the right thing. If not we will continue to see these boneheaded (if not malicious) proposals being signed into law across the US. We need to stop the next bill before it even passes in state legislatures!
Legit, we have been late to the game on a lot of these laws where they have already been signed into law awaiting only a start date. We need to block these proposals way sooner than we are doing today.
I have taken my first steps with TrueNAS. In the future, I would like to no longer have any data on macOS and Linux clients, i.e., everything remotely in TrueNAS. I really like TrueNAS; I find the system very streamlined and clear. The community is very helpful.
Main mobile number deleted/changed
I had been using my old mobile number for about 15 years and have now deleted it. Unfortunately, it was stored in many places where I no longer have access. I am still in contact with various support departments to change the number. It’s a very tedious process. But hopefully the next mobile number change will go much better. This one really went wrong.
I finally took the time to audit my accounts and poor email hygiene. I created a tuta email, made an addy.io account with it, went through all my accounts on my password manager and swapped them all to email aliases with a few on my tuta. I also made sure to enable 2fa on a bunch of accounts lacking it. To those looking to do something similar, it took a few hours and I still need to keep my old gmail around to get some account support emails.
Very minor win…did some troubleshooting and discovered a lot of the issues I was having on some of my devices were actually caused but UBO-lite. So I’ve been experimenting again with AdGuard and it did fix those issues. Had a family member report some similar breakage as well with UBO-lite I installed for them in Chrome, so this is just an ongoing troubleshoot I’m trying to figure out, but just discovering the cause was huge! So yeah: if you’re having issues with site breakage, UBO-Lite can cause issues (apparently even when it’s disabled on a website? — not sure, still experimenting!) Will surely update as I learn more
Thanks for leaving your wins everyone! This week we’re going to showcase @BleachedFeather with some AWESOME wins, but definitely not the only big wins to showcase
Tune in to the stream here at 2025-10-31T20:00:00Z — see you all soon!
Welcome to our 67th week of privacy & security wins 
still finding myself in Linux and GOS !
). My next win is joining the Techlore forums to get more involved as I really like the vibe 
