this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Like most things on the internet it's a game of one-upsmanship. User X uses Firefox with Incognito. User Y say's that isn't good enough for his own inconsistent definition of "good enough."
So User-Y suggests Firefox with 14 different add-ons and only browse through an immutable VM. But then user-z comes along and says that if you are using windows at all, you don't really care about privacy, so you should be using Icefox on some obscure fork of ubuntu through an immutable VM, with a pi-hole.
Then user-w says well if you aren't using a VPN none of this matters, so Obviously you need to rent an Alibaba cloud server hosted in China, that you only connect to through a privacy respecting VPN, and then you only browse through TOR.
And so on. By the time a user is asking about how to stop google ads, the only "serious" answer by the community involves using Packet over Ham-radio -> and spending thousands of dollars a month on 4 different cloud providers, rented through several shell companies set up in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and China, while only typing in Esperanto using an ASCII-only font.
It's so overwhelming. I just want to be able to use Wireshark well to figure out wft is going on at my house with outbound surveillance data.
Wireshark is the wrong tool for the job unless you are only interested in the destination IPs, but those are useless to most people because malware and PUPs are hosted on public cloud services or rarely hijacked insecure endpoints, so what value is a source IP going to get you? For example most 'suspicious' traffic is from your cell phone and some app is phoning home over TLS, with 'home' being an elastic IP in AWS.