2023 Reddit Refugee
On Decentralization:
“We no longer have choice. We no longer have voice. And what is left when you have no choice and no voice? Exit.” - Andreas Antonopoulos
When you get an email from Company A that sends to your alias email, the email goes to your inbox. When you reply to that email, your alias provider forwards it to Company A where the sender is your alias address.
In short, you simply reply and your alias service takes care of it for you so that the recipient only sees your alias email and not your true email.
I signed up with them ensuring I read their privacy policy. Based on my personal privacy threat model, I’m okay with their policy. This wouldn’t fit a more intensive threat model.
I haven’t read it recently but last I remember they do have the option to temporarily store an email in the event of a failed delivery, until it can eventually get sent to you. This is opt-in I believe, and a toggle you can enable in your account.
In the time I’ve used them I haven’t had any issues with email deliveries. Been happy with the service so far, having left SimpleLogin and Proton for political reasons.
This is what I do as well. I purchased my own custom domain name and run aliases off it using Addy. So as an example, an email for an online account would look like: random9.words@mycustomemail.com
Then I feed these accounts into a password manager so I don’t have to remember them.
All the aliases forward mail directly to my main inbox. Companies never see what my real address is. If I get spam, I know which company either sold my data or leaked my data. I can then take action by simply turning off that email alias and then spinning up a new one.
The best thing about owning your custom domain is that you’re in control and never have to change your email addresses. If I want to move to a new email provider, I can easily do that. The process, simplified:
Edit: All providers make it very simple to set up a custom domain. If you can follow instructions and copy and paste text, their systems will run checks to make sure you did it correctly and it’s syncing properly. Very easy for those who aren’t technical.
Not necessarily. If you can find on Bandcamp, it’s probably best to buy from there since I heard more money goes to the artists. I buy from wherever I can find the music, and thus I’ll cycle between Bandcamp or HDTracks if I can’t find it on Qobuz.
Separately I dislike how Bandcamp embeds their name in the metadata of the tracks you buy, but it’s trivial to remove it. Just rubs me the wrong way, so most of the times if songs are on Qobuz I buy it there since they don’t do that.
I only can answer your second question. You can redownload your purchases at any time. Music will remain in your library forever until one day licensing will take it away from you.
Qobuz has been very transparent - when you complete a purchase, they warn and recommend you to download it as soon as you can because license revocation can remove that music from your account. They’re my preferred platform for buying music.
Just a heads up that the Smart Cancer has already begun infecting PC monitors. Samsung makes Smart Monitors.
It won’t be long before there are no longer Dumb Monitors.
Same strategy here. I’m in the U.S. and tariffs were my big concern. In December, I waited for the Sapphire Nitro+ 7900 XTX to go on sale and I paid less than MSRP for it brand new. Having experienced both the disasters of the previous two GPU gens, I had the foresight that the launch of the next gen cards would also be a disaster, and here we are.
PC Gaming has become a rich person’s hobby.
Buy current gen right before the next gen launches, and you’ll be set. I expect to get 10 years out of my card, with the incredible performance, build quality, and 24 GB VRAM.
Nah, you can still try Floorp. It’s very similar to Vivaldi (Chromium). I’m happy with it after using it for a few days to where I uninstalled Firefox. Shame for Firefox, been a user since 2003 or whenever.
It took me less than five minutes to easily migrate my data from Firefox to Floorp. If Floorp enshittifies in the future, it’ll be super simple to migrate to another Gecko browser, or possibly Ladybird or other engines.
Yep, it’s an excellent way to hide loading. If you played the Tomb Raider games, crawling and worming through tight crevices as Lara was a loading screen in disguise.
You can buy an adapter for PC, and use the PSVR2 on PC with Steam. That might be worth considering for that integration alone.
I would never consider a Facebook product so Quest is an instant no for me.
Wow, 7 TB in a month?
Slaps roof of internet router
You can fit a lot of Linux ISOs in that data cap!
Microsoft Edge: “Thank you, Chrome, for sharing the load.”
Exactly, and this is additionally why it is predatory: you can’t opt out.
It’s similar to Facebook. If you never in your life ever created a profile, well, Facebook has one for you regardless.
The only way you can opt out of bluetooth beacons is to not bring your phone/smart watch/etc, or have either a hardware switch that disables your network functions or put it in a faraday cage. Also, because of data profiles and associations, if you’re walking into a store with your partner, expect that your partner should do the same or else it’s all moot. You’re associated with your partner and thus tracking and profiling occurs anyway.
No tinfoil hat needed. Retail stores are equipped with bluetooth beacons that tracks and monitors customer behavior. This in turn can be sold for targeted advertising. Another scary thought is that the tracking is so precise, it measures the distance your phone is from a product, including height. How high is the phone from the ground? The data points can be extrapolated to influence product placement: what products and prices influenced a customer to bend down and look at/interact with the product? How long were they in close proximity with the product? Based on the phone’s orientation, were they bent down to look at or passing by the product (indicating that they stopped for a separate reason and not necessarily for the product)? Did they buy it? Were they looking for coupons in my “retail store app” while next to the product, or somewhere else in the store? Where do customers often stop or gather in order to browse through coupons? Could we place Y products there? Where should we put the product in stores to maximize sales? What ads can we send to them as they arrive at the store? Based on aggregated data with the rich profile we built for this customer, are they likely to sign up for our rewards credit card? What is this customer’s income level? Have they purchased X product recently? What part of town do they live in? What products are popular there? Et cetera ad nauseum.
Tracking is so predatory. Makes me look at my smart phone with disgust as the years go by, and I periodically grapple with the decision if a smart phone is even right for me or if it’s time to stick to a computer and a truly dumb phone going forward.
Some public info about Bluetooth beacons: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluetooth-wireless-tracking-privacy.html
Want to find Bluetooth beacons? Simply install a Bluetooth scanner app from your phone and head to a store to see them.
Here’s how Shopify engages businesses on how to utilize Bluetooth beacons with their software package. Bought anything online? That site was most likely powered by Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/retail/the-ultimate-guide-to-using-beacon-technology-for-retail-stores
Great questions! Seriously, those made me think for sure.
For question one, I suppose a profiler could do that. If my domain name is myemaildomain.com, they probably could track all emails and sell it collectively. But I don’t think corporations do that at this time. That would be akin to profiling all Hotmail, Gmail, Live, etc emails, appreciating those are massive services. I suppose if nefarious actors were to do that to my domain, I could consider switching domains - I have multiple domain names I own, and it’d be trivial to use the other ones. In the years I’ve been using a custom domain for email, I haven’t encountered any nefarious actors and have significantly eliminated any spam.
For question two, the domain provider I use doesn’t do that in their terms of service. However, if they did look at my MX records and decided they wanted to profile me as a user of Addy, they definitely could do that. Though it would hurt their business as many users would migrate their domains to new registrars - I certainly would move my domains to a new registrar!