Your options if you wish to stick with Windows:

• Windows 10 LTSC (massgrave activators and has a guide for getting an ISO for it) which means a reinstallation (best option with Windows, least enshittification, still keep security updates but have to back up your stuff and reinstall everything) though this may not be a long-term plan if you play video games as I expect many places may drop Windows 10 support by 2028-29 end of ESU rather than 2032 end of LTSC support.

• Windows 11 but change to LTSC (massgrave can do this)

• Windows 11 but change to Enterprise license (massgrave can do this) and use Windows Group Policy settings to set target for updates to the current OS build version number which will delay feature updates for I believe up to 6-12 months but allow you immediate security updates. Bad news is you still get the new “features” but good news is they’re delayed significantly and maybe by the time you have to “upgrade” Microsoft has tweaked them to be moderately less bad and much less buggy.

Not sure.

Apple TV devices do offer a similar app for collating together all your streaming services and their offerings and Apple tends to be a tad better on privacy but for something like this I really suspect your data is being collected by Apple though what they do with it may be a little bit better than Google though I don’t really know.

These apps tend to have some sort of built-in recommendation stuff and to do that they need to profile you and your habits to be useful. Now true they could do that and not make it available to advertisers but the very idea is pretty fraught. I can tell you the streamers themselves in many cases are selling your habits and preferences.

Basically though when it comes to streaming you have only these choices of ‘platforms’:

• Google / Android TV: Run by Google, you know the deal, comes with lots of smartvs, various devices exist running it from Walmart (Onn) to Google themselves, to Xiaomi, and so on.

• Apple TV: By Apple, comes in two flavors, with and without ethernet, typical Apple experience in that it’s locked down, so no side-loading but no ads on the homescreen either and less data collection than most other offerings by Apple themselves (note: the streaming company apps often do their own data collection and will do so on any platform). Very direct competitor to Google TV by a company wealthy enough to be able to stand toe to toe and not fret too much about profits from one small device line like this, also used to get people into their streaming service AppleTV+ as the devices come free with a few months of it.

• Roku: Probably about the worst for privacy, very aggressive anti-privacy practices, data collection, profiling your local network devices and of course the service itself is ad supported.

• Fire TV by Amazon: Not great, better than Roku probably, not a lot of hands on experience with this myself but it runs a modified version of Android and in future probably a modified version of Linux. Used to be sideloading friendly but they’re now cracking down hard because of piracy.

• Roll your own device, use a mini-PC, raspberry pi, old laptop, etc: Disadvantages include all commercial streaming services will not go above 1080p (no 4k), many are locked to 720p because it’s not a certified device with lock-down against video capture, experience isn’t as natively smooth as a dedicated streaming device designed with that in mind. Hack-y solutions like using air-mouses as remote controls that can be good or bad. Things can break and you’re on your own to support yourself. Upsides include no homescreen ads, minimal data collection, complete control of the device, ability in some cases to do limited adblocking but at the cost as I said of no 4k, often no full 1080p with most streaming services. I wouldn’t recommend this unless you do a lot of served from home media streaming via Jellyfin, Plex, directplay off your movie rips hard drive, etc as this is where it really shines.

• Dune-HD: If you’re looking for something with high-end support that allows 4k streaming from streaming services plus stuff like Plex there are Dune-HD devices. They run certified Android alongside a custom linux build inside a privacy container isolated from Android. They offer a lot of devices that are in the roll your own category but a bit more polished (though still often locked to 720 or 1080p by streaming services), but they also offer a few devices that are dual-os as mentioned so straddle the AndroidTV and roll your own divide kind of offering the best of both.

It’s also incredibly annoying for file hashing and trying to verify the integrity and that the file wasn’t tampered with or replaced in transit because often every single one of these stub online installers has a different hash because they’re embedding time or some other variable about you in installer.

Three basic options exist:

1. Burner: Take a device that isn’t a normally used device for each category. Make sure it has nothing you care about on it, no incriminating web history, no accounts logged in or saved as cookies that are incriminating, etc, etc. This is simplest, most expensive, but also most fool-proof against all possible threats.

2. Wiped: Wipe the device before travel, possibly backing things up in the cloud to download after arriving. You’ll have to back up again with any changes you make and wipe again before traveling back then at your final destination again restore the device from backups. If you have serious fears of close inspection or forensic analysis then it would behoove you to use a secure erase feature on the drive and reinstall the OS rather than just trying to delete problematic files. For smartphones especially doing this and restoring from a cloud back-up can be pretty easy, for laptops it’s more of a pain.

3. Mail ahead: Take the devices to a package service, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc ahead of time, mail them ahead of or just behind you so they arrive just before or slightly after you. For this to work you need a fixed accommodation that can accept packages and which you trust to store them and give them to you. This technically doesn’t prevent mail interception but unless you’re a high value target that’s unlikely at present as its kind of a multi-agency intentional effort thing. Still I’d mail the device in a fully encrypted state.

No other feasible options exist. You can encrypt yes and if you are a US citizen you cannot be denied re-entry (non-citizens can be not only denied entry but barred for years after for refusing to decrypt a device/cooperate) but they can seize your device and hold it for up to a year while trying to crack it and you’ll have to expend effort to get it back at the end of that period. They can also put you in a holding cell for hours or hypothetically up to a couple days if they really want to press it accuse you of something and be unpleasant during that time.

Okay you say this but these tools are privately owned. What happens when one day the provider slams them with a 1000% price increase? They can either pay or go back to doctors who detect cancer even worse. It gives these AI companies undue influence and turns a tool into a crutch and an addiction which can be leveraged to drive up healthcare costs and punish providers who don’t play ball perhaps resulting in deaths from doctors in systems that don’t have access to the tool because they’re in a payment dispute with it or they had it but stopped paying for it and patients may not know any of this.

This is a nightmare for human beings who have fought hard to grow smart, to be intelligent as a species and to have educated professionals who have learned to use their brains be instead trained by these machines to stop using their brains, to atrophy them, to become dependent on these systems and worse than before the moment they are removed.

It will be used to attack the wages of doctors and I guarantee that they won’t be compensated with cheaper schooling (doctors need at least 6 years of university plus additional years in training before being able to practice on their own, it’s an immense expense and burden in a time of rising costs and huge debt). Which will lead to shortages of doctors and they’ll be replaced with AI and nurses not up to the task and we’ll be told this is fine. Having access to a thinking human being may become a gated luxury that few insurance companies want to shell out for until after you’ve been evaluated by AI systems several times and only IF those systems deem it necessary. Some AI systems will make mistakes that kill patients and insurance companies will be fine with this as a quickly dead patient is usually cheaper than paying for months or years of treatments and/or surgeries so they’ll have a perverse incentive to push patients towards those systems. Doctors take an oath not to do harm, not all take that as seriously as they should but usually there’s some compassion there whereas a computer system would not care one bit if you’re denied and unlike a doctor won’t fight for you against the insurance companies.

If the UK is serious about blocking VPNs that don’t comply they’ll mostly succeed for the big ones. They’ll get them removed from app stores which will prevent most normies from finding and using them. They’ll apply network blocks to their entrance IP addresses (laughably easy, there are commercial vendors who sell data like this so they don’t even need to invent the wheel here) and make it difficult. They wouldn’t be able to prevent truly determined VPN providers from providing service but the days of $4/month for privacy/torrenting would be gone as the prices would likely be higher and you’d have to do things like mail cash.

Beyond the known IPs, VPN traffic is fairly easy to flag with DPI solutions and could be detected and blocked or dropped by ISPs acting under the law. This could also be used to stop people running tunnels to hosted VPS solutions outside of the country or run by friends from their homes. There are obviously ways around these, disguising traffic, various techniques but for most people they’d give up and either stop browsing porn or cough up their ID. Of course this would create a dangerous state of affairs where anyone using a VPN without being KYC’ed is clearly a criminal, at the very least a suspected video pirate, at the most a dangerous child predator or terrorist.

Additionally the UK isn’t like Russia or China, lots of western CEOs and employees pass through and within its jurisdictions and if a particular VPN is providing service without this they could try and arrest c-suite people or engineering staff associated with it and slam them with jail time. So that’s a problem.

then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function

A little credit here. They’d rephrase the law to only target VPNs whose purpose is offering as a service to the general public (as opposed to exclusively employees and contractors) the ability to connect to a private network with exit points / the ability to appear as if their traffic originates from outside of the UK.

On a related matter they could also require know your customer for all VPNs, require all VPNs keep logs available on request for police inspection and those who don’t are banned. All companies keep extensive logs for corporate VPNs so this wouldn’t present any additional burden to private enterprise but would be the end of anonymous VPN services.

I really don’t think this is more of the spectacle and move on. Not this time. I think Palestine has them spooked because they lost control of the narrative and the best way to seize control of the internet and clamp down on people conveying information they don’t like is starting with things like this.

No. It’s fine.

Tor uses its own DNS system to my recollection. It’s true there is DNS as part of fingerprinting and DNS leaks are a concern for VPNs (see for example https://www.dnsleaktest.com/) but Tor is not vulnerable to this and it’s more a problem of you’re using a VPN to appear to be in NYC but your DNS shows Phoenix so that’s a big discrepancy that raises the uniqueness of your fingerprint on a VPN and even lets threat actors guesstimate where you actually are. As I said though this is not an issue on Tor.

So understand that the DNS from Mullvad will only affect other programs not Tor. It will prevent say your ISP’s DNS from seeing your video games calling their domains that way. Your ISP can still see you’re connecting to infrastructure for as an example Genshin Impact when you launch the game because they can see where your traffic is flowing and the IP addresses as well as traffic patterns, ports, etc. It somewhat limits the data and visibility they get but there is something called SNI snooping as well as of course the fact they know the IP addresses where your connections go. So it’s perhaps better than nothing but understand the limits of it as they still have a lot of visibility though they shouldn’t be able to see your web searches regardless just that you’re accessing google or bing or duckduckgo as those sites use HTTPS.

Pretty easy honestly.

You do something like remove section 230 (or whatever the EU equivalent is) that provides safe harbor from liability for transit providers like ISPs and content providers like websites that host user submitted content. You condition any safe harbor on the services in question being able to turn over and ID exactly who the offending person was without fail and tie any and every packet to a real world person. You make explicit that not being able to scrutinize content (because of encryption) is not an excuse. Thus someone pirating or sending CSAM over your network via a VPN makes you liable for not stopping them.

As a result this forces ISPs to block all encrypted traffic detected via deep packet inspection. Only traffic encrypted with public key infrastructure that has government issued keys that allow snooping on it is allowed.

Tada. There’s no way around this that doesn’t involve painstaking steganography which can possibly be nailed by AI anyways. Things like embedding a secret message in pictures you send with some pixels shifted to hide the data and your friend having a program and key that can decode it. Or things like taking all the capitalized letters and applying rot13 or something to them with some sort of algorithm but then you need to find a way to make the message intelligible on the surface as if you’re sending constant unintelligible messages you might get flagged and blocked or visited by the police (or the police get a warrant and have your mobile company deploy malware onto your devices and spy on you as a threat because of that).

The only other alternative is using alternative infrastructure. HAM radio type network transmission via a series of hops with similar activists but this wouldn’t be practical for most given the expense and the bandwidth would be awful. Also probably illegal and if they wanted to it would be trivially easy to identify and arrest those running these nodes and relays due to triangulation.

Turns out the whole liberal west with freedom of thought and speech was in fact a lie. Kept around to use as a stick to whack at the USSR with but now dropped at the first signs of serious popular discontent and trouble in favor of total control. Supposed values quickly dropped with no more excuse than “Russians” or “think of the children” or the usual criminals and terrorists.

They can’t stop a really determined actor from engaging in encrypted messaging but they can stop 98% of the population and that’s more than enough to control thought and action of the population.

Hmm how long until Hollywood sees this and demands the same of anyone discussing engaging in online piracy?

Also an interesting thought. What if this isn’t actually meant to get all drug producers or users talking online but the companies? This could be meant to be used as a threat and a sledgehammer against the tech companies. Basically they pass this, let them rack up not reporting anything for months, years, then come and hit them with a lawsuit demanding internal moderation logs and data and threaten to rake them over the coals for thousands of built up violations BUT then they offer to instead drop all that in exchange for them changing their moderation policies in a certain political way to suit the administration and some token reforms to address the law which won’t be scrutinized further if they comply with the political censorship wants.

The billionaire tech class was created by the Internet and are actively damaging the world for their own personal gain.

I hate to tell you but there were billionaires and multi-millionaires way before the internet and they were damaging the world horrendously for greed and personal gain. They even have this system structured around allowing them to do that called capitalism.

So no the internet didn’t create that. Capitalism created that. Just as it created the climate change denial oil industry and the people who made money off of destroying the planet with that and would still be doing so without the internet. Just as it made dishonest press barons who loved Nazi Germany such as Randolph Hearst way before the internet existed and for a more modern example Rupert Murdoch. Just as before that it created incentives to hide and denial tobacco caused cancer or that asbestos caused cancer and other diseases or that lead poisoned us especially children. And on and on. Or the Triangle Shirt-waist fire and thousands of incidents just like that around the world where people are killed in poorly maintained factories kept that way out of greed. Or companies that pump poison into the water and air because it’s cheaper. I could go on forever.

PIA is run by a sketchy company with ties to zionists. Please do not support them.

If you need a cheap VPN go with AirVPN or even Nord over PIA.

No.

This is where you provide a streaming link file like m3u8 or a link to such a file and watch streaming content provided by others. For example NASA has a channel like that, so does CNN, and various other ad-supported TV network streams. There are also paid providers that require a subscription for example to access content.

Third party anti-fraud database providers that have access to private databases with info on people. Things like public records, private records, data brokers, etc.

• He used to follow (probably still does) open white supremacists and Nazis of the Richard Spencer/Lauren Southern type and got called out for it and privated his follows on twitter. That was many years ago but given he’s never done a u-turn and say started attacking gamergate and other reactionary gamer politics or loudly supporting broad coalition progressive politics I think we can assume he still holds those politics and more importantly he dog whistles and is part of a pipeline of radicalizing young men, specifically gamers into hate.

He also used to follow a ton of open white supremacist NAZIS on Twitter like Laura Southern and that guy who got punched in the face. People screenshotted it and he noticed and privated his follows. That was many years ago. But you don’t follow open Nazis if you’re just some gamer dude (if he was some sort of respectable journalist you could have an excuse of having a newsworthiness angle but he followed them because he liked their posts because he is a NAZI).

I think he’s more greedy than committed to bringing about Nazi goals so is somewhat careful about not exposing too much of that part of himself but he’s part of the white supremacist gamergate to white supremacist streamers pipeline and should be called a Nazi until they day he 1) admits he was a Nazi, 2) disavows that. 3) disavows other Nazi gamer streamers who exist in his “edgelord space” 4) becomes openly progressive and goes out of his way to denounce and attack fascists and white supremacy. Until that day he should be assumed to still be a Nazi.

It’s impossible to de-google or meaningfully remove unwanted stuff from Smart TVs while keeping them usable for streaming purposes.

What you want to do is factory reset, don’t connect to the internet, go into settings and turn off whatever you can, and then use a streaming box.

Yes it’s an additional cost but it’s BETTER. The processors and memory in those TVs are lousy, the apps are often sluggish, the experience is simply not great. Frankly the hardware was built not to be usable for you, they are data collection platforms that include minimal low quality streaming experiences in order to collect data. No software is going to fix that.

Want something that “just works” and supports all the major streamers? Get an Apple TV 4k. It’s pretty private but importantly no ads, clean interface, powerful hardware. Is it maximally private? No. But it is easy.

Want to put in effort? You can get either a Dune-HD box (some have dual-OS without reboot where one is Netflix certified to get you full resolution while passing DRM checks while another is unlocked bootloader which you can install all kinds of things like Plex and Kodi on) or get some other Android streaming device of your choice (Walmart’s Onn brand 4k devices used to be very good and cheap though you might need to check as I heard rumors the latest devices can’t be unlocked).

You’ll have a better experience on more powerful hardware and will never want to go back to the bad on-board TV experience.

Wait until you find out they offer apps with ties to:

• FBI
• US military
• CIA
• NSA
• The most awful fascist ghouls on podcasts and youtube
• The “israeli” state and its war criminal institutions.

Curious then you pick on vague ties to China to fearmonger.

I mean FFS Microsoft and Google are actively abetting the most documented genocide in a century. Where is the outrage from these garbage people over that? Where’s the push to help boycott and pressure them to stop assisting the slaughter? Children are being killed right now in Gaza with the help of these American companies and where are the stories encouraging people to stop using them?

IMO focus on purchasing physical content from creators or distributors who NEED to get paid.

It’s one thing to foolishly throw money at these big companies for blurays of an already very successful series while they’re throwing their old libraries in the trash or ‘the vault’ or just shoveling most of their money towards low quality reality garbage.

It’s another to buy a Criterion or BFI or Vinegar Syndrome bluray of something out of print that they need to recoup the costs of restoring and scanning.

If someone buys a bluray of an MCU movie they are a chump, firstly for liking that stuff, secondly for giving Disney more money for it when those things already earn piles of cash in theaters and that alone would be enough to keep them paying salaries and producing that stuff.

Spend money on independent film-makers/releases, on restorations, on series you like on the verge of cancellation.

Sadly I think the conclusion is already written, physical media’s days are numbered, the big companies are going to shut down the overwhelming majority of bluray and dvd production within 5-10 years is my feeling because why sell you for $20-$30 a copy of something when they can get your rent in the form of streaming monthly payments for the rest of your natural life?

And best of all with the rent they can push ads which further increase their revenue. That bluray is a one-time payment, ads for watching the movie on streaming are a continual revenue stream. I predict that they will either have completely killed off ad-free tiers of streaming to push most of their audience into an even bigger and more valuable ad pool to sell to advertisers OR the prices of the ad-free tiers will grow dramatically away from the ad-supported tiers. Right now it’s a few bucks a month, I suspect within 10 years it will be 170-300% the cost of the ad-supported version.

Because their founder (Marlinspike) is probably under a National Security Letter, maybe it’s just that, maybe he’s done some crimes they’re also holding over him. If you look at his behavior it’s that of someone very paranoid that they’re going to be found out to be cooperating with the feds and get hit with charges for not upholding the bargain, someone straddling one or two big lies that have to be maintained to keep their life going. Very controlling of things they should be open about if they care about privacy as they claim. But exactly the behavior of someone under an NSL who’s terrified of getting hit with charges for that and maybe other things but who is expected to front and run a purported privacy first messenger. The secrecy, the refusal to allow others to operate their own servers, the antagonism towards federation, the long periods without publishing source code updates.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that signal message content is compromised, the NSA primarily scrapes metadata and would most care about knowing who is talking to who and to put real names to those people and building graphs of networks of people. Other things like what times they talk can be inferred from upstream taps on signals servers without their knowledge or cooperation via traffic observation and correlation especially when paired with the fourteen eyes global intercept network. With a phone number it’s also a lot easier to pinpoint an exact device to hack using a cooperating (or hacked) telecom. Phone numbers can also be correlated to triangulated positions of devices, see who in a leftist protest network was A) heavily sending messages and B) attended that protest and left last and begin to infer things about structure and particular relationships.

And those saying it has to do with spam prevention, that’s kind of nonsense. First I still get the occasional spam, second a phone number that can receive a confirmation text is something all these criminal organizations have access to which the average person doesn’t. Third it’s possible to prevent spam just by looking for people (especially new accounts under 120 days old) sending very small amounts of messages (1-3) to a very large amount of other users especially in a short amount of time. Third there’s no reason to keep the phone number tied to the account, a confirmation text could be required with a promise to delete the phone number immediately after (would still be technically useful to the NSA though less useful for keeping track of people changing numbers or using a burner for this who might be higher value targets).