Real world, it’s a royal pain in the butt trying to get a not-smart TV. There’s a couple of companies that sell them at consumer-accessible prices and they aren’t as frequently on the kinds of deep discounts bigger brands go for. You might just have to steer your parents towards using an Apple TV (the only ads are for Apple’s own services plus nice integration with iPhones if your parents happen to be iPhone users) then set it up to boot straight to the Apple TV so they never see the Smart TV OS, and of course never connect the Smart TV to the Internet so whatever data harvesting it does do is useless

There’s an infamous tech support tale dating back to the Windows 95 days of a very religious lady who wanted all of the wizards removed from her computer. Similar for an individual who absolutely did not want any mice around their computer

I’ll just throw out there the old school halt and catch fire (also the name of a really good show I need to rewatch and actually finish sometime) but also who can’t love lp0 on fire?

I mean, the advice I’ve heard for one who’s threat model is “the feds are actively trying to identify me” is to have a dedicated burner computer that you do all of your illegal activities on and no other activities. Then of course on top of that avoid saving secrets onto the device and type them in manually every time (ephemeral distros like Tails are good for that)

That’s honestly kinda funny but also very useful!

i noticed both of the ethernet lights were on and blinking

So usually one of the lights on the port indicates the link state (up/down and if its at full speed or a reduced speed) and the other light indicates data flow. Both lights blinking suggests either a really shoddy link state or an unusual implementation of status lights on the port. Do both lights blink while its booted and actively transferring a large file? Can you find documentation of how your device implements the indicator LEDs? (I can’t tell if that’s a dongle or a port on your computer)

If the power cord is plugged in but the computer is shutdown, and the light is still on, then that means the network adapter supports WoL or OOB management and must stay on for that reason

Also worth noting that Windows is especially bad about actually shutting down when you tell it to shut down because something something fastboot. I’ve seen similar inconsistently on Linux but I strongly suspect that to be more edgecases with specific hardware and my install.

The lights are blinking because broadcasts packets from other devices on your LAN are sent to every device. This is normal and expected behavior.

Just building off of this, modern computers are chatty as heck and there’s just constantly little bits of chatter spamming out on LANs. This is normal and expected behavior

About a month ago I got a dozen for $3 from a neighbor. Delicious!

For public facing only use key based authentication. Passwords have too much risk associated for public facing ssh

In the US the FDIC sets security requirements for banks and audits annually, and they keeps raising requirements every year or so. At this point its just easier for a bank to invest in following current best practices and keep updating to the current best practices than to keep chasing every new finding on the FDIC audits each year

Source: I worked in IT at a bank for a while

Just a quick tip: I’ve had good luck getting insurance through a broker. I have cheaper insurance through some B2B place that doesn’t work directly with consumers with better coverage than if I went through some national brand that spends millions of dollars a month on advertising to consumers. The other benefit of a broker is now you have a third party who’s incentivized to not only find you the best deal but also someone you can get advice from during a claim should anything seem off to you.

Who knows, maybe they’re required by Google to provide a privacy policy, like xscreensaver was

so all rules would have to be applied on the Pi itself

Sounds like you’ll want to setup IPTables

Chrome’s privacy sandbox is a very different protocol from Mozilla’s PPA protocol. I haven’t read about Safari’s variant so I don’t know if that’s a copy/paste of Chrome’s or it’s own protocol

The big difference between Privacy Sandbox (previously Topics API and before that FLoC) and PPA is that Google’s “solution” still tracks the user while Mozilla’s just tracks the ads and gives aggregate data to the advertiser

Non-profits of the scale that Mozilla is need good talent to continue to exist. Good talent needs to be paid close to market rates to work for non-profits, and retaining good talent requires even better pay and benefits than just what will get good talent in the door

No matter how much or how little the talent at a nonprofit is paid people will go “why are they paying the CEO a $1 million dollar salary? They could hire 6-8 developers for that much!” “Why are they paying developers 100k/year? Can’t they accept 80k for the privilege of working for such an important bastion of the open internet?”

15 million a year is a lot but it’s also 1/3 the median CEO pay rate. They have to pay the CEO at least semi-competitively to retain them

Totally free, open source, and offering a vast offering of office apps, with paid hosted versions.

When Mozilla was founded the idea of hosted webapps didn’t exist. Quite the frankly web standards didn’t yet exist to allow such a thing to exist. Those were the days when you’d use Flash, Shockwave or Silverlight just to view media content on the web.

But I do agree, they could be investing right now into feature rich hosted services, but they’ve only half-assed any paid services they’ve tried to integrate and then dropped them because they couldn’t get enough users to make it worth continuing the effort (mostly due to the half-assed effort they put in to start with)

Holy crap that actually sounds genuinely good for meeting the advertisers desires without giving up user privacy

For those dark pattern email boxes I like entering things like admin@[website that’s serving a dark pattern mailbox] or marketing@website because 50% of the time it just gives me whatever without any trouble and the other 50% of the time I clear cookies and consider if I really need whatever they’re gating behind harvesting my email…

I feel like a browser API that just gives info to the site when request of either “is under age, is of age to create an account, is adult” might be an easy way to establish something like this too

This way the site can voluntarily check if they’re illegally collecting data on minors, if they’re showing adult content to adults, and automatically display age appropriate content of applicable

Maybe an NSFW flag as well that sites can check to automatically show/hide NSFW content, for example on work machines or shared computers, but that’s probably getting a little too finegrained

The real question is how is the age flag determined? Is it determined by the browser? The OS? Browser seems the safest bet, since Google can base it off of the Google Account, Microsoft can base it off the Microsoft account and Mozilla can shove it in the settings and potentially base it on the Mozilla account