Stuck in botnet

Does anyone else wish to escape botnet software and services, but is simply unable to do so because of niche needs, communication with friends, etc...? I tried switching to Linux and embracing cyberpunk ideology. I couldn't do it. While I found Linux extremely comfy (i3 is a godsend), there was software I regularly use that just doesn't work well, is a pain in the ass to use, or doesn't work at all on Linux. (Ableton Live with an audio interface, ZBrush, various games...) When I turned to things like the AUR for solutions, I often ended up breaking soykaf on my system. Then I ended up spending more time doing system maintenance, which made me miss the justwerks environment of Windows. I'm stuck with services like Discord because all my close friends use it and I know that they would never switch. normal people don't care about their data being sold. normal people care about convenience and simplicity. It's left me very conflicted. I go back and forth between not caring about/ignoring botnet concerns, and wanting to escape botnet but being trapped by my social life. I managed to delete social media completely a few months ago and it's made me feel much better, but I don't know if I can go farther. Do lains have any advice?

>>30871 Privacy/Security/escaping the botnet is a slow process and a state of mind. You're fighting against very powerful forces trying their best to exploit human tendencies and make it difficult to use alternatives. I'm in a similar situation as you with discord. Although I've managed to get my group of friends away from facebook messenger and onto signal. I now have zero social media presence and no Google account and my life isn't harder. I don't know your requirements or your threat model but there are people who professionally only use Linux/FLOSS for audio work and art/film work. If they can do it and literally live with what they do, then it can be done but may require plenty of work to get used to it/find alternatives/create a workflow. I don't game on Linux but apparently that's been rapidly improving recently with WINE and Proton but DRM/Anticheat multiplayer games don't work. You can always ask yourself if those games are really that important in your life. There are more video games that anyone could play in a lifetime not playing some certain ones shouldn't be that big of an issue. Try to be aware of the "fear of missing out" and realise it's not life/death. I would say continue with what you're doing. Be aware of it and keep researching. If Discord is too cumbersome to quit now focus on other things: email, cloud services, smartphone data collection, IoT, etc. Finally, you could give Linux another shot but not with a distro like Arch and instead one like Fedora/Mint/Pop_OS!

>>30871 Are you willing to live in complete isolation or talk exclusively to failed programmers and anime obsessed weirdos who are likely on your non-botnet chat service because they're doing something illegal or sit on the other side of political extremism? Nobody will follow you over. If you ditch them on Discord and demand that they follow you are putting a tool they don't care about before them. I would be disappointed too if you ditched me as a friend because my silverware isn't adequate when I invite you over to dinner. This is how it looks if you don't care about privacy. There is no "cyberpunk ideology" aside acknowledging that you live in a dystopia. It's not cool or edgy to do any of this. If you really want to dip your toes into "cyberpunk" get another drive with linux when you feel like chatting on IRC, or don't because all IRC channels that aren't dead are bridged to Discord anyway.

I understand this pain. The reason I use a debloated W10 over Linux is due to how many issues Linux has that makes me spend most of my time doing maintenance: http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html W10 despite all of its soykaf does work mostly. If you know what you're doing you can negate most issues, and if you happen to know where to get a LTSC iso you have even less to deal with. Discord despite all the privacy issues is a much more superior platform than XMPP or other chatting applications, it's the reason why it's one of the more popular ones out there. I also don't use social media, just a waste of time in my opinion. In my situation and thread model I use botnet services, but I make sure they don't get any useful information out of me by carefully selecting what I say. If you choose not to use Linux and privacy respecting software, make sure you give the botnet nothing of value.

>>30878 >I would be disappointed too if you ditched me as a friend because my silverware isn't adequate when I invite you over to dinner. This is how it looks if you don't care about privacy. On the other hand, I really appreciate my long-time IRC friends (since before Discord's existence) constantly berating me for refusing to follow them to Discord. Really great fuarrrking friends.

>>30877 Linux gaming has definitely made strides, but it's not quite there yet. Creative workflow is definitely a big one for me. Linux audio kinda is like kicking dead whales down the beach ass and trying to get near-zero latency input from an audio interface into your DAW is hell. Trying to get your VSTs working through a bridge is also a pain in the ass. It's just not worth the hassle when it literally just works on Windows. Recently I've been considering what to do about my phone. I have a OnePlus 7 Pro that cost way too much. I think I'll probably get the next Pixel phone when it comes out and GrapheneOS is stable on it. >>30878 You're not wrong. This is the other side of "fuarrrk the botnet, open source all the way" that keeps me from embracing it completely. >>30879 Agreed. I couldn't even get Xorg to properly save settings for my monitors on multiple different distros. I tried everything. It was hell. One acquaintance of mine who uses Arch regularly was baffled that I had so many issues. >>30880 Unfortunately, most people will always gravitate towards what's cool and new, and will leave the "old" in the dust.

>>30878 I think your view of isolationism is way too extreme. My friends followed me to Signal because I made them aware for a long time (years) before it happened that I wasn't comfortable using facebook and would eventually leave. I took that time to do research in what would be the best compromise for me and them in terms of alternatives. Yes I could have self-hosted an OMEMO XMPP server but I chose Signal (even though I have some issues with it) because it provided the best compromise for my privacy requirements and their ease-of-use requirements. Further, my friends followed me because they actually want to stay in contact with me. They like me and my input to the group. Discord, like many things, will come and go. It's current near monopoly on the gaming VOIP market is because of how ridiculously easy it is for someone to "create a server" and the crazy amount of marketing they did. It functions well enough and after a critical number of users just exploded. In order to get your friends to switch, you need to figure out their limit of the value of you + their tolerance for inconvenience and find something just below that.

If you gonna use W10 then please use a custom windows 10 OS https://www.teamos-hkrg.com/ It's better than having a literal spyware as your OS

>>30884 Barebones W7 ISO.. Honestly I might use that instead of W10 LTSC

>>30884 >Sign in required to download files >Sign up only allows a small amount of Email domains (Yahoo, Yandex, Gmail, etc) fuarrrk sake I just want to download one iso.

>>30884 I get what they're trying to achieve but after seeing the change list I don't really see how changing some bloat for a different one makes any difference. The windows 10 base is still there and it's still spyware. Without the source you'll never know if it's completely secure. And with that in mind, there's no complete way to know if they didn't add their own stuff onto the releases either. Worse of all, most images are still more than 5 GB. There are 1 GB versions of LTSC that'll do the job just as fine if you disable telemetry manually and you'll have an unbloated system.

>>30888 Right now I have a W10 LTSC ISO that's ~2.6GB W10 Home 2004 is ~5GB if I remember correctly. Honestly some of the ISOs seam to have more bloat in them than the default ISOs, despite removing things like Edge, One Drive, and the other soykafty default apps of W10. >>30887 Also that, why is there even a need for an account? I'd figure these ISOs would be easily leaked in other places.

>>30887 >>30890 its to stop people from spamming, not to mention the site is kind of like a private tracker >>30888 I disagree, the reason I posted that link was to fight the idea of being stuck by microsoft. and I don't think 5GB is a big deal considering the tradeoff you get. Not to mention you know microsoft can enable back telemetry if they deem so right?

>>30883 >"create a server" We've really gotta push back on this propaganda the hardest. You can't create a fuarrrking server on Discord because they own all the damn servers.

>>30893 it would be hilarious if they started saying Discord is decentralized because there are so many different servers are they actually called servers in the application?

>>30896 Yes they are. Not sure why they call them that since it's not decentralized in a traditional since.

>>30871 You cant escape the botnet because you are a manchild OP >be me >spent the college years looking for solid friends, a life long partner, and people that had a preference for face to face conversations and spending quality time with each other >never spent a lot of time on this discord bullshit or video games, since that stuff is childish stuff you should have grown out of when you turned 18. Good friends would send basic texts ("hey anon, want to go get lunch?") that would take about 30 seconds to craft up, and then we would meet for a few hours and have physical, face to face conversations and time together >reached mid twenties, most of friends became solid individuals, focusing on their families and getting into careers that aren't soul crushing or long hours >more than half, including myself, got married to solid partners and have absolutely zero need or desire to use a chat app or do manchild stuff like playing video games >I used linux and my wife barely uses a computer since most of our activities aren't on the computer (stuff like cooking and trying out new recipes, skiing, etc) >the botnet literally cannot get me because me and my friends were always adults, not manchildren Now let me guess your case anon: >be you >literal manchild, still playing video games in early twenties >still single and not even actively looking >severely afraid of missing out on "gamer time with the guys" so attached to some botnet chat app 24/7 >friends actively encourage the use of botnet and will dump you if you switch to alternatives (low quality friends) >can barely spend any physical time with people since you've become so used to interacting with folks behind a screen, and so have the folks you associate with >the cycle continues, spend more time on the botnet, lose time that could have been spent actually living your life and connecting with people in the physical sense (virtual connecting is bullshit), get afraid that you are missing out, get older, get so used to the botnet that you lose the ability to connect with individuals without the screen, get to mid twenties single, try some dating app to make up for lost time and because you cant live your life without the screen now, match with other people who can't live without the screen, never end up connecting with any of them because you are broken now and can't form physical connections, continue the cycle until you hit 30 and at that point there will literally be no going back. You'll forever be stuck in the botnet and the screen. Literally your only chance out of the botnet is to change all your habits now. Prioritize physical over virtual. Find people with that same preference. Prioritize novelty over familiarity. Never heard of this software before? Awesome, something new, lets try it out! New restaurant? Let's try it! Never went ice skating before? That sounds new, I want to experience it! You get my point here. Good luck anon, its probably a 1/1000 chance you'll get out of the botnet, but if you do you'll never want to go back (notice how anyone who has used linux for more than 3 months has never said "im going back to windows or mac").

>>30899 I do meet with friends in person, but it's much more rare an occurence with all the COVID soykaf going on. Just the reality of 2020. My friends are all fine and have social lives but we play a lot of games since it's our main way of having fun together without seeing eachother face to face. That said, none of my friends are really the type to have parties or go get lunch together anyway. We usually have LAN parties if anything. I'm a uni student so I'm not exactly rushing to find a partner to abs

>>30900 that cut off for some reason? ..to absorb my free-time.

Ultimately the solution is for there to be adons that help reduce botnet type activities. It would be easier to get someone to use an adon than make them either switch to another program or use an additional one just to communicate with you. Unfortunately there is no way around it except through laws that protect privacy and the popularization of more private and secure software.

>>30899 I hate reading this cause it reads like Oh look at me and how better I am than you" but what you just said is totally true

>>30899 This, op is just an comfort seeking manchild. He doesn't need discord and winblows, he just wants to take an easiest route.

>>30899 It hurts to read and I think it goes a smidge too far in place but I think I needed that wake up call. Thanks.

>>30899 In spite of what you state being true to some extent, I'd argue that people cannot escape the botnet not because they are [buzzword], but because the botnet effectively permeates every single layer of life nowadays. I hope that you yourself see that your own case is somewhat ideal and I hope it's al true and you enjoy living such life. You say that the botnet cannot get you at the end of your post, nor your friends, because you are not [buzzword]. I wholeheartly disagree. If you do use a smartphone, a dumbphone, even an Internet connection... then I'm afraid someone out there is preying upon you and your friends and everyone else, be it your ISP, your typical letter soup agency, etc. The botnet at its core is not habit related. If every single lainon here would lead to live your very life, the botnet would sadly still exist.

>>30899 i haven't read such concentrated amount of truth in a while. thanks for the wake up call lainon, although i already had this sort of epiphany. lucky that i'm only 22

>>30899 And then you wake up. Seriously, what kind of cock-globbing shart friend sends texts? fuarrrking glownigger maybe. Real friends log into your onion service BBS and leave a GPG encrypted zippng with time and coordinates of your next assembly. Far away from cameras and bypassers.

>>30899 You really don't seem to understand that ditching all your friends because you're such a gigachad who doesn't need "childish" video games isn't exactly the way to become more social.

>>30905 I don't think they are trying to imply that they are better than the OP. I think they are showing them what life could be like if they made similar choices. I feel it is best to just read things with the benefit of the doubt. What is there to gain from claiming to be better than someone on an imageboard? I don't think very much. They are entirely right, regardless. Personally, I think being right is more important than some social grace. >>30899 I escaped the botnet to the best of my ability. Although, academia has a requirement that I use their Google-sponsored .edu address, and sadly I need a modern browser for academia as well... Plus the way my wife and I make income requires some botnet nonsense. However, I keep everything separate. Do you think just mere separation is enough? (Botnet machine, non-bot net machines. Separate IP addresses for the botnet. Etc.) -- I have considered having two internet connections in my house, but thought this potentially superfluous.

I'll clarify my situation a little since this thread caught some discussion. I'm studying computer animation at a decent art school with intent to work on games. I grew up with games and I can't really see myself just quitting games because it's "childish" or something, but I do enjoy classics that don't need to touch the botnet, so at least there's that. I can't just completely exit my current social life to seek out people who don't use botnet services. That's just not realistic. The vast majority of people in uni right now are social media obsessed NPCs that will never exit the botnet. If anything, I'm just glad my friends have enough sense to use Discord rather than post every second of their lives on soykafty social media apps, even if Discord is still a great way to give your personal messages to a nice big happy California based corporation who will definitely never sell your data. They're the reason I was able to escape social media at the least. Botnet services have done a great job of farming entire newer generations for data. It's hell. I sorta wish I'd been more involved in free software and programming from a younger age so I could have adapted to it better, but back then I was just playing around with Lua scripting in soykafty games and had no idea how bad data privacy was becoming or already was. To go completely away from botnet would require me breaking off time and communication with pretty much all of my current real-life friends. I would look like a schizo idiot, as >>30878 said, it's not very kind to ditch people because you don't like their silverware at dinner. Trying to be the free software chad who prioritizes commuication in-person would probably end up with me being a complete loner and loser, because refusing to use mainstream services and soykafty chat apps will give people the impression that you're a conspiracy muncher who's lost it and nobody will interact with you regardless of whether they make "good" friends. Maybe I can't escape when everyone around me has grown into the botnet. I hope that's not the case. I suppose I'll just have to do what I can for now, escaping botnet where I can and isolating it where I can't. If what you've said is true >>30899 then I hope you're very happy with where you are in life. I really wish privacy awareness was better, but good luck getting through to these people.

>>30966 >I suppose I'll just have to do what I can for now, escaping botnet where I can and isolating it where I can't. Have you looked into setting up a Matrix-Discord bridge? You can better isolate Discord's soykaf and still stay in touch with your friends.

>>30966 > I would look like a schizo idiot Trust me, you should look like a schizo idiot if needed, that's how the things work. No one people who really care about you will give a fuarrrk if you choose to not use some social media or even stop playing some games, and all the people which matters (I mean the ones you really need contact) fall in two cases, first case are your friends and maybe family, all of these will learn how to contact you using signal/xmpp or wahtever... and the second case is the people from job/college for these cunts you will need to keep separated accounts to keep the contact using soykafty services, btw even in the second case most of these people will have an e-mail so you dont need to keep sending/reading messages all time like an idiot. Keep this in mind OP, real time chat is just useless in 99% of cases.

>>30970 I've heard it's really slow. I'll do some research on it though. >>30971 School services suck ass. High school used Google for everything, now college uses Microsoft for everything.

>>30975 I know and it is like kicking dead whales down the beach, my college use fuarrrking google services as the academic emails, because it is cheapeast to use fuarrrking google services than hosting/configuring his own mail services. In this case what we should do? It dont have a unique answer but some nice approach is to split your things in the most great way you can, I will just drop a link here and give you an idea. https://people.debian.org/~lunar/blog/posts/tor_only_outgoing_firewall/ You probably know what TOR is and you will learn a bit about bridge and firewall after reading this link, my suggestion is that as you know get bridges and configure your firewall to just allow outgoing packets through those bridges, you can use some bridges in a instance of Tor to do your college and other "impossible" to bypass things, and other bridges in another instace of Tor to do your other things. At least is granted your ISP will never be able to record what your are doing, even in your personal things from college and either the other things because in all the cases your things will be going thorugh the bridges in a obfuscated way, to all they have is encrypted/obfuscated packets to your configured bridges. As long you never mix the bridges in your two instances of tor, none of your circuits will be start from the same bridge so it will be very hard to correlate your usual browsing to your college or other needed things. As a bonus this configuration will block all packets to going out if not by the usage of the bridges... it will disallow you to do a lot of errors which can reveal your location and another information when you probably dont want this. I hope it help you a bit, let me know if you have some problem.

>>30976 Thanks anon, this is helpful. I should really learn more about networking and actually figure out my threat model.

>>30966 >probably end up with me being a complete loner and loser I wouldn't recommend it for just anybody, but honestly, I have been better off after I stopped having IRL "friends". I only use Linux, I exclusively use lainchan and my college website (as well as certain sites for managing subscriptions for journals, and such.), and when I have free time, I read mathematics books. I haven't hung out with another person IRL and I am not just better for it, but I am happier as well. Friendships are nothing more than attack vectors.

>>30882 There is a soykafton of Linux distros for a reason. For audio get another distro (AVLinux is what I used and was happy). When it comes to your phone, you should just jailbreak/root your phone and use another launcher. It's still botnet but way better. The only phone that might make a difference is those FOSS phones like Librem and Pine Phone. The rest is equally botnet

>>30989 If this isn't bait then be careful about being 40/50 years old without friends, then struggling to make friends because of a lack of social skills and getting depressed. We humans are social. I hate meeting people and being around new people but I still get lonely without friends/family.

>>30989 I think you'll find that isn't very healthy after continuing down that path for a while.

>I tried switching to Linux and embracing cyberpunk ideology. I couldn't do it. b8 the thread

>>30989 I second this post, while friends may seem worthwhile, i found it much better on my own. Spending my time alone i decide where i go and what i do, i have time for my own thoughts. Friends may seem fun but unless they are the best friends you can have, you will have a lot of time wasted on stupid nonsense. Sure you shouldnt cut yourself off from the world, but in the end one should make his time as worthwhile as possible.

>>30871 I honestly blame the lack of competition from non-botnet projects. All of the chat services and social media sites designed to fight the botnet use that as their soul gimmick, which is a decidedly uninteresting one unless you already care about the issue. To your average Joe, Riot/Element is just a second rate Discord with fewer users. People need to stop cloning the botnet and start surpassing it. It's the only way we stand a fighting chance.

>>30871 >>30879 So the proprietary platforms may be a little more gentle on you than something open source, yes, but really the trade-offs are not worth it. I'm not willing to stream the contents of my hard drive to Microsoft, or my browser history to Google, so I use something that verifiable doesn't do that. Things are sometimes slightly more difficult to use, yes, but the alternative is so repellent that I wouldn't even consider it. These days even my router runs Linux. My entire family messages/calls me on Signal. We hang out with overseas relatives on Jitsi. For me, there's really no choice but to use something that respects freedom. I'm frankly quite scared of the alternative.

>>31019 This is not the projects' fault, it's the end consumers' fault. The moment you say "it's not botnet, it's private, e2e" your service is overrun with porn, warez and other illegal stuff, I think it brings nothing to the table, but honestly what else would you say to advertise your new thing? You need to advertise, it's not an option. People will not do the word of mouth for you no matter how amazing your thing is, because they are lazy and they don't care unless they can gain something from it. Honestly this is the reason why anybody cares about privacy or e2e, they're doing something they want to hide. This is the reason behind 90% of the privacy crowd, the other 10% being a mix of mentally ill anti-establishment paranoids and businessmen advertising their YouTube channel to them. How do you tell people "don't use Discord, use this new thing with 1/10000 of the users"? From the perspective of someone who doesn't give a soykaf about privacy, why would you not use Discord, or why would you ever use something else over it?

>>31029 >From the perspective of someone who doesn't give a soykaf about privacy, why would you not use Discord, or why would you ever use something else over it? Probably because they got derezzed from discord for one reason or another. That's the first reason that came to mind. Not that this is necessarily a good thing. Imageboards arguably got a lot soykaftier once they started having to catch the runoff that got kicked out of mainstream social media and don't have any other option.

>>31029 >From the perspective of someone who doesn't give a soykaf about privacy, why would you not use Discord, or why would you ever use something else over it? Being able to host your own goddamn servers for one. Some people like that level of control, whether it's about privacy or not.

>>31042 That's one actual reason but, again, what about the users? You've set up your own server, what are your arguments to get people on it from Discord?

I've managed to come back to Linux and it is pretty comfy once set up. I have to use botnet services for now until the future. I plan on moving away from Discord later, deleting all my accounts.

>>30976 Bridges are entry point for Tor network, changing them like gloves as you suggest is entirely pointless. The destination server receives packets from exit node, all exit nodes are known and included in abuse/spam/bad boy lists. You will not connect to any surveillance tech server with exit node address like you would with your home IP.

>>30966 >I'm studying chemistry at a decent chemistry school with intent to work on drugs. I grew up with weed and I can't really see myself just quitting drugs because it's "bad for my health" or something, but I do enjoy classics that don't need to touch the needle, so at least there's that. Games = opium for the masses. You are part of the problem, you are feeding the beast, serving the Satan, sacrificing to Moloch. Realistically speaking, you're not even a regular software programmer who could start working on free software projects any time and stop being part of the problem, you will be hired by a botnet corporation, work on surveillance/addiction-inducing products, publish your stuff on proprietary platforms, it's a dead end. You're not making yourself freer, nor plan on helping others.

>>31029 Hello fellow wh*te person, I have read your b8 comment out of context and feel compelled to eat this bait. >The moment you say "it's not botnet, it's private, e2e" your service is overrun with porn, warez and other illegal stuff File hosting is the most basic application on the internet. The idea of it being controversial is purely a construct that exists in your head and as a symbol of political "debate" for popularity contestants of democracies to argue about. It's people like you who amass endless "debate" over "the ad/ad blocker problem" and "the hate speech problem", while being oblivious of how a free marketplace of ideas (which is what the internet is regardless of how pathetically implemented it is) even works in the slightest. Instead of having a nice uniform file sharing protocol with anonymity to prevent government #572532532 cripples, we have to have 303052839582352 different protocols that get obselete every day, even for legitimate uses. You literally cannot even uniformly browse Youtube, the most "legitimate" file sharing platform on earth, because each government and company applies all kinds of inane beuracratic, microjustice rules to every file. If you had friends outside the 2 kids you met in high school, you'd know that sending a youcrap link to someone often does not work because that person cannot view it in his country. So no, file hosting is not to do "illegal things", it's just a basic mechanism. Remember the golden rule of software and protocol engineering: MECHANISM NOT POLICY. Even the neckbears from the 80s got this right. >why would you not use Discord, or why would you ever use something else over it? Because you could use actual real software, or at least Teamspeak which is already a thousand times better, instead of JNC du-jour. Discord is gimped web based garbage made by some stupid fuccing webdev kids. The official Discord client is literally a web page. It crashes and inherits all the bad attributes of webshit. For example since web browsers fuarrrk up your font in Windows, so does Discord. For example since webshit forces 2FA and captchas down your throat for absolutely no reason, so does Discord. Funny how cattle these days still call people paranoid while doing all this security theater bul1shit that completely makes the program unusable.

Here's my security theater experience with discrap: day 1: >make 2 accounts from computers side by side at lan party >OH NO YOU HAVE MADE A SECOND ACCOUNT YOU ARE A BOT PLEASE LET US CALL YOU ON A PHONE WHICH IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT NETWORK FROM THE INTERNET BUT THIS IS TOTALLY A SANE ENGINEERING PRACTICE BECAUSE CUNTSUMER FACEBOOK RETARDS SAID SO day 2: >have new ISP >make discrap account >OH NO YOU MUST SUBMIT A PHONE NUMBER BECAUSE YOU NEED A PHONE TO USE THE INTERNET YEAH THIS IS REAL SOFTWARE WE ARE SO CUTTING EDGE SECURITAH

>>31066 You completely missed the point, changing the bridges is not about bypassing censorship to soykafty services as you supposed, its a way to split your entry point to the network in different usages os TOR, btw its easy to just add another layer as an socks proxy or a VPN after the some one of your TOR instances just to bypass censorship. Keep in mind that the usage of bridges in this model is totally about controlling what you need to allow in your firewall, and as bonus on this, even if the ISP being used choose to just block your bridges, what the people should do? disable the firewall? I think you got the point.

>>30899 >the botnet literally cannot get me i assume you live in a forest somewhere, or do you think the botnet is just chat apps

>>30877 fpbp >>30871 >breaking system with AUR How does that even happen? Sounds like you should make root snapshots. It's like the "system restore" but you do it manually. >escaping the botnet The future is divided. A monolithic botnet and a decentralized system. It's only a matter of 'design', humanity really needs to work on it now. >>30887 Yandex doesn't require mobile number, just avoid logging in with a mobile device/UA and it won't bug you to ask for a mandatory phone number.

>>31029 And there is no legitimate need for search engines, as they just end up being overrun with content-free marketing pages. I think it brings nothing to the table over searching directly through Amazon. Look up anything what so ever on Google and it just brings you to a magzine type web page designed for teenyboppers. Literally any Google search that can be "solved" with a product, is just a link to a product with a paragraph of text saying "product good trust me". For example googling "what is conditioner" gives you an article written this month (August 2020) trying to sell some soykaf and maybe a tiny explanation of what hair conditioner is, and something about a bullshit study from last month that will be disproven/obsoleted next month, instead of an article from 1990 or so explaining what hair conditioner is and maybe one useful piece of info people learned between 1900 and 1990 (and maybe another update in 2020 if anything else _significant_ changed, but I doubt it). Google "how to stop mice from getting in home", and instead of a pages from 1800, 1900, and 2000 explaining the ways mice can get in a house and how to stop them and how to inspect them, you get a bunch of marketing pages about mouse poisons, mouse traps, mouse repellant snake oils and ultrasonic pseudoscience, and rid-o-mice (overpriced weep hole covers that claim to be well-engineered with no proof of expertise - plus if you dig deep enough you discover cell vents which are basically free and a known thing in house construction and seem to do the exact same thing). The only real info is contained in a sea of voodoo nonsense on a few "pest control" service websites, which is still effectively just an advertisement. The G could not even answer if weep holes are a viable entry point for mice. You could Google "smallest hole a mouse can fit in" and discover it's .75 inches, but that's just based on some specific mouse from some video someone made of some species of a (full grown) mouse getting through a hole. There's literally no reputable answer Googleable stating what the smallest hole is a mouse is likely to fit through (let alone any explanation of whether the wall behind the bricks is penetrable). The best info you can get is a bunch of hicks saying "a dime", "a quarter", "a pencil", and these same hicks say dumbass soykaf like "put poison in your attic". Because that's the nature of the content-free circle jerk. Stating non-trivial facts is too dangerous and could hurt your PR because you could be wrong (and most websites are just there for the PR), and it would take more brain power than a 9-5 monkey is capable of to make a real answer in the first place. There's also the fact that most answers are "do this and that", rather than an answer to the question, because this avoids answering th question. Then again, """cyberpunk"""/lain culture is inherently content-free.

>>30899 >I'm a robot moron whose personality is as deep as bird soykaf and exist solely to reproduce like the useless insect I am but that makes me better than you because I submitted to my culture's demands which are superior to moral imperatives like freedom from tyranny because reasons. Also, I'm now past 30 and I regularly travel the world working wherever I want, experiencing things you now will never experience because you are a slave and you cannot escape, yet you will find every single excuse regardless of how idiotic and nonsensical just to justify your situation. Repulsive.

>>31135 >And there is no legitimate need for search engines I generally completely agree with your points about recency-bias in "search engines" i.e. Google. I agree that's it's mainly because Google is a business that its search engine is optimised to make money out of people rather than act as a search engine. However, I think you're wrong that "there's no need for a search engine". Mainly because there is a need for discovery although I know plenty of studies have shown that using a search engine to get to places you've already been to is a big chunk. But how are you meant to get to wikipedia if you don't know its URL? Search engines should be for discovery. Searching for "facebook" just to click on the top link is moronic. That's what bookmarks are for. People talk about how important convinience is yet they don't make the bare minimum effort to make their computers convinient to use.

>>31153 I was just trolling when I said "search engines are useless". Personally I would like a search engine that allows finding text within documents [1], doesn't block Tor and other IP addresses, and the ability to classify documents by webs of trust (e.g. "not spam", "not a magazine", "work safe", "is qualified to speak on subject X", "USA safe" etc) for additional filtering. 1. Google always partially was able to find text within documents, and it just gets worse over time. In recent decades they even false detect and block your searches because they look like "dorks". Every other search engine is deliberately rigged to be barely functional, from what I can tell. DAY OF THE WOT WHEN

Having used Linux for about 10 years or so now I can agree that maintenance tends to be a huge pain in the ass. But I still stick with it. Why? Because I also remember the godawful bluescreens, the "mandatory updates", needing to reinstall when your computer slowed down because no one knew how to fix the abomination that is Windows. I may spend an inordinate amount of time fixing things when they DO need fixing, but I also spend more time sitting around and enjoying what I fixed. I'll never go back to Windows and you should come back to Linux. All it really takes is a decent amount of memory, a dedicated GPU and enough cores and you could always use Windows through a VM. I stopped using fad technology ages ago and I am pretty glad I did. It gets pretty lonely but every time I try to use the new "great" service I am assaulted with "ENABLE JAVASCRIPT glitterboy" or "please enter your real name" or "give me all your real information pleb" or "enable 2fa" or "we enabled 2fa for you" or "we control your entire life, submit". It's fuarrrking tiring. I am also sick and tired of companies and other people thinking they have any right to tell me what to do with my life because they submitted to the machine as if because they are being controlled they have some right to control everyone around them. No thanks. New tech these days either is bogged down with soykaf you don't need or designed to fuarrrk with you and control your data and it's incredibly liberating to break away from that system. You should try it anon.

>>31159 I was running PCI passthrough for a while but it was just a pain in the ass. If I'm gonna use linux, I'd like to be able to use it completely without relying on a VM for anything. W10 is also stable enough that I haven't had a bluescreen in ages. I just disabled updates and can install them whenever I want.

>>31160 Telemetry you can't disable, new crap in the Group Policy with virtually every update that almost inevitably you need to change, bluescreens still happen, the system still slows down for no real reason among many other issues with Windows. Don't submit to the system anon, you'll regret it one day. How is PCI passthrough a pain in the ass? I set it up in about 10 minutes when I first did it reading a walkthrough and with few exceptions it's always been a one click, stable, solution.

>>31160 VM are very good to develop exploits and study about OS internals.. try to debug a kernel driver without having two machines to use the other as the test-machine... the only option without a VM will be to test all the things in your own machine... every error you will have a KernelPanic or BlueScreen (restart and try again)... you cant attach a debugger to your own system because it dont even make sense.... Just a single example on how VMs can be very useful sometimes :)

>>31161 Mostly needing two graphics cards, and then not being able to use primary card on the host without restarting the system and changing soykaf around.

>>31167 Well needing two GPUs is unavoidable, so I'll give you that, but what are you talking about with the primary card? Do you mean using the same card for passthrough with the system again? Do you mean using one of the other cards at the same time as you use the gaming GPU? Because I use the gaming GPU and my primary GPU at the same time with no issues and my computer has been running for 42 days uninterrupted so far.

>>31171 Yeah, using the same card with the system afterwards. I don't wanna keep switching back and forth, and not having the same graphical resources available on both sides of the system is annoying.

>>31178 I apologize if I am coming off as pushy or anything like that but I am genuinely curious. What use case did you have where you needed to use the passthrough card with the system again? Was there something you needed two cards for?

>>31184 I do a lot of 3D/CGI type work, so having those resources availalbe for Blender, for example, is very nice.

>>31225 this is basically why i dual boot instead of doing some vm passthrough thing. i do 3d and machine learning so even if i had two graphics cards i'd rather have both of them available in linux rather than sacrificing one to windows gaming. btw i think i read a forum post a while back that said you can actually switch GPUs between VMs without powering off the whole system, but it sounded like a huge pain in the ass.

>>31230 That's the thing - I don't see the point in dual booting rather than just using Windows, as far as botnet goes.

>>31225 >>31230 >>31234 Fair enough. I am a big proponent of the chad "use-caser" doing whatever he wants versus the beta free user. I am looking into a new VM workstation that might fit your needs better, so I'll get back to you once I've had a chance to look it over and test it if you're interested.

>>31238 >free Excuse me freetard

>>31238 Very much, thanks anon.

>>31234 >I don't see the point in dual booting rather than just using Windows, as far as botnet goes. Well only using windows every once in a while to play a video game or whatever is preferable to using windows all the time. That's what I do My day to day computing is like 95% linux. But yeah, if you dual boot but still use windows as your main OS it would be pointless.

>>30878 >[...] failed programmers and anime obsessed weirdos who are likely on your non-botnet chat service because they're doing something illegal or sit on the other side of political extremism is this projection this feels like projection

I think many lains are nerds who judge people based on their software choices, and then project that out and think that other people will judge them for theirsoftware choices. But most people won't. You can do your weird thing but be cool about it and most people will be ok with you. And if they see you happy, thriving while doing your things the foss way, and still they want you to switch over to the botnet and abandon your happiness and principles, then to hell with them. But if you're a depressed fuarrrk who can't deal with people and are full of insecurities, then people will a) worry about you or b) flat out dislike you and want you far away. tldr there's things more important than the software you use, even if that doesn't sound cybapunk. If you want to be foss, be foss but have something to show for it. Show people the music you make with ardour, the digital art you make with inkscape or gimp or krita, the animations you make with blender, the videos you make with kdenlive, the foss games you program, the website you code, the "hack the planet" shirt you bought with btc, the foss IM program you use and are part of its dev team. You can be a lame nerd or a cool geek who actually gets some vitamin D on the side. lol I think the tldr spans most of the post.

>>31792 this. the people i know either think i'm cool for knowing stuff about computers (and are grateful for my help when they fuarrrk something up or need software recommendations), or are just somewhat bemused and think i'm being too paranoid about things. sometimes they'll make lighthearted jokes like "oh lainon won't use that app because he's hiding from the CIA" or whatever but if you take that kind of thing in stride it's endearing. honestly the main thing people complain about is me not having venmo so they have to pay me back for things in cash, but i try to be understanding of how annoying that is and just carry cash myself or else just offer to have them buy something for me later.

With Qubes OS you can have separate, isolated "identities", perhaps one for contacting your friends, one for anonymity, one for whatever.

>>30871 Try crashing their servers and claiming that you were hacked. There is some Discord exploits online that you can use.

>>30896 Internally they're called guilds I believe, but yes, they are called servers in the UI

>>31797 this looks cool as fuarrrkkkkk. thanks lain!

Just bumping this so not another one of those question thread kills this

>>31072 >not spending $0.50 in bitcoit for a real phone verification online shiggy diggy doo From memory, it gets suspicious if you have a VPN but fake phone verification fixes it until a stranger tries the same number. I think it checks IP->location at startup/login, then nothing after that so I chuck it in a lightweight VM for isolation.

>>32011 >this looks cool as fuarrrkkkkk. thanks lain! Qubes absolutely is. Just be aware that it also eats laptop batteries for breakfast. Expect your average battery life to halve, or worse. But Qubes on a desktop with good enough hardware (max out your RAM) is soooo comfy.

>>34047 OP here, later realized that it's not a good fit for me as I would need convenient GPU passthrough for it to be viable for my needs unfortuantely.

>>30954 stallman doesn't confirm.

>>34067 qubes doesn't support IOMMU passthrough? That's pretty odd.

>>34380 they could have an encrypted Qubes partition and boot from a USB key. That ought to be a decent computer security setup, from then on the hard stuff is all behavioral. It's a bit hard to do though. Check out the Arch guide for it. personally I gave up on avoiding the botnet years ago. It was a nice hobby and I still do a lot of stuff instinctively, like keeping a bunch of profile-randomizing addons installed that break a bunch of sites. But I have other soykaf to do with my time now than do opsec so nobody can see me post on lainchan.

>>30899 Why are you even here?

>>34413 idk, I don't need an account here.

>>30871 I feel your pain. I've successfully migrated over to Pop OS but I'm still stuck on Discord and some other stuff. It's been a struggle and a balance, not to mention the steep learning curve in trying to escape all this.

pic related >I tried switching to Linux and embracing cyberpunk ideology. I couldn't do it. While I found Linux extremely comfy (i3 is a godsend), there was software I regularly use that just doesn't work well, is a pain in the ass to use, or doesn't work at all on Linux. (Ableton Live with an audio interface, ZBrush, various games...) When I turned to things like the AUR for solutions, I often ended up breaking soykaf on my system. Then I ended up spending more time doing system maintenance, which made me miss the justwerks environment of Windows. welp, just... git gud, not kidding, you eventually will git gut if you care. >i'm stuck with services like Discord because all my close friends use it and I know that they would never switch. normal people don't care about their data being sold. normal people care about convenience and simplicity. I think that's okay to aknowledge how harmful this "botnet" apps/companies/whatever are and still use them; specifically with discord: welp, first of all don't buy nitro lol, probably the less harmful option is to use it on your browser or use a 3rd party client (like cordless).

>>34674 problem is sometimes it's not a matter of gitting gud when there is literally no solution for your needs outside of botnet. being a vfx artist and music producer is like kicking dead whales down the beach like that sometimes

>>34676 >like kicking dead whales down the beach At this point it triggers me. Either I missed out some meme or this gets repeated in every second thread.

>>34678

I'm really close to leaving Discord, but there's only one server stopping me from leaving Discord mostly due to me having nowhere else to go that is actually stable in terms on how long it will be comfy. I only know one comfy XMPP groupchat despite it being a public groupchat so far. At least I'll try not to add anymore friends on Discord or join anymore servers just so its easier for me to leave. I'm unsure about putting in the effort to host an XMPP bridge on the Discord server since I might be the only person using it anyways. About getting the people from the Discord server onto XMPP, most if not all won't make the jump due to the pain of having to hop onto a new protocol just for one person, they are in other Discord servers anyways, and they don't care about privacy compared to me. I expect nobody, one, or two people to hop onto XMPP.

>>34676 >being a vfx artist and music producer Keeping a windows disk around for things like this is a decent compromise imo. Although I will say "git gud" is still an option. I'm finally at the point where I actually prefer using linux for music stuff, but my workflow is pretty unconventional. I've learned how most common audio processing algorithms work and can just patch them up in puredata or write standalone software. It's a lot like eurorack except sometimes you have to build your own modules. Obviously this requires good working knowledge of DSP, math, and programming, so I'm not exactly offering it up as an alternative to ableton. Just pointing out that when you don't have something, learning how to make it yourself is always an option if you're willing to put in the work.

>>34678 It's an old language enhancer you n00b.

why can't people just pgp or otp encrypt in discord

let me guess signal requires a phone number?

What's the best way to securely send pictures/files to someone who doesn't use an encrypted chat service without forcing them to install something? I had surgery recently and I want to show my friend on discord

>>34815 there is no such thing. Your friend will have to do some kind of cryptography on his computer, using a key you send him out-of-band, otherwise the encryption is extremely weak.

Normal users could have 7zip. Password protect it

>>34817 (of course you will have to share the passcode, if you use voice it can be done verbally, or temp-host a pastebin with the pw)

>>34815 I guess you could try something like https://framadrop.org/en/ You could find some temporary file host e.g. volafile, encrypt the file with a zip program like 7zip, then securely share the password. You could encrypt the image with PGP and email it. What's with this aversion to "installing" things recently? Just fuarrrking get your friend to spend 10 seconds installing Signal which is designed to be as accessible to the masses as possible and send it over that.

>>34817 >>34818 That's a good suggestion, thanks.

>>34683 >>34676 >grabbing someone else's soykaf and copy/pasting here and there > "artists"

>>34810 yes. And the server source code does nothing since you cannot change the server in the client.

>>34819 >ust fuarrrking get your friend to spend 10 seconds installing Signal which is designed to be as accessible to the masses as possible and send it over that. 1. meanwhile skype even don't need registration 2. signal isn't federated like matrix, xmpp let me guess, you are one of those who create this problem (which moves the thread!) instead of solving it, retard

https://reclaimthenet.org/discord-banning-misinformation/ ENJOY discord die

Unfortunately, botnet is more or less inescapable if you plan on using modern communication technology and hell even non communication tech is also botnet with IoT garage. That doesn't mean you shouldn't strive to remove as much of the botnet as possible, starting by your OS, which is the biggest 1st step you can make and it will snowball your other software choices to be more inclined to FOSS, you figured out arch so you're halfway there already, just use a regular desktop environment initially since you're less likely to run into incompatibilities compared to WMs like i3 or DWM. Reduce your online footprint, don't use social media, don't use cloud services or any subscription based service, things like this are small steps you can take to slowly move away from botnet which will add up over time and ultimately make you more free in the long run.