Excellent. There’s a couple quirky sites I hope are fixed.

That stinks. Maybe it’s the region or they just haven’t found it yet.

I know I’ve tried to get birds that have been in my yard to come back more (jays and orioles) but no matter what I do they only show up if they want and then leave.

I’m like you though, I default to sunflower seeds because its the great universal, everybody eats them. And it’s simple enough that I don’t have to think of it on a day to day basis.

As others said, gold finches love them. Thistle seed as a close second. House finches and sparrows will eat them too.

I will also say that how you feed them affects it too. Putting it in a hard feeder or tray is okay, but using a sock (the mesh tubes) will get you more birds.

I never thought of it as salesy before, but I can see that.

They are not selling anything. The tool is free to use. The playbooks are free too. Or you can make your own, but I’ve never done that.

I’ve used this since I learned about it on multiple machines, and never need to think about it again other than when recommending it.

Probably the only “bad” thing is you need a legitimate, activated instance of windows.

I hear you on the phone number thing. That’s another stupid thing I don’t really do. I have a separate VoIP number that I use for any business I need to deal with. No way are they getting my real number.

And speaking of friends and their apps and my phone number, I rarely give anybody my phone number too. I don’t need it being harvested by the load of apps they have installed. You’re only as strong as our weakest link, and most people don’t give this stuff any thought.

I’m coming from the same place. My windows updates are off (that’s one of the mods that ameliorated makes) and I have not had a problem with it for a few years now.

I’m not saying that windows should be the choice, but I am saying that when I have to use it (there are legit reasons) then my ameliorated version is fantastic.

I use windows at work daily so I am very well aware of out of the box experience. No way I would ever use that for my personal computing.

Ameliorated is something I always recommend and it sounds like while what you are doing is pretty good, there are some shortcomings. I don’t know, maybe ameliorated won’t work for you either, but its worth a try.

Company apps.

Every business you deal with has an app these days. Grocery stores, restaurants, etc… Just install and scan to get your discounts and track your points. Yeah… No thanks.

The most viable option is to manage your own firewall and block the outbound traffic. Only suggesting as a work around for those that want a robot vacuum.

I agree with both of you. Windows is not fine. But it can be made fine with an easy privacy modification.

I recommend ameliorated.io to everybody who needs to use windows. It makes it a viable OS, stripping out the junk, and setting better defaults for security and UI. I run it in VMs whenever I need it.

Wonderful information. Not just the successes but also the challenges and setbacks. It gives good perspective into the reality of the situation instead of leaving it up to our imaginations. Thank you for sharing and keeping a cool head through it all. I’m looking forward to the beta.

People like to hate.

I’m coming from a position and stance similar to yours, a paying customer for many years, etc… I can completely see criticism of the proton platform for various reasons, such as some feature sets, your mentioned slow to market on what seems like priorities to the community, the security stance of eggs in one basket, etc… I think proton deserves honest criticism on many fronts, and also aren’t the answer to everybody’s threat model. Fine.

The rest? It’s hate. It’s not even stance or opinion. Its hate. The smallest things are taken and the reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Andy Yens comments haven’t been THAT bad compared to the political people he gets associated with. But okay, I can see taking the small concept and saying it’s evidence of a bigger picture behind HD scenes. But then there’s hate. But proton set up their organization to prevent a single person (like Yen) from dominating and taking them in the wrong direction, but that gets ignored. Just hate. Let’s talk about a news article where out of context proton “gave away” user info (when in reality it was all the fault of the user). But we’ll ignore all the times proton didn’t give up information they were asked for. Because that goes against the hate squad.

Again, if somebody doesn’t like proton, good for them. Don’t use them. Think they are the devil, good for them advise people as to why and to stay away from their products. But most of the hate comments aren’t expressing any of that. Its just hate, and if you don’t see it too then you are stupid and deserved to be hated too. That’s the vocal majority. That doesn’t mean its the majority opinion, it just means the loudest voices are saying that.

Sorry, my answer is a bit of a rant saying I agree with you. I’m sure many will disagree and that’s fine. But opinions are allowed to be shared both ways.

I also run Win11 with 8GB of ram just fine. To be fair though, its a virtual machine and not my daily driver. But the main reason it works is because I used an Ameliorated package that basically strips down the OS to what it should be. (ameliorated.io) I highly recommend it.

Adding Tempo as a mobile app.

Yes, but even imperfect steps are in the right direction. My phone number is out there because of others (within 6 months it was obvious) but I do get FAR better results than before. Simply having a personal number and a number for businesses (JMP VoIP numbers are cheap) broke the biggest connection to my ID from a data broker persecive. Also using dedicated emails for every company/service was big in this.

Yeah, the IMEI is set to the hardware like a serial number for lack of a better description. That’s why if you want to protect that, you never put a SIM in your phone. Also, if you go that route you need to buy your phone cash or second hand. IMEIs are logged at purchase so if you buy with a credit card its instantly traceable to your name.

And yes, I presume you are not avoiding authorities and just want some basic privacy. That’s all I’m after, I don’t need to be a ghost.

This privacy game is a process, and it never stops. But if you take small steps all the time you always make progress. You’ll also figure out what your true threat profile is once you hit all the friction points. Its all theoretical until you put it into practice.

I didn’t follow your links, but I’m sure you found that IMEI is a device ID and IMSI is the sim ID. So, best way to deal with that is to never put a sim card in your phone. I’ve done that for a long time. Not going to lie, it works but it sucks so hard.

With a SIM in your phone, your carrier knows your device and can track you that way. Yes, every telco company that isn’t one of the big boys just licenses their networks. They are the “upstream” carrier or provider.

So basically, if we assume the privacy companies are legit in not tracking your IMEI then its still a problem because the upstream carrier can do it. But, as far as I can tell since you aren’t their direct customer they don’t do that (this is really big gray area here) because there’s no reason to. But the point is they can. So if the government wants you they can still find you. But because you’re 2 layers deep in the networks they don’t have good enough data to sell.

Rotating IMSI solves similar problems. These days your phone number is your ID, and the sim card it sits on has an ID. So on average they are equivalent since people don’t change phone number or sim cards frequently. But a rotating SIM helps prevent profiling you since you are constantly changing the way your identifier. It’d be like following a guy who changed clothes every block. You can still do it but it gets harder.

So yes, your sim can be seen calling Alice and Bob from your location. But tomorrow its a different sim calling Alice and Bob from your location. You’re not a ghost, authorities would be able to put together that sim 1 and sim 2 are both you. But its significantly harder to track history of all those sims. And for data brokers its nearly worthless because its a days worth of data. I actually don’t know what they do after it expires from you. Does it get deleted or migrated to somebody else? So today its me and tomorrow its you. That would also be good because it would poison the data.

I hear you. That does seem like the ideal scenario. I don’t think Cape will ever go there but the future isn’t written. I never thought I’d see a company like Cape in the first place, so there’s hope (however much of a tiny sliver it is).

Probably depends on the car. But I’ll say that it probably isn’t easy. The sim will pull out just like it pulls out of a phone. But getting to it is the tricky part. You have to open up your dash to get to it.

Excellent. You’re essentially confirming my initial feelings and experiences.

I’m testing group messaging now. I’ve had some issues with that on my VoIP number so that’s a big pain point for me. Waiting to hear back from people on if anything becomes unthreaded (especially from iPhone).

Technically you’re not wrong. But phreeli and calyx exist too though, so its hard to say.

I’m not sure what you mean by DIY, how do you diy your own telco network? Currently I’m doing my best but it takes multiple services and gives me suboptimal results. That’s part of the appeal here.

Skepticism is welcomed, as is your comment. But I’m not sure where to go from there.