I think you’re a permanoob.

They are Coming For Your Data

(4 min read w/ memes)

Oracle is behind the scenes on many Big Tech websites, they are in the business of reselling your data,

They track you across devices and sell which devices are you, using fingerprints. This is not crazy conspiracy theory, but well known court cases,

Google has a similar method to sell your sensitive personal data (across all websites using their JavaScript, including Captchas) through a Cookie, tied to your fingerprint. This is illegal in Europe, because it violates GDPR, but they get away with it because of political influence.

Fingerprints can include Screen size, timezone, browser version, and 70+ other factors. This is very hard to fool this without blocking, and many websites and services won’t let you block everything.

Mullvad’s Browser is Weak.

Mullvad Browser relies upon Letterboxing to hide your screen size. Letterboxing adds or subtracts a little bit of padding, to lie that your screen size is the same as everyone else.

But there are a few ways around this, including having your device render graphics to see it’s not real. In fact, Fingerprint-com-Pro openly sells fingerprinting through Letterboxing. Look at the last line of their ad:

Fingerprint-Pro JavaScript, which is worth 80 million dollars, is shilled on hundreds of websites. And then Big Tech will pick this data up as well, with similar systems, to rake in billions. This makes fingerprinting effective, since then they all share data with each other,

Easy Solution:

Our app launches isolated second graphical environments that realistically creates a new Screen Display Size, and matches your timezone to the IP address.

No Way to Detect

From inside it, there’s no way to detect this fake environment.

The only other way to do this type of deception is virtual machines, but ironically Oracle makes VirtualBox. The exact company that you’re trying to deceive, and the copy-paste isn’t open source.

All VMs are a pain in the ass to setup and slower. Unlike a virtual machine, our app doesn’t slow you down or consume extra resources. So you can have many at once.

The conversation goes one of two ways.

Me:

I have a Linux app. It works on Debian, Arch, and Fedora.

Choice 1:

Them: I actually use Windows, and Microsoft's cord connecting the Matrix to my cerebral cortex is so crusted on, it can't be removed.

Choice 2:

Them: Linux! That's great! But I actually use obscure goo-artix-blah-gentoo-blah distro with SystemD removed, that has no window manager and no package manager. So until you make a version that works on my hardened elite distro, you're basically a mainstream bitch living the Matrix. You like Debian? Dude, you might as well suck the NSA's ballsack.

freedom down bad amigos

This is a community note proposed to Anita's post, and I think we need to talk about it.

The past years have brought a swarm of new people into Bitcoin, and these posts and comments show how hard we failed them.

First off, to address the majority of commenters in Anita's post that also like to spam my posts with the same nonsense (and then tell me that I'm stupid because I have a vagina (?)), in the Bitcoin network, you do not get to vote for anything. Your node allows you to control the rules that your node runs by. That's it. That's all it does.

There is no voting in Bitcoin.

Second, miners run profit oriented businesses. This means that miners follow the rules adapted by the nodes with the majority of economic activity.

In the event of a hard fork, it does not matter how many nodes you run – if the majority of nodes generating profit for miners apply new rules, those are the rules the miners will follow.

Bitcoin positions do matter to the extent that they generate economic activity.

I understand that the voting analogy can be helpful, so here's one that you can make: in Bitcoin, you vote with your feet.

If a large exchange was to signal for, say, a Bitcoin compliance fork, you can threaten to pull your money out – to the extent that the exchange still allows you to.

Lastly, what Anita is referring to in her post is Bitcoin's social layer.

Bitcoin is run by humans, and humans can be influenced.

Humans can be influenced by setting positive incentives, such as gov subsidies or developer grants, or by applying violence, such as threatening to throw the people running and building Bitcoin in jail.

This is a reality of human nature and should not be controversial - How to prevent such actors from influencing open source development is often discussed in the open source community.

If this topic interests you, look up Operation Orchestra at FOSDEM.

Let's remember that the memes are not always your friends.

Influencers spent the past few years so focused on "hyperbitcoinization" that half-truths about how Bitcoin works are now taken at face value.

Because so many "Bitcoiners" now genuinely believe things like "Bitcoin can't be censored," "one node equals one vote", "Bitcoin is for enemies," or "everything is good for Bitcoin," we have created a culture that believes paying attention to the creation of an adversarial environment is unnecessary.

These memes are mental shortcuts. They are true to some extent, but do not reflect reality.

In the case of my posts, next to the obviously snarky comments here and there, the majority of commenters are not posting these things with bad intentions - they genuinely think that this is how Bitcoin works.

If you are an educator, influencer, or in any other way have the capacity to better explain these things to people, _please_ take the time to do so.

The memes are fine to get people interested, but we all need to do a better job at combating these misconceptions. The future of BTC could depend on it.

It’s weird to me the sheer number of normies who seem to think the level of sinister profiteering behavior ends with the health insurers but never occurs with the pharmaceutical companies.

If someone had shot the CEO of Pfizer most of the people I see cheering for the UnitedHealth CEO’s death would be calling it a terrorist act by a Nazi…

Bitcoin Lightning is developing! And it's great!

I'm happy to see it. But it needs async (offline) self-custody payments, where the end user doesn't have to run their own node or sink funds.

Telling me to be patient, not to use other coins, and ONLY and EXCLUSIVELY wait for Lightning to develop further,

Is like the government telling us to wait for the covid-19 vaccine to go outside.

Gold

is fungible because one ounce of pure gold is indistinguishable from another ounce of pure gold.

Bitcoin

is not fungible because its transaction history is traceable, which makes individual coins potentially non-equivalent due to blacklisting or tainting.

Monero

is fungible because it uses privacy-focused technology to obscure transaction histories, which makes every unit effectively identical.

Disclaimer: I am a country woman in a little tropical contry not very knowlegded about BTC.

I am a little worried because I get the impression that in the beginning the miners were bitcoin geeks at heart committed to, let's say, the ideals of BTC, which protected the original idea, and I get the impression that now they are entrepreneurs in search of megabusiness. or to control what is emerging as the currency of the future, without caring much about its original values, could I be wrong? I would like to know your opinion on the matter.

Español

Yo estoy un poquito preocupada porque me da la impresión de que en un inicio los mineros eran geeks bitcoiners de corazón comprometidos con digamos los ideales de BTC lo cuál protegía la idea original, y me da la impresión de que ahora son empresarios en busca de megabussiness o para controlar lo que se perfila como la moneda del futuro, sin importarles mucho sus valores originales, será que me equivoco? Me gustaría conocer su opinión sobre el asunto.

Over on the hellsite David Marcus is complaining about the government shutting down his Libra/Diem stablecoin so I thought now would be a good time to remind everyone that this actually saved you from running head first into a CBDC testflight program

There's not a lot of times to be thankful for the government, but I'm pretty sure that this is one of them

I’ve never understood the hate for Monero. Bitcoins only flaw is layer 1 privacy especially in this KYC heavy environment, we all know Chainanalysis and KYC is a huge privacy issue and privacy is a huge part of freedom and the Cypherpunk ethos. Monero does well the one thing bitcoin does poorly and that is layer 1 privacy. Does that mean Monero is better and replaces or outperforms bitcoin? ABSOLUTELY NOT, just is a useful tool if you need to do a private transaction that you don’t want to be traceable to you. That’s it, that’s all. Why hate something that enables some privacy?

get this browser extension for skipping in-video youtube ads and thank me later

Make a choice:

1 Bitcoin and every transaction is recorded, evaluated and tracked by Chainalysis on behalf of Big Government.

or

10 Monero and you are completely free to spend it.

I have to tell you something

For the past 3 years, our team of 3-4 devs and artists have been working on an original VPN.

I did not tell you about this before, because to be honest with you, I didn't know if we would succeed

For technical, financial, and logistical reasons. It was so hard, I can't even begin to tell you the problems we overcame. But it's like that old Thomas Edison quote, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work" And despite the odds, our crew has passed the largest hurdles.

This thing is a beast. It solves many of the issues going on, and it has so many amazing features that I could not be more excited to show it to you. Today, we are proud to shout from the top of the roof-tops,

OUR ALPHA TEST IS GOING ON NOW:

this is for regulars in our chats, As soon as we clear bugs,

OUR BETA TEST WILL BE:

FOCUSED ON LINUX

You can use other platforms with the config files, but our client and it's features are for Linux. Linux is usually neglected as an afterthought. Our goal is to provide such value, that more people switch over.

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

NO EMAIL REQUIRED.

IN-APP PAYMENTS

XMR or Bitcoin Lightning. No Fiat.

OPEN SOURCE FROM DAY 1

you can even use it as a Python file, without compiling it. This means you can modify the UI, even without coding knowledge swapping graphics.

The focus of our upcoming content will be teaching you why and how these features work. Tune in