marcie (she/her)

  • 8 Posts
  • 138 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • A lot of conspiracy theories reference Hermeticism blindly. One example is Flat Earthism, they use a lot of Hermetic concepts of the firmament to describe why the world is flat. Hermeticism is fundamentally the progenitor of modern astrology, alchemy, ‘witchcraft’ and so on.

    Like the other commenter said, hermeticism relies on the belief there is an “unknown” reality that can be unveiled. This was a core tenet of ancient Greek religion and explains their tendency to practice divination, in a way a lot of modern woo-woo stuff is directly lifted off of a bastardization of ancient Greek religion. Its very interesting to do a meta study of conspiracies, people are tapping into shit they have no clue about and are rethinking thoughts and ideas made 3000 years ago by a drugged out woman in a cave filled with lead. Hermeticism was also a very popular system of gnostic beliefs during the medieval era, quite a lot of Arab philosophers for example believed in a variety of gnostic religions, e.g. Sabianism which is referenced in the Quran as being ‘people of the book’, a group of people along with Christians and Jews that should not be harmed but taxed.

    As Marx said, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”



  • I’ve actually tested doing addons to the browser and keeping permanence, and I found it good for my use cases and my specific add-ons (add-ons that do not access DOM). Most major sites don’t have the tech to actually fingerprint it that way. Yes, it does harm the potential fingerprinting, but if you are careful and make it so that private browsing mode basically resets it to default, you can turn it on when you need to. The biggest issue is turning cookies on imo.

    Of course, only do this if you know what you’re doing, know your requirements, and know the ins and outs of how fingerprinting on particular sites work. Its perfectly reasonable to main mullvad browser with its baseline setup.



  • Confiscation of the domain isn’t a big deal. As I’ve already said, there are many anonymous hosting providers that have been tested on the Israel issue and came out the other side. 1984 is one, ADL served them an injunction in court in Iceland and 1984 was successful in fighting it and also avoiding divulging any info about activists.

    If you wanted to it’s also possible to proxy server traffic so that the main server is never divulged which makes it very easy to swap domain names and providers. I consider this overkill for this use case though, would be necessary on a streaming site or something, though that should be hosted in Russia to avoid issues anyways, Russia essentially allows for the piracy of non Russian data.



  • I’d argue every small social site should run on the principal that they will be prosecuted like an illegal streaming site. You can divest yourself of liability and doxing with basic opsec.

    An example: host on 1984.hosting and pay with mined or donated Monero. Only access the site through a computer specifically for that purpose, and only with Tor / Tor Browser and a Linux distro such as Qubes, Tails, or less suspiciously, Fedora Atomic. Memorize credentials if possible, if not encrypt them on drive with a strong password via a keepassxc databases. If you are hosting the site properly, you can transfer the site podman/docker container and url with databases and info intact with no effort. Make sure the computer for managing site management stuff wipes itself on every shutdown sans credential info, has secureboot, and an encrypted drive. As an admin account, only access the site through base Mullvad Browser with a VPN (ideally Mullvad) or Tor Browser on a computer of your choosing.

    You can easily say the site is no longer yours and your payment information will reflect this. This has been done before. Germany can ban the site but it’ll be easily discoverable through other fediverse servers, Tor, and VPNs. They would have to ban anything that uses acitivitypub, and again, even in that scenario you can use a VPN or Tor or self host a vps with the instructions above to access it normally anyways.



  • Mullvad browser and Tor browser are the only serious options for privacy on the internet. Librewolf, cromite, Firefox, brave, etc will get you fingerprinted. If you care about security more than privacy, use a chromium based browser. Personally, I use Mullvad browser with Vpn (use only protonvpn, mullvad, or ivpn, they have had security and legal tests) it’s the best combo of fast and private.

    For mobile, the options are more limited. Ironfox, Cromite, and Vanadium (GrapheneOs) are the best bets for daily use. Tor Browser is the only one that actually stops fingerprinting however, but it is difficult to recommend it as a daily driver, it’s more of a tool.

    Source: I actually help code security software and test it in real world scenarios regularly








  • It really depends on the game. Old games often run better on Linux than on windows. Check protondb to see how supported the game is, may be a driver issue. Old Nvidia parts use proprietary drivers which suck in comparison to old AMD parts which use open source drivers on Linux. New Nvidia parts use open source drivers, though these drivers are new and still having the kinks worked out. Sometimes laptops even have specific proprietary drivers that must be used for the laptop which can break compatibility with Linux or reduce performance. I’m pretty sure Intel is in the same boat, it’s proprietary.

    Personally, for games I enjoy, I saw a small 5fps performance increase over windows on a newish desktop.