>>108551892
You can't be sure without removing the wireless communication parts of a laptop, which is why it isn't worth switching if that's your only gripe with Windows.
You could try reinstalling Windows using an autounattend file bypassing the stupid MS account stuff and just using a good old fashioned local account, then use an ad/tracker blocking browser.

gentoo of course lol

>>108551892
>ISP spies on you
You could always communicate via pigeon I suppose

>>108551892
Dude, your ISP only sees the domain of the sites you're browsing, not their full path. Like, they can see that you are on YouTube.com, but not the videos you're watching.

>>108551892
First of all you must acknowledge that reclaiming your privacy takes patience, lifestyle changes and sacrificing some convenience. Can you do that?

>>108552781
yes, but the average privacy tard is unironically not very helpful in making conrete first steps.
>>108551892
after doing some poking. a t1480 is what im going with unless there any objections, then im installing ubunto onto it and whinix in a partitioned drive. all of this shit i had to learn myself and im still not sure if im missing any steps or something thatll make all of this pointless if i dont do.
>>108552743
thanks for the clarity but i hate even that, plus they still moniter traffic and shit if you torrent

>>108552802
Great.
The second step is acknowledging that it is impossible to achieve perfect privacy online. The only foolproof way is living innawoods, but I assume you do not want to go that far. You can avoid most dragnet surveillance, but if the glowniggers for whatever reason decide to target you, they will succeed.
Can you acknowledge all of the above too before moving forward?

>>108552822
yeah... best i want is the best that you lot and sam bent (yes i watch him) are capable of.

>>108552912
all the ones im looking at have windows 10 or 11 already installed. im sure ill figure it out somehow tho. ill core boot it myself with a usb or something

>>108552289
anyone with eyes can spy on that

>>108551892
First buy a good laptop, if you have performance requirements, buy an X220, X230 if not, T480. All of these support libreboot, which is your next step. Next, remove cameras, nfc, wwan, mic, speakers. Next you shall choose the software. You have 2 choices, Artix and Gentoo. Artix is fast and easier to use, it's also easy to archive for full offline use. Gentoo is painfull to archive and has many developer forced choices that you have to make, which might go against your freedom. Next you will find a great source of proxies, that you will use for networking. It is helpful to setup a burner box that will scrape torrents through dht and a search engine/ipv4 crawler, setup passwordless sshd on it. After this, you will learn C and python for your future troubles. You are now set.

File: 2026-04-08_04-55.png (14 KB, 330x468)

14 KB PNG

>>108556398
cam I ask why you necrobumped this thread? it was on page 9, you clearly went out of your way.

>>108556420
helping the hopeless i guess

>>108556426
no, you're shilling. get a fucking life.

>>108551892
nigger they going to always be looking at your dick pictures and your cute girl dresses and also your bbc training videos

>>108551892
You probably don't need other hardware (other than your router maybe).
Use this to determine what is the best OS/VPN/Browser for you. Should get you a long way.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/

>>108551892
Get a thinkpad x220 (less than 100 dollarinos), replace the intel management engine with libreboot, install Artix, set up a firewall, get a vpn and start encrypting files if you care too much.

>>108556598
>vpn
>artix
does he know?

>>108556398
>>108556598
>>108556426
i appreciate it genuinely. is there much of a difference between X220 and T480 besides price (seems x220 is cheaper)?
>>108556434
eat a dick

>>108552743
still a problem for OP when he tries to resolve the IP address for watchkids.online

>>108557418
You just need any hardware that supports libreboot,
https://libreboot.org/docs/install/#which-systems-are-supported-by-libreboot
rather than the x220 or t480 specifically. Before your operating system and even your bootloader loads, your computers BIOS initializes the hardware. And at the lowest level, before even the BIOS loads, the Intel Management Engine on Intel machines, and AMD Platform Security Processor on AMD machines, loads. The Intel ME is on whenever your computer is powered (even if "shut down"), and can directly control your networking hardware, can see your screen, can execute CPU instructions, can read your RAM, etc. Libreboot completely removes the Intel ME, which is a difficult process and explains why supported hardware tends to be so old. It also replaces the proprietary BIOS your motherboard manufacturer provides with an open source (and thus auditable) BIOS. Thinkpads are typically recommended because of their build quality, but all will be equal from a security perspective. Supported hardware tends to be quite old, but the T480 is comparatively very new (2018) and powerful, so I'd recommend that. Keep in mind that if you upgrade your ram, libreboot might be finicky about supported kits. Consult their website. As for your distro, you're gonna want to use the linux libre kernel. The default Linux kernel ships with many proprietary blobs, and the linux libre kernel removes them all. This will almost certainly cause issues for you unless you explicitly buy a supported wifi card. Like with the laptops, I recommend getting the fastest supported card you can. All distros on
https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
come with the Linux Libre kernel, and have packages that prevent you from downloading proprietary software without jumping through hoops. Of these, Guix will have the highest privacy guarantees, though the last time I used it 'guix pull' was unacceptably slow. I don't know if this is still the case or not.

>>108557463
If OP is a nonce, he would be using Tor.

The only real solution I can think of is to take over and own the ISP. As in work in telecommunications and take the actual company through buyout or promotions.
Or create your own ISP.

>>108559205
There is a theoretical attack called the Trusting Trust attack, by which a compiler could be infected in such a way that it can add arbitrary code to anything it compiles, and reproduce itself in any compilers it compiles. So if you use that compiler to compile a compiler, it will propagate the same infection to the new compiler.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
Guix has defeated this attack vector by creating a full source bootstrap for GCC rooted in a small human-readable assembly file. There is no binary in which such an attack could be contained.
https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/
You can run this bootstrap yourself. 2 things to keep in mind are: 1, if you want to automate it, you have to trust a much larger binary as well. Trusting only the small binary involves typing a bunch of commands manually at the start of the bootstrap; 2: it might take a while.
All packages distributed by Guix are derived from this bootstrap.
Guix builds packages in a deterministic way, so most all packages can be "challenged" with `guix challenge`, which involves building the package on your machine and comparing the hash to the hash of the binary provided by the guix servers. They should be the same in most cases (some programs use things like the date they were compiled or random data to generate the binary. guix developers actively work to remove differences caused by stuff like this by for example setting the date to a common value).
Another thing you'll want to avoid is the systemd init system. Guix doesn't have it, nor does Artix or Gentoo (if set up to not), nor many on the gnu.org page. Systemd is not proprietary, the developers are just insane.

>>108559380
You can always provide your own kernel, for any Linux distro. Additionally, even better than Linux Libre is a custom configured kernel that only includes kernel modules you actually use. If you want to go this route, Gentoo will probably be your best bet.
Gentoo is another solid choice for a distro because it gives you a lot of tools to empower you to control exactly what is on your computer. For example, with USE flags you can pick what dependencies you do and don't allow. This is possible on Gentoo because it's a source-based distro that requires you to compile everything yourself. You can also eek out slightly more performance from this by optimizing software for your specific hardware (march=native), but realistically you're going to spend a lot more time compiling than you will ever save.
Proprietary software can't be audited, but even open source software still needs to be. The less code your system depends on, the fewer places there will be for an attacker to hide something.
If you're extra autistic, you could compile a stage 3 gentoo iso using a Guix compiler. Doing this would require significant work on your part.
Finally, another good choice for a distro is Alpine. Alpine is a very minimal, very easy, SystemD-free distro.

Now that you have your hardware and your distro, you need to connect to the internet. Most of your network traffic will go from your computer to your router, through your ISP, to a DNS, and then to whatever website your visiting. You can get a librebooted computer, install OpenWrt on it, and control your router. You can put a VPN between your ISP and whatever websites you visit, assuming you can trust the VPN. You could rent a VPS, install wireguard on it, and use that as a VPS too. Of course, then you have to trust the VPS. Since they control the hardware, it will be near impossible to do anything they wouldn't be able to see if they really wanted to.

>>108551892
Step one is researching which desert has the purest / highest concentration silica sand.
Step two is figuring out how to make your own near perfect purity silica seedling.
Get back to us when you're ready for step three.

>>108559589
For this reason, the location of the VPS can matter. IE, would your country be able to compell the VPS provider to spy on you? Regardless, you will never be fully secure on the clearnet (regular internet).
Darknets (Tor, i2p, etc) offer much better privacy guarantees, and you can be considered essentially anonymous on them provided you use them properly.
Another thing to keep in mind is your fingerprint. Websites can gather all sorts of information about you when you visit them, and use that information to identify you as a unique individual even if they don't know who you are. Then you have massive data farmers like Google and Cloudflare that are able to do this whenever anyone visits most websites, and they're able to build a profile on you. Based on this profile, they might even be able to link you to your real identity with the other information they have. And you might continually feed them more information to do this with by, for example, updating your habits in a trackable way by using your phone.
The real solution is to limit your activity on the clearnet, use the darknet, and use your computer offline. You can get even more schizo, but doing so isn't productive.

>>108552101
The wifi adapter is usually a tiny board held on by a single screw. I've done it for work reasons before. Like removing and sd card

>>108551892
grapheneos is more secure AND private than any desktop os shit

>>108551892
I'll give you my philosophy and setup, which will be nitpicked by purists but whatever. First, you need to understand that you never have full privacy or hide from the feds. And, the more private you become the bigger the inconvenience. Personally, I do the "bare minimum" that keeps my tech use smooth/convenient. First, use a VPN as much as possible. ISPs can analyze packets size/timing to know what websites you visit, but they probably won't because it would be very expensive to do this for everyone. Also if you care, VPNs often have features that can help prevent this. So a VPN, then use a "privacy" focused browser. I use Brave, which is hated here but it is simply too convenient for me to care about some drama that happened 10 years ago. Also learn about browser fingerprinting and set up accordingly. Make a personal email and a burner email. I use Proton for both, but kept my old gmail for when I really need to use Google. Proton is also hated here but it's the best normie-tier solution for protecting privacy, just like Brave. If you find something you prefer that is more autistic then use something else, I'm not a shill for them. The criticisms have some weight to them and it's good that people care enough to shit on them. Schizos do blow it out of proportion and don't trust anything. Use the burner email for anything not directly related to your personal information/identity. Don't use Windows, they spy on everything you do no matter what settings you disable. If you want a Windows-like UI experience, use Linux Mint with Cinnamon. Don't feed your data into AI and help them make money. That's my real goal: limit companies like Google and Amazon from profiting off my information. There are no absolutes, only solutions that go from basic to autistic. You have to decide what level you want to deal with.

>>108559667
Also, encrypt your hard drive, look into decentralized VPNs (I haven't myself), look into ways to detect if someone has tampered with your laptop, look into sending legal demands to data brokers to delete your data, look into custom DNS services, look into custom modem and router stuff, and monero and physical Western Union locations are your friends for making anonymous payments. Everything I've said should be a jumping off point for more research, and shouldn't be blindly taken as gospel. The goal is for you to understand and take control over your own digital footprint.
https://igwiki.lyci.de/wiki/Data_Broker_Removal_Links

>>108559803
Oh yeah I forget, encrypt your hard drives and put any files you backup online in an encrypted veracrypt volume or similar. Try to make purchases with cash and only use Amazon when you have to. Use a search engine other than Google/Bing. There are private search engines you can pay to use. And I didn't mention them, but there are better alternatives to Brave/Proton if you want a little less convenience but more ease of mind. LibreWolf or hardened Firefox are good from what I can tell for browsers. There are less popular privacy focused email services that are paid. MullVad seems to be the best privacy focused VPN because you can mail them cash and they don't know who you are. Personally I am fine with a "no-logs" and audited VPN. Some other things to think about: don't post online with your real name. Don't use social media in general. Always disable personalized ad settings in apps you have to use (probably does nothing but it takes 2 seconds). Don't spend any money online or shop for things. That is the data they are really after. It's all about money for private companies.

>>108556420
anon, not everyone uses the index in bump order. this thread is in the middle of you're using the catalog in creation order.

>>108556420
so you were watching this thread, hoping it would die? what an odd question, fed-kun