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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • You wanna go for start-ups then. Most bigger and medium-sized companies have centrally-managed security where they wanna push updates and such to all computers or there’s some corporate spyware everyone’s gotta run or they’ve got everyone on M$ Office etc etc. Odds are a place that lets you use a linux laptop is going to be reluctant to buy you one and invite you to use your own. Macbooks aren’t so bad, if they let you have sudo, lots of places use those.




  • Being privacy-conscious can protect your information from being passively collected by mainly corporate entities that track your buying habits, life events, and health.

    If you think you’re being actively targeted for surveillance, then you need security that is proportional to the resources that the people who are spying on you have. In the case of say, the NSA, they could have a backdoor in a various location in your hardware or software stack. If you have privacy tools like tor, they’re liable to target you and collect your data just for that. Most android/IOS phones are thoroughly bugged and tracked, to the point where if the battery is still attached and the phone is switched off you can still be tracked. If the NSA does collect your data, there’s a 99% chance no human will look at your data unless they have a reason to search for you.

    If you are being spied on, odds are you won’t catch it. You might be able to isolate abnormal outbound network traffic if you’re really good about tracking that kind of thing on your network. Your phone could connect to a fake Stingray cell station and you wouldn’t know.

    If you’re being stalked by a person with less resources than the NSA, it becomes a lot easier and common-sense privacy protections can help you keep a low enough profile.

    It’s also worth noting that if private companies get a hold of your data, they’ll sell it to any government or private organization who’ll pay them. There’s scant regulation about what they can’t collect and what they can’t do with it.

    I think the simplest rule of thumb is if you have something sensitive, don’t say it near an android or ios phone and don’t put it on a computer that’s plugged into the internet. Criminals have their own OPSEC, as do people in the intelligence industry, and usually the answer is an “air gap”.




  • There was a programmer at my job, he put out the vibe of being a gung-ho guy and got promoted to team lead. The moment he had a scrap of power he started publicly berating the other devs, randomly, over nothing, leaving me wondering who he’d snap on on a given day. One day I got the message to shut off his access to the build server, which meant he was fired. It took way too long but it was delicious when it happened and my work satisfaction skyrocketed. An asshole can change a whole job.