Well ThinkPad back in the days weren’t cheap either but then even a 2nd hand one could still last a while and one could still get them fixed.

Doctrow himself is pretty clear about this. Interoperability is the way you fight back against enshitification.

funny that’s not what I just read in his FT piece “There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labour. To reverse enshittification and guard against its re-emergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.” published just yesterday.

Also FWIW we absolutely are locked into GitHub… because others are too. That’s why M$ bought it in the first place, classic strategy from Redmond. I go use Gitlab, have my own Gitea instance, but in practice where do people talk on issues? Github. That’s why even entities like Mozilla or KDE that have entire CI and bug system outside of Github still often have mirrors there. Because that’s sadly where most of us end up being locked.

chromium being poisoned last year

Can you please expand on that? I don’t use chromium except when I have compat tests to run but still curious.

Depends against whom you are protecting yourself. If it’s against

• your younger sibling then it’s probably sufficient
• some script kiddie or scammer running scripts against the most typical setups, might be just obscure enough
• a proper targeted attack, then it will depend on which zip software you are using. Most likely the stock one that might (I didn’t bother checking) relying on something that is far from the state of the art in terms of encryption. In that case it will most likely not be secure.
• a proper attack but you use something like 7z with encryption that is relatively resilient, then most like if you are not facing state actors with huge amount of resources to try to crack it, most likely secure

Note I’m NOT a security expert so… don’t believe me.

Indeed, thanks for the mention because I wanted to go back on this. I wouldn’t quality any of this as evidence of Sync sharing usage data. Everything else is still correct, i.e defaulting to Google as search engine, some analytics, etc but it’s still unrelated to Sync. I don’t see how other browsers are relevant. It looks like they and OP are trying to show that Mozilla is not perfect, that they make money and share some private data and thus assume that any data used on any Mozilla product is shared with 3rd parties, including Alphabet, without providing any evidence for that. I’m not sure arguing more will help.

Are you saying Firefox shares data to Alphabet beyond Google as the default search engine? If so and if it applies to Sync (as if the question from OP here) can you please share sources for that?

Don’t get stuck into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness or perfectionism! So :

• every step counts
• even if you are not entirely private in anything you do, you can still be more or less exposed
• you are not alone in that struggle, we ALL are, from CEOs to politicians to random folks, we are all threatened and must help each other
• alternatives DO exist (as a personal example, I don’t use Google, WhatsApp, TikTok, etc) and enjoyable
• it’s not just technical but also psychological. If you focus on the technology it can be daunting, if you focus on usage it gets easier, ideally you combine both while insuring you don’t burn out.

You can do it, WE can do it! :D