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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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Some scattered thoughts about what you posted from somebody who browses the Web almost entirely via Tor:

  1. Use Matrix at a minimum people, seriously. Discord is shit garbage.

  2. Always set up a TOTP 2FA key (assuming the service supports it, which most big ones do nowadays) on any burner account immediately, the very first moment you're registered, logged in, and can access the settings panel, before you do anything else. This will in many cases serve as a valid alternative to providing a phone number (can't say about Google though as they truly might be the Antichrist and you definitely should avoid their products entirely if possible). (PS: If you didn't do this on your Outlook account, you're going to get blocked with a request for a phone number the next time you log in with a different IP.)

  3. You're doing Proton dirty here. They've only ever claimed to encrypt the bodies of your emails; the subjects (which are all they need to figure out that you're receiving registration e-mails) have never been claimed to be encrypted and aren't (otherwise it'd be very difficult for them to do spam/phishing/etc. filtering). And given that they're providing a free service where according to all known information they don't sell off your data to finance it (that is, solely using it as a free trial/advertisement for their paid offerings), why do you think you deserve infinite, unmetered use of it in violation of their clear ToS which says one free account per person only? Hard to feel sorry for you here. (Further, while I know you were in a rush at the moment, if you ever want to use an account to chain to registering another account, if you have the time and want to avoid any hassle, it is always a good idea to let the first account in the process age at least 24 hours. Proton is hardly the only service with a system to detect making throwaway accounts to register other accounts.)

  4. Facebook makes it pretty easy (or at least easier than normal) to register a truly anonymous account via their Tor .onion hidden service, though it's been spotty at times. (Be sure to set a plausibly real profile picture that is edited slightly enough to not be reverse image searchable or ideally one that's AI-generated entirely, plus a plausibly real name that doesn't at all resemble any celebrity's.) After you wait at least a day with the account registered (as Facebook has similar measures in this area as Proton, though they just tell you to wait longer instead of putting permanent restrictions on your account), then you can often use this anonymous account to get a foot in the door on websites that allow you to sign up with Facebook. (However, the key is that you must only ever log in to the account via Facebook's hidden service. If the cookies for the account ever hit actual plain old Facebook.com itself, it will be permanently disabled. This means if you're using a "Sign in With Facebook" authentication link, you must modify the URL manually to the .onion version before going to it. Also this doesn't really work nearly as well for Instagram. You'd think having a Facebook account in good standing would guarantee its attached IG account, but nope. They'll often disable you quickly, especially if the account is unaged.)

  5. If you ever use an app or locally-installed/program version of a service, they're probably already able to fingerprint you and your device enough that nothing else matters. If you're ever "pleasantly surprised" that a service doesn't give you crap for signing in via a VPN or something, it's because they already know who you are anyway based on your device characteristics. At a minimum probably every app you use on your phone (unless you use Graphene or something similar) can be connected via fingerprinting to every other app.

  6. External services don't receive your MAC address (unless you use IPv6 without privacy extensions, but if you're using a VPN you're not showing off your real IP in the first place). Changing it has nothing to do with what happened.

  7. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason to go out of your way change the IP you use to connect to a singular account. All of the IPs will be automatically connected by that account anyway. Opsec-wise, what's the point? You were hoping Discord might end up confused about whether the person still using the account now is the one who registered it? I guess you got what you wanted... (Yet any human or moderately-smart LLM looking at the account now probably still wouldn't question that it was the same person the whole time anyway.)

Use Matrix at a minimum people, seriously. Discord is shit garbage.

Is Matrix actually not garbage these days? I tried to set it up a few years ago and gave up when I couldn't get the default Android app to make a voice call without crashing. As I said, that was a few years ago, so hopefully it's gotten better, but I skim their weekly blog posts and it still sounds pretty beta-quality. Moving off Discord to something open sounds great, but it has to be to something that actually works.

Well, voice calls still suck in my experience, but that's never been what I've used Matrix or Discord for.

For encrypted voice calls, I suggest Wire.