#tech stuff

My new car also had to be a hatchback because I liked the shape and because it opened the door to adventuring as well as providing better storage if I needed to fit bigger stuff in the back.

Last, it needed to be a fun color. Truthfully I wanted green or orange or purple, but cars are woefully boring these days.

So I went out and I found Hades, a bright red Ford Fiesta. I loved her at once and she’s been a plucky and reliable vehicle for ten years at this point, seeing me safely along on road trips and daily commutes.

My beloved wife had a Ford Focus which died unexpectedly a few months ago, and we acquired Pomegranate, a pretty burgundy Nissan Leaf. Now, Pomegranate was intended to be my beloveds new commuter. But the kid at the dealership fully lied about her range and the reality is that unless my beloved wants to charge for an hour after they get off work they need to take Hades.

I don’t mind. I can’t park Pomegranate worth a damn but she gets me to and from my much closer commute just fine.

My beloved grouses about taking Hades though. “She’s your car in spirit, I wish I were taking Pomegranate.” I commiserated. If we move to get closer to my beloveds work we can switch back.

One day we got into Hades to go run an errand and my music started playing on Bluetooth. My Bluetooth had previously been turned off but it often automatically pairs to Hades.

My beloved huffed, “That’s how I know Hades is your car. I have an intricate ritual to get her to acknowledge my Bluetooth but for you she’ll just turn it on and play.”

The app is a trojan virus.

Source:

👀Tutorial pls👀

I got you!

First off I want to explain what exactly we are setting up. This is a Domain level filtering. In laymen’s terms, we are using software that will turn a device on your network into a filter for your internet traffic. Traffic containing ads or malware simply won’t be sent to your devices. This affects everything on your network. Your smart tv, gaming console, pc, and phone will all be add free.

But it does more than that. This will stop your smart devices from spying on you and sending information off to companies that want track and sell your data by filtering that traffic in the same way that it filters out ads.

I use a program called AdGuard Home. This is not the only software that does this. It’s not even the best one out there, but I like this one. It works well for me, and I think the official tutorial was easy to follow. It takes a little less than 30 minutes to setup.

Download the software here

And follow this tutorial here

This tutorial assumes you are going to install the software on a piece of hardware that is always online. I wouldn’t recommend using your main computer for this because you likely won’t want to leave that on all the time.

I use a cheap 2nd hand mini pc that I purchased. You can run this on an old laptop, a Pi, a Mac/Mac mini or any number of other things. Just use whatever is cheap and available.

Link's working for me, so maybe it's blocked where you are which would be uhh. interesting. Or maybe just a weird glitch, the url is agelesslinux.org if you want to try typing it.

When it comes to active resistance against digital spying/restrictions, my feeling tends to be that you can 1) give money, 2) share information, 3) help with the tech infrastructure, and/or 4) change who you support with your own digital habits.

If you want to give money, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) is a good place to start. I don't think Ageless Linux is taking donations yet, but it looks like they're planning to start letting people contribute to buying cheap computers to hand out to kids at school STEM fairs and such.

Sharing information can go a lot of different ways. The Sherwood Forest Zine Library (sherwoodforestzinelibrary.org) has a whole computers & tech section with some privacy resources - if you've got a Little Free Library near you you could stuff a few copies in there.

#3 doesn't necessarily mean you need to know how to code. At the easiest end of the spectrum you can install the Snowflake add-on for Firefox (snowflake.torproject.org) which lets you volunteer a bit of your bandwidth to help other users get around censorship and tracking.