“If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program - immediately, if not sooner.”
-R B Fuller

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 25th, 2025

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  • Now?

    I remember using netgroups and UUCP in the early 90’s to piece together files from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica

    Back then there were fewer financially/data-predatory websites, mostly because we didn’t have payment methods on the Internet yet (we were just getting websites as opposed to news and gopher), and it wasn’t yet practical for companies to scrape your data.

    So instead we were inundated with viruses. Like every few weeks, somehow, a virus would eat your frickin’ files. It was more simply malicious, not even greedy. Not going to try and argue which is worse.











  • Qubes requires a lot of configuring to be properly secure and you have to have a fair bit of understanding about virtualization.

    I’d suggest starting with Whonix . It still uses some of the same virtualization technology, and like Tails routes everything over Tor, and provides excellent protection against threats on your local network (due to separating Gateway into its own VM)

    Also Whonix is straightforward to set up. You first install VirtualBox, then literally just double-click the Whonix .OVA file to install. It fires up two virtual machines: Gateway and Workstation. You use the Workstation; the Gateway handles Internet traffic (and you generally don’t login to it)

    You can save files, customize your desktop, use it like a normal computer.

    EDIT: just noticed this

    opening risky files

    For that, your best bet is a burner laptop that you re-image regularly. Qubes is also a pretty good way to do this; you’d set up an extremely locked-down execution environment for the “risky file”.

    But if the risky file attacks Linux-based OSes, you’re hosed even under Whonix or Tails.