[SILENT - 13.8s]

people should certainly be worried privacy is under threat and it's under threat both from

dangerous legislation like the online safety act that is working its way into law in the UK

and it's also under threat by the unbridled AI hype that we sadly see too much of at Davos we're

seeing technologies that are based on massive amounts of data on concentrated power be resold

as intelligence in ways that are stripping people of personal privacy and collective autonomy I

think people should certainly be worried people should realize that you know they don't need to

buy the hype they actually have a lot of knowledge and a lot of ability to push back on some of this AI hype

I'm here today because I think it's important that those in power have no plausible deniability

when it comes to the significance of the decisions we're making around technology

and just how dangerous the threats to privacy and autonomy are.

Well, happy new year, everyone.

hope everyone had a good holiday

whatever you celebrate

Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa

all those things

hopefully everyone had a good new year

oh I did not mean to hit that one

it's kind of funny

what is that

on my sound pad anyway

let's see

oh okay

alright

we can vibe with that

total accidental

what's going on everybody

this is Simon for the Clothes Network Privacy Podcast

episode number 50

recorded today

Tuesday, January 6th

oh yeah

now I remember that clip

so yeah recorded today

Tuesday, January 6th

2026

so we made it to 2026 so far

so

good question mark that opening clip was uh meredith whitaker uh from the signal foundation

and uh being interviewed by cnbc some clipped together responses to some questions uh at davos

which is the um well if if uh if you're not familiar with what davos is the world economic

forum uh annual meeting in davos and davos and a lot of people attend and a lot of people like

to comment on those because there's a lot of dystopian conversations that seem to revolve

around uh the world economic forum and and world leaders and oligarchs that want to

shape the way society uh moves forward in their eyes how to resolve i guess bring world peace

peace

We'll be right back.

You know, it's just every time I see anything out of the WEF, I'm usually cringing and terrified.

So there's a lot of talk within those circles to utilize artificial intelligence and technology to increase the surveillance apparatus within different governments and law enforcement.

Of course, always just to protect children, and that usually means talking about imposing or writing legislation or policy to vote on, to pass, to expand the overreach and the tentacles into all of our lives in every possible way, of course, just to protect the kids.

And if you're not for protecting the kids, then you must be...

a terrorist or a criminal. So if you use Grant Fino West, you must be a terrorist or a criminal.

I've said many times on this podcast in the past, kind of tongue-in-cheek,

I'm talking about becoming a criminal or think like a criminal. And it's like, ultimately,

I feel like the powers that be just want us to be criminals. And because we constantly have to

be on guard, not just from surveillance, but also the lackadaisical implementation of all this

technology with no care or concern about how information is stored. But yet, you're almost

being forced at some point to provide the information in order to live your life. But

then yet, there's also absolutely no laws or enforcement or oversight in how this data is

collected, stored, and used. And oftentimes, it's just left wide open for a data breach or some

other kind of compromise with of that information which it blows my mind so um normally uh you know

i actually i'll just i'll just step back a little bit because i want to dive right into the data

breaches um which i'm going to cover a couple i'm not a huge data breach show that's not my primary

focus but i think there's some that i i should mention because they directly relate to this

collection of information so i will be talking about some of the data breaches as well as

uh the 2026 year of linux and year of self-hosting uh talking about my server setup and some

infrastructure changes i'm in the midst of working on for the closed network podcast show and how some

of those resources will be moving around and how we might be utilizing uh different ways to communicate

you know with it within the community uh so let me talk a little bit about that uh about the 39c3

uh

which um one day i hope to go to but there's a there's a some content i want to play play from

there regarding agentic ai and what that actually means and and i also probably want to get to a

quick seven minute um clip of of what will happen for you know in 2026 in relation to privacy with

a heavy emphasis on the uk the online safety act the expansion of that it was revised on december

9th 2025 uh just a few weeks ago and um there's actually someone i follow on youtube who has a

has some just kind of a really good overview of that that i'd like to probably play as well as

some updates to digital id and age verification laws and proposals within the united states uh as well

as in other countries within europe italy asia pacific malaysia uh india as well i'm going to

have links to all these resources in the show

notes also in the show notes there's a link uh there's a link in the wherever you're listening

to this podcast there should be a link that you can hopefully click on that will take you to

the show notes topic on the forum we actually have a forum uh where you can kind of like watch

the youtube videos or or click on any of these links to all of the the sources i try to always

cite uh a source for anything that i'm talking about so if you want to go read on you can a lot

of those just come from your typical cyber security news websites uh or reuters or or some other news

outlet uh where you can go and read on so so yeah um this is 2026 and it's starting off pretty frosty

after the united states has gone in and uh captured maduro to bring him back to the u.s and the memes

the memes are not letting me down and uh just wow there's a lot going on there's a lot going on and

i think there's a lot of

you

a lot of challenges and having conversations about all this because

i i find it difficult to stay apolitical sometimes because there's a lot of alignment

within uh actions that happen and sometimes people find themselves on opposite sides of

the fence and sometimes they're on the same side and so i'll kind of talk about that in a minute

but i'll give you an example um in the united states there's been a lot of expansion of flock

cameras these are cameras that were traditionally looked at as what was called alprs or automatic

license plate readers or scanners basically keeping track of vehicles and their movements but now these

cameras have been kind of they've evolved and there's a number of different companies that that

manufacture these cameras and now they are incorporating artificial intelligence uh in

in there meaning they're tracking not just call

But movement of people, the clothes, how they walk, what they look like, and not just reading license plates of vehicles, but also characteristics of the vehicles, colors, dents, all sorts of unique, basically fingerprints of these different objects and tracking the movement throughout the network.

So as these things move, and some of these cameras have been exposed to be very poorly secured and being accessed online by different activists on YouTube, that's not the crux of any of the topics within here, but it's just kind of an anecdote.

All of this technology is being implemented and there's no oversight is some of the biggest concerns, in addition to just the overstep and overreach of that.

So this episode is going to be pretty heavily covering those types of topics, but I am going to be...

talking about some server infrastructure changes. I'm making my own life and desktop and operating

systems and things of that nature. So if you want to hear any of that, stick around because

yeah, that's what we're going to be talking about. So before I dive in to all of that real

quick, I just want to say thank you to all the supporters of the show. These are people who

have either contributed financially, contribute with their time, talent, treasure, all of those

different things, not to steal, but emulate the no agenda model, which is value for value. So

there are no sponsors, there are no promotions or ad placements of any kind within this podcast or

any of the websites that we run. It's 100% just authentic, transparent, just a dude behind a mic

who has a full-time job and a family and all those things, but isn't looking to make money

through the traditional.

ways that content creators make money, which is affiliate links and selling stuff and running

ad spots. So I'm going to take the moment to say thank you to the people who do that because

that's how this all works. So to the Patreon supporters, Michael Bates, David, Daniel J.

Martin, TK. TK, got your email. I actually just read it. I was out of town and you were asking me

when the next episode is. So hopefully, hopefully this answers that. As well as David, Mr. Milk

Mustache, and Hutch. Lightning Boosters, as of recently in the last few episodes. Bon, always

coming in clutch and on top. Thank you very much. New one, Snacks, S-N-A-T-X, as well as Firefly Go,

Wartime. He or she, they have been supporting for a very long time. Wartime, thank you. And two,

unknown or anonymous contributors. These are people who are donating through.

using bitcoin using a podcast 2.0 application which allows you to attach a bitcoin wallet and

and send value to your favorite artists and creators so thank you to all of those people

also thank you to unintelligence 7 and mattis max for helping with the community and welcoming

people what are we sitting at i we just actually were talking about this the other day in matrix

so we do have a matrix chat yeah over 400 people now are in our main chat uh and that's i mean that's

huge because you know it's it's a it's a little bit of a process you have to download uh a matrix

client and create a matrix account and then go to close network.io and join the room it's not

something like just easy super easy to join i mean it is easy but you have to want to do it so

there are over 400 souls out there that decided to do all of that and i just want to say thanks

there's a lot of awesome conversations and we have a off-topic channel

two where we share memes of course but it's just kind of a a flow uh a stream of consciousness and

conversation so um i'm going to be talking about the matrix stuff here in just a second as well

uh so thank you to unintelligent seven mattis max uh for helping out with uh just keeping things

cool in the chat rooms and and introducing themselves to new people and making them

feel welcome we very rarely have ever had to kick anyone out it has happened a handful of times but

it's very rare so um basically the the general rule is uh just don't be an asshole you know be

cool and treat everyone with respect it doesn't it's pretty basic it's pretty act as if you were

acting in public and standing in line at the grocery store or something like just be kind

and i really want to be cool other than that there's not a lot of rules i don't like a lot of

rules uh but but respect is you know is one that i think is a good one a good one to have um if you

want to check

any of these resources out you can on the website everything is at closednetwork.io

and there are links to join our matrix channel if you want to connect with me on any of the

different uh socials like nostr mastodon i'm also on twitter uh then you can connect with me there

and uh yeah that's pretty much it so um on the on the topic of of matrix um for a long time i've

been wanting to kind of have a have more organization to the group chat and we've gone

back and forth many times we've also experimented with different apps like simplex and signal where

we have group chats that and they are still active those are still live they're just not very

um the frequency of communication is pretty low on those because matrix is pretty much the main one

i don't know the things i the thing i don't like about simplex or signal

for these types of implementations like say like a commute

community is we don't really have any control over them so if something goes on with signal

or a country is blocking signal or or simple x though you can access that over tour and stuff

like that signal you can use relay servers and things of that nature it just becomes a little

more centralized and i don't really like the whole centralized ecosystem of of software doesn't mean

that i don't like signal and don't use it because i do use the hell out of it and some of you i talk

to on a fairly regular basis on on signal as well as on matrix but i kind of feel like in order to

have a true decentralized way to communicate uh i i need to be able to self-host a server

and so that's kind of my philosophy that's my mentality as of the last few months and actually

probably a year so right now the matrix channel is hosted

with matrix.org which is okay but i would like to move that over to a self-hosted matrix instance

and that would also allow us to have different channels that are more topic specific rather than

having everything crammed in one room and then one off-topic channel for all the memes so

kind of think like discord right like but you know it's going to be it would be self-hosted

so i actually have been experimenting with that um i have it working i just have a you know a few

things i need to test and work on before we move because i don't like moving multiple times like

if we're going to make a big shift to something else i want to make sure that that's the one

uh you'd still be able to use your matrix account that you already have it would just be adding a

server essentially or you know connecting to a new space is what they call them i think in major in

matrix world so uh that's something as well as um setting up an xmpp server more just for a personal

communique these are things that you can also host yourself and and have your own account just

like mastodon mastodon uses activity pub protocol if you're familiar with blue sky mastodon is very

similar where you can join someone else's server or you can host your own but you can federate

meaning you can make yourself available to talk to anyone else that's using the same protocol

i had a episode i think maybe six episodes ago where i was talking about protocols not platforms

it's kind of the way of the way that i would like to move and that's for a lot of reasons but a lot

you know as we kind of get into some of the meat and potatoes of this episode you'll kind of understand

why because these platforms can be controlled and dictated by governments and big tech and force

users into uh revealing their identities and not just that but also forcing them to upload

their personal ids and then

not really storing them well. I don't like any of that. So that's kind of why I've been going down

these paths of experimenting and testing with different environments, whether that's in a

Proxmox LXC or using a Docker container or running on just a Linux server. So I'm going to be kind

of talking about some of my favorite apps that I've been running within Proxmox as of the last

few months. And it's kind of opened my eyes. And I just wanted to share some of them because

I talk a lot about self-hosting. And I think some of these might resonate with other people who are

considering this route where you take your data back and now you store it somewhere that you can

control. And then, you know, that does come with a lot of responsibility, however. So those are

things that each person needs to weigh out for themselves is the convenience factor and the

responsibility factor. Some things.

might be worth continuing to pay somebody else to manage all that for you and other things you may

be willing to take the risk if it the barrier to entry is maybe a little easier or lower to enter

and so that's kind of where i've been in my journey for the last five years or so

and it's actually started a lot further back than that i just didn't realize it then

uh but you know i really started doing self-hosting uh really in in the mid-90s with bulletin board

systems and in the early 2000s i was buying decommissioned enterprise hardware from local

computer stores for like a hundred dollars a pop and i was running red hat linux on them so i could

have my own you know ip tables firewall and uh dmz and a web server and a dns server and a quick

three arena server and a team

systems

you

server because uh there wasn't really any other options unless you were going to spend hundreds

of dollars a month to someone like rackspace or something now vps's and stuff are super cheap

you can get vps's usually for as little as like you know three to ten dollars a month

but back then in the late in the early 2000s uh there wasn't a lot of like vps hosting options

so you just kind of did it yourself and now i'm kind of going right back to doing that again

over 20 years later i'm just doing it with with better technology we have much better technology

available to us to to do these things kinds of things and i will talk about some of that so

uh so yeah there's there's kind of the state of the housekeeping also i'm looking at self-hosting

the website i do already host the website but it's hosted on wordpress just not a big fan of

wordpress i don't hate it i don't love it so i've actually set up a

ghost cms uh running on another linux container uh all of so everything i'm talking about hosting

is like in my domain uh either in my house and replicated to another data center proxmox at one

of other two locations that i have physical uh access and ownership to uh so that's kind of

that's kind of the way for me i i'm at this point now where uh for the last couple years i've

everything has been kind of optional and more fun or tinker tinker hobby uh reasons to be doing a lot

of this and it started out with running bitcoin nodes and and things of that nature and now i

really feel like oh no i'm not going to use any other kind of service unless i can run it myself

case in point um for those that don't know i run a business and part of that business is managing

clients um uh marketing campaigns and they're

you

websites and some other infrastructure and i've started um uh kind of hosting some of those like

some of the things for that like monitoring tools uptime detectors using kuma and stuff like that

versus like uptime robot paying some other service 10 or 15 a month to send me an alert if a website

goes down for you know some period of time i can run that stuff myself and so that's what i'm doing

so some of it is is uh for professional uh use now but the the motivation for starting out to do this

was to do it all myself with next cloud which i set up a few years ago and now my family's been using

that uh as well as for all of their contacts and uh backups from their phones as well as some photo

backups though i'm moving i've i have moved all of that over to image now and then i use nt photos

is kind of my safety net uh that's

That's an end-to-end encrypted photo backup service, no promotion or anything.

It's just who I use and, you know, have been paying like a monthly plan.

And that's kind of a safety net while I test all this, all these other things out that

I'm doing, because the last thing you'd ever really want is to move all your photos to

something like, you know, a server that you run and then something goes wrong with it

and your backups are no good.

So those memories can't be replaced.

So I do still have that as a safety net.

But yeah, so I'm running a hypervisor, which is basically just a server and it's free.

Proxmox, that basically is a powerful and efficient like open source server solution.

And it also, I also have a backup server for that as well.

And everything I mentioned that I talk about, you don't have to write it down.

It's going to be in the show notes under my server infrastructure section.

like right below all of the links for the website and everything.

So that way you don't have to keep track of everything.

And then also I'm running different NextCloud instances,

which basically NextCloud,

think of it if you're not familiar with what NextCloud is,

it's kind of like running your own Dropbox backup,

but it has even more features to manage contacts.

You can even actually video chat and things through NextCloud

using the Talk app.

And this is all open source.

It's all free.

You can edit documents just like you would using Google Documents.

You can create spreadsheets.

You can edit.

It's quite a powerful system.

Some people will say, oh, it's a little bloated and stuff.

And hey, everyone has their own tools

and you don't have to use what I'm using.

I'm just kind of going through what's been working for me.

But the reason why I like NextCloud

is because it has a CalDAV connection server on it.

I don't know.

That CalDAV connection server.

hard DAV and CalDAV, which is for your contacts and your calendars. So as you create a contact

on your phone, it's not really creating it on your phone. I mean, it is, but it's syncing

to Nextcloud in the background. Same with your calendars. It's syncing to the calendar. And this

is all within your infrastructure. This is all in your house or place of business or whatever.

So you have some kind of backup and you can also create shared calendars and have collaborative

calendars with friends, coworkers, whatever, family members. So you need some server to run

that on the backend. You can just get by with just running everything locally on your phone,

but it makes a lot more difficult to say, share that calendar with somebody else because that

calendar only lives on your phone. It's just a local. It doesn't have a way to serve those entries

to other people. So that's worked really well for me for since.

really i think i i think i set that up in 2019 uh the next cloud and i've had a couple different

instances of that running on a vps in the beginning through linode and then migrated that over to

start nine and then have now migrated it into a proxmox virtual machine the reason why i like

the proxmox setup is because it's very very easy to set up your snapshot backups i do them daily

and put those either onto a separate drive or you can also send them to another proxmox backup

server which could be literally running on a laptop somewhere it doesn't when i say server don't think

of like big massive you know rack servers i mean those are cool if you can get those um but a

server is just any computer that can serve files is really what it is or or run services and that

could be old laptop it could

an old desktop uh there's a lot of computers that may not be able to run windows 11 because they

don't have the tpm 2.0 chips those uh old computers the computers you may have laying around with

windows 10 that are not going to get security updates anymore might be a great candidate to

install linux on like ubuntu server or maybe proxmox and or or something like um you know

starting off with casa os or umbral u-m-b-r-e-l uh those are graphical interface management

software stacks that basically manage little mini servers like you know docker containers

essentially uh and it's a great way to experiment and learn you could do this on a raspberry pi you

could literally run this probably on a toaster if it's an iot device you can run this stuff anywhere

uh so i feel like i feel like at this point

And especially the way things are moving in society is like, there's this like window

of opportunity.

Don't get me wrong.

I don't want you to have anxiety over this.

Like you've got to do it today.

But I feel like if you're one of those people who's been thinking about experimenting with

hosting your own data, now's the time to experiment.

Take your time.

Take as much time as you need.

If you're currently using an Android device and all of your photos are in Google Photos,

think about hosting that yourself, right?

Like using Image, I-M-M-I-C-H.

It's an open source server that you can sync your phone to and back up all your photos.

And the cool thing is you don't lose any functionality.

This stuff is so cool.

Like it can read all the meta information and it can do face detection, all that stuff.

So you can build your collection.

your albums but the great thing about it is this is all on hardware you own and no one can scan it

without your permission no one can touch it without your permission and and you still get the benefit

of having this great interface to search photos hey we we took a trip to europe we were in italy

in 2023 you can find those photos really quickly 2023 you can type in italy it does all of that

meta uh searching and and it's just really really powerful and it's just really slick they have

native apps for your phones you can use on android or ios uh you can access your servers remotely

really simply just by using tailscale which is a vpn for free up to three users user accounts uh you

could also use something like twin gate uh if you want to set up a reverse proxy you can do that

uh you could set up a cloud flare tunnel um not a huge fan of cloud

cloudflare but it would still be way better to use a cloudflare tunnel to access you know your

own data uh then expose your ip address by opening up ports so um i i think uh my son and i have been

talking about doing some tutorials i don't know when hopefully sometime in the first quarter or

first six months here to put them up on the forum because we've been doing some really fun stuff

all basically fueled by wanting to download memes uh so what do i mean by that uh there's just a lot

of funny instagrams stuff on instagram that you might want to download and we uh my son he's you

know he's in his 20s and he likes memes and all that fun stuff like a lot of a lot of people his age

and wants to download and save them for later or share them with his friends so we set up a cobalt

tool server which is an open source uh script similar to the scripts like me tube like the

youtube downloader scripts which we also have running now in the house

but we set up a cobalt tool server and what that is is basically a server and an api and then we

set up a shortcut on our phones to basically send an instagram reel to just grabs the link and sends

it to that server all within two touch points on the phone and then downloads the video and it's

processed on our server so it's like okay this is pretty cool right so sometimes it's like not even

just about digital sovereignty and all this other stuff which is which is great which is a good

reason to uh you know want to self-host and do that kind of stuff but sometimes you also just want

to like i don't know download soundcloud tracks because that does that too or download youtube

stuff to archive for your for your own reference later uh i'm not going to you know explicitly

talk about like pirating or anything like that but i mean there's a lot of content that you're

you're consuming online that you may want to consume in a different way later and it's a great way to

archive something so uh those are perfect examples of things

that we run uh in addition to um an ad guard ad guard server which is very similar to pihole

it's uh basically allows you to control uh dns queries and what gets blocked at the dns level

which allows you to do a lot of ad blocking at the network level for your entire network

block cookies block ad tracking and super cookies and all that kind of stuff um excuse me as well

is jellyfin uh jellyfin and i've i've mentioned some of these before but um that's a volunteer

built media solution and basically puts in control back of your media you can stream to any device

from your own server uh and there's no no uh scanning of any kind there's also plex uh you

know does a similar but plex is a paid a paid license to use and uh there's a lot of information

that does flow uh through their network that they um likely have access to see uh circ

you

ProxNG is a free internet meta search engine which aggregates results from like 200 plus search engines online and users aren't, you know, tracked or profiled because you're basically setting up a search engine proxy.

That's another thing that we have running on one of our Proxmox VMs as well as Olama.

If you've heard of, you know, the open source LLMs, the local language models or AI and having a web front end for that, we have that running.

One thing I wanted to mention which is really cool and I don't think I've ever, maybe ever talked about it before is Chasm, spelled with a K, K-A-S-M,

which are basically zero trust remote workstations that you can run in isolation through your browser.

So you could have, say, like a desktop as a service or maybe, you know.

you just want to be able to have an ephemeral desktop that you can fire up accessible through

your web browser this could be a progressive web app on your phone say you get maybe a shady

link or something or an attachment from an email address that you don't recognize you could

actually copy and paste that link or open that you know send that document to the server and

open it there and if something goes wrong haywire something gets hosed it's not a big deal it's not

going to leak into anything else or maybe you just want to look something up online real quick and

you're not you don't want that record of it on your phone or your computer you can use chasm to kind of

have this really cool throwaway anytime you need it desktop environment that can have files or browsers

or anything that you want and um you know it's kind of almost like using tails os sort of not

nothing

exactly the same but in a similar vein where you have this ephemeral environment you can fire up

and everything you do is gone after after you close it like literally gone it's destroyed

doesn't exist anymore so if you started again it'll be a brand new instance so you know that's

that's useful for a lot of different things um if you're into doing OSINT like open source

investigation stuff something like that could be really useful to allow you to um you know

research sensitive information without actually storing it on your on your local machine maybe

you travel uh you're a journalist maybe you're an activist um this is a remote uh like i said

you know ephemeral desktop uh that runs in a browser in isolation so nothing will come back to your

machine to infect it like malware or something and yeah it's it's it's just really useful these are

these aren't the reasons why i started self-hosting but when you self-host your environment meaning you

you set up some computers uh to allow you know run some of you

your critical, we'll say critical infrastructure, maybe like your backups of your phone and pictures

and things of that nature, then you're also kind of sitting there going like, wow, what else can

I do with this stuff? You know, I can, oh my gosh, I can run this, I can run that. And what it does

is it kind of puts you into this mindset of, you know, just you're your own data center. Now you

are ultimately able to do things that other people just, you know, not that they couldn't do it,

they just would never think of it. But because you're putting in the time and effort to set

this stuff up now opens up this expansive world of free software and open source software that you

can run and utilize and, and take advantage of for yourself. You know, if you want to store all of

your documents, you know, like PDF files and, and all that and keep track of record, but have it

highly searchable and indexed, you can run your own paperless ng server, put all your documents in

there, and it'll index and everything.

you can it'll ocr scan stuff for you it's amazing so even if you took a picture of a receipt maybe

for expense purposes and things of that nature you could you know copy that over there it'll do

what's called ocr which is basically reading reading the receipts and make making it searchable

and you can have all of that running in your own environment so you're not uploading anything to

do with service that you don't have any control over and don't have any control over not just it

being scanned but it being leaked potentially so um yeah the reason why i was kind of going down

this path is because there was a recent uh conference the 39c3 conference and there's a

video i'm going to play a couple minutes of um again from marith whitaker uh i think she's the

president of of signal and talking about a gentle uh ai so

Agental is the software that would run on your computer or your phone that can actually act

on your behalf based upon its AI modeling and its access and its context to things within

your digital life. These might be things that are prompted by you or things that are just

happening in the background. I'll give you an example. If you ask your AI to pull up an email

or pull up a calendar or what's on my agenda for tomorrow and that kind of stuff, it's responding

to a query that you're giving out. Whereas Agental AI might be something like it's automatically

replying to an email based upon your authorization to do so. But in order for these things to work

really well, they need access to everything on your device. So if you have...

encrypted communications or emails in in your mind you're thinking like oh well my communications

are safe my signal chats are safe whatsapp are safe and my email is safe because it's end-to-end

encrypted and not all emails end-to-end encrypted i'm assuming that you're sending from one email

using the same platform to another email user using the same platform email is fundamentally

not encrypted but i'm just just saying uh let's just say you emailed your proton friend on friend

on proton mailing from your proton mail that would be in an encrypted these ai agents are bypassing

any encryption because they are just scanning on device you're scanning your files your emails

your text messages your signal chats um and by default these things are on and usually on for

all of these apps and so this is on-device scanning and these are black box systems uh meaning these ai

because oftentimes they're using a third party like in the instance with app

they're using open ai's chat gpt there's rumors that they'll be moving over to gemini 3 sometime

this year uh and google obviously is using gemini 3 but if you have other assistants installed

whether it's clod or perplexity or other things or other tools that are doing api calls you know

there are so many layers of where my info is going i have no idea like you are not going to be able

to track it and when we start getting into the realm of uh digital id on devices tied to device

ids when we get into financial transactions where you're using your digital wallet to pay for things

those receipts are coming back we're not talking about just your ai having access to your email

or your text but your location data your purchase history what grocery you know oftentimes what

groceries you've purchased especially if you're using an app to do scan and go so you can bypass

the lanes well it

It's usually, if it has access to learn from all the apps on the phone, which it does by default, it can also see all of that.

How do you know and why would you believe that companies aren't salivating at the idea of having access to all of that information?

It's sold to us that these things are created for our benefit and for our convenience to streamline our lives.

But we all know that's bullshit.

And this information, these applications, these agental AIs are going to be used to track everything, literally every interaction you have.

All the phones have sensors on them.

Your phone knows when you're picking it up.

Your phone knows what orientation you're holding it.

So when you pick it up off the table and you go from a horizontal to a vertical flip and then you unlock the phone and you're holding it,

it knows what orientation it's in.

It knows...

what it's doing it knows what the screen brightness is it knows the time of day it knows the weather

it might know what the hell you're wearing it might know if you're going to the bathroom or not

um based on your routines and based on your routines what apps you do and use everything

all of that stuff is being cataloged it's being tracked on top of the content so

the whole point of of me moving to uh hosting my own infrastructure is uh yes i i give up a lot of

convenience sometimes for sure right and i have to own the responsibility of making sure that i know

how these systems work and how the backups work and testing my backups and having some redundancy

in place i'm willing to do that because i don't the trade-off is i go i i'm stuck going down this

other path and being locked into ecosystems and being locked into black box uh software that i

don't know what it's doing

you

and where my data is going and if it'll be breached. So I'm going to skip ahead for a

second. I'm going to bring up this news article about a data breach that happened with 500

million users. Let me bring this up. This was on Bleeping Computer, December 15th. So it's a

couple of weeks ago. But Pornhub is extorted after hackers steal premium member activity data.

Pornhub is a porn website. If you're not familiar with that, I'm sure you could figure it out. It's

an adult video platform and they're actively being extorted by the shiny hunters extortion gang after

the search and watch history of its premium members. So these are premium members. These

are people who pay for the service. So their information like their name and credit card

info and everything is what we're talking about. And it was stolen in a recent mixed panel data

breach. So it says last week.

which would have been the week prior to December 15th,

it says Pornhub disclosed that it was impacted by a recent breach

at analytics vendor Mixpanel.

So Mixpanel is the analytics vendor for them, for their website.

It says they suffered a data breach on November 8th, 2025.

So this is just less than two months ago.

After an SMS phishing, what they call smishing attack,

enabled threat actors to compromise its systems.

Quote,

a recent cybersecurity incident involving Mixpanel,

a third-party data analytics provider,

has impacted some Pornhub premium users.

Yeah, more than somebody.

It was to the tune of like 500 million records.

Now, it doesn't mean 500 million users, but 500 million records.

So potentially millions of people, not a few,

where they said some, the word some Pornhub premium users.

It says, specifically, still quote,

specifically the situation affects...

only select premium users is important to know this was not a breach of Pornhub premiums systems

passwords and payment details and financial information remain secure and we're not exposed

Pornhub says it has not worked with mixed panels since 2021 which is interesting so this data

breach came about exposing on November of 2025 so I don't believe that this is the trust me bro

uh press release kind of thing right indicating the stolen records are historical analytics data

from 2021 or earlier they said hmm mixed panel said that the the breach affected a limited number

of customers with open ai and coin tracker previously disclosing that they were affected

okay well open ai didn't wasn't even fucking around in 2021 so I'm like this doesn't make any sense

and the mixed panel says the data breach affected oh I'm sorry it says that this is the first time

it has been publicly confirmed that shiny hunters

was behind the mixed panel breach when contacting porn hub the company did not provide any additional

comment to bleeping computer beyond the security notice so they they're not talking and after

publishing their story mixed panel told bleeping computer computer that it does not believe this

data originated from the recent november breach okay well that's of course what they're going to

say because they're probably a big client to to porn hub mixed panel is aware of reports that

porn hub has been extorted with data that was allegedly stolen from us mixed panel told bleeping

computer we can find no indication that this data was stolen from mixed panel during our november 2025

security incident or otherwise quote the data was last accessed by a legitimate employee account

at porn hub's parent company in 2023 if this data is in the hands of unauthorized parties we do not

believe that it's this is the result of the security incident at mixed panel okay uh it goes on to say

you

Today, Bleeping Computer learned that Shiny Hunters began extorting Mixed Panel customers last week,

sending emails that began with, we are Shiny Hunters,

and warned that their stolen data would be published if a ransom was not paid.

In an extortion demand sent to Pornhub, Shiny Hunters claims it stole 94 gigabytes of data containing over 200 million records,

so not 500, over 200 million records of personal information in the Mixed Panel breach.

Shiny Hunters later confirmed to Bleeping Computer that they were behind the extortion emails

claiming the data consists of 201 plus million records of historical search, watch, and download activity for the platform's premium members.

A small sample of data shared with Bleeping Computer shows that the analytic events sent to Mixed Panel

contain a large amount of sensitive information that a member would not likely want publicly disclosed.

Coz.

This data includes a Pornhub premium member's email address, activity type, location, the video URL, the video name, keywords associated with the video, and the time the event occurred.

I mean, the article continues talking about the exploitation of the Oracle e-business suite zero day and so on and so forth.

But my point is, is that even when these companies are compromised and the hackers are literally proving what they have to bleeping computer the journalists, the companies are saying, like, oh, they got some records that might have been from, like, you know, four or five years ago, and it's not us.

It's somebody else's problem, right?

Now, Pornhub is required, obviously, if you're a premium member, you're paying.

So they're probably taking your credit card information, so you're doxing yourself unless you're using some sort of temporary card, a privacy.com card, a gift card, something of that nature.

You're going to be using your real.

real identity. Second to that, there are several states and countries now that require age

verification to access adult websites and some just regular websites that aren't adult, like

even YouTube, which is crazy. So they're being required to show identity to prove their age.

Well, these identities are being stored, data is being stored, and they're sometimes being

exploited. Sometimes it's a bad actor internally. It's not necessarily a hack. It's maybe an employee

that could be exposing some of this data or using it for blackmail. My whole point is

it's like all these services, social media sites, media sites are eventually going to be in a

scenario where they're going to have to collect your information. So plan accordingly. If you

want to be able to enjoy some of the luxuries of being able to...

movies or talk to people without having to reveal your identity not because you're trying to hide

but because a lot of these platforms are not securing your data nothing is unhackable by the

way so everything you do put online at some point you have to just accept that it's likely

that it will be exposed either through poor security through some sort of direct attack

by hackers or people just being incompetent lazy or just don't give a shit so i mean some of the

largest websites on earth with the best security teams have all been breached adobe meta oracle i

mean all these big companies so so for anyone to think like oh i'm sure their security is good

no assume no one's security is good when you so when you kind of have that mentality moving towards

words

signing up for stuff you're either a going to evaluate how badly do i want this and is it worth

the trade-off or b can i use fake information and get away with it so if there is an exposure i'm

not i'm not personally exposed we've talked ad nauseum about using things like aliases for email

accounts uh using password managers to have unique passwords on every website you go on because it's

only a matter of time uh and you know using false information and i think we need to normalize

that countries are are basically um forcing platforms to do this so uh you can either a opt

out or b you know run your own platform you don't have to use x you don't have to use a lot of these

platforms um you know you can use mastodon you can use nostr there are other places and the more

you can use mastodon you can use m manufacturing machines and then you can use syphilis to manage

have to use a lot of calls for some of these platforms and that's fine because there are some

people that that support these protocols and and work within them the bigger these things will get

and they can't force anyone to do that i mean they might they'll might try i'm just saying it's gonna

be it's gonna be a lot harder so you know this this data breach is a big deal um because people

are are basically being being extorted uh hey we got we we know what you watched we know what you

typed in for the keyword we know what you're into um we also found your email address and another

data breach which basically had an association of other contacts because some social you know

networking site was breached so we can also have a list of all your friends and family to send this

to or you're gonna pay us right so these are the types of things and i have a quick recap of recent

data breaches just in the last few months right from coupang and south korea 34 million records

exposed 4.3 billion records exposed

uh, from the LinkedIn, uh, data leak, right? That was on cyber news. Uh, just, uh, just recently,

actually, uh, the university of Phoenix data breach is an online college in the United States,

three and a half million people affected. So the university disclosed that they had a large breach,

uh, impacting approximately 3.5 million students, names, applications, employees,

uh, you know, it just goes on and on a Salesforce. Uh, there's a, um, gain site supply chain breach

that impacted 200 plus firms. So there are major, uh, supply chain breach involving Salesforce and

gain site systems affected more than 200 organizations, exposing sensitive corporate

and customer info, including some us banks, Oracle EBS vulnerability exploit, uh, with Korean air

catering and duty free, uh, in the Europe, you know, in European space agency, the ESA, there was an extra

server breach 200 gigs of data reportedly stolen and it's not even been has not been fully verified

but i've got links to that on tech radar so i mean these are just stuff that i just grabbed

that happened in the last two months uh just tons and tons of data that's making its way to the

internet and hopefully hopefully uh hopefully you're not any of those you know what what do

these companies do offer you like six months free credit monitoring the very from the credit

agencies that are all breached it's like you can't you can't make any sense of this right so

the more you can do to limit your exposure by not registering with your real identity on these sites

and platforms the the better off you'll be not if but when they are exposed so if you like

porn hub you know i'm not no judgment just don't use your real identity

and don't use a real credit card borrow a friend's credit card uh just don't do it in your own name

uh so i want to hop back over to this ai uh agental ai and that's why i wanted to kind of

jump to those breaches is because now we're going to jump back to the agental ai and there's a clip

i'm going to play uh it's a few minutes long uh at this 30 39 uh sorry 39 c3 conference um it's like

the 36 minute mark and this video is in the show notes so if you want to go watch this i highly

recommend watching it and uh this this section is meredith kind of talking about the path forward

um because what their challenge is is a software development company is they're making software

you know hence signal uh is is trying to be the most secure end-to-end encrypted uh communicating

platform but when you have software like when

Windows Recall, or other AIs that are basically scanning or even screenshotting the operating

system, then it's very hard to ensure the safety of your users because now the operating

system is acting outside the purview of what its previous expectations would be.

It used to be that an operating system was a fairly trusted environment.

Fair, I'm saying air quote, fairly trusted, but at least trusted to be able to run software

that you want to install.

But now the OS itself is actually the malware, right?

So rather than worrying about getting a virus and then getting your software exposed, like

the operating system is the virus.

That's kind of what we're talking about here.

So I'm going to go ahead and just play a few minutes of this.

Before I conclude, I want to mention that, of course, like we at Signal aren't the only

people noting these profound threats, and there's a lot of approaches.

beyond our urgent battlefield medicine that are being proposed by the ecosystem,

from ideas to treat agents as entrusted, to schemas for applying principles of least privilege,

to frameworks for using secure enclaves and confidential computing to hide sensitive information

while making it available to agents.

And these also represent harm reduction and more power to them.

But nothing here, and certainly nothing we've proposed in our three steps,

actually addresses the core issues that Udbov and I have covered.

As we've reviewed earlier, in a very real way, the privacy issues,

the imperative to access all the data or context, the security issues,

the architectures that enable non-deterministic systems to act without explicit permission

with significant susceptibility to prompt injection due to its reliance on text

and inability to truly discern, these issues are fundamental.

They're constitutive.

so you can wall up data in a secure little enclave face id style but an agent that accesses it can

still proliferate other harms can still leak information similarly you can run an agent in

a little sandbox you can cut off its access to everything but email but this limits its agency

and scopes its role much much more narrowly than the marketing promises of a general purpose robot

butler would advertise so here we hit the core tension it is not clear what it would mean to

both enable ai agents in the way they're being created today and to ensure that they respect

privacy are implemented in robust secure ways and remain fully under users control while respecting

the decisions and boundaries of third-party developers like us in my view the velvet glove

coup we are witnessing represents a critical inflection point in the history of computing

and that's what i hope

we've made clear today. We are transitioning from the operating system as a set of tools under

developer and user control that they and we can wield to get a job done, to the operating system

as a container for AI systems that monitor, predict, and act for you under the ultimate control

of the companies and organizations that create them. And it's this fundamental issue, this profound

paradigm shift that I hope you all can focus on. I hope you can use your brilliance and good hearts

and keen sense of justice in and around computers to take seriously, to examine, and to amplify.

Please make the memes, find and responsibly publicize the exploits, and help bring us back down to earth

so there's no plausible deniability, there's no way to claim that the hype substitutes for the

technical reality. This is the bigger task, to keep us grounded and to use the map established in doing

so to come up with real solutions beyond the harm reduction tourniquets.

that we also desperately need

to keep afloat for the time

being. Thank you so

much, CCC. I love you.

I highly recommend

if you have the time to

go and watch

that entire talk. And there's a lot

of great videos on the

MediaCC YouTube

channel, so you can actually get there

from

my show notes.

So

these are the upward challenges

that a lot of people who

are focused on privacy,

digital sovereignty, you're

having agency over your person,

your data,

your files, your pictures,

all of that stuff, your communications,

from being

so aggressively

and anxiously

scooped up and

basically taken from

you without really

any

you

transparency on like what's happening on your computer on your phone what data is being scanned

looked at sent off sold you know uh you know you know there we've kind of gotten used to this like

well i can trust my device like you can't always trust apps you know kind of a thing but now

the device software itself out of the box is the malware that's being introduced into your life

that we have never seen quite like before windows recall is a great example uh apple intelligence

google gemini all these uh samsung has their own uh in-house stuff too their own ais and things of

that nature on their devices that are basically just scooping data and there's no real understanding

like what what exactly is safe what's not what's protected what isn't there's no scopes

to some of these things uh you're just everything's on

by default. I'm going to play just a quick clip regarding the UK and some of the things that are

going on with what's happening to our privacy in 2026 by CyberWaffle. Again, this will be in the

show notes. This individual makes content anonymously on YouTube and follows a lot. I'm

pretty sure they're in the UK. So that's kind of an epicenter for a lot of arrests being made over

freedom of speech, over people posting things online that aren't even necessarily defined as

malice. They're just opinions or some criticisms of government officials, but because they don't like

it, they're clamping down. So therefore, people are using VPNs to change the location of where they are

to circumvent age verification. And now this legislation is

I forget exactly what it's called.

I think it's an amendment to the Online Safety Act, actually,

to do age verification now for VPNs.

Not even age verification, just KYC.

You have to show an ID,

which kind of defeats the whole purpose of using a VPN to begin with

because if you're trying to change your location

so you can step outside the surveillance

or you can step outside the geo-locked rules or laws,

then it kind of just puts you right back into the same boat.

So, yeah.

With 2025 closes out,

I want to go through everything that's happened this year

in relation to your digital privacy.

This includes all of the UK laws and regulations that affect your privacy,

all of the proposed bills that they're looking at putting into effect,

and also laws that will affect not just the UK,

but also people in the rest of Europe and most Western countries.

So, we're going to start off with number one,

which is the Online Safety Act.

Safety Act. This came into effect in 2023 and in July of 2025 they amended the act to include

age verification for adult websites. Now of course this caused quite a stir. People were

understandably frustrated that their data would be collected when viewing certain websites and

this isn't just adult websites, this has also required age verification on social media and

a byproduct of this is that people's information has unfortunately ended up leaking. In the case

of discord the company that they used for their customer service was hacked and therefore there

was a huge data breach wherein people's passports, driving licenses and age verification photos were

leaked and this further validates the concerns about things like verifying your age and I can

assure you this isn't the first time we're going to talk about age verification in this video. Now

before we move on to point number two pretty much everything we discuss in this video works on

geolocation i.e if your location on your device is in the countries where these laws apply

you will have to submit copies of your passport, driving license, biometric data.

whatever else to verify your age. Now this of course has led to a lot of people utilizing VPNs

to change their geolocation to other countries. Now digital identification has gained the most

steam over the past few months. Since it was provisionally announced in September of this year

nearly three million people have signed a petition against it and this of course led to a debate in

parliament in Westminster Hall where the Labour government essentially got bent over for round

about three hours and publicly humiliated. Out of all of the things we discussed in this video I think

digital identity is probably the least likely thing to come into effect. With around about a 94%

disproval rating for it people do not want digital ID and if the Labour government actually go ahead

and institute it and if the Labour government actually go ahead and start dishing this out

publicly to people I think there'll be a lot of investigations that take place not just from other

political parties but I think within the Labour party themselves. It's very clear that there is

a massive distaste for digital ID and I just don't see it happening. However

we are talking about our current uk government which is let's be honest not listening now the

next thing i want to talk about encompasses three pieces of legislation that have been proposed all

within the last 30 days so there's something in the uk called the children's well-being and schools

bill now this bill was passed earlier this year and effectively what this bill is is about you

know protecting children in schools and also some other controversial things like requiring children

to have identification numbers so their medical records can be shared between different schools

counties hospitals and institutions now there's a huge amount of privacy concerns with that and we

have actually covered those in a previous video but around six weeks ago there was an amendment made to

the bill now you watching this might be thinking children's well-being and schools bill it's to do

with schooling it's to do with children's medical care and that's what i thought initially when

people started contacting me about it however in the latest changes to this bill they've added new

proposed pieces of legislation that let's be honest are completely dystopian and we're going to break

this down into the three which i think you

you'll find the most concerning. The first one is VPN ID checks. So one of the things that they've

added to this is basically people would be required to verify their age to download VPNs in the UK.

If you've already got the VPN that's installed on your phone or computer, essentially your device

isn't in the UK, so this wouldn't apply to you. But for people in maybe two or three months time

to download a VPN, they will have to prove who they are and their age, which actually completely

contradicts the core purpose of a VPN, which is privacy. So to actually use a VPN and to maintain

your privacy, the government wants you to hand over a copy of your ID. Now the next amendment to

this children's while being in schools bill is social media age checks. Now we knew this was

coming because Australia's just done their under 16 social media ban, while the UK government have

proposed for this to take place in the UK and they've added this to the bill as well. Essentially

to have a social media account, you will need to verify your age and hand over your most precious

identity to prove your age. Then this brings me to the last thing that they've added to there,

which is absolutely terrifying. They want phones.

manufacturers like apple google samsung to screen your photo albums to screen your camera and to

screen your messages to make sure you're not sharing inappropriate images of children and

as we've discussed in previous videos they're assuming everyone's a criminal in the hope they

catch a criminal and it's absolutely insane now at this point in the video i just want to clarify

a couple of things because i don't want there to be any ambiguity or speculation on what my stance

is on this in the comments i think nonces should rot in jail i don't think children should be using

social media i don't think children should be viewing inappropriate content online but with

all of that being said i don't think every single british resident should hand over their most

private identification to third-party companies and private businesses and even the government

because the government has proven time and time again that they cannot be trusted with our most

sensitive data when it comes to things like verifying people's ages we must rely on systems that already

exist right now your home internet router you'll be able to log into it and actually just set which

websites can be accessed

you can block adult content through your home router and on your children's phones

you can stop adult content from being accessible if the uk government instituted a law where parents

must stop their children from accessing adult content i actually would agree with that although

i believe that the government shouldn't intervene with parenting in this case they're setting a law

that children shouldn't be viewing that sort of content which i agree with but what they'd actually

be doing is putting onus back on parents to do the right thing i understand the complaints from

parents that it is very difficult to watch what children are doing online and of course you can't

monitor your children all the time when i was younger me and my mates used to go down to the

park and smoke magical substances now requiring age verification for those things wouldn't have

stopped it the reality is is we can only do best practice when bbc news comes up they could run a

little 30 second segment for six months after the main news stories about how to set up parental

controls on devices and home routers and if parents are genuinely concerned about what their children

accessing online they can do this it's not the end of the world even things like pc gaming and games

consoles it takes just

a couple of minutes to set up all of the protections you need to stop your children from

basically contacting strangers online. These protections have existed for years and since

the first draft of the Online Safety Act in 2023 a lot of these things actually became mandatory for

companies to create which I think was a good thing. You know there should be options to have

parental controls on different applications and stuff and different devices. I think that should

be a mandatory thing because otherwise you are giving children unfiltered access to the internet

but the difference is is that doing that puts the responsibility on parents to spend a couple of

minutes for every new device that their child gets just to set up a parental control feature rather

than instituting an absolutely insane national security risk. So these are the latest and most

concerning laws that are currently being passed through. I have no doubt in the next week or two

there will be more that they try to push through other bills and I'm keeping my ear to the ground

to try and see if any other pieces of legislation come into effect. At the moment the last three

points that we've just spoke about are currently being discussed in the House of Commons and we will

find out very shortly.

whether they're going to be instituted but at the moment they've gone through the first two phases

with no objections so it's very likely that things like message screening vpn age verification and a

social media ban will be coming into effect at some point in the next three months so before

so yeah that's um kind of like it was a quick six or seven minute recap of everything that

uh i thought was kind of on par with what i've the research i've been doing and um i do have

a bunch of information in the show notes if you want to go take a look and see uh just just a quick

run through in the united states regarding digital id or age verification laws or proposals

there's one for in the state of missouri which is enforced as of november 30th 2025 where websites

hosting harmful to minor content which is not clearly defined what that is there must be age

age verification used in a government id or third party age verification service uh that that

has gone into effect. Same within Virginia. Social media time limit law is what it's called

for under 16. That was effective as of five days ago. So January 1st, 2026. It's under a legal

challenge, but basically the goal is to limit minors to one day on social media platforms.

This is very difficult stuff to roll out. It puts a lot of weird implementations within the

platforms that will have to enforce the requirements and be able to enforce this one

hour limit per day. At the federal level, the App Store Accountability Act, which there's a push

for that in the last two months. I don't think it's passed, but would it require Apple and Google

to verify user age at the App Store level? I don't think this has really made it anywhere to where

it's actually being...

.

uh, implemented, obviously. I think there'd probably be quite a bit of an upset over that,

but I do have a link to that story as well. So that's, that's at the federal level, as well as

a trend signal, uh, for a state by state laws to indirectly identify verification mandates. Uh,

so, you know, this is like, you know, biometric or data retention, um, and normalization of ID

checks for, you know, lawful speech. So I have a link to EFF and wired regarding those,

those topics in Europe, um, France, they have under 15 social media ban. Um, so that was announced

and effective as of September of this year. So this was just reported on, uh, that would be going

to affect basically prohibiting anyone under the age of 15. Uh, so how do you, you know, more age

verification, uh, St. Italy mandatory age verification for adult content. This went in force on November

12th of 2020.

25 uh adult websites must verify users age by third party or facial recognition in a selfie

type type of thing uh the secondary effects are you know the vpn adoption and geo blocking of

italian's ip so they'll probably go to the same route that the uk is going with um the vpn kyc

verifications in asia pacific uh australia there's a social media minimum agent on now

uh that took effect on december 10th of 2025 so just a few weeks ago uh where there's you know

platforms must take air quote you know reasonable steps to prevent under 16 uh the age of 16 year

olds accounts um through different verification mechanisms those mechanisms are still under

discussion whether it's just digital id systems or it's approved by third party assurance providers

things of that nature and uh that kind of then brings in the reason for digital id to be

uh passed and accepted in malaysia you have a proposed under 16 social media ban uh that is

set to be approved in 2026 but we'll see and i'm tracking this stuff over the year india a lot of

stuff going on in india now the latest thing is a domain registration an electronic uh kyc at the

infrastructure level uh mandated by delhi high court this went into effect december 2025 so no

registration of domain names anonymously you've previously been able to use uh pork bun name

cheap different different platforms like that to register domain names anonymously and and they want

to uh to to stop that um and i have a tracker table for the like the last couple of months broken down

by jurisdiction uh the category uh a summary and and basically an effective or status state and what

the likely methods are whether it's an id upload a digital id face id things of that nature so uh all

All of these, I just put into a little table, along with all links to all of those different

things that I just mentioned, whether it's like a Guardian or Reuters report or Wired

or EFF TechRadar, I've got links to all of those different things.

If you want to dive into those, if those are in your locations, there's obviously more

going on in the world than that, but this podcast would be several hours long if I try

to cover all that.

Again, I'm not trying to go super deep into all of these things.

It's just to demonstrate the trend, the trend that this is the way of the future where the

toothpaste is out of the tube, so to speak.

It's going to be really hard to put it back.

These are the things that we're faced with.

Anything that you can do, even on a small scale to a bigger scale, even if it means having

discussions with family members or friends who are more technically savvy than if you're

not feeling very confident and being able to host these things, I know not everyone has

those skill sets.

It's way easier than it used to be, but there are still some basic fundamentals of knowledge with computers and networking and backups and things of that nature that you're going to want to really take into consideration if you're thinking about moving into this realm of hosting your own data and maybe even considering moving to a privacy-respecting mobile device like a Pixel phone running Graphene OS or something of that nature.

You know, a flip phone or something that's not a smartphone that's tracking all this stuff 24-7 and reporting it to some sort of agental AI that you don't even know about, some digital robot keeping tabs on you and narking on you every minute, every hour of every day.

So, I didn't really mean this to sound so dystopian, but good lord, everything that's happening around the world right now is…

is dystopian, but the positive thing is that there are so many people in great mass that

have the same feeling and feel that are talking and supporting and promoting different methods

and off-ramps using open source software, using Linux.

Linux has got a massive traction from influencers and creators, gamers, all alike.

A lot of that's due to the fact that Windows 11 sucks so bad and nobody wants AI co-pilot

running all the time and Recall, and it's just really bloated as well.

So people who are really into gaming and things of that nature are looking at switching over

to Linux distributions, specifically Bazite, CacheOS, PopOS, Fedora, Nobara, some of these

other distributions, Steam.

os runs on arch linux it's been a huge um gap fill for the linux community as it relates to

gaming because valve has put so much time and money and effort into the development of these

layers that that translate windows apis until you know so linux systems can actually play games

that that are that just natively install and they're able to run proton middleware to to

basically make these games very playable and a lot of instances play a lot better on linux than they

would on windows and there are some game manufacturers especially the online but the

popular online multiplayer games like call of duty and stuff that use um i think it's called ricochet

uh there might be a couple different uh anti-cheat softwares that run at the kernel level uh that are

not compatible obviously with linux because nothing's going to run at the kernel level that's

also called malware um that hopefully will change how they run their anti-cheat software because

So many people are moving to Linux for just regular computing as well as also gaming, video editing.

DaVinci Resolve works decently well on Linux, especially if you're running an AMD graphics card.

But, you know, yes, are there hurdles? Are there challenges?

Of course there are, but they're getting fewer and further between than they were just even a few years ago.

And because the user base is growing so rapidly, more money, time and development is going into making a lot of this stuff better, which we all benefit from.

So I'm like, that's the positive, right?

The positive is that there's a lot of cool tech and solutions and software being developed and people and activists speaking out.

But like even in the midst of all of this kind of like really awful, terrible news, there's still a lot of light.

And I'm trying to stay positive.

is it gets really depressing and it's just not fun anymore um so i'm gonna wrap it up because i i

have a lot of stuff i didn't even get to um that i would like to talk about but i will um probably

do within the next week or two in the next episode because um i actually have like a lot of things

i'm working on uh myself that i think other people could benefit from and as in tutorials and maybe

some learning sessions or online uh hosting some online um kind of show and tell or how to is not

necessarily like doing youtube content though that might be it i'm still kind of fleshing all that out

um but i think that in order for us all to benefit you know the sharing of knowledge is really really

key i have a lot of knowledge i have a lot of information but i don't know i don't know a lot

of like what people know and the 400 people in the matrix chat know um everyone's good at something

and that is kind of the whole point of why i ever started this podcast to begin with

was to connect with other people out there that hopefully are, are, are chasing the same thing.

They're seeing the trend and they want to, they're looking for off ramps off the crazy highway.

And this is where I was like, well, let me just do, we'll start podcasting. We'll just build a

little community and it'll just be a great knowledge share, a knowledge exchange. And,

and, uh, that slowly, but surely where, where we're getting to. And I have no idea where it's

going, uh, this year or next year, I'm not going to try to say, Oh, we're going to do this and all

these great things. No, I really just want to keep it like digestible and simplified. Um, we can get

as complex and crazy as we want to. Sure. Um, but I, I don't, I'm not trying to set any crazy lofty

goals cause I don't know what to expect. Um, uh, this year, you know, with the political climate

and the economy and a lot of stuff going on. So I'm just going to keep chugging along, doing what

we always do cranking content, trying to bring great people on to have conversations with.

And, you know, keep tracking the laws and software and things and solutions that are available to us that we can utilize to circumvent and continue, you know, protecting and keeping our arms around our own digital lives online, who we are.

And not having to expose ourselves to such insane dystopian rules, especially when there is big chances of that data leaking out and getting out and being used against us in some way.

So, yeah, it's like, you know, it's like this turns less into a privacy podcast all the time and more into like I'm trying not to, you know, form an army and get super active.

So thanks for hanging with me and feel free to connect with me on any of the social platforms.

Send me an email.

Let me know your thoughts.

questions and i will catch you in the next one whoa that is not i'm just failing today no that's

not it either i i'm just gonna roll with it because you know i don't i don't do any editing

on these these are just we just do it live that's all that's to it that's a way to always be

out of the watch i'm setting the stage you should give me my props you ain't got a soul you lacking

the spirit you talk about your neck i'm gonna show you i'm with i've been really happy you

just didn't watch me win again and win again and win again i know it's probably getting on

me and when i'm sending them so if i ever win again there's no i did the minimum i didn't have

to sell my soul