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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Yep, thats the blogpost from the owner of haveibeenpwnd regarding the email OP received.

    OP, it seems like you have or had malware on one or more of your devices that has been logging all of your credentials to any services you signed into on the infected devices with the email address provided in the screenshot you shared.

    we’re talking about the logs created by malware running on infected machines. You know that game cheat you downloaded? Or that crack for the pirated software product? Or the video of your colleague doing something that sounded crazy but you thought you’d better download and run that executable program showing it just to be sure? That’s just a few different ways you end up with malware on your machine that then watches what you’re doing and logs it.

    These logs all came from the same person and each time the poor bloke visited a website and logged in, the malware snared the URL, his email address and his password.

    I would suggest running a malware scan on devices you use to log in with that email.

    On a secure device, you should change the passwords for each service that you use that email with.

    If 2FA is already enabled on any of these accounts, then it should be safe and I would ensure the device is not infected before changing the passwords or else the passwords will be stolen again when you sign in on the infected device.

    It is likely any other accounts that were signed into on the infected device have had their credentials stolen too, you may not have those email addresses set up to receive this notification. Also you should notify anyone else who has used the infected device that their credentials were likely stolen too.

    You can check if other emails have been comprised using https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and you can also check if passwords have been comprised there too.





  • Lol I spent a week going back and forth with Revolut support in august. I could sign into the app but it would always ask me for a “selfie” verification and every time support would say its a super dark selfie.

    Eventually I decided to try a stock ROM and it just worked and I realised what was happening so I transferred all of my money out and deleted my account.

    Most local banks here are terrible at making apps, some even require a separate device that looks like a calculator to use online banking, so hopefully they wont follow suit anytime soon


  • Thank you! I’ve been hesitant to install a whole bunch of extensions but vitals and astra monitor look great, I’m going to try them out this week and see which I prefer.

    I’ve been avoiding flathub, it just doesn’t seem like my cup of tea but I may have to reconsider and take a proper look at it because it sounds better than a browser extension ngl

    I was just so surprised that a terminal that supports tabs doesn’t have generic tab switching, at least I know I’m not crazy now for not enjoying Gnome terminal lol

    I promise the giant cursor is a useful feature even though so many people have thought it was a weird bug lol I constantly do it when I’m trying to figure out how to word an email and on the very rare occasion where I can’t find my cursor it has actually been helful!


  • I’m pretty biased since I have been using KDE for a few years and only switched to Gnome this week to properly try it out so maybe I’ll change my mind but I doubt I will.

    IMO KDE has better theming and is more uniform across a wider variety of apps. It has support for community themes out of the box and it feels like the components are modular so you can have a different colour title bar compared to the app window etc

    • Dolphin > Nautilus
    • Kate > Gedit
    • Konsole > Terminal

    These are the 3 main default apps I use on both DEs. Dolphin has way more customisability and looks better but Nautilus has a fantastic multi-file rename with the option for find and replace built in.

    For me, Kate is like the vlc of documents. It will open anything and everything whereas I’ve had a couple of “could not open” errors from gedit this week. I also prefer Kate to Vscode.

    Konsole by default switches tabs with ctrl tab but Terminal doesn’t and thats basically my only issue with it.

    Gnome seems to still require you to install a browser extension to use Shell Extensions.

    KDE widgets are fantastic, I love having system monitors in a hidden panel at the top of my screen so I can really easily check system resource usage. I haven’t found anything similar on Gnome yet.

    KDE Connect is such a brilliant app, it wouldn’t launch for me on Gnome but there is GSConnect for Gnome but its a 3rd party app

    By default on KDE, if you shake your mouse the cursor gets bigger and there doesn’t seem to be a size limit which is so fun to do lol

    Going from Plasma 5 to 6 was a nightmare for me but its probably because I was using EndeavourOS so the updates were sooner and more frequent.

    Overall I think Gnome looks and feels a bit outdated and clunky and KDE looks and feels more modern with better integration across apps but that might just be QT vs GTK

    I do plan on continuing to use Gnome for at least another 2 months to give it a fair try but I will almost always recommended KDE because I prefer the look and feel


  • 2 accounts consistently reporting the same IP, location and user habits etc being linked is more absurd than nobody ever noticing excessive uploaded data from their phones? It is very easy to monitor the amount of uploaded and downloaded data on a device, lots of people would have noticed by now. The amount of storage, bandwidth and processing power that would be required to monitor the audio from hundreds of millions of android users globally 24/7 would make this the dumbest business decision ever when there are so many easier and efficient ways to track users.





  • For android, Google uses Firebase Cloud Messaging, basically a server that pings the phone when a notification for an app is available, which wakes the app up to receive the notification. There are alternatives but they need to be adopted by app devs for them to work.

    For people running a degoogled android, they’ll notice most apps won’t receive any notifications until they open the apps since most apps rely on Google Play Services to receive a ping from FCM.

    I don’t have any google play services so most of my apps don’t give me push notifications but I do have WhatsApp installed and that still receives notifications, they’re sometimes delayed by a few minutes which makes me think Meta have their own implementation/alternative to FCM but I’m not sure.

    For Signal, their servers tell Googles FCM servers that you have notifications waiting on Signals servers and to wake up your Signal app so it can communicate with Signals servers to receive your messages.

    WhatsApp and Signal claim/have end-end encryption on their messages but that shouldn’t matter when specifically looking at Googles FCM servers so, at most it would be meta data that could be obtained from the FCM servers.

    https://jami.net/unifiedpush/ has a pretty basic explanation of push notifications on android and also showcases an alternative to FCM https://unifiedpush.org/ which has a nice little diagram about push notifications on android. Unfortunately, Unifiedpush is not widely adopted by many applications.

    So there are ways to avoid Googles FCM servers on android using Unifiedpush or always having the application on in the background but for the most part FCM is used.





  • Weirdly in this case I think I agree. You can look at my previous comments about how much I hate Apple but it seems to me that OP isn’t too technical and installing a custom ROM might not be what they’re after. iPhones don’t have any of those annoying games and stuff preinstalled, as long as the carrier doesn’t install stuff. I’d suggest a refurbished unlocked iPhone though, to save some money. Make sure the previous owners account is removed from the device or else it’ll probably just be a paper weight.

    If OP is open to custom ROMs then GrapheneOS is a great choice but LineageOS and DivestOS are also great options for someone that wants to get started with privacy and they support a lot more devices, that can be got for cheaper than an iPhone/Pixel. Again, I’d recommended a refurbished, carrier unlocked phone that is supported by one of these projects