Buy a pixel off marketplace then. You can brag about saving e-waste.

Google isn’t a bad company, just a product of poor regulation. They have amazing engineers and produce valuable hardware and that should be praised.

Its the business side of things which needs massive regulation and an ethics check.

Straight talk or similar services that you can buy in store for cash.

GraphineOS sandboxes google services. You can take it a step further and only install sandboxed google services on a work profile or user profile so you can have toggle-able google services, allowing bank access and whatnot.

Brother… apple couldn’t find my airtag when it was dropped somewhere in my yard… How would apple find a submarine 5 miles below sea level in a faradayed submarine?

I’m just saying that collaboration with or association with spooks or glowies isn’t in itself a red flag.

Many privacy and freedom granting software is made by these people.

Take Tor for example, made by the navy to hide information from the public and anonymously attack networks of adversaries… Yet now is the NSA’s biggest obstacle in mass surveillance.

And I’m sure you only use twofish because the NSA backdoored AES when they standardized it.

YouTube ads are served on the same server as the video… So they would have to filter it through one of their servers and block the elements and stream it to you.

So if you’re using them for privacy… you better trust them a lot because they would have equivalent info as google.

Since its for school you’ll want it to be reliable and to work 100% of the time. I’d just get a big brand and not connect it to the internet if you don’t want your data collected.

Other than that you can try to block the telemetry at the DNS level by VPN to your home with a pihole instance or using a private DNS.

If you really don’t wanna use apple or google OS, then best bet is to buy the tablet for the hardware and try to flash a different OS. But then you’ll risk it not working very well or having app compatibility issues.

I disagree. Firefox is fine, but saying chromium is spyware because its primarily maintained by google is like saying android is spyware.

Additionally chromium browsers are arguably more secure than Firefox, and has more advanced sand boxing. So much so that graphine OS used chromium instead of Firefox for their vanadium browser.

Only thing I agree with is not using brave… Cause well… They fishy.

Honestly servers don’t need to be speced out of oblivion. I use a 10 year old desktop and added a 1TB ssd and it does 99% of what I want it too.

Most important thing for a server is probably the CPU and making sure it has as many cores as possible and maybe hyper threading because you’ll be running a lot if simultaneous services and users.

Maybe find good audio quality on YouTube and download via newpipe?

I also use vimusic on fdroid for as a YT-Music frontend with premium features, but haven’t figures out his to download in the app yet

No only the server, you can host an openssh server and have clients connect remotely.

Sorta like how you can host a webserver and a client doesn’t need 443 open. Except a reverse shell is possible with ssh, allowing a client to be controlled without their port 22 open.

Looks chromium based, maybe look for another chromium with extension support?

Ungoogled version doesn’t have extension support, but I think that extensions are overated anyways because they make you super easy to fingerprint.

Brave is chromium based… But you have to trust brave.

Without a prior email or some sort of identification? I don’t think so.

If you wan anonymous email, use a tor email. If you want a private email, don’t use email.

You can tunnel RDP over SSH. Then you’d only open a port that requires authentication to access and is encrypted.

I’m a tinkering nerd, so I like to have a headless Linux box.

I did use self hosting operating systems in the beginning, and they’re nice. However, when I tried just a plain Ubuntu headless install, I felt way more accomplished after getting everything working.

Checking the router is probably the only way to see if someone is active on your network.

Can anybody hack your computer? No. Most people only know how to run scripts that are known and patched in most operating systems.

There are skilled people who may be able to create an exploit or find a vulnerability in your computer, but they will mostly target businesses or people they know will be worth it to hack, so most likely they won’t bother you.

Generally if your on your own WiFi, having a WPA-2+ personal password is enough, but the more paranoid may have an IDS/IPS on their home network.

If your out and about, I’d personally use a VPN. I don’t like public ones and like to recommend setting one up on your home WiFi instead.

If you think you’ve been hacked… change your passwords and run virus scans. If you still don’t feel safe, backup your data and reinstall your operating system.

Repost bots can help siphon users from reddit and make it easier to transition.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-11/how-to-block-a-program-from-accessing-the-internet-windows-11/m-p/2772951

The reverse is easy, maybe consider hosting the apps as containers?

Easily, here’s a resource if you need it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtuAdk4MwWw