Very cool. That’s the good part of AI. It increases access to existing solutions.

Can this be true if you use a device without any connection to the internet and no SIM card?

There’s a bunch to unpack here:

• If the device is truly offline, your privacy is okay.
• But there’s lots of ugly ways vendors work around “being offline”
• Denying the device a SIM card means the device is not authorized to get online, but certain emergency services that require a network will work anyway. The SIM is to make sure we’re paying to be online, and is otherwise not actually needed to connect.

I mean could a hardware connect to some kind of network to send private information?

If you’re asking if it is possible to hide a secret antennae in an officially offline device, yes, absolutely.

I’ve heard privacy nerds theorize that these will become common in smart TVs, so the TV can phone the vendor with screenshots, even (especially) when playing pirated local media.

Because the basic thing is, it won’t expose your data if doesn’t leave your phone, right?

Exactly. And you’ve also caught the tricky bit - it’s hard to be 100% sure a device isn’t phoning home if the device is a closed proprietary (secret) design, running closed proprietary (secret) software.

.htaccess files are pretty simple to set up, if not hosting anything too sensitive.

I’m baffled as to why you think that counts as a source.

I mean, just Google it. Microphone hacking is a thing. (Edit: You know what, Let me Google that for you.)

I only felt obligated to grab a link grabbed because folks keep repeating the misinformation that “no one is hacking your phone microphone, or it would be in the news”. It’s just not news anymore.

Android and iOS malware will try to grab stuff off of your microphone.

It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s not news.

Malware actors do malware things, and sell whatever they can harvest.

No it’s not listening to you unless you explicitly gave an app permission to listen to you.

Is worth highlighting. Good point.

Here’s court cases lost by Google and Apple

Also, whenever monolithic megacorporations not recording you directly, virtually everyone is still buying any data about you they can get from actual malware distributing criminals.

Microphone hijacking is real and commonplace. (Edit: Fixed link thanks to some feedback.)

The malware vendors sell what they learn about us on black markets. And in net effect, everyone is buying from them.

They “Privacy Wash” the things they learn from the illegal recordings, by passing them from one disreputable broker to another. Each broker can keep poor quality records of exactly where they got their data. Pretty soon it’s just “part of your digital fingerprint” and “can’t be helped”.

Aside from devices that acknowledge theyre listening all the time there actually isnt any, for undisclosed data collection via microphone specifically. Research has, to my knowledge, never found that to be the case

Please stop quoting this misinformation.

Microphone hijacking is real, and it is common. The average user has been a victitm of it.

And in addition, Google and Apple effectively admitted to microphone abuse in court.

The first person to actually prove this whole mass spying via microphone to sell ads thing is actually happening, would be world-famous overnight.

The first person that proves that Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Meta are directly doing it, using their hardware vendors privilege - would be famous overnight.

But that won’t happen, because they don’t have to.

(Okay, it might still happen with Meta. I’m not sure those jackasses have any self respect.)

In general, the big vendors don’t need to listen to anyone’s microphone, because the average user installs a free flappy bird clone that runs the microphone continuously, and then sells that to absolutely every single limited liability corporation, coffee shop, or data broker - to correlate for advertising.

Saying “they’re not using the microphone” is splitting hairs to death.

Yes, a few of the biggest players can’t be arsed to directly use the microphone.

Instead they buy the result of malware microphone use indirectly from the malware pushers who do absolutely use the microphone.

Absolutely every tech company, employer and three letter agency is buying the content of your voice recordings through a form of Privacy Washing. They didn’t collect it themselves, and they didn’t look to closely at how it was collected, so it’s okay, right?

For the average user, whose kid installed some stupid little free games, yes, someone is almost certainly “listening” right now, and all the time.

But they’re not using it to decide who to arrest, who to deport, or who to hire or fire (for saying “union”), or whether you really need the salary you requested…unless they are.

And yes, finding out some of that would absolutely make the news, but those are harder to find out, and could go for decades undiscovered.

Twenty years ago, we were speculating whether open source browsers would survive or catch on.

Now there aren’t any closed source browsers left.

Vendors will find other forms of lock in, anyway, of course.

To pile on to your (excellent) suggestion, OP might try enabling POST (power on self test) in BIOS. It takes awhile on modern RAM, but I’ve had it identify failing RAM sticks for me.

What would you suggest?

Not OP, but here’s an answer for your consideration.

Assuming you are not currently being hunted by well resourced scary people…

It seems to me that even using a single user profile on GrapheneOS already provides dramatically better security and privacy outcomes than any other mobile device option, anyway.

I’m not a computer expert or planning to be.

I don’t use Arch, but my perception is that it is meant for people who want to be computer experts.

Do you have any reason not to use Linux Mint? As others have mentioned, Mint has 95% of the benefits over Windows that Arch has, and Mint is designed for folks who just want to use their computer.

how do you use cracks? or did you stop using them?

I make good money now and buy all my games, but I still apply mods.

Mod manager tools tend to just work on Linux now, thanks to the SteamDeck.

Haha. I don’t believe in destiny, but the things you like about Windows are the things I liked about Windows before I switched to Linux.

You’ll find many other fans of cracking / Liberating software, here. It’s where the “Libre” we talk about comes from.

Anyway, keep asking questions of you’re curious.

I’ll just add that I haven’t used the command line for anything basic on Linux in several years. Command line is really not necessary anymore, unless I’m doing something advanced like modding my games. Actually, I guess I haven’t modded anything in awhile that didn’t come with a graphical kit. But I’m sure I still might, for the right mod.

Ooh, as a web developer, I can answer this.

We (web developers) are, on average, incompetent. Many of our websites only work in Chromium based browsers, due to aforementioned incompetence.

I suppose it makes sense for Ubuntu to slowly go down as the bad news about Snaps and the great news about Linux Mint spreads.

Edit: But if we trust the data, I guess the real great news is Arch, btw. Haha!

Also if they want malware infections through notepad.exe - I can probably accomplish that on Linux with Wine, but it would take more effort.

Edit: I might give up and just send the Malware author a few bucks, out of pity.

Yes. Great point. I do try to give each game a test run before I schedule a group of friends to play it together. I guess I did that on Windows, as well.

When I was a big windows gamer the result tended to just be it works or it doesn’t, on my current hardware. But maybe that’s just gaming today. I think we have better optimization options, in general, now.

I’m not sure when things changed, as my journey was Windows PC Gamer to console gamer to SteamDeck to Linux PC gamer.

I think PC gaming, in general, got much nicer while I was only playing consoles.

I was gonna partition my gaming PC’s main drive and try Linux Mint on it.

Nice!

If you can afford it, I lately recommend getting a separate harddrive, and physically taking the Windows drive out, and putting a blank drive in, to run Linux on.

Windows has never liked to share, and has gotten worse (more aggressive preventing other operating systems from booting) with various integrations into BIOS for secure boot.

Also, either way, be sure to back everything up while Windows is still installed. It is much easier to lose data today, due to secure boot and full disk encryption being the default.

(Putting the Windows drive back in and resetting any BIOS settings should be enough, but it is possible that Windows will decide it wants the full disk encryption (FDE) password. I believe I have found my FDE password on the web through Microsoft account, but there’s just more that can go wrong, today. So I prefer to just have my files backed up so I can relax.)

(And be aware that it may not be possible to backup files directly from a removed Windows drive, if full disk encryption was enabled. There’s probably a utility for it, as long as you have the FDE password. But again, it’s much less effort to just make backups before pulling the Windows drive out.)

I’ve had the best experience booting to a fresh blank harddrive and installing Linux Mint on it, and throwing the Windows drive into a drawer until I find I want the extra drive space more than I want a retreat path to Windows.

It produces code that looks more like final code, but adds a lot of subtle unexpected issues on the way.

That is an excellent summary of the challenge. The code looks high quality sooner in the debug lifecycle, which actually makes debugging a little bit slower, at least with our current tools.