Formally, it’s the Alliance to Restore the Republic. Mon Mothma is the Alliance’s Chancellor, which is a sort of association of rebel cells spread across the galaxy. So she’s sort of elected by the leadership of each rebel cell.

Then on the starship side, it basically seems like anyone with a ship gets promoted to general and promised back pay once the Republic is restored. It’s sort of a gamble, but it beats smuggling spice and contraband.

It’s toned down since 23andMe was new, but I absolutely know people that will regularly call themselves by whatever European group they think gives them character.

I always ask if they have an EU passport.

That’s not what I’m saying.

First off, you, my fellow human, are a fallible creature that can make mistakes. Relying on airplane mode is a huge risk because if you oopsie once, you’re done.

Second, your phone at home is a reasonable alibi. As long as you cover your face fully.

Third, your phone and face are gifts to LE. Do not go bearing gifts.

Using public WiFi is enough to ping a MAC on a snoop-able network device. Let’s recall that no one should be connecting to free public WiFi without a VPN anyway. Plus, every LE agency can check connections from IPs of popular open WiFi spots near a route and see that your gmail or Snap or Twitter were accessed. Also, do you know and trust whoever owns that WiFi? So you need a burner, randomozed changed MAC, and a VPN on the phone just to use that public WiFi.

Open BT or AirDrop are also enough. The Chinese love using AirDrop.

Next, if you get arrested, everything on your phone can and will be used against you if they can get in. Did you take a selfie? Good work collecting evidence against yourself. Plus, that phone is gone for food even if you get released. Why do that to yourself?

As for contractors, that’s how the military industrial complex works. Contractors do the morally grey area stuff and the government uses what’s called third party doctrine to use those capabilities that might not necessarily come up in full during a FOIA request as it would if something was only government based.

Did the Isreali government develop Pegasus spyware? No, NSO Group did. How about which governemt develeoped facial recognition databases used be LE? No government did that. Clearview AI, Amazon at one point, Meta, and Google all did their own. Where does the government get all that data on what you do on your phone? From targeted advertising markets that anyone can access. The government doesn’t make fighter jets, or tanks or guns or uniforms or paper or computers or surveillance equipment. Contractors do.

Then it automatically connects for emergency calls, and ya cooked.

No. Full stop. No.

No device that can or should connect to the internet. At all. SD card camera at most. Leave your phone at home, charging, playing an 8 hour YT playlist to your dog.

Don’t want Clearview AI destroying your life 3 months from now? Cover your full face, arms, and legs. You can and WILL be identified easily from even a partial facial image. Hat, sunglasses, bandana. Guy Fawks mask. You do you, but you have to commit to it. Don’t take anything off until you are sure you’re concealed and not visible from any cameras.

You are trying to casually tempt the second most advanced surveillance state on earth. There is no room for error anymore.

You are not smarter than a well-resourced set of my military grade contractors that sell intel to law enforcement.

No networked devices. At all. This isn’t hard! The entire Civil Rights Movement happened with zero mobile phones. You can do the same. Write important info in a notebook. SD card camera if you must.

But the phone imei is still always yours. If there’s a SIM in there, or it connects to a mobile service, you’re cooked anyway.

2018-2019 is when they officially turned the corner and decided to focus only on ad revenue. But the SEO abuse dove it into the ground by 2014ish. They were making money enough to expand by orders of magnitude into other areas, so they simply didn’t want to tweak their search or strategy and kill their golden goose that funded things like Good Drive and their shit social network and loon, etc.

Let’s say you use a VPN, and all your internet traffic comes from an IP in London. 178.238.10.1.

It doesn’t matter if you have a VPN, if you log in to anything with any account tied to your real name (yourname@gmail.com), your email and anything done on that London IP are all linked. Google builds a profile on you based on the activity on that IP. AND your browser profile. Private/incognito window or not, if there’s a Google tracker on the site, they connect it all. Google doesn’t care about private windows. If you go to reddit in a private window on the same IP as your gmail, Google sees that and tracks every page you look at.

So let’s say that you log into your email from work. Google now has a treasure trove of new info about you and people you know. Same for FB, who uses the fact that you and someone else were logged on from the same IP range to suggest new friends.

Let’s pretend that you live in China and still have access to a VPN and want to learn about the Tienanmen Square Massacre. But the government can ask Google about you. What do you need?

• an IP never ever used with an account associated with an account with your real name.
• a no-log VPN that won’t tattle on you if asked what sites did you access on a specific date.
• a browser fingerprint never ever associated with an account tied to your real name.

Since January Google has been using browser fingerprinting and IP triangulation to track across incognito windows.

Meta wants in the game as well. Nothing done on a phone with Meta apps is done in isolation.

Edit: seems like only vanilla mobile browsers affected. Brave was not vulnerable, DDG minimally so, and I expect Iron/Waterfox with uBlock would also not have allowed tracking.

https://securityonline.info/androids-secret-tracking-meta-yandex-abused-localhost-for-user-data/

No, you use one as the backup. That’s why I said use JShelter, but if a site breaks beyond use, switch IPs and then reload with NoScript instead to be more selective of what is blocked and what’s not. That way I can still block Cloudflare and Google and Apple and still let the actual site load. And JScreep seems (for me, YMMV) to treat each as distinct fingerprints.

IMO if you know you can have multiple fingerprint profiles anyway based on which combo of extensions you use that do roughly the same job, that’s a net benefit.

The why is browser fingerprinting. Which Google started using as of January to track everyone.

https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/

So if you go to ANY page with Google trackers, even in private mode, Google knows.

For vanilla FF I use multi - account containers, uBlock, and privacy badger.

For other FF forks like Librewolf, I get more blocky, like JShelter, a random agent switcher, and if that breaks a site beyond use I try Chameleon and NoScirpt.

It is, but it’s a use case that has a shitload of money behind it.

Do you know why we have had reliable e-commerce since 1999? Porn websites. That was the use case that pushed credit card acceptance online.

The demand is so huge that firms would rather stumble a bit at first to save huge amounts for a bad but barely sub-par UX.

Holy shit. Yes, it does. Thanks! Hadn’t heard of it until today

Because it’s an option already. “Transliterate to Latin letters.”

Edit: I should add that you should look at how many keyboard layouts there are. It’s kind of silly that for me to use an OSM based map and go to any county east of Slovenia I need to both have the keyboard AND know the transliteration of the alphabet.

Have you seen the Armenian or Georgian alphabets? What makes the K sound?

Did you know every dialect of a Slavic language using Cyrillic has it’s own distinct keyboard varied by mostly the letter for the nya sound and J?

Greek?

All while transliteration works fine in Google.

Destination search in all the OSM based maps is a challenge. The Latin letter transliteration only applies to large features. So if I want to find an address in a country try that doesn’t use Latin script, I literally need a keyboard in that language or do a lot of cut and paste from Google Translate. My address never, ever works on OSM. Gets the wrong street, can’t even handle house/building numbers. Works fine on Google.

Not all states. Fewer do this than don’t, IIRC.

Depends on the person. My spouse and I, along with 5 or 6 friends, use a variety of key words from a couple shared languages to talk about things when we don’t want other to understand. Mostly haggling or talking about sales stuff to discuss if we like something or think it’s too expensive when a human is hovering right there. So I can give body language of disappointment while saying “this is great.”

That sounds boring AF.