For those needs, an old used thinkpad off ebay would be pretty ideal. Affordable, well built and reliable. Only downside is I think the smallest model is a 12"

Perhaps a Chromebook known for being compatible with being flashed with Linux?

Depends on your needs. Matrix can mostly replace the functionality of Discord, which makes it stand out despite its flaws.

If you just need group chat, encryption, and 1 on 1 calls, XMPP is easily self hosted and highly scalable.

SimpleX seems to be another decent option that’s decentralized.

I hope this isn’t inappropriate to share, as it literally begins with a potentially very triggering suicide attempt, but I think you may enjoy reading this somewhat short web comic/graphic novel about a scientist on mars who is struggling with existing.

I hope it helps, genuinely.

This post on the subject of privacy may be relevant.

AFAIK, GrapheneOS supports the Pixel Tablet, which is probably the only truly secure android tablet on the market.

If you’re willing to sacrifice some UX, there are some Linux tablets. A cheaper option could be a 2-in-1 chromebook that allows installing Linux.

Otherwise, you could try to degoogle your Samsung tablet by installing LineageOS on it, if it’s supported.

I consider odysee to be a longer term pump’n’dump scam for the reasons outlined here:

https://slrpnk.net/post/11302039/9749921

Personally I wouldn’t place much trust in them.

An excerpt from “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45”, an interview with a German after WWII on why they didn’t rise up:

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Dude.

This is the same guy who, just a couple weeks ago, publically endorsed the AfD (the far right nazi party in germany), saying “Only the AfD can save Germany.”

For context, this AfD (That is a real ad by them). Look familar?

Surely you must see these aren’t just a series of unfortunate coincedences?

They don’t, the only people who own many guns generally do so as a hobby.

Statistically most people will never need a firearm to defend themselves, though they may have one anyway for the small chance that they do. But it’s not a requirement to survive, it’s just a little bit of extra insurance.

The other user responding to you, Knightly, is IMO exaggerating the dangers quite a bit. While the US is certainly more dangerous than most of Europe, the risks of being harmed are still quite low if you’re not involved in illicit activity or looking for trouble. Going by statistics, by far the most dangerous thing you can do while in the US is to simply drive in a car, and I imagine driving in Europe is similarly dangerous.

If you feel the need for something to defend yourself, a small can of pepper spray is generally very effective, quite affordable, and legal in all 50 states.

From what I’ve gathered recently, the Mullvad browser left unmodified and combined with a VPN is one of the most private browsers you can use, short of using Tor.

I’m coming around to this conclusion, and updated the post to reflect that. For something as important as a browser, it’s a little concerning the Librewolf dev team is so short staffed, but they do seem to be holding their own. I hope they’re able to stick around long term.

That’s a well reasoned take, honestly.

As I investigate other options to LW, all of which also require a certain level of trust and/or diligence, ultimately I’m finding LW seems difficult to replace, as it does walk that line between ‘good enough’ security/privacy and convenience. The Phoenix project seems promising, but so far is only convenient on a few distros, leaving Windows users with LW, or perhaps Zen.

To clarify, the only relevancy PrivacyGuides has here is that their forum is where I found the link to the Arkenfox github issue, and how their arguments against Librewolf appeared to have been potentially validated by said github issue.

The main concern is that github issue, where one of the main developers of Arkenfox, from which Librefox is derived, claims:

LW since fxbrit left/died/who-knows has gone to shit - I worked with him behind the scenes to make the right choices and while he would do his own analysis, we always agreed, and his voice influenced them. Now they don’t know what they are doing, and in fact have compromised security and make really stupid decisions. Same goes for all the other forks - really dubious shit going

And directly after which a Librewolf team member then voices agreement that Librewolf’s quality control has degraded since the departure of fxbrit.

Now it could be that the Arkenfox dev is exaggerating, and tbh he comes off as a bit of a prick later in that github issue, but overall, I’d say it merits at least some concern (though perhaps less than I originally thought)

According to their intructions, it would seem it’s trivial to install and receive updates on the supported linux distros:

By default, Phoenix is installed & updated via your operating system’s package manager. This allows for fast, easy updates & fixes as needed, right with the rest of your system!

Windows isn’t support though, so it would be a far more manual process there.

Another user here mentioned the Phoenix project, which may be a good solution for us, as I share the same goals.

I haven’t looked into Zen, I’ll do a dive on that now.

Cheers for mentioning that, I hadn’t heard of Phoenix, but looks like an excellent alternative.

I haven’t given it any research since it’s chromium based.

Unfortunately, adding any addons to the Mullvad browser would defeat the purpose of using it somewhat, since it would defeat the anti-fingerprinting methods.

The Librewolf team member said they’re falling behind on keeping the arkenfox tweaks up to date, despite putting out new releases. Perhaps they are able to keep up with Firefox security updates despite that, which I suppose would still make them a better option than vanilla Firefox, but it does give reason to keep a closer eye on them.

I believe Brave is better from a fingerprinting perspective, if only due to it being easier to blend in with compared to Cromite, though Cromite has far better security AFAIK.