I recently finished Permanent Record, and it spurred me to see what the author’s thoughts on current situations were. I despise Twitter as a platform, but Snowden seemed to be most active on there, so I made an account and found his profile, reading through some of the messages from the last 1-3 years. In those, he referenced a pretty wide variety of things that were happening in the privacy world that I had just completely missed, and was unaware of.
That got me thinking…if I actually want to protect my privacy and the privacy of my family, I should probably stay more up to date on what is actually going on. The recommended tools are great, yes, and I already utilize many of them, though my family does not sadly. But there are tools that I use outside of those recommended tool categories, and I’d like to make sure I’m not missing any huge blind spots. For example, one item that I’ve been enjoying immensely is having my own AI model running locally. When Lumo came out, I was very excited, but it ended up being extremely terrible, compared to ChatGPT and Gemini, which I’m required to use at work each day. However, after building my own system and running models on it locally, training, etc. (I used Level1Tech’s video for this), not only is my privacy improved, but so is my functionality.
I want to know what other resources are out there for me to stay up to date on these things. Especially in short form (not shorts, but like, individual posts) or content that I can read as a reference. I am less interested in listening to 12 hours of podcasts a week to protect my privacy.
You can do what I do and create a customized RSS feed using sources like Ars Technica, BleepingComputer, and TechCrunch. I would also add in sources such as Apple/Google security blogs and various Linux distributions announcements as well. I personally like reading news articles and press releases over short form explainers.
Besides that, you can find relevant information through amateur security blogs and past forum discussion in other communities. I can’t make specific recommendations for the latter, but there are a lot of amazing folks in the Privacy Guides community that have their own blog posts.
What are you looking for exactly? Worldwide policy developments? Cybersecurity news? Or just privacy/anonymity related stuff?
A little bit of everything, I suppose. I just don’t want to be caught on the tail end of things. I imagine it’s difficult to keep track of, and the ultimate choice is probably just to use technology as little as possible, but that becomes more difficult every day.
You can do what I do and create a customized RSS feed using sources like Ars Technica, BleepingComputer, and TechCrunch. I would also add in sources such as Apple/Google security blogs and various Linux distributions announcements as well. I personally like reading news articles and press releases over short form explainers.
This is my first time using RSS feeds. I love it already. Hopefully I’ll be able to tailor it pretty aggressively. I added around 8 sources so far, which delivered 80 unread articles to me, and after reading through the headlines of them all, I was only interested in 2 of them. I’ll have to play with it more to see what it’s capable of.
You should look into RSS feeds with filtered labels such as “privacy”, “cybersecurity”, or “technology policy”. For example, Verge and Ars Technica consists of mostly consumer tech stuff but has a dedicated cybersecurity and tech policy RSS feed that filters out the irrelevant articles.
Nothing is perfect; you would still need to shift through dozens of articles to get an interesting story. That’s why any good RSS feed should include blog posts
Here’s my list, specifically for security/privacy stuff, tho some might overlap with my other interests like gaming and hardware stuff, but i think i did a decent job of removing those from the lists, tho they won’t always post specifically about security/privacy stuff:
A lot of cybersecurity researchers and other knowledgeable people post commonly on platforms like twitter (x), mastodon, bluesky etc. but i have yet to use those for these interests specifically. So if someone can drop a list with usernames for those platforms that would be great, since i have nothing here.
What i do have tho is a list with youtubers that specifically post security/privacy stuff as their main channel content (not occasionally like linustechtips or gamersnexus):
She’s a cybersecurity researcher that has made many videos over the last years which show why default-allow setup is completely insufficient on windows 10/11. Any malware author with 2 brain cells can easily bypass AVs like eset, bitdefender, avast etc. trivially, and she shows exactly how it’s done in her videos.
Not only that, but she shows exactly why and how popular antivirus test sites like av-test.org and av-comparatives.org are completely flawed. They show a protection rate of like 99% but in fact the real rate is 10-20%. Any malware that is truly zero day and thus isn’t on the AV’s static signature list will most likely pass unscathed. Because when AVs have to rely on more than their blacklist of known malware sha256 hashes, they completely fall apart more often than not. And malware authors morph their malware using AI every few hours. Default-allow is a terrible security model that 99% of windows users use and that’s why people get infected all the time. Even legitimate services like steam has had 5 games that turned out to be malware this year alone.
The only real way to protect yourself is zero trust, default-deny setup. Whitelist your trusted programs and then block everything else. Which means that 95% of the AVs on the market are completely and utterly useless, especially in their stock config that 99% of users never bother to change. Like, avast has a hardened mode that only allows exes which have good reputation from the cloud to launch. This significantly increases its protection capabilites, but of course it’s not enabled by default as users would complain.
This channel truly opened my eyes as to how useless antivirus software are. But, since it’s a billion dollar industry, the propaganda is very strong. It’s very hard to fight people when u tell them their AV is basically a cosmetic icon in their taskbar. People get real defensive when u tell them such stuff, kinda like telling them their favourite politician is a crook. It’s very hard to fight the disinformation and ignorance of the general public.
As others have said, setting up an RSS is the way to go.
Many privacy product sites (like Proton or Tuta) have their own blogs which you can throw into an RSS feeder.
I’d also recommend the Mastodon server floss.social which focuses on FOSS and (some) digital privacy.
Louis Rossman also comments (rants) on digital privacy, but generally he focuses on local laws and consumer rights.
Beyond that, most Open-Source product forums like GrapheneOS, Linux forums or anything similar will often discuss privacy news or topics that affect them.
I also recommend leaving or simply no longer using corporate social media and jumping to the fediverse. Lemmy is similar in structure to reddit, and the privacy community there seems fairly robust.
Re: Twitter, if you want to follow people on it but don’t want to use the terrible app/site, use fedilab.
It is for the Federation (mastodon, misskey, etc) but it also can create a feed for Twitter follows as well. Definitely a way to avoid the dumpster fire that is Twitter nowadays
I personally use a RSS feed reader with over 25 different privacy and security-related blogs and websites.
