At least in the US, it’s important to remember that the First Amendment starts with “Congress shall make no law…”

People aren’t free from repercussions and consequences if they say dumb shit. That’s the important distinction that more people should understand.

This is a bit like the “If you’re not doing anything, you have nothing to hide” argument. You’re thinking this is an all or nothing position, and it’s very much not. It depends on one’s threat model, but there’s two sides to the coin worth considering.

First, that your entire life is open to anyone with money. Individuals so motivated can spend a couple grand and buy your advertising data and stalk you. Everything you think, every little whim, every random question, is used to build a profile on you that benefits someone else financially. All you get is free email and a mediocre browser from a billion-dollar company that derives an average of $1,600 from you a year if you’re in the US ? You can pay for those services for a tenth of that. So you’re 90% profit to Google.

On the flip side, by giving up so much high-value data, that profile becomes active in real time. Even if you use ad blockers and don’t see the ads (which as a Chrome user, you no longer can do). You are an active target by companies. Not just you, everyone around you. Friends, family, coworkers. For some big ticket items, advertisers will target anyone connected to your profile. So your parents, your kids, your neighbors, might start to get ads about a cruise. Not for them, but for you, since it looks like you might be a good mark for a cruise. These companies manipulate people around you to be the ads, so that when you bring up “we’re thinking about doing a cruise” at some point, everyone around you jumps in with the same “oh, well I’ve heard that XYZ Cruise company is good.”

You trust a company that much to manipulate you and everyone around you without bias? With your best interests in mind? You want to cede your agency as a human to real-time auctions?

Personally, this is fundamentally abhorrent to me. And I understand that other people are fine with this. However, I’d rather leave a small and bland trail of a few occasional and useless crumbs, and then leave “redacted” as a middle finger because that deprives Google and Meta of using me as a revenue source. The nice part is that even partially masking your footprint and traffic, it’s enough to break the real-time value of you as an individual. So not only does every little bit help, every little bit has effects to protect you and your family.

i2p is a separate network entirely, and part of that is routing your traffic to someone else’s connection. So your exit node is someone else’s laptop or server. And you’re letting other people doing who knows what else use your connection as an exit node. Which, for me, is an absolute deal breaker. I don’t trust other people online to let them use my connection.

Shocking number of people under-informed about browsers here.

Brave just released a $60 paid (except on Linux Desktop) version without bloat. It worked barely OK in the first place, but didn’t obfuscate all of your browser fingerprint. It spoofed fonts, that was its major innovation.

Only Tor truly anonymizes web traffic. This is not opinion, this is fact.

LibreWolf, Mullvad, and hardened FF help, but they all give their own fingerprints. As does Vivaldi and Floorp.

Personally, I cycle through all 7 of these. Only things tied to my name on stock FF. Everything else gets its own different browser private mode and VPN location.

Use whatever you want, but understand that unless you’re on Tor or spreading your risk across multiple tools, it’s trivial for Google to triangulate you across the web.

All or nothing is right - nothing. No images depicting child sexual abuse. None. Not AI, not animated, not drawn, not real CSAM. WTF is even wrong with you?

It’s based on Chromium, which is open source. It IS the fork.

Do you honestly think people who make AI CP and want to see CP are training models on a ton of things to get them close, and then figuring out how to nudge it all just a bit further? Or do the people already in the CSAM world with access to CSAM that want to make CP just use the CSAM to train the model? I expect the second. Meaning there’s victims.

Plus, it’s disgusting and should be illegal anywhere that it isn’t just in general. It’s weird that you’re defending it like it’s diet coke or something.

If you spend some time understanding how AI image generation works, it’s essentially iterating on known images to make images that are probably also close to what it was rained on.

So if someone took some CSAM pictures printed up, and cut them up and made a collage, is that no longer CSAM? Of course not. It’s still CSAM. If someone took digital CSAM images and photoshoped the victims into different settings, it’s still CSAM. Real people were victims in the base material.

If you trained a Stable Diffusion model on only pictures of Rwandan people, and asked for an image of “a man sitting on a chair” the man will look vaguely Rwandan.

When you train an AI on CSAM, it produces images that are based on CSAM. Real people were victims in the base material, too. Close e-fuckin’-nough. Real people’s victimization is literally the core of how those images are made.

Except that these cameras easily go anywhere, they aren’t just outside on the street.

Spas? Pools? Gyms Locker rooms? Find a nice spot sitting on a bench near a women’s dressing room at the mall that peeks in a bit? Set your glasses at your side and record while you look ahead at your phone, not freaking anyone out. They’re pervert enablers just as much as Grok is a CSAM machine if you pay for it.

Great advice. I found an old laptop and I’m putting it through the paces now, and I’m really surprised at how easy all of this is. Setting up my own Invidious instance took minutes. Immich is where I’ll need to plateau out, I expect. My partner will immediately fill up the laptop by dumping her phone onto it, so that will need to wait for a long-term solution. That being said, a Lenovo mini whatever seems like a solid standard.

Oh, I can deal with something that’s larger…

-wait, not like that.

Thanks for this, this sounds like where I’m headed. I just hadn’t even considered thin clients/mini PCs, and it sounds like a lot of people are using Lenovos for this exact thing. I’m not at the point yet of doing something big, just small home lab, but I would like to get to the point of hosting immich for the family, and maybe having an LLM or SD in there at some point. But by then I’m hoping the RAMpocalypse is easing up. For now, it’s just privacy front ends until I know what I’m doing.

Thanks - I’ve put it off for a while, and didn’t realize how easy this all was to set up!

Thanks- I found an old laptop to give things a test run. I’ll do some thin client shopping once I cut my teeth a bit.

Yeah, I was looking earlier, and sort of didn’t know what to even look for, but then everyone here made suggestions of what to look for. I’m all over this!

Thanks!

Yep, I forgot we have an older MBP that can still manage minimums for Docker. Already had redlib up on it.

Thanks - I think a NUC/thin client will be how I end up going. I just didn’t even think about them in terms of meeting the criteria of “small thing I can leave running and not care about.” I think I still have an old laptop my partner used to use that would work, which might be my tester.

Will do, thanks!

Thanks - I’ll check them out.