M. Orange

Precisely this. Consumer VPNs are not tools for security or anonymity. They won’t protect you from most kinds of fingerprinting or tracking beyond IP-based tracking. They have relatively specific uses. I recommend Privacy Guides’ article on them for further reading: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/vpn-overview/

I’ve been using a SimpleLogin alias on Patreon for a while and have never been flagged, so there’s that.

It says in the article.

Law enforcement use CSS to pinpoint the location of phones often with greater accuracy than other techniques such as cell site location information (CSLI) and without needing to involve the phone company at all. CSS can also log International Mobile Subscriber Identifiers (IMSI numbers) unique to each SIM card, or hardware serial numbers (IMEIs) of all of the mobile devices within a given area. Some CSS may have advanced features allowing law enforcement to intercept communications in some circumstances.

Looks like they aren’t using “IMSI catcher” because it only covers one of the uses of those devices.

Just in case anyone didn’t feel like reading the article, here’s the last (and imo most important) paragraph:

However, without changing the DMCA, we can’t expect to see real, lasting change in this space. Doctorow said as much to me: “What we really need to do is get rid of DMCA 1201, that law that makes it a crime to format shift your media…it’s the same law that stops farmers from fixing their tractors, blocks independent mechanics from fixing your car, stops rivals from setting up alternative app stores for phones and games consoles…this law is a menace!”

can’t imagine you would have many problems on opensuse tumbleweed

I use Firefox and I literally am a woke vegan.

It’s basically focused on establishing good community-centered governance, cleaning up the codebase, standardizing workflows (reconciling disparate parts of nix), and (I think?) eventually reimplementing the whole thing in Rust instead of C++.