@lisamelton @blogdiva
Boosted 4 reach!
@blogdiva The internet without an ad blocker is unusable these days. Everything is abusive and manipulative. Most of my older friends and relatives seem to be fairly tech-savvy, thankfully, but we should be offering to help those who aren't.
It's a minefield out there for the unwary!
@ApostateEnglishman @blogdiva Every now and then I end up looking at the web with a naked stock browser and an unfiltered connection and it's just shocking how unusable it is. Like, if it were my first exposure to the Internet, I'd just say, yeah, this isn't for me.
@mattblaze @blogdiva Yeah. I can't help but wonder if the growing opposition to "AI" among younger folks may actually just be because they're sick of the internet and tech in general, and their educators aren't teaching them much online hygiene.
Perhaps chatbots being shoved into everything without their consent is simply the purest distillation of everything that's wrong with it all.
@blogdiva Here's a hot take from the Original Safari Girl™ (accept no substitutes):
Tell your friend to do what I've done: install Firefox (or one of it's clones) on all their devices and then *immediately* install uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger afterwards. Follow that up with setting the search engine to noai.duckduckgo.com or something more palatable but still safe.
And use the default browser on their machines (Safari, Edge, etc.) only as a compatibility crutch in time of desperate need.
This is what I've done for years.
I have found the Helium browser is working well. It's totally de-googled and have ublock built in. I haven't notived anything bad yet. I've been using it for about 6 months now.
My other goto is LibreWolf
Oh, It does have ublock built into it and it works ok
I also have privacy badger and noscript installed too.