A Lazy Coward`s Guide to Fighting Fascism

Gaming has never been so expensive. OK, that’s not true, gaming is - weighed against inflation - the cheapest it’s been since the $1 shareware bin days at the local supermarket. Dedicated gaming HARDWARE targeted at the average consumer has never been more expensive. There have always been elite consoles that were the stuff of school yard legend - NeoGeo, 3DO, The Turbo Express, just to name a few -, but predictive search algorithms holding up the entire fake economy have demanded so much silicon that now entry level consoles, which no longer get the benefit of walled-garden subsidy, are coming in at prices that look like cruise packages. “Our hands are tied” say the giant corporations who are literally behind the Ozian nightmare curtain, shoveling coal into the Furnace of Occasionally Almost Correct Things. “You must bear the burden of the problem we caused because the solution we *absolutely* posses won’t drive shareholder value the way the human suffering engine does.”

I have no cash, and I must game.

Owing to the Enshittifiplaystation 6 being one step away from a set-top streaming box, the X-Box following suit immediately on the heels of their announcement with Helix the Discless being confirmed, the GabeCube being as powerful as a 7 year old mid-tier gaming laptop and costing a number that shot so far past $799 as to actually cause a globally heard record scratch, Nintendo doubling down on weird digital dongle cart blanks with online-required patches making up the bulk of the software, and any myriad of other depressing, AI-filled, late-stage suck gaming news, the landscape for the hobby is as bleak as this sentence was run-on. The aluminum lining on this Vanta-Black cloud is that it’s becoming cheaper, easier, and better than ever to play the unimaginably vast existing galaxy of games.

Emulation is a no-cost (minus a few things you likely already have, such as a PC newer than 2013 and a VPN…stay safe!) entry to a library of games so large it would be impossible to even sample it in any meaningful way in a lifetime. There are emulation handhelds that put enough power to drive perfect emulation of up to 5th gen hardware into hardware you can have on your doorstep in days for under the cost of a single AAA game that you can never own. There are new preservation methods for old hardware that put real-hardware-only buffs into a place where restoring old hardware is cheaper than buying new, even if a bit limiting, platform-wise. Powerful single-board computers make a DIY emulation wonderland cheap and easy enough for almost anyone, and with enough juice you can even get into some light 6th gen gaming on something like a Pi5 or an Iota. There are just tons and tons of options.

One choice people can make when deciding on their ‘primary’ device for retro gaming is FPGA. “Why the what and how? Also…a little…whom?” I hear you asking. Don’t worry about it. I took a pill I found on the floor at a gas station. It’ll go away. But I’ll answer the voices anyway. FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is a now somewhat genericized term for support hardware and software systems built around a chip that allows hardware simulation in a fabric of logic units. In a massive oversimplification, the silicon is recreated electronically, making the output functionally identical to the original chip it’s simulating. This allows many parallel, individual components to be created in the array and wired together, creating an electronic copy of a physical component. These “cores” (a compiled layout for the entire simulated system targeting a specific FPGA architecture), when wired to I/O through host boards, simulate much hardware so well, their components can be screened into ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) as drop-in replacements for real failing hardware. Why is this important? Honestly, it’s not in the slightest these days. Emulation has gotten to a point where anything an (affordable) FPGA can recreate, a desktop, laptop, or even handheld gaming PCs like the Deck can run frame-accurate with room to spare. BUT, a small number of CYCLE accurate (all memory states, registers, frame buffers, etc involved in a cycle of the main clock on a system matches what real hardware would read if probed at that moment in execution) issues could potentially come up on any emulated system due to host conflicts, performance, system priority, and so and such forth on cetera et and whatnot. Whether or not that would ever be perceptible to a human doing human things humanly is up for debate, though almost every emulator will experience some hiccup at some point due to system stress or memory leaks somewhere upstream. A quick reboot will, with 5 9s of Old Guy on the Internet certainty, fix the issue. FPGA has a consistency advantage simply through its function of simulating hardware at an electrical level. The silicon lottery is not part of the equation. You know what you’re going to get every single time you load a core. Their timings are so precise you can play lightgun games and other games which require analogue timing down to beam-chasing (using the clock to update video signals being sent to a CRT’s beam driver mid-scan) fidelity. Provided, of course, you have a CRT display and the FPGA has been harnessed to outputs it supports. It sits in a niche between hardware purity and emulation accessibility, with a lower price tag than the former, but a higher one than the latter.

Weapon(s Manufacturer) of Choice

If you’re in the target demographic for FPGA solutions, you generally know, but if you’re window shopping, the landscape can be overwhelming. The term gets plastered on tons of hardware and it has many different levels of integration over the entire hobby of retro gaming. So please, come along even if you’re not fully decided on FPGA at all - seeing the differences in offerings may help you make up your mind. Or confuse you more. I dunno, humans are weird.

The choices range from extremely cheap drop-shipped DIY to fairly expensive full ‘modern console unboxing events,’ designed to restore a feeling more holistically, amping everything up to break through the calloused dopamine system of burned out adults and rekindle a spark of joy felt on some holiday morning decades ago. From open to guard-railed to fully locked off. From buck nekkid circuit boards to elaborate or whimsical cases. There are a ton of options which, under the hood, deliver the same experience. They differentiate themselves through additional features, integration of menus and subsystems for development and output hardware often, and occasionally they have an entirely different platform, being built out independently from large public projects like MiST, MiSTer, Tang, and OpenFPGA*. Little separates the performance of the cores themselves on any of these platforms until you get to some of the 32bit systems. Even then, there’s little between them at stock performance. None of the 32bit systems are truly cycle accurate on any of the current FPGA platforms anyway. Don’t @ me. They aren’t. The closest is GBA. And I could go into about 20 pages on why that’s true but I don’t allow comments here anyway, so why bother? It’s my truth. It just also happens to be THE truth. What you do get is, again, consistent, usually frame-accurate performance that isn’t tied to a host OS’ system queue. The point is, once you start bending a little on the hardware accuracy, bending a little more becomes easier and most of these systems have QoL improvements that throw accuracy out of the window (and that I do recommend using, personally). Things like overclocking, post processing toggles - for N64, these are key-, expansion hardware, extra RAM for homebrew, and a lot more are on the table and allow for some differentiation amongst the available higher-end options. Separating them further are the ethics of supporting an actual IDF arms dealer because you like translucent plastic versus not…doing that.

*OpenFPGA is currently only implemented in a single Analogue-branded handheld. While it does provide a fully featured framework, making porting cores from other projects easier, it’s essentially a single-product framework owned by a company. But it does exist with an avenue for deploying it elsewhere, despite nobody choosing to.

Ride the Cyclones

Let’s start off with the biggest, but most ubiquitous options out there. The MiSTer project, built on the Intel nee Altera Cyclone V. The project started in 2017 when a developer got fed up with trying to get usable video out of the MiST project (more info). Driven, like so much of humanity’s progress, by frustration with the stupid choices of our forebears, dev Alexey “Sorg” Melnikov turned to the Terasic DE10-Nano; an educational project board which had just released. This new hardware provided an affordable, widely available, off-the-shelf solution to developing for the MiST project that provided things like USB and HDMI support. Sorg started work on the framework which became most of the projects in this section. Some products consume the project directly, which is allowed, while others fork it and add some of their own customization.

DIY MiSTer

The DIY set has a number of options. First is the OG, the DE10-Nano. This board is still available directly from the manufacturer or through suppliers like Mouser or DigiKey. Quoted lead times are often high directly from Terasic, though just as often they ship much faster upon order. The price at the time of this writing is $225USD or $190USD with academic ID, putting it at the current highest-priced spot for DIY options, though easily the most consistently available. Additionally, it comes with a lot of packaging and additional cabling and software for FPGA development. If this interests you, this may be the best option for the educational support built around it by default. If you just want to play games, this is all landfill.

In addition to the board and its shipping fees, expect to buy a few add-ons to get the most out of it. A 128MB stick of DDR3 expansion RAM, a USB hub, and a larger microSD card (the included 8GB card is very low quality and it’s recommended you just throw it in the drawer you throw things to forget) are a bare minimum for most people. I like to do a ‘full stack’ build which is the DE10-Nano board, a USB hub board in the same footprint that connects with onboard pogo pins or an S adapter, and an I/O board with buttons for power, reset, and menu, as well as optical audio out, analog audio out, and analog video output via a DE-15 connector with options for composite sync, sync on green, VGA-compatible RGB, and a ton more. There are a series of jumpers and power bridges and occasionally HDMI rerouting depending on the I/O board you go with. Some have features like 24bit color or arcade JAMMA hookups. If you have a use case for anything special, odds are someone has already solved it and it’s readily available. There are options for passive cooling, active cooling, water cooling, 3D-printed cases, acrylic cases, themed cases, milled aluminum cases, ITX cases, retro cases, boards to fit these cases, all-in-one boards that provide RAM, I/O, and more USB all hooked up through GPIO pins, expansions for a realtime clock, an audio input for tape drives, expansions for MIDI, expansions for original controllers and accessories via SNAC/SNAX (Serial Native Accessory Convertor).

DIY MiSTer is extremely customizable is what I’m getting at. You can basically turn one into a candy cabinet with a few extra parts. Providing, you know, you own the candy cab. It can be a bit overwhelming because there are so many options and they all have similar names and depending on where you live in the world, the entire ordering process and accessory supplier chain changes. The DE10-Nano is the compatibility gold standard and will just work with nearly anything calling itself ‘MiSTer’ such as IronClad, MiSTerCade, or this monstrosity from across the pond.

Fiberglass board 3D terrorbox puzzles aside, you’re not stuck with the Terasic board for MiSTer. There are a number of alternate options, with . Taki Udon offers a clone board which is generally around $100 alone or $150 in a kit that includes some common upgrades. Full kits with cases occasionally show up as well, but he has shifted most of his manufacturing to the SuperStation and its follow up hardware, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. If you follow his social media accounts, he does announce restocks and it’s a dash, but not a MAD dash to get them before they’re gone.

Another option is QMTech, who came in with another ~$100 offering as a drop-ish replacement for the Nano. While the formfactor is mostly the same, ports have shifted, cable headers have moved, dip switches and GPIO pins have shifted alignment. This means compatibility is usually something that needs to be explicitly called out on accessories. Some, such as the IronClad case, come with adapters specifically for the QMTech design. Some cases have a QMTech faceplate option. But not all accessories support it, making it the least universally compatible option of the major clones. All available clone boards also use a slightly different version of the Cyclone V, rated for a wider temperature range, but with a slightly slower internal cache on the ARM core. This doesn’t translate to any performance issues that I’ve seen.

As with anything that presents itself as open, camps have formed that are a bit of an annoyance when you’re trying to get into this stuff. And DIY generally requires eventually interacting with the community. The Linus of this whole endeavor, Sorg, is notoriously prickly - to the point where the forum actively warns you about this when you visit it. This, of course, emboldens the ‘annoying prickfaced fuckknuckle,’ as we call them in the community. The takeaway by non-geniuses from a gruff, stubborn genius in a position of authority is always that the gruffness and stubbornness is why they are where they are. So you get a lot of …just read my previous post. Beyond that barrier to civility, there is also a strange culture war going on right now that I won’t get into, but believe me when I say it’s some playground frolics hijinks nonsense.

Terasic DE10-Nano

Pros:

• Availability
• Consoles Supported
• Can be used with analog accessories
• Customization
• This IS the development platform where most cores start
• Active dev community with lots of support resources
• The most mature platform
• Built on Linux, remote management
• Dual-RAM digital-only options exist, but are sparsely utilized

Cons:

• Price fluctuation
• Higher priced than the clones
• “Stack” formfactor can be limiting/cumbersome in the livingroom
• Older architecture
• Bad actors in the community
• Overwhelming for novices

QMTech

Pros:

• All of the DE10 pros except compatibility
• Price
• The most mature of the clones

Cons:

• All of the DE10 cons except price
• Compatibility. By far the least compatible of the DIY boards
• Availability fluctuation
• Exacerbates confusion by having limited support for accessories

MiSTerPi

Pros:

• All of the DE10’s pros
• Price
• 32GB MicroSD included

Cons:

• All of the DE10’s cons
• Availability

Consolization Prize

The pricetag on pre-assmbled MiSTer kits is generally pretty high if you can’t catch one of the clones during a production run. Still south of whatever the next terror Sony spits out will cost, but not far enough south for many people as to make this a more attractive prospect than emulation. Enter the consolized MiSTer clones. There are a fair number of these available from dubious sellers on AliExpress, eBay, and Amazon Marketplace, none of which I would personally buy from. But YMMV. So for this I’m going to stick to the major players. We’ll go chronologically for this first entry because it’s the one with an image I already had uploaded. The Multisystem² MiSTer consoles. These are from The Retro Collective (formerly Retro Man Cave) and use a custom PCB in an injection molded plastic case.

In addition to a standard MiSTer setup the board includes the 128MB RAM expansion, passive cooling, USB hub, and an NFC reader for Zaparoo/TapTu* support. A second analog model also includes a 24bit analog video out, D15 port with the same customization options as on the MiSTer analog I/O board, 9pin mini-DIN, and an exposed expansion port for proprietary interface with the user port on the MiSTer via modular upgrade carts. This is fun and for SNAC adapters, it can be a much more elegant solution than a cabled mess, but ultimately it’s another proprietary bit, so worth thinking about for future repairs and replacements. The current price is ~$230USD (without export/VAT) for the base digital system and ~$300USD (without export/VAT) for the analog system with the additional connection options and ethernet. There is, additionally, design built into the console specifically so a generic screen can be mounted to turn it into a slightly ruggedized ‘portable’ party system for tournaments, gaming events, expos, computer get togethers and the like.

*Zaparoo and TapTu are NFC-based loading systems for games to replicate the ‘ritual’ of putting a game in the console by bypassing menus.

Multisystem²

Pros:

• Availability
• Price competes with clones, not Terasic
• Sleek console design
• Zaparoo integration is central to the design (complimentary)
• Lots of connection options on the analog version
• Optional screen integrates well, despite being designed for other systems

Cons:

• Zaparoo integration is central to the design (derogatory)
• Limited to UK without steep fees
• Proprietary expansion cartridge slot limits future support
• Non-customized MiSTer OS experience (If this is a pro for you, feel free to PRO…mote it)
• Shell feels less premium than other offerings
• No included MicroSD card
• No option for dual RAM
• Digital version requires wifi dongle or removing the microSD card for management

The SuperStation from the previously linked Taki Udon is another consolized MiSTer solution with a much more compact footprint than the Multisystem. It also runs a custom PCB and has 128MB of built-in RAM. A quick aside, the RAM tests faster than any other Cyclone V FPGA I’ve tried, locking at the initial 167MHz of the RAM test and never dropping. The aesthetic is pure PSOne. Specifically the miniaturized, late-life re-release of the first Playstation that looks like it got jumped by Sanrio and hammered into something sold in a blister pack.

Apart from knowing in advance it was a MiSTer at its core, you would be excused for thinking it was a single-tasker like the Analogue3D, which I’ll eviscerate later. The system comes after a very reasonable year and change of development time. The build quality is solid and the board design is well executed and very professional looking. The homage to the PSOne continues as we go down the feature list for the console. It includes two PS1 SNAX ports* and 2 SNAX-based memory card slots built into the console. This may trap customers who are new to MiSTer since, because they are built into the console, it feels like you should just be able to plug in a PS1 controller and go. SNAC, however, cannot be used to navigate the MiSTer menu. It is directly wired into the I/O of the core so it must be enabled through the menu with another controller or keyboard. Moving down, the MicroSD card slot is on the front in the center and leaves some edge overhang so the card can’t be lost inside - the bane of the DIY MiSTer case. The USB ports are cut down from the standard 6-7 on most hubs and the Multisystem to 2 on the back and one on the front. A powered hub can be attached, but it’s very limiting if you want to use wired controllers or have a keyboard and mouse hooked up for PC gaming. There’s an expansion port on the bottom for use with the optical drive (hold that thought) and, one would hope, future SNAC controller modules. What it lacks in USB connectivity it makes up for in video output options. It has a fully implemented composite, s-Video, component RGB, D-15, DIN10 “Saturn” 24bit out, and an in-built composite gun-con sync port (again, showing the design DNA of PSOne extends beyond just the aesthetics). Audio is available over HDMI, analog stereo, or optical. An Ethernet port, wifi, and Bluetooth round out the additional connectivity over a stock MiSTer stack. At $210, it’s currently the best value prop on this list. That is, if you’re willing to wait. And…there’s something else we need to discuss.

The discus. Must be discussed. And the discourse is thus: shit don’t work.

The SuperDock, which was planned to release with full support for reading and backing up Playstation games from real media can’t read anything right now. The add-on still functions as an additional 4 USB ports, has an M.2 drive port, and does some IR nonsense for remote control (and for $40, so temper your temper), but the core functionality as an optical disc reader for Playstation (and one would assume other cores, potentially) just isn’t ready. This comes in parallel with the news that the custom console-mode OS is also not ready. All of that said, if you want a MiSTer and you like or don’t mind the PSOne look, this is a hard one to not recommend at the price it’s being offered.

SuperStation

Pros:

• Price - you get a lot for your dollar
• Most of MiSTer’s pros, except availability and dual RAM.
• Very fast expansion RAM
• Setup is easy for a novice IF they watch the guides
• Video connectivity is very robust
• Solid build quality
• Very sleek console design
• Lots of bonuses for Playstation fans
• Nice packaging, very long USB-C cable

Cons:

• Some of the wider MiSTer cons like community issues and older tech, but it solves many
• No dual-RAM options
• Limited USB ports without dock
• Some things gated behind the dock (User port passthrough, in example)
• No power brick (must be >2Amp)
• SNAC ports for PS1 may confuse novices since they can’t be used to control anything outside of PS1 games, including any menus
• Custom ‘console mode’ OS is not ready, unknown future release date

You had ONE JOB to do. ONE JOB!

Single task FPGAs are a little strange for me. Logically I get why they are stupid. I also, logically, get why they are preservation and part of the story of this hobby. Someone out there with a full N64 collection is going to absolutely be thrilled with the Analogue 3D as is, no notes. For me, personally, they aren’t useful in a world where MiSTer exists. The Rolls Royce of Doing One Thing Kinda OK is Analogue. A boutique retro company, Analogue hit the scene as a player in FPGA in 2017 when they released their Nt Mini. The successor to the Nt, which used real Famicom parts, the mini moved to a Cyclone V, like our beloved MiSTer. Though a version with fewer logic units. The system got a jailbreak making it compatible with a number of cores, but none that required external RAM. They released FPGA versions of the SNES and Genesis/MegaDrive which both also got jailbreaks, opening them up to SD loaded ROMs and a handful of additional cores. In 2021 they dropped the Analogue Pocket, which I would review on this list but I think fits a different niche than the ‘console’ FPGA. The dock not withstanding. The DAC still not working. Zing. I think that if you’re a portable gamer and like FPGA the Pocket is just the only current game in town, so there’s no need to compare it. I don’t like it as a console at all. Double no reason. I don’t own a Duo so I can’t really speak to that. But the Analogue 3D is a Cyclone 10. and I just want to hate on it for a second. The company put a very beefy FPGA in the 3D. Which was likely required because, as I mentioned earlier, N64 is ‘good enough’ on the Cyclone V. But if you want to get closer to cycle accurate, you’ll need more chip than the MiSTer can muster. The irksome bit about all of this is that Analogue is basically the only game in town running the OpenFPGA project. And they won’t enable it on this device, which would be absolutely outstanding at being a MiSTer replacement/upgrade for the $269 price tag. I don’t understand the reasoning, personally, but it’s their company. They’re not selling subscriptions or games or licensed anything, so why throw a limiter on demand up like that? Perhaps it’s just support costs, but what we’re left with is a system that’s got an absolute beast of an FPGA under the hood and can only use it to emulate the worst console shut up THE WORST CONSOLE of that generation.

For what it does and for what it’s marketed to do, it’s certainly best in class at doing that. The overclocking mode is stable and well implemented. The work with 8bitDo (it’s ‘do’ like ‘doe.’ The way of 8bit. Not ‘dew’ like it’s some kind of memory-limited energy drink) on their controller is solid and the system’s build quality is second to none. It feels like premium kit. If the only thing you care about is N64, why don’t you already own one? Otherwise, if you’ve got some cash to burn and just adore the console, this isn’t a bad premium experience. For this one, very silly platform.

Analogue 3D

Pros:

• Great build quality
• Very powerful FPGA for the price
• The best FPGA experience for N64, hands down
• Save states, screenshots
• QoL improvements and graphic improvements
• Upscale (post output)

Cons:

• It just does this one thing
• Still not fully accurate
• Requires carts or an Everdrive, no SD game storage
• Analogue has a moron calculating their shipping costs
• Plays N64 games

Unfortunately, any slight boom in an industry brings profiteers. And profiteers tend to be people of low moral fiber. And people of low moral fiber are anyway this is about Palmer Luckey. Luckey is a giant piece of human garbage and he is releasing the M64. Unfortunately, the N64 core developer on this project is a good person, but holy shitballs, this Smeagol by way of the IDF, Ted Nugent’s Bathtub Raisin Clone, absolute dirt clod of a person running the show makes it an instant no.

M64

Pros:

• Nope

Cons:

• Powered by AMD and the death of thousands of innocent children
• New architecture means cores need to be rewritten, few have been
• Broken initial firmware
• OS has bad HDMI code
• Dude literally makes money from dead civilians

Use Your Conclusion 1

So what’s the best bet if you’re just getting into FPGA? Hands down the winner for a plug and play option, to me, is the Superstation. The RetroPi would be my first pick if it weren’t unlikely to be available any time soon, but for the average person who isn’t in a hurry, I have to go with the Superstation. It’s got a few quirks and is definitely more exciting if you’re a Playstation fan, but even if you’re not, the limitations are offset by the price, the ease of use, and the functionality all out of the box.

If you have the cash and don’t want to wait, the only real game in town is a Terasic DE10-Nano and a build from the various accessory dealers’ available inventories. I’d caution once more against eBay, Ali, and Amazon Marketplace for MiSTer components as in my experience they have trended toward lower quality than I find acceptable. And if you have it in you to wait, go search up the Superstation and get in line. It’s a great deal for what you get. Unless you know you need more USB ports, I’d skip out on the SuperDock. At $40 maybe it’s worth it to you, even in its current state. But never buy anything for the promise of a future update, you know?

Use Your Conclusion 2

Don’t buy shit from arms dealers. No matter how ‘grape’ it looks.

One of the broadly-accepted privacy stalwarts has just turned rat.

https://tech.yahoo.c … -aids-160711711.html

There’s a lot to say about this news. The fact that the service sells privacy as the product even more than the service itself, to the fact that free accounts are inherently more secure than paid accounts owing to this utterly unforgivable loophole in their protections for customers. The fact that aiding an active regime of war criminals is being brushed off as ‘following orders.’ The fact that they are using the buffer stage of rolling over for their own government as the excuse from ridicule. The fact that you are constantly bombarded with upgrade/upsell ads when using the service which all - again - focus on buying privacy and security. The fact that they have a glib, canned response and astroturf trolls on social media trying to steer the conversation into personal accountability. All of it is obscene.

Proton has taken an immediate, reactionary, hostile approach to this being leaked to the news. They call it click bait (it’s not). They call it misrepresentation (it’s not). They have their brand-identifying user base marching for them in social media comments, decrying the person for not obfuscating their own payment methods rather than blaming the person who lied to their user base (they did). They call it anything but a problem for them to solve, violently hand waving to the point of slap fighting.

And as problems go, Proton, despite being A problem, is not THE problem on display here. They suck. Do not think I’m in any way asking for absolution for their utter shittery. Rather, there is an inherent problem with any service you do not personally host. When faced with compromising their advertised ideals, they are only as strong as their board members will allow them to be. Promises are free. Actions are not. Until an event occurs which burns away the facade they’ve built in times of easy sailing, there is never a guarantee that any entity you don’t control won’t immediately cave to any outside pressure deemed too difficult or expensive to challenge. In this case, rather than even test the laws of their home country, the company scuttled the ship at the first sign of a boarding party. Being a Not For Profit just means the decision was made by people who didn’t want to deal with the hassle of defending their product’s core feature, rather than being a fully financial decision in the endless pursuit of more profit. Same outcome.

There’s no solution for this, from the standpoint of the average consumer. Hosting your own e-mail service is no longer tenable for nearly anyone and doing it in an anonymous way is basically impossible. Constantly using throw away accounts means not having a permanent address and basically makes e-mail about as useless as a rain-soaked ValPak stuck to the top of the communal dumpster lid.

There are a few mitigations, but no matter what you do, ultimately anything hosted outside of your control is outside of your control. VPNs? Doesn’t matter what the law is where you end up. With enough pressure, it can all be linked back to you if any piece of identifiable information is involved. Your payment method? Easy. Your originating IP? A little harder, but not by much. Even if you hop and hop and hop, the trail exists. Your only true option for anonymity is burner hardware that you dispose of after use. And that’s economically and ecologically a horrible option. All you can do is make the trail back to you as hard as possible to follow. I know it sounds as if I’m echoing the people who blame the victim for not obscuring payment info, but their action - in this case - is correct. The blame still lives with the company that lied, but in praxis, that’s little consolation. It is, however, a good way to find people to block on social media.

There are a few things you can do to make the pursuit of your information a high enough cost of entry to prevent a free bingo square for the pigs and pigeons who might want to find you. First and foremost, don’t believe a goddamned thing any company says about privacy in regards to selling it to you.

Second, don’t pay for any service you want to be anonymized through an account linked easily back to you. Prepaid cards are an option (bought with cash, preferably). Crypto is about as anonymous as a Zorro mask worn while showing off a chest tattoo of your driver’s license and the world built around it is very similar to these privacy-first services. They do not actually protect you from anything. The manifests for transactions can, with a bit of forensics, bet rebuilt pointing right back to you unless you did the initial buy in a completely anonymous way. If you’ve already got your foot in that quicksand, do what you will. But for people who don’t want to touch it, stick with converting cash to anonymous payment methods in the real world.

Third, use free accounts with false information to run any protest organizations. Don’t use subscription based services that force you to keep a payment record on file. Freedom of speech, and in fact, the entirety of the Bill of Rights has been shown time and time again to not be anything but a promise to gullible customers. Especially when critiquing capitalist dogma or elite class supremacy. You can go online and talk a child into killing themselves or walk into another state and open fire on brown people all you want and it’ll be considered your undeniable right. But say that you think rage-fucking the entire planet into apocalyptic extinction is maybe not so good and your information will be handed over without a second thought. The Mrs. Kravitses of the world are overwhelmingly fascist-leaning and will drop more dimes than a busking hedgehog running into a spike trap.

There are options like co-op service subscriptions where ownership is decentralized among a few people who trust each other or running through the absolute dredges of humanity along side illegal pornographers, human traffickers, and raw milk peddlers. There’s a high bar to entry in understanding things like the Onion network and an even higher bar of technicality in implementing those understandings. You’re still stuck with the first-payment problem, in most cases. Getting comfortable with using cash is still the key element to protecting yourself from payment provider abuse. Laundering your completely legal activity should not be something we are required to do and my hope is that a lawsuit arises from this that costs Proton much more than they would have spent defending the principals they sold. The world does not deal in fairness, though, and the business self-preservation instinct is myopic, amnesic, and very, very stupid, so lessons will likely be ignored even if that does happen. All we can do now is tell people who blame victims to shut their fucking mouths but take their methods and internalize them.

That’s it. That’s the whole blog entry.

The myth of the anonymous Internet - and it has always been a myth - is slowly fading as the average Internet user watches their protections and rights to be ignored wholly forgotten in the mad rush for capital-building information. While forensics have been able to piece together identifying markers from online activity for decades, the cost of doing that work has gone down substantially in recent totalitarian regimes. In the United States, the fourth amendment has generally held that your privacy, digital or otherwise, cannot be invaded without judicial intervention. Just cause has turned into “just ’cause” overnight with the very public dismantling of checks and balances. Private tech companies no longer worry about rolling over for fascism causing their stock to drop. Humans are no longer their customers. Speculative bubbles are more profitable and if they never have to put the money back into the pot - rather, just hand it back and forth to one another and tip their hats like playground pantomime - they are all the more happy. So why bother saving face when you can get special treatment by playing ball with dictators? That hurdle has classically been the most difficult one to overcome when doing Internet sleuthing and it has eroded entirely.

Palantir and its precursors, along with government programs like PRISM, work their way into boards and halls of tech giants. They use kickbacks, permitting, and all sorts of bribery to make sure that the biggest-named players are all in on the grift of faux security in modern tech. But tech is less secure than it has ever been. It may prevent low-rent script kiddies from scamming your Roblox account, but everything you do on most of your devices can be laid bare in seconds if someone merely decides to look.

Again, this is not new. Logging has been fundamental to computer network interaction since its inception. Things needed for reliable communication over an infrastructure made to carry flustered Trans-Atlantic accents from Pennsylvania-65000 to Klondike-5555 were already being stored so these digital bridges could be created. Endpoints had to be known. Routes had to be known. Owing to this, there was little anonymity in computing from the start. Anonymity was added, intentionally and otherwise. Log files take up space, so anonymity is bolstered simply by not storing this information past the active session. But compression got extremely good, extremely fast. Especially for text. Logs became less and less a storage concern and more one of privacy well before AOL shipped its first disk. For a while, privacy was a top tier feature in online communication. At least, behind the scenes. People love to identify themselves. It’s almost like we are all apes made of existential dread and routine. Because we are. As the net became more ubiquitous, people started realizing the importance of privacy. Not for illicit acts, though certainly those were in the mix. But for every day activities that were becoming more common online. Communication with friends, family, doctors, colleagues. These all needed some protection from prying eyes. Encryption technologies became an arms race against bad actors trying to hijack communications to steal what information they could. At the same time, however, companies began realizing how much of the data flow they controlled and how much that data could be used to create targeting for themselves. Then, they realized people would still pay for services even if ads where part of that service. In some old newsroom storage closet, William Randolph Hearst’s portrait smiled. So began the two-faced deceit of IT security.

All of this is just a long-winded intro to say this: No corporate entity ever has your best interests in mind when making decisions. Only profit. Or reduction of loss. When paramilitary police forces decide to dox you, the ’safe, secure, encrypted’ services you use from publicly traded for-profits mean absolutely nothing. They have your data. They will give it over to the cops. It’s the most financially beneficial stance (on paper), and that’s the only stance they will ever take.

So what is there to do? Break out paper cups and semaphore flags? How can you go to a protest and keep your digital life from becoming Exhibits A-Q should a stormtrooper decide you look enough like his ex or his abusive dad or just that kid he beat up in high school so it’s your day to get zip-tied and paddy-waggoned? Not all is bleak, nor do you have to pull a Full Amish when you head down to the future kettle where the first amendment is “protected” until it’s not. You can do quite a bit to harden your personal security - which in turn makes those around you more secure. It’s work, but what isn’t these days? Work, I guess.

Leave your phone at home

This is one of those pieces of advice that often gets eye-rolled by activists and organizers. But before you dismiss it, hear me out. I’m not saying ‘don’t take a phone.’ I’m saying leave the phone you use as your primary device at home. It is very easy and very cheap to pick up a second phone for recording - one of the most important functions of a phone at any protest - and communication. You can use an anonymous pre-paid carrier phone for emergencies, an old phone you’ve wiped, or grab a cheap used unlocked phone off of any number of marketplaces. Considering the despicable desposability cycle of modern phones, you can probably find a few free ones with some calls to friends and family. A few things to keep in mind:

• Fully factory reset any phone you receive or purchase. If possible, do this offline using tools from the manufacturer.
• If an alternative, hardened OS such as GrapheneOS is available for your device, consider using that instead of stock Android or the manufacturer’s bloatware.
• Try to find a phone that uses a physical SIM card. eSIMs are convenient, but are tied to the device and usually tied to the sales records of the device. A physical SIM lets you swap to another carrier or a prepaid number with ease.
• Keep apps to the bare minimum. When possible, use app stores that do not tie to an account. F-Droid is a good option. Obtainium is very popular as well.
• DISABLE BIOMETRICS. Apart from being way less secure than they purport, biometrics can be used to illegally compel you to unlock your device. Face scans are NOT legally protected. Fingerprint scans can be obtained through force. Set up a complex PIN or password and don’t fall for the false security of biometric login.
• Don’t sync accounts, contact lists, texts, etc. Don’t use e-mail applications. Check e-mail through a private browser session. This is a pain because you have to manually enter security info every single time, but it means that there’s no forensic footprint left on your phone once the session is closed.
• If you need to stream or capture to a cloud service, add a second, anonymized account for doing so. You can always re-share from your primary account later, but there’s no reason to link your activities to verifiable identification.
• Remove data from your phone when you get home. Back it up on a secure drive and remove it from the device. Again, there’s no reason to provide a free map of your whereabouts for potential prosecutors.
• Use a VPN (with manual credentials, not apps). A VPN can help protect you from local scanners, a more and more popular tool for oppressors, as well as provide an extra layer of cover from your carrier snooping on their behalf. Generally, use a VPN from a country with sound data protection laws like the Netherlands if possible.
• Utilize wifi hotspots over cellular data when possible. Many areas have free wifi if you look for it. Combined with a VPN, getting your exact activity trail becomes much, much harder.
• Only give the phone number for the device (if applicable) to a few people you trust. An army willing to use a 5 year old to draw people out of a house will absolutely put pressure on people close to you. People can’t give up your info if they don’t know it, so keep the list as small as you can.
• Use your protest phone for protesting. Keep it on Airplane Mode or turned off. Take it off Airplane Mode AFTER arriving at the protest. Put it in Airplane Mode BEFORE you leave the protest. Cell tower pings can be used to create a very accurate map of your path to and from. Again, don’t give them anything for free.
• If you simply cannot use a dedicated phone and cannot leave your phone at home, consider paring down apps, creating a second profile with very little information and using that when you’re at gatherings, using a VPN, disabling ALL AI tools, turning off tracking metrics (such as “send us data to improve your experience while using the app!” settings), signing out of social media accounts, and following the biometric and VPN suggestions above.

Be comfortable being bored

Excepting a secured phone (if necessary), don’t bring any connected devices with you. No iPad. No Switch. No Steam Deck. No ROG Steam Deck But Worse. If you have one of those handheld retro devices from Anbernic or anything with bluetooth, wifi, or mobile data, just leave it at home. Tablets, smart watches, even many MP3 players - anything that can connect with a wireless service of some type can be scanned and identified and linked to you if found on your person after an arrest. If you’re going to a protest, you’re going to protest. Not to scroll feeds or find epic mounts. Being uncomfortable with being bored is no reason to tag yourself like a migratory whale pod.

Don’t give up your entire identity at home

In your day-to-day life, more and more of your online identity is being added to your digital fingerprint. Platforms can predict, with astounding accuracy, what your next website visit will be. They can pick you out of a haystack of haystacks of users in seconds. Every cookie you accept, every permission you grant…they’ll be watching you.

Use a VPN on your home network. You don’t need to go so far as to tunnel to another country for your day to day use, but just adding one more layer of obfuscation helps. Obscurity is not security, but it’s better than nothing. Use secure communication when available. Set your browser to always use https, in example. Switch off of known problematic messaging apps like Discord to more secure options like Signal. Don’t use AI processing on anything. In fact, turn off AI everywhere you can. If you’re using Windows, [url-”https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-rip-out-copilot-from-windows-11/” target=”new”]uninstall and prevent CoPilot from reinstalling [/url](note - this can change on a whim and they are pushing CoPilot hard, so your best bet is to leave Windows or go back to Windows 10 and use a debloating tool). Switch your search engine to a non-AI backed search such as DuckDuck Go’s No AI service. Remove AI tools from your browser if you use Chrome or Chromium based browsers or Firefox. (Note, beginning with Firefox 148, a single kill switch will be introduced under Settings -> AI Controls -> Block AI Enhancements, but it has not rolled out globally at the time of this writing).

Don’t use social media to discuss your activities at protests. You can obviously be loud and proud about your views, but any insight into the inner workings of direct action will be use to subvert it. There is no virtue signalling in protest. There’s no reason to share intel with the enemy during an active war. Save your mementos in a safe, encrypted location. Once everyone swears they were always against all of this, which they will, feel free to make a wall of dissent. But during active operations, no need to identify locations, organization, or the faces of others for internet points.

Keep your systems secure. Self-hosting can be a great way to withdraw from the onslaught of platform rot, but it can also open you up to attacks. Automated attacks are becoming more sophisticated, or in the case of AI based attacks, more frequent to the point of overwhelming systems. Not smarter, just more waves crashing against the beach. Protect yourself by understanding edge security. Make sure your router is not compromised and is up to date on its firmware. Make sure to keep an eye on security bulletins for software you host and quickly update it if a confirmed security hole is disclosed. This is obviously for more technical folks, but anyone can learn how to lock down their home network in a couple of days worth of YouTube videos and old forum posts.

Stop using Spyware as a Service

The Superbowl ad for Ring really shook the tree in terms of the general public’s understanding of just how perverse and pervasive private spying has become. Convenience has, for at least the last two decades, come at the cost of security. We hand over our details willingly to save a few steps while logging in or to scream into our personal void and have it play back our favorite comfort songs. Ditching digital servants is a minor inconvenience that feels like oppression to so many who are now used to the ease of it all. I promise, it’s really not that hard to pick a playlist by hand. Drop digital assistants from your phone. Doubly so if they’re AI-backed. Get rid of Echos and Smart Speakers and cloud-connected doorbell cameras and app-based light managers and all that BS. You can find replacements that leave all of your data in your personal network for nearly everything. So if you really need the convenience or are in a position where you need these things for accessibility, there are options. Home Assistant is a robust, multi-protocol service which can be locked down, but still control your existing closed-source hardware, in example.

Don’t use sign-in aggregators when you can avoid it. “Sign in with Google” sure feels like a convenient wonder. But what it really is is a single point of access for anyone who is able to get your Google device from you. Like the cops or TSA (cops) or ICE (somehow even more cop cops). Instead, consider an encrypted password manager with a strong master password (not biometric!) and individual site password. Avoid saving the password manager backups on cloud storage and instead, sync them to a folder on your network or an external endpoint you control. Again, passwords are protected by the 4th amendment. Your fingerprint is not.

Stop sharing videos with tracking data. YouTube, TikTok (dear god, stop using this garbage), and many other video hosting sites have a share button that tracks you and then tracks further shares by others who are NOT you. Strip your URLs before sharing them. Use only the required query string data (example - on YouTube, shares usually include an si=(code) element. When you share, remove everything except for the required video ID. When using the fully qualified www.youtube.com, this usually means deleting everything after and including the first ampersand. When using a shortened youtu.be link, this usually means deleting everything after and including the first question mark.
Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOxERcvYE9g&si=XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
or
https://youtu.be/EOxERcvYE9g?si=XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Become

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOxERcvYE9g
or
https://youtu.be/EOxERcvYE9g

respectively.

Don’t use photo filter apps, AI enhancement apps, or anything that requires personal data to produce some social token. “It’s fun, everyone’s doing it and I want to see mine!” Nobody is going to care about this shit in a week. Remember BitStrip avatars? Garbage, prepackaged flash art that was reassembled after you handed over the keys to your personal profile? Nobody actually liked anyone else’s but their own. Which means nobody actually liked them. You’d give them enough info to fake a MasterCard support call and get the most dated, ugly garbage to hang on your digital sash. Stop.

The future of capitalism and the future of humanity cannot coexist. We’re living in that tumultuous between-time, when neither side has laid full claim to the next stage of development and both sides are still under the illusion of a false pact. The average person still thinks technology is a service, not a siphon. The average CEO still thinks that there is more wealth to be pumped from a dry populace. One side will crack and separating your affairs now will do nothing but benefit you, regardless of how the whole thing shakes out. Services are built to incubate product. YOU are the product. Your data. Your eyes. Your time. They sell your own atrophied ability back to you in a neatly packaged, completely standardized, wholly unowned-by-you way. Put up as many roadblocks to them getting all of you for nothing as you can.

Some other videos and resources I’ve enjoyed (GDPR protected. Click Play Video to view):