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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

What's out there is no longer under your control. It's best to just forget about it. Better than shutting accounts down, just stop using them.

And yes, create new ~anonymous accounts. But here's the thing. If you just use the same social media with the same peers about the same topics, they'll figure it out.

To my family and friends, I'm that guy who burned out on the online world. I'm just gone. And I'm only reachable via old school channels.

None of them know about Mirimir. And nobody who knows me as Mirimir knows anything specific about my meatspace life.

Basically just work in VMs, and use VPNs and Tor. And remember the first rule of Fight Club.

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Can you expand on "just work in VMs"? I've wondered before if, for instance on my mac laptop, if I could have multiple VMs of my same mac OS. But it sounds really complicated and I doubt it'd be able to "reach through" the vm boundary to use my peripherals.

I think OP is saying “just use VMs” as a metaphor for segregating your identity across multiple services. But literally using VMs could make fingerprinting easier or harder.

No, I mean using a separate VM for each persona. And if it really matters, different hardware. The goal is preventing all cross-talk between personas. That is, compartmentalization.

Edit: Now that I think of it, I basically use VMs like applications. On a machine with SSDs, Linux VMs come up in just a few seconds.

As much as I'm impressed with Apple's public stance about privacy, I don't recommend using your current setup for establishing ~anonymous personas. It's just too connected to "you".

I run VMs on VirtualBox in Linux. Mostly Linux VMs. And I use nested VPN chains, implemented using virtual networks of pfSense VMs as VPN-gateway routers.[0] That guide is pretty old, but the basics are still OK. Specifics about pfSense configuration etc have changed a little.

You could probably do pretty much the same thing in MacOS. But I don't know for sure. I have some vague memories about VM sluggishness in MacOS, but I could be misremembering.

One cool think about Apple is that their online store is privacy-friendly. Just for fun, I managed to create a persona with an Apple account, funded through Bitcoin giftcards. And I managed to buy software for a Hackintosh VM.

0) https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/advanced-privacy-and-ano...

Edit: The most secure way I know is using Qubes. But that may be more than you need. Unless you're already a target. Or you work with malware, or with people who work with malware, and/or are into exploits.

Do you firewell VirtualBox telemetry? I have read multiple times (on HN) that VBox phones home. It just doesn't strike me as the privacy oriented VM solution.

KVM (or perhaps virt-manager on top of KVM) seems more appropriate.

Thanks, I hadn't heard that. I'll look into it.

I'm not too worried. I do firewall everything that's not necessary, at every level. That is, the host machine runs a VPN client, and iptables only allows traffic to the VPN server. So any VirtualBox traffic is using that VPN service.

All of the pfSense VMs in my nested VPN chains have pf rules that do the same. And I doubt that VirtualBox would be routing traffic through them. But I'll check.

I'll probably use KVM for my next VM host. The tools have improved a lot in recent years. And I've become a lot more comfortable managing stuff in terminal.

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