Crucial distinction: this is specifically for enterprise developer workstations under corporate management (requiring Defender for Endpoint / M365 enterprise licenses), not a general release for all Linux users.

I wrote a bit about what this means for the compliance versus privacy tug-of-war over on my site: Microsoft Defender Arrives on Linux Workstations.

Definitely an interesting shift for mixed-stack environments.

Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!

I too, many years ago now started my smart home journey with cheap Tuya devices and didn’t know any better. The more I used Home Assistant the further I got down the rabbit hole and learnt about privacy. Now I am a privacy advocate and have a dedicated blog 🤓

You tell that to my kids 😂

Probably not much help but I purchased a domain to have my own email, I can then have a separate alias for every single login/site, that way I know who leaks my email and just move on to a different alias. I don’t even need to manually create email aliases and can make something up on the fly. All emails then come to a single, private inbox.

Thank you for taking the time, I will definitely take these points into consideration.

Always open to feedback

It’s crazy how quickly a policy debate gets compressed into online panic. Between people assuming their phones are about to become expensive bricks and others leaning entirely into the time to buy a dumb phone comments, it’s hard to separate the real threats from the noise.

Looking past the viral posts to see what’s actually being pushed, why the panic overstates things, and why privacy advocates are still right to be uneasy about the push toward OS-level age checks

https://unknownuniverse.uk/privacy-security/smartphone-id-panic/

Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!

I don’t restrict music from my kids but as a parent I want to know what they are listening to so I can have open conversations with them. At the same time seeing their listening habits can also help me pick up on how they’re feeling.

I had the bulk of the tool written myself but used AI to help tweak the final polished version. I’ve always been open about my AI use in the past, I have a post on my blog about the subject. AI doesn’t generate my content, all ideas and opinions are my own but I do use it as a tool for refinement when needed.

https://unknownuniverse.uk/tools/proxmox-calculator/

My bad lol

Thank you. It’s just me running the site and I hope to have at least one new article a week.

Right mouse click, it was an intermittent issue and never did get to the bottom of it as the only forum posts I could find were from 10 years ago. Yes I know I could of used the keyboard shortcuts but my muscle memory is more mouse orientated than keyboard lol

I get the opposite with any Linux distribution I’ve tried on my HP laptop. Windows, fans never shut up but with Linux just pure silence!

The images? I’m a system admin, not a graphic designer lol

I’m not saying privacy and convenience are the same thing, or that the situation is somehow natural or benign.

I agree that the real issue is power, distribution control, and the way mobile software has been turned into a duopoly.

What I meant was more practical, for ordinary users, the choice often ends up being between an ideal setup and one that still lets them do necessary day-to-day things like banking and navigation.

That doesn’t make the underlying problem any less political, it just means people are forced to make compromises inside a system they didn’t choose.

It is a fair bit of homework but for those of us who use Linux on a daily basis, we’d rather do the legwork once to have a private, predictable system than deal with the out-of-the-box bloat.

Regarding updates: that’s exactly why I focused on Group Policy tweaks rather than simple registry hacks or UI toggles. Policies are designed for enterprise environments where IT managers would be furious if an update reset their security configurations, so they tend to survive major build updates much better than standard settings, it’s not foolproof but it is the best way to stay ahead!

The UK PM has just announced an under-16 social media ban.

This is the ‘Trojan Horse’ in action. You cannot enforce a ban without an Age Verification layer, and you can’t have Age Verification without a National Digital ID or biometric database. They are using the ‘child safety’ card to build a mandatory surveillance gate for the entire internet.

Between the new taxes and the constant bans, it’s clear this government has zero respect for personal agency or digital sovereignty. If you aren’t already moving your data off the cloud and into your own home lab, start now. The gap between our current society and a total surveillance state just got a whole lot smaller.

Those are solid resources but I built mine specifically for the folks who don’t want to pipe a remote bash script into their shell during a malware outbreak. My goal was simple, a private way to audit the list without needing to clone a repo or install Python dependencies.

Use the forensics scripts if you’re a power user, but if you just want a quick, client-side check that doesn’t touch your filesystem, that’s what the tool is there for.

Dedicated PC on LAN talks directly to VPS via Wireguard. The local machine acts as an exit node so when I add a local IP and port to my reverse proxy the whole thing acts like a local network.

I wrote about my setup last month; https://the.unknown-universe.co.uk/home-lab/wireguard-vpn-two-vps/

You’re right, I missed that.

I personally use a reverse proxy and Wireguard setup to access remotely.