The top cat uses ports to sort messages based on application.
Think pigeon holes, applications usually use protocols which are assigned a number by convention. The application gets it’s message out of it’s assigned ports instead of having to sort through all the messages.
Voter registration is public information and sufficient for cold callers.
If you live independently you will inevitably have to make privacy sacrifices for the sake of expediency. Having a bank account is probably going to be one of them. There are many essential services that you use but probably do not think of as an eighteen year old that may share information when you provide for yourself such as your phone carrier, ISP, utilities such as power, water, gas etc, insurance, health services, education or certification providers, employment or recruitment agencies, the list just goes on and you will have to thoroughly evaluate every company you interact with and in many cases there will simply be no realistic privacy respecting option.
Keep fighting to protect your privacy but don’t put an impossible burden on yourself to be perfect. You will make mistakes, you will make compromises, you will probably get spam. Welcome to late stage capitalism.
alias?
Android is built on linux yet it is increasingly locked down and many phones are extremely difficult to get root access on.
So Valve could have followed the phone ecosystem path and pushed as much of the feature set as proprietary code as possible (binary blob drivers, proton proprietary instead of bsd), replaced pacman with a valve controlled package manager & repos, setup selinux to give users no power to do anything and made the deck only able to secure boot steamOS signed by Valve. Technical users may be able to jail break such a device but the majority would not be inclined to.
Valve’s wisdom here is in realizing that the majority are going to buy their games anyway but if you don’t lock the device down then most of the technical users will also buy most of their games whereas if you have to go out of your way to jail break a device to install something fun then that device basically becomes a piracy only device from that point on.
You only need the app to do ear shape analysis
Does this require the app for operation or can you temporarily install the app for config and then use the feature without the app?
“if” gcc had a Ken Thompson hack how do you secure checks notes anything